Peter nodded.
In the meantime, Katarina got a suit for the spacewalk and put it on. Although the robot did not require oxygen, her exterior was not designed to function in a vacuum, or at a temperature of only three degrees above absolute zero. It took two minutes for the suit to adapt to her physical shape. She turned off the suit’s oxygen supply and stepped into the airlock. There she found everything she needed for the repair job, including two replacement plates, plus a lever, several mounting clamps, and the necessary tools. She waited for information from the outboard robots.
“I’m connected to you,” Marchenko told her. “Since you have no programming for space missions, I will support you. I have already hooked you up to the shell control system. Thus, you will immediately be able to run a test to see if the repair job was successful, and the system will help you to find the damage.”
“Thank you! But I am surprised that you have so much confidence in another AI,” replied the robot. Katarina fastened the bag to the side of her suit, gathered all the materials together, and placed them in the bag. While doing so, she noticed that the work instructions were being downloaded into her memory. She was accustomed to receiving commands directly via her brain.
“You would never do anything that would put Peter at risk,” Marchenko said.
“Correct.”
Meanwhile, the air had been pumped out of the airlock, and Katarina waited for the hatch to open. But nothing happened.
“You have a safety line. You have to attach that to your suit, or the hatch will not open.”
“Do I need a second line to move around on the hull?”
“No, the safety line on the reel is long enough for you to get to your position.”
The hatch opened slowly. Behind it lurked the inky blackness of outer space. Katarina used her arms to swing herself out of the hatch. She carefully set foot upon the hull. Her magnetic shoes gave her a strong-enough grip on the metal elements. Nevertheless, she was not used to walking on surfaces that appeared to slant and were even elastic.
Marchenko noticed her uncertainty. “You can control the shell. Make the hull form a convenient path to the damaged area. But note that, at the moment, you can only form a path up to a point a few meters away from your destination, the damaged area.”
Katarina tried out the protective hull’s controls. It was true, she could move the plates one at a time. She felt the vibrations caused by the movements of the plates. If there had been an atmosphere, she would probably have heard clacking noises, too. But here, everything took place in complete silence.
She was not afraid. On the contrary, she chose to believe she was one with the machine. She left her robot body and merged with the protective cover to become something much bigger. This feeling was addictive, she noticed. How did Marchenko manage to resist this temptation? He could dominate the whole world—no, be the world—if he had wanted to from the beginning.
After a few trials, Katarina got the hang of it. She positioned the plates in such a fashion that they formed a straight path to a point near the hole. Right next to the damaged area, the plates formed a kind of staircase. It wasn’t perfect, but it met her needs.
She approached the gaping hole. About two meters away, the artificial path ended in a sloping plate. The individual elements overlapped so that they could always provide optimal protection, no matter in which direction the adjacent plates pointed. Katarina walked along the hull and knelt beside the hole. She would need more support if she was going to straighten things here. Therefore, she first removed the adjacent plate, which was also damaged.
“Please bring this plate with you. Maybe we can still repair it,” Marchenko said.
She slid the plate down into the bag. She then carefully climbed into the hole and planted her feet on the intact area of the structure. She took a thick-walled tube out of the bag, pushed it onto one of the broken beams, and began to fix the faulty connection. She imagined how Peter would have had to slog away here. For her it was a piece of cake. She pulled the long tube over the broken ends—which were now opposite each other—and pushed a button on the tube. It contracted as much as possible, closing the hole.
“Looks good,” said Marchenko, who was observing through her eyes.
“Well, it seems to be rather makeshift. A shipyard could fix it more thoroughly,” Katarina said.
“It’s not ideal, but the entire cell is working again,” Marchenko said. “If I have learned one thing as a human, it’s that there isn’t always a hundred percent solution. Eighty percent is usually good enough.”
Marchenko fascinated her. How much of him was still human? she wondered. Katarina climbed out of the hole onto the shell and exchanged the clamping mechanisms on the edge of the destroyed plate for new ones. After that, she inserted a brand-new plate and tested the function of the cell.
