Hell is the Morning Star

by Gustavo Bondoni

I. Orbital Paradise

He’d taken two showers, scrubbed and perfumed everything that could be scrubbed and perfumed, and donned a dinner outfit that was worth more than most people made in a year… but Mirabelli still felt like there was dirt under his fingernails. A place like this would do that to anyone.

“Hello,” the ice-cool voice said. “I’m so glad you could make it.”

Well, it would do it to anyone but her; Victoria Featheringshaw-Hóng looked like she’d just walked out of a mindnet ad for luxury goods. Her pale skin glowed in the soft light and even in these enlightened times, the aristocratic British accent made him hesitant to respond—his own upbringing had been spent dodging loaders at the South Texas Launch site, and he had the twang to prove it.

“I’m honored to meet you,” he replied.

“The honor’s mine. Your fame precedes you. Have a seat.”

She led him through the large room to an area roped off for private conferences. The place was furnished in red and green leather and wood veneer, redolent of a gentleman’s club from a couple of centuries before.

But the view through the floor beneath his feet could not have been confused with anything but a modern site: the blue and white sphere of the Earth floating four hundred kilometers below. He wondered how much it had cost to ship the colossal, reinforced piece of glass—was it even glass?—into orbit.

It didn’t matter. The people who owned this outpost could afford it, and much, much more.

He sat. The artificial gravity wasn’t as strong as the real stuff dirtside, but Mirabelli had spent enough time in space to adjust quickly. “And to what do I owe this honor?” he asked.

Victoria smiled enigmatically. “Just beating you to the punch. You were going to come ask me for money sooner or later, so I decided I might as well call you myself.”

What are you talking about? He thought, but didn’t say. He’d never heard of this woman until her call came through, along with a prepaid trip to orbit and a complimentary week’s stay in humanity’s most exclusive resort. Of course, if he had known who she was, he would have had her on his list of possible sponsors long ago. He didn’t even know anyone could have that much money. “And why would I need to speak to you?”

“Because Lord Belanor can’t foot the bill for what you want to do, and neither can the González family. That leaves the Russians—who won’t give a cent to anyone who isn’t Russian—and me.” She grinned at him. “So what were you planning?”

“Planning?”

“The next expedition. No matter what you say, I won’t believe you’ll let Campbell take all the credit. You were the first man to climb Olympus Mons and come back alive, but all everyone ever does is talk about him.”

Mirabelli shrugged. “It was his idea, his plan, his dream. In the end, he paid for it with his life, but at least he made it to the top before his air ran out.”

“And you? What’s your dream? Is it enough to have been along for the ride, to bask in the light reflected off of him?” She laughed, the tinkling of breaking glass. “This is the greatest era of human exploration ever. Do you want to be another Sebastian Elcano?”

“Who is Sebastian Elcano?”

“You’ve never heard of him?”

“No.”

“Not many have. He was Magellan’s second in command. He was the man who brought the expedition back to Europe. Magellan was killed thousands of miles before he completed his circumnavigation.” Her eyes twinkled as she closed in on the pitch. “So who are they going to remember in five hundred years? Dead Campbell or living Mirabelli?”

Damn. In just under a minute, she’d expressed his deepest fear: that everything he’d done with the Campbell expedition, all the hours and the terror and the exhaustion, would be forgotten by this time next year.

She was reading his face, and the satisfied smile told him she saw what she wanted to see. “So what’ll it be? Don’t pretend you haven’t thought about it.”

He surrendered. “I was thinking maybe Venus. It’s challenging as hell, but we should be able to land a manned vessel on the surface and stay there for a short time. Either that or a submersible under the ice in Europa. It’s less challenging technically, but it’s farther away, so it’s much harder to make it back if anything goes wrong.”

But Mirabelli realized he’d lost her somewhere around the word ‘Venus’. Her dark eyes had acquired a light that said she wouldn’t listen to any other options. He knew the look; Campbell had been the same way.

“We’ll walk on the surface of Venus. The first ever.”

“Wait, I didn’t say anything about walking. The atmosphere of Venus is an acidic mess with impossible pressure. No one is going to be doing any walking. Just getting there and back is going to be hard enough.”

She wasn’t listening, but staring out through the floor towards Earth, which the station’s rotation was just bringing into view again. He watched her for a second when something she said that he’d ignored bubbled up from his subconscious.