The plate suddenly rose up and hit Katarina’s legs. She lost her grip and was thrown into space. The second replacement plate, which lay on top in the bag, disappeared forever into the void, to end up as a piece of space junk.
“No!” Marchenko cried.
Katarina smiled. That must be his human part. But there was nothing to worry about—she was tethered, after all. What could happen, except for this little trip into space? She laid her arms next to her torso and her body spun faster. Katarina enjoyed the unplanned spacewalk. Then the reel connected to the suit stopped her flight. The engine started and reeled in the line.
“Sorry. There was a mistake in the instructions,” Marchenko explained. “You should have only performed the test once all the plates had been inserted.”
“Well, nothing problematic transpired,” she said.
Two minutes later, the robot was back at the hatch.
“I’ve brought you a new plate. It’s in the freight airlock near the exit,” Marchenko said.
“Are the plates in short supply?” Katarina asked.
“Not really. We have fifty spare plates in stock. Therefore, the loss of one protective panel isn’t a problem. It’s more important that nothing happens to you or to the hull structure. I’m sorry. I should have checked the instructions one more time beforehand.”
A short time later, Katarina was continuing the repair work. The last plate was particularly tricky to insert. She was about to ask for help when she finally succeeded, then moved away from the site where the hole had been. She exited repair mode, and the entire cell with its plates moved and adjusted in automatic testing, which took about a minute.
“Excellent job!” Peter said from the command module.
Katarina gave him a thumbs up and made her way back.
June 3, 2079, Venus Orbit
“Are you coming? What are you looking for now?”
Nuria was getting on his nerves. They were totally on schedule. Now Erik had forgotten what he’d just been looking for! Charles sat strapped in his chair, observing him and smiling. The commander would stay aboard the transfer ship. He was responsible for the connection to Earth—and for picking them up after four weeks.
The spices. Of course! I need to pack the spices. Erik did not want to spend four weeks eating bland food out of bags. He floated to the kitchen cupboard.
“Erik, come on. We’re already here!” he heard Nuria say over the helmet radio.
Yes, he thought, but this is important, too! She would be grateful to him when he added spices to her meal. The three of them would be spending nearly 30 days together in close quarters. He and Ethan were getting along better lately. The pilot would control their descent and then steer the spaceship. He was more worried about Nuria, because she always took everything so seriously.
The spice jar was filled with a universal mixture that nearly always suited the food. It possessed an integrated dispensing mechanism that also worked in conditions of weightlessness. Erik happily anticipated finally being able to feel his weight again aboard the spaceship. He placed the jar in the tool bag and pulled himself along the walls to the hatch that led to the re
armost part of the spaceship.
“Finally,” Nuria said.
Erik looked around. The capsule that they would inhabit in the coming weeks was at most 20 cubic meters and consisted of a single room. The lighting was uncomfortably bright.
Why didn’t they use the same lights as in the rest of the spaceship? “Can one dim that?” Erik asked, pointing to one of the lamps on the side, which would later form the ceiling.
“The lights are intended to be dimmed manually,” Nuria said. “At night, the lights go off completely. That’s how they want to simulate a regular, 24-hour day-night rhythm, and keep us wide awake during the day.”
That makes sense, Erik thought. The wind would propel them around Venus once every four days. That was not in sync with the biorhythm of humans.
“Are you ready?” Ethan asked.
The pilot was strapped in his chair, gazing attentively at the screens in front of him. Erik operated the hatch. They had not said goodbye to Charles. That would only bring bad luck, he had said. After all, they would be seeing each other again soon. Erik pulled the outer hatch shut, then the inner one. Then he moved hand-over-hand to his own place to the right of Ethan.
“I’m ready,” Nuria said.
Erik fastened his seatbelt and closed his helmet, just in case. “Let’s go,” he said.