“What do you mean, we?”

She batted her eyelashes. “If you want me to foot the bill, I’m going with you.”

***

Victoria looked much younger without makeup. She was supposed to be in her mid-thirties, but he’d have pegged her for late twenties at most. Of course, the wealthiest individual in the history of humanity probably had access to really good skin creams.

And she’d been a pleasant surprise in other ways as well. Mirabelli expected a woman who’d inherited every penny she had, and whose companies were run by teams of experts to be a bit of a spoiled and vacuous incompetent…but she had buckled down to the training and planning with enthusiasm, determination and an obviously superior intellect. Her questions weren’t frequent, but they usually identified a problem that no one had thought of before. Usually, embarrassingly, something that would very likely have gotten them all killed if unattended.

Progress was steady but expensive. The cost of some of the pressure chambers and exotic materials designed to withstand the hellish conditions on the surface were truly staggering—even to Mirabelli, who was accustomed to putting together missions to the planets.

“Have you seen this?” She tossed him a sheet of intelligent paper displaying the front page of The Sun. The headline showed a picture of Victoria and Mirabelli in flight suits in the simulator. He grimaced: Mirabelli always looked fantastic in pictures, with his longish brown hair and soulful eyes… but sitting beside Victoria, he looked downright frumpy.

“The headline, you moron.”

He read it and chuckled. Barking Mad!

“You think that’s funny?”

“It is. And besides, you should have seen the things they wrote about Campbell when he told them that he was off to climb a mountain on Mars. The Guardian had a field day: they said it proved that the New Aristocracy had finally gone soft in the head.”

“They’re wrong of course. The New Aristocracy is going to go down in history as the greatest group of human explorers since the Renaissance. Besides, most of us are content with one crazy voyage. To be really soft in the head, you’d have to go on two.”

Victoria laughed as she said that, but Mirabelli turned serious. “Well, at least there’s one good thing about this. Now that our cover’s been blown sky high, we can move our operations back to Earth.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Why not? We’re spending a fortune bringing people up here for training. We should move the command center groundside near one of the factories.”

She paused for a long moment, choosing her words with care. “I can’t do that. If I were to set foot in any of the countries that have signed the Global Tax Alliance, I’d be arrested and deported to either China or the UK to pay the inheritance tax they say I owe them. When sums that large are involved, no government on Earth cares that my legal residence is on this station and that I don’t have to pay taxes to any of them… they want the money and that’s that. Also, admitting that people can reside in space would be the first step in losing trillions of dollars as everyone with a couple of nickels to rub together moves into orbit.” She held up a hand. “And no. I can’t go to one of the smaller countries. They won’t even pretend to charge me taxes; they’ll probably just kidnap me and hold me for ransom.”

“Wow. So you can’t go home?”

“This is my home for as long as governments see their main purpose in life as the removal of wealth from individuals to their own coffers.”

“Why don’t they just confiscate your assets?”

“They can’t. For one thing, I have better lawyers than they do, but I can also close my factories in any country that displeases me. They won’t risk it.”

Mirabelli wondered what the families she’d leave on the street would think of that…but he bit his tongue. He wasn’t being paid to lecture her on social inequality.

“All right. So we stay here. What’s on the list for this week?”

“Spacesuits.”

Mirabelli clenched his teeth. The monstrosities necessary to keep two human beings alive on the surface of Venus added weight and complexity to the mission. Worst of all, however, the walk added time to their stay on the surface…nearly twenty minutes in the pressure cooker.

The engineers assured them that nothing could go wrong, that the designs were overengineered to the point of absurdity.

But Mirabelli had been on too many missions to believe any of it. Something always went wrong with the overengineered components…or something that no one even thought of reared its head at the worst possible moment. He knew that twenty minutes on the surface of Venus was more than enough to kill them a thousand times over.

“Can’t we rethink that?”

“We’ve been over this. You have the power of veto, but you’ll need a new sponsor if we don’t walk on the surface. You choose.”

Finance versus sanity. It was always the same question when it came to breaking down the barriers that had hemmed humanity in. In space exploration, sanity rarely held the field.

He never got the chance to bow to the great god Mammon, however. An explosion sounded and the platform—built specifically to hold their training ground—shook.