Ethan raised his head slightly and then pressed a few buttons on his armrest. “Clamps loosened,” he said.
They were no longer attached to the spaceship. But the capsule was still hovering quietly beside the ship. Ethan pushed another button. Erik sensed a slight amount of momentum in his back.
“Spring mechanism triggered.”
A bolt with tensed springs had pushed their capsule with its inflatable blimp away from the part of the ship that would remain in orbit. They needed to be at a safe distance to ignite the engine. Slowly, the capsule floated through space, distancing itself one meter at a time from the ship.
“Okay, we’re twenty meters away. That should be enough,” Erik said. “Ignite the engine.” He felt hot. The two-stage engine in the bow had by now been exposed to outer space for three months. If it did not start, they would never reach the atmosphere. He counted the seconds. Why was it taking so long? He clutched the armrests of his chair.
“Don’t worry,” Ethan said. “The combustion chamber must first reach the standard temperature.”
Suddenly, it was there, the anticipated pressure on his chest. The engine was braking as it was supposed to.
“Ignition initiated,” Ethan said.
“Have a pleasant journey,” Charles wished them over the radio.
“Thanks, Chuck,” Ethan replied. “We will.”
The first part of the descent was surprisingly uneventful. Erik contemplated the ever-changing cloud patterns as they circled the planet, their orbit getting smaller and smaller and thus closer and closer to Venus. The clouds were so dense that there was no sign of the surface. Even the radar didn’t reveal anything yet.
“Minus 180 degrees,” Nuria reported.
There was as yet no sign of the heat on Venus’s surface.
“I’m measuring CO2, N2, SO2, H2O, and H2SO4,” Nuria declared. None of this was surprising. Sulfuric acid formed up here from sulfur dioxide and water vapor. But the concentration was low, because the atmosphere was still extremely thin.
“Heatshield at one hundred and twenty degrees,” Nuria declared.
The capsule and the spaceship were by no means moving as fast as when they had entered orbit, which was why the heat shield had heated up far less at this point. It was now primarily protecting the fabric of the spaceship.
“Everything’s going well,” Ethan concluded.
“A hundred and five kilometers,” Ethan announced. Coming from the pilot’s mouth, it sounded like a warning.
Venus’s cloud layer reached up to an altitude of about 100 kilometers. But they were already decidedly feeling the braking effect of the atmosphere.
“We’ll soon jettison the first stage,” Ethan said. “Aaaaand... now.”
There was a small jolt. Had Ethan not warned them, Erik might not have noticed it. The rocket stage must have already been burned out, because the braking force didn’t change.
“Minus thirty degrees,” Nuria reported.
It was much warmer here than at the same altitude in the Earth’s atmosphere.
“Eighty-two kilometers. Four hundred and eighty meters per second,” Ethan read aloud. “Time for the parachute.”
The air resistance of the parachute pushed Erik backward forcefully. He inhaled the wrong way and started to cough. “Parachute deployed,” he said wryly between coughs.
“I will jettison the heat shield at seventy-five kilometers—in about a minute,” Ethan informed them.
This was a critical moment. They needed to discard the shield so that they could inflate the spaceship’s hull. But during the time the hull was being inflated, the ship would not have enough buoyancy to keep their cabin at a steady altitude. This meant that they would plummet toward the ground—slowed down by the parachute—until the atmosphere was so dense and the spaceship filled with so much air that it had sufficient buoyancy.
They did not know at what altitude they would reach that point. They had a rough idea of the structure of the atmosphere, but pressure conditions varied, depending on the prevailing currents and the altitude. There was no way to predict the exact conditions.
“Heatshield now,” Ethan said.
Erik heard a metallic scratching sound. He knew it must be the clamps, which were operated automatically from the cabin. He noticed that Ethan was looking skeptically at the floor. “That noise...?” Erik said.
“There should not have been a noise,” Ethan declared.
The scratching sound stopped and Ethan heaved a sigh of relief. They had evidently gotten lucky. “We’ve cast off the heat shield,” Ethan said.
“It’s a good thing nobody lives down there,” Erik said. “Imagine a ton of metal falling on your head.”
“Certainly nobody lives on the surface,” Nuria said.
As if he had seriously meant that! Anyway, they would soon have made it.
“Blimp is being inflated,” Ethan announced.
Erik would have liked to see that from the side. Above them, an empty balloon of coated fabric was just in the process of being transformed into an elegant spaceship. Erik was able to tell when the blimp inflated because the cabin’s surroundings suddenly darkened. The spaceship had cast its shadow over them. Apparently the sun was just then at its zenith.
“We’re at sixty kilometers,” Ethan reported.
“Pressure at zero point three bar, temperature thirty-five degrees.”
It was tropically warm, but the air was still much thinner than on the Earth’s surface.
“Fifty-five kilometers. We’re still sinking. Blimp at thirty percent.”
Only 30 percent? Why is it taking so long to inflate the blimp?
“Fifty kilometers. Still sinking,” Ethan said.
That was the height at which they had planned to stabilize. “What about the blimp’s inflation?” Erik asked.
“Sixty-seven percent,” Ethan answered.
“One bar, seventy-five degrees,” Nuria added.
She seemed perfectly calm, but that was of no help to Erik. They were sinking below the planned altitude.
“We have some wiggle room for error,” Ethan said. “Don’t worry. At some point the atmosphere will carry us.”
“But by then it may be too hot. What temperature can the spaceship withstand?” Erik asked.
“Two hundred degrees for sure,” Ethan said.
“One point three bars, one hundred and ten degrees,” Nuria said with no trace of emotion.
Erik had to admire her. Does she trust in her God, or why is she not afraid?
“Forty-two kilometers. Slowly sinking,” Ethan said.
‘Slowly?’ That sounds encouraging, anyway.
“One point f
ive bar, one hundred and seventy degrees,” Nuria piped up.
Erik was trembling in his seat. He had the impression that they were falling faster.
“Dammit, we lost the parachute,” Ethan said with steely calmness. “The mountings probably could not withstand the heat.”
Great! If he ever met the engineer who blundered here... If he ever got the chance! Were they fated to die at this point? He mustn’t panic. Ethan seemed to be unconcerned about the loss of the parachute, so maybe it was not as bad as it appeared.
“How much can our cabin withstand?” Erik asked.
“You should know that,” Nuria said. “We studied it.”
He could only remember five bars, five atmospheres, which was five times the pressure on Earth’s surface. But he had hoped that Nuria would now give him a number that was ten times higher. At the very bottom, on the surface, it was supposed to be 92 bar. That was why they had brought the AVs. But if this continued, they would soon be the first humans to land on Venus. How long would they be able to enjoy their fame? One minute? Or would Venus crush them before they reached the surface?
“Thirty-eight kilometers,” Ethan said. “I believe we will make it. The blimp is inflating slowly because of the high pressure, but we’ll soon stabilize.”
“Thanks,” Erik said.
“I’d rather you thank me when the time comes.”
Oh, no! Erik pressed his upper body firmly against the backrest.
“The clouds are opening up,” Nuria said. “You have to look at this!”
She seems to be really excited. How can she exhibit such eagerness in a situation like this? Maybe this would be the last view they would enjoy in their lives.
Hmmm. I should look at the screen. Erik absorbed the picture. A huge, flat structure lay directly below them, a volcanic formation—lava. It had diverged in all directions and then solidified. Above the northern section, a plume of smoke curled up. There seemed to be almost no wind down there.
“That might be Ozza Mons Volcano,” Nuria declared. “And beyond that, that would then be Ganiki Chasma. Do you see the three thick knots in the fracture zone? Viewed in infrared, they are much brighter than the environment. I bet magma spurts up from the mantle there.”
The Clouds of Venus: Hard Science Fiction Page 13