“The hell was that?”

But she’d already jumped in the direction of the door. Mirabelli took the wrong angle and bounced off most of the walls of the room before he finally reached the loops embedded into the wall which led him to the exit. Sometimes he hated zero-gee.

Hull integrity alarms—something most spacers had nightmares about—glowed and pulsated all around them, and the growler that indicated a leak blared at full volume. Every nerve in his body screamed that he should run for the nearest sealed blast door and seal it behind him… but Victoria was already moving in the other direction: the only place the blast could have come from.

There didn’t seem to be too much air rushing past so the breach must have been very small or already under control.

The simulator room was a shambles. Mangled equipment floated everywhere and a large metal pole had embedded itself into an armored window. Victoria insisted on having those in every single room despite Mirabelli’s protests. She was convinced that the inspiration they provided was worth the extra cost and integrity issues.

Something wet landed on his face. He wiped it away absently and then recoiled when his hand came away trailing a thin red liquid. Too thin to be oil from a broken machine. “I think we’ve got a casualty,” he said, holding his fingers up for Victoria to see.

They soon found the victim, a young woman with muscular arms, dusky skin and curly black hair. She was half-conscious, clutching a bleeding abdomen and crying to herself.

“That’s Rina,” Mirabelli said. This time, he didn’t vault over any furniture, just tried to reach the woman as quickly as he could. She’d been hidden from view behind a long piece of floating cloth probably torn from the simulator couches by whatever had caused the explosion.

Victoria reached her first. She just seemed to have a feel for zero-gee that Mirabelli couldn’t match—maybe there was something to this whole living in space thing.

“Rina,” Victoria said. “Can you hear me?”

The woman sobbed something, a muffled response that could have been random noise as easily as it might have been the word “Yes.”

“You’re going to be all right.”

“No.” Gasp. “Dying. Hurts.”

“You’re going to be all right,” Victoria repeated in a voice that brooked no argument. She turned to Mirabelli, who had just arrived, grasping the rungs. “Take her feet. Gently. I want to get her immobilized.”

They pulled the injured woman laboriously through the corridors. Victoria kept up a running dialogue, trying to keep her awake. “What’s your role with us?”

“Pilot can…can…candi…”

“You’re one of our pilot candidates?”

Victoria hadn’t met any of the candidates. She insisted on only getting to know the people who were actually going to come with them, and that meant that culling had to take place first. There were still seven pilots left, each among the best the world and the space habitats had to offer.

“Yes.” Then the pilot grimaced. “Last.”

Mirabelli, who’d gone through all the scores, knew what the woman was referring to: she was ranked last in the latest testing, close enough to the man in first place that a hair would separate them, but that was the difference between pilots at this superhuman level…less than a hair. Only the absolute best would serve…if something went wrong with the automation, the pilot would have to land them manually, and would also be the only one authorized to abort the mission if things got too rough.

Victoria’s face hardened. “I don’t care. As soon as you recover, you’ll be flying us to Venus.”

“Can’t…dying.”

Rina passed out.

***

As the medical team stabilized the injured woman, Mirabelli fumed. He grabbed an unfortunate admin who happened to pass them. “Get me Hassan from engineering. I want to know what happened. How could anything explode in there? It’s all just computers and screens. Maybe something overheated—”

Victoria’s hand on his arm quieted him. She dismissed the admin. “That wasn’t a malfunction.”

“What?”

“We were bombed.”

“That’s insane. No one knew about us until the article.”

“Think about that for a second. Someone knew. There are pictures. Someone found out and sent up some camera drones…or a spy. They could have planted something in our equipment…a dozen things.”

“But we screened everything.”

“Not well enough. We weren’t looking for something like this.”

“Who…” But it was a dumb question. Half the kooks and crazies in the world had it in for Victoria. Left-leaning groups had never forgiven her for deciding that her fortune would stay in her hands and that she was disinclined to give in to the threats of seventeen governments who intended to relieve her of it in the form of inheritance taxes. Ironically, this woman that the left hated so much had been orphaned by religious extremists who’d managed to catch her openly atheist parents out in the open and killed them with a precision strike from a circling drone.

“No Space,” Victoria said with disgust. “That’s who.”

“Wow,” Mirabelli said, impressed with her knowledge. He’d heard of the group, one of several who thought that humanity’s resources would be better spent creating equality on Earth as opposed to establishing a presence in the solar system… but that was all he knew about them. “You really know your nutcases.”

She grimaced. “Not well enough, it seems. We’ve been getting some serious heat from them ever since the cost numbers for the habitat went public. It’s gotten worse in the past few days, but I thought they were bluffing. Evidently not.”

“We’ll have to step security up even further.”

“I trust you can manage that.”

“I’ll need to talk to Bajuk.”

“He’s probably already on his way.”

Mirabelli shuddered. Victoria’s security chief made him nervous. He changed the subject.

“Are you really going to let Rina pilot the lander?”

“Yes. If she’s any good.”

“Oh. She’s brilliant. Just not as brilliant as a couple of the others.”

“I don’t care. I’m not doing it because she’s the best pilot. I’m doing it to give the bastards who bombed us the middle finger in no uncertain terms.” The fire in her eyes made me wonder if her revenge would end there. She had access to a number of private security forces dirtside; they were mainly there to defend factories and employees when necessary, but they could easily, oh, so easily, be diverted.

“And if she doesn’t recover?”

“She made it to the infirmary alive. She won’t just recover, but the doctors will give her back to us better than before. They’ll correct her eyesight and give her better hearing. Trust me. This is the most advanced medical facility ever built. All my team needs is a beating heart and a functional brain, and it will rebuild the rest…and the heart is pretty much optional.”

She left. She’d been trying to hide her rage, but Mirabelli could see it in her stiff walk. It was hard to stomp in the low artificial gravity, but Victoria made a good effort.

***

Bajuk’s eyes reminded Mirabelli of a block of ice. Cold and hard and pale blue.

“Nothing will get by us, I promise you,” the man said.

“Thank you,” Mirabelli replied. He was glad that the security arrangements were taken care of. Every moment he could avoid talking to Bajuk was a happier moment.

Mirabelli looked at a pale forearm, exposed by the t-shirt Bajuk sported even in the chilly confines of the training area. Rows of crosses and crescents, with an occasional Star of David thrown in, were tattooed on his skin.

The security chief caught his glance. “It’s important to remember the fallen, even if they are enemies. Most were honorable men. Some, many, are only remembered here. They have no other marker.”

The sense that he had to end the conversation before he learned things that it was better not to know was strong. But he couldn’t help himself. “What are those symbols?”

Bajuk gave him a half-smile that never came close to his eyes. “Pasta strainers,” he replied. Then he shrugged. “It’s a stale joke, but I needed to show atheists somehow.”

The explorer wondered if they were men Bajuk had killed himself or merely those whose deaths he’d ordered. He didn’t ask. Instead, he stood and held out his hand. “Thank you for coming. Are you flying back?”

The pale eyes stared back. “Not yet. Victoria wanted to speak to me in private. I think there’s something she would like me to take care of for her.” He walked off in the direction of Victoria’s quarters.

Mirabelli swallowed and walked off. He had a million things to do.

***

News of the unfortunate demise of several dozen members of an extreme activist group wouldn’t have caught his attention in normal times—violence was a natural consequence of intolerance, after all—but as the newsclip was winding down, the reporter happened to mention that the group called itself No Space.

Mirabelli watched it again.

Apparently—at least that was what the newscasters stated—the group’s annual convention had degenerated into an argument about future direction which then turned ugly. Fistfights at first, but firearms soon appeared. Surprisingly few members of the group had come through unscathed.

“They must have been good shots,” he muttered to himself, wondering how many new crosses and strainers Bajuk had added after this one. From what he’d seen, the group appeared to have been composed mostly of American academics, so there presumably weren’t too many crescents among the dead.

On a whim, he did a quick net search for the group that had taken credit for the deaths of Victoria’s parents.

“Ooh, boy,” he whispered.

They hadn’t bothered to concoct a cover story. The leaders, men and women who moved in the shadows and were notoriously hard to find, had been found—dead—just a few days after the murder of Victoria’s parents. Best of all was the group’s spokeswoman. She was in the middle of making a few new threats in front of a live audience when her podium exploded. It had gone viral all over Earth.

Mirabelli had missed the furor because he’d been on Mars at the time…and bandwidth was used for more pressing matters. He’d heard of that incident when he got back to Earth; he just hadn’t been able to put two and two together—he hadn’t met Victoria at the time.

“I wonder if we’re on the side of the angels on this one,” he muttered to himself. He’d tried to cure the habit, but out in space, he found that talking to himself was a comfort, especially if he was sick and tired of the rest of the crew.

He stared out at the blue globe beneath him and tried to feel guilty about being associated with Victoria. He just couldn’t bring himself to do it. On one hand, he thought that No Space and their ilk were utterly misguided. Mankind was meant to roam the stars…and he’d dedicated his life to making that happen sooner rather than later. The fact that Victoria fought fire with fire might have bothered him more if he hadn’t privately been delighted with the group’s demise.

Then why did he feel that there was something terribly wrong somewhere?

He stared at the planet some more, searching his innermost thoughts to understand what the problem might be. Why, if it wasn’t moral indignations at her brutal methods, did he have a sour feeling every time he thought of Victoria?

When the answer arrived, it came with a sickening certainty.

“Oh, no.”

The sinking feeling he’d been getting lately had little to do with the fact that Victoria’s security people were apparently slaughtering activist groups wholesale and everything to do with Victoria’s slow but certain takeover of the mission. When she decided that she was coming to Venus with him, he should have known how it would end.

This voyage, which he’d always hoped would be the Mirabelli Expedition was becoming the Featheringshaw-Hóng Expedition at full speed. Worse, there was very little he could do about it other than call it off…and with the amount of money Victoria had already spent, she would simply replace him with the next experienced space hand either greedy or insane enough to go along with it. Neither quality was in short supply among spacers.

He’d been fine with it when the leader had been Campbell. Why not? The guy had concocted the mad scheme to climb Mount Olympus without help, had financed it and had invited Mirabelli along for the ride. It was an honor, a nod to Mirabelli’s years in space.

But this was different. This one was his baby. He didn’t want to give up the glory to yet another scion of the plutocracy.

But there was little he could do about it now.

He had a hard time getting to sleep that night.

II. The Hothouse of the Solar System

“Buckle up, people,” Rina shouted. “It’s going to get bumpy.”

“It’s going to get bumpy?” Mirabelli shouted back. “What do you call this?”

“This is smooth sailing. Just wait a few seconds.”

She was right. The slight turbulence that had felt so disturbing was nothing compared to the sudden violent buffeting the ship began to take. Rina laughed and shouted over the roar. “Winds here are strong, but it’ll calm down once we get a little closer to the surface. The pressure and density are going to work in our favor there. We’re not riding one of your dinky little Mars landers here, you know. This ship can take it.”

She was right. He knew what was supposed to happen, knew the upper layer of Venus’ atmosphere had strong winds and that it would be a rough ride. He hadn’t imagined just how rough, but it made no difference: the lander was built like a tank, designed to withstand a hundred times the pressure on the surface of Earth.

He kept quiet during the rest of the descent although he did glance at Victoria once, satisfied to see that her knuckles were white as she gripped her armrest. Of course it only lasted until he felt his own nails digging into his palms. He breathed deeply and tried to relax.

The final—and lengthiest—part of the descent was actually much calmer. The buffeting stopped, even though he could see from the instruments that their horizontal velocity with reference to the ground below was still quite high.

Rina sat calmly at her workspace, watching the readouts with eagle eyes. The descent, if everything worked as it should, was an automated process. There would be no Neil Armstrong-like heroics here unless something went badly wrong with several well-backed-up systems. A lot of the weight they were carrying was composed of redundancies. And fuel…one mustn’t forget the fuel.

Lateral acceleration hit them as Rina slowed their speed relative to the ground and the roar of the wind returned, audible even through the thick—relatively speaking—hull of their lander. In a way, the pilot had been right: Mirabelli had no real point of reference for a spacecraft that could maneuver inside a real atmosphere. The spindly stuff they used everywhere else in the Solar System wouldn’t last two minutes on Venus.

The altimeter gave them the final few feet and Mirabelli unconsciously braced for impact but the single-use parachutes—ideal for the thick atmosphere of the planet—brought them down to a gentle landing and saved enormous quantities of precious fuel in the process.

“Welcome to the supercritical carbon dioxide sea,” Rina said.

Victoria scowled at her, but said nothing. She hadn’t transmitted, so, other than the three of them, no one knew that the first words spoken by humans on the surface of Venus were little more than an inanity. In a way, this was the continuation of a long tradition. Aldrin’s first words from the surface of the moon had been “Contact light,” while Hsu’s initial remark on Mars was strongly rumored—and just as vehemently denied—to have been: “Okay, pay up. I told you it would hold together.”

Victoria gave Mirabelli a look, and he started. Toggling the transmitter, he repeated the prepared words. “Paradise Station, Morningstar Base here. Venera 17 has landed.” There, that would make nearly everyone happy.

It would be five minutes before the news reached Earth, relayed and amplified by the orbiting robotic mothership, and at least ten before they could expect any response.

Suddenly, Victoria rocketed into his arms. “No matter what happens now, we did it. We were here, we transmitted our message… We’re going down in history. Whatever comes next can’t erase that.”

He returned her embrace, surprised at just how elated he felt. It wasn’t his first time on another planet, but he felt as excited as a youngster before his first date.

Still, there was work to be done. He pushed her away regretfully, and said: “All right. Let’s get into the suits.”

The suits had been designed with a ticking clock in mind. The designers knew that time on Venus was limited to approximately twenty minutes, so they couldn’t waste time with dressing.

The solution was that the suits had a door in the armored back shaped like the person who would use it: Mirabelli’s door was larger than Victoria’s. You just threaded your arms and legs into the hole the door made and the third crewman, Rina, sealed the door behind them.

After a couple of weeks of practice, it took less than a minute to get them both in their suits.

“Radio test,” Mirabelli said.

“I copy,” Victoria replied, her clipped, aristocratic tones sounding even less human over the comm.

“All right. Rina, lower us.”

The ceramic-covered armor plate that protected the suits from the hellish conditions outside during landing fell away, explosive bolts doing their jobs perfectly. The two suits were lowered by the same winch, ensuring that they’d touch the surface at precisely the same moment.

“Okay,” Mirabelli said. “We’re down.”

“What’s it like out there?” Rina said. The lander, of course, had no windows. The suits only a small visor, an inch thick, in the head area.

“Yellow, mostly,” he replied.

“Yeah, but only in the distance. I see Mirabelli’s suit perfectly well, in all its red glory.”

“Well, you can tell me all about it when you get back. I’ve disconnected the winch, and I’ll be lowering the rover.”

The rover had paid for a good chunk of the mission. After the story had broken, NASA had insisted they bring it…and written a check that insisted even more. The winch disconnected from the hooks at the top of each suit. They’d hook back on when time came to return to the ship.

An armored ramp opened and the rover rolled out. It was as big as a car, and hammered home the sheer amount of weight they had brought with them. The space it had occupied immediately began to be filled with samples lifted by automated arms. Mirabelli thought of the early space missions, where every ounce counted, and sighed. It must have been a much simpler time to be a mission planner.

“Let’s take our walk,” Mirabelli said.

“Does this suit make me look fat?” Victoria asked.

Mirabelli watched. The suit was overbuilt, looking like a pyramid. The legs were thick and gave a base wide enough to ensure that it would take a suicidal effort to tip over. The torso was also quite wide, while the head tapered off. Topping the whole ensemble was the loop for the winch.

None of the numerous servomotors, pipes and tubes that allowed mere humans to shift such a large heavy chunk of metal were visible under the armor. The red paint had been specifically formulated to withstand an acid bath under high temperature conditions. The structure was sufficiently strong that they were able to forego the usual spherical pressure chambers; they’d decided that the suits had to be seen making walking motions on the surface for anyone to count it as a true excursion.

“Nah, you look great. Triangles are sexy.”

And then he shut up. The view through the visor was a bit distorted… and yellow… but it was Venus. Before this mission, humanity had basically had two photographs of the planet, both taken by Soviet landers nearly a century before. He was seeing something that no one had before. He allowed himself to take thirty of his precious seconds just to look out into the distance.

“You all right back there?”

The plan was for them to walk around the lander once, a circumnavigation that should take no more than a few minutes. Their cameras would work furiously, and then they’d begin the process of getting the suits winched back into place. They had four hours of air… but the lander was programmed to take of in fifteen minutes, more than enough for what they had planned.

He followed her and wondered about the dim light and the lack of sun. He’d imagined the yellow tinge of the surface—their simulator showed that color, and they’d logged hundreds of hours each—but not the dull glow of light. It was a miracle that sunlight could penetrate the thick atmospheric soup in the first place, of course, but that was something he only understood on an intellectual level. When he looked out at the broken, charred surface, he wanted more light.

And, unexpectedly, he got his wish.

A tiny sun erupted, for just an instant, right above Victoria’s helmet. The suit rocked.

“Victoria, are you all right?”

No answer.

“Can you hear me?”

He rushed to her side as fast as the suit could take him, and looked through the visor, but the plastic was too thick. Shining his lights through did little to make it better.

“Rina, can you raise Victoria?”

The pilot didn’t waste time asking why. She would have been monitoring the conversation, so she’d know that Mirabelli was trying to raise his companion.

“She’s not answering, but vital signs are normal, and suit integrity is also good. Maybe there’s a glitch in the radio.”

“No. I saw something,” Mirabelli replied. Besides, she’d suddenly gone stock still.

He studied the space where he’d seen the light. It had looked like some kind of explosion, but that couldn’t be, could it? The helmet wasn’t even dented. Only…. “Oh, my God,” he said.

“What?” Rina’s voice came over the comm.

In his shock, he’d forgotten that the radio worked automatically. “Victoria’s cargo loop.” He was referring to the hook by which the winch could lift the suit back to the ship.”

“What about it?”

“It’s gone. Severed at the base.”

A shaped charge, he suddenly realized. Just big enough to cause the damage. Was it the same group, stragglers that Bajuk had missed or some other nutjobs who had it in for her? It made no difference; they’d done their job as well as if the charge had blown her head completely off.

But an explosive big enough to do that would have been detected almost immediately. Something tiny would have been possible to smuggle on board…maybe.

“Wha… what happened?”

“Victoria!” Mirabelli said, “Are you all right?”

“Yes, I think so. My head is ringing. What was that noise? Did you hear that?”

“No. Only you did.” How could he explain to her that the loop that was the only way to lift the heavy suit onto the ship had been severed? It was a death sentence, the only question being whether her air would run out before the heat and pressure destroyed the suit. “It’s your loop,” he said.

“My loop? What are you talking about?”

“There was a shaped charge. It cut off your winch loop. I’m sorry.”

“Oh.”

The silence stretched out for a seeming eternity. Finally, Victoria spoke. “You guys need to start getting back.”

“What? And leave you here?”

“What choice do you have? We can all die…or just one of us. The cold equations and all that.”

Mirabelli froze. The thought of abandoning his companion on this planet, to cook or suffocate as the case might be, was just too much. Victoria was a strong personality, demanding, obsessed, cold to the point of callousness at times, but still a bond had formed over months of constant companionship. How could she ask that of him?

Worse, he could almost see the headlines if she died. Mirabelli’s leadership, his very presence on the mission would be forgotten after Victoria’s death. It would be her mission, she would be remembered as the first human to set foot on Venus, no matter that they’d made contact with the planet at exactly the same moment. Mirabelli would become a footnote, the guy next to her when she made planetfall, just like he’d been Campbell’s companion when he reached the top of Olympus.

Forever Sebastian Elcano. Forever Tenzing Norgay.

“Mirabelli, are you coming?” The anxiety in Rina’s voice came through even over the radio. She didn’t know what to do and wanted someone to decide for her.

He was damned if he would let her pressure him into leaving before he was ready. “How much time do we have?”

“Seven more minutes. Then the autopilot will lift us off.”

“All right. Override the autopilot.”

Victoria, silent until then, broke in. “No!”

“Yes. We can get you out of here.”

“How?” The hope in her voice cut him like a knife.

He had no idea. But that was what they paid him for. “Give me a second.”

Mirabelli thought about the problem, conscious of the clock ticking in the background. Could his suit somehow grasp hers so the winch could lift them both?

No. The exoskeletons were too heavy: even if he could keep his grip, the maneuver at the top was impossible. He’d have to rotate the suits around until hers was in position against the hull. It would never work.

“We just passed the takeoff time. Everything from here on is outside of our safety margin,” Rina told them.

But she didn’t tell him to think faster. She remembered who had paid for her recovery, who’d promoted her for sacrifice in the line of duty. If there was a chance to save Victoria, Rina would wait until the ship melted around her.

That wasn’t an option. Already, he could hear his suit’s fan straining to cope, an unusual situation. It was usually the cold of hard vacuum that was the problem.

“That’s it! Rina, how much air does Victoria have?”

“A full tank except for these seventeen minutes. More than four hours.”

“How long until you can get us into a stable orbit?”

“A few minutes.”

“Victoria, are you there?”

“Yeah. Not many places for me to go.”

“Help me empty the hopper.”

“What? Oh…”

“It’s worth a shot.”

She didn’t argue. They set about removing chunks of Venusian shale or whatever the rock here was from the sample collection space. Open to vacuum, it wasn’t intended to hold a person, but was reinforced against the weight of stone they expected to lift.

It took them six agonizing minutes to open a space big enough for Victoria’s suit; the automated crane and shovels had been busy.

“Am I going to freeze out here?” Victoria asked as Rina winched him into position.

“I don’t think so. The suit is as insulated as hell.”

“Yeah, against heat.”

“Should still work. If you start to feel nippy, turn off the refrigerator unit.” They both knew that was an idiotic suggestion, as that unit was activated by the outside temperature and couldn’t be controlled by the user.

He left her there and attached himself to the winch.

“I’ve changed my mind. Can’t I just stay down here and cook?”

Mirabelli’s suit clicked into place and he immediately felt the ship shake. Crushing acceleration followed.

“I don’t think Rina’s in the mood to open the door,” he replied.

He quickly popped the hatch and stumbled into the control area. Rina was seated, grimly pressing buttons.

“You could have at least waited until I was strapped in,” Mirabelli said.

“Not really. Every single indicator is in the red. A few seconds could make all the difference between living and dying…a few extra bruises won’t do you much harm.”

She was right. Indicators blinked and flashed at him from all over the board, and every graph seemed to be in the red section.

“How are you doing out there?” he asked Victoria.

“What do you think? I’m getting beaten to a pulp.”

She would be. The external hopper was built to transport stone. It wasn’t damped against vibration like the cabin was…and even the two people in the pilots’ seats were being bounced around quite a bit.

About four minutes into the flight, Victoria’s voice cut off.

“We lost telemetry to her suit,” Rina informed him.

Soon, they were drifting weightless in space. “I’m going to get her.”

Rina nodded wordlessly and unstrapped herself. Between them, they squeezed Mirabelli into the maintenance suit. Unlike the surface suits, this was just a standard issue vacuum hardsuit, strong enough to grasp and manipulate heavy objects in zero-gee. It wasn’t a hauler, but it would have to do. They didn’t have time to reach the orbiting mothership and use one of the crane arms.

“Slow down,” the pilot said. “If we forget a seal, you’re both dead.”

Mirabelli did as he was told, heart beating at a million miles an hour.

The airlock took forever to cycle.

“Come on,” he grunted at it and slammed his fist against the airlock door. That didn’t make the thing go any quicker.

Finally, it opened, and he made his way around the hull to the sample door. He marveled at how small the lander was without its armored undercarriage. More than three quarters of the craft had been designed to remain on Venus after the mission.

Even with the limited exposure—they’d only really been on the surface about thirty-five minutes—the vehicle looked decidedly second hand. Two trips through the acidic middle atmosphere plus the extra time on the surface, had left it pitted and scarred. He suspected that, after study, the conclusion would be that they’d come closer to cooking the thing than anyone expected. They’d thought twenty minutes would be perfectly safe and that the ship would be good for five times that.

It didn’t look that way.

The hopper was in worse shape than the rest of the hull. It was dented from the inside, and Mirabelli shuddered to think of what that kind of blow would have done to the fragile human being inside the suit. But there was no way he could turn back. He had to go get her… and he’d find whatever he found.

The visor gave no clue: the light he shone in there only revealed two hollows of closed human eyes deep in the helmet without giving any information about her state.

He looped a tether around Victoria’s suit. He’d been in space long enough that some things were second nature, and tying everything down during spacewalks was one of them. Nothing like watching a tool you needed to keep your crew alive spinning off into an eccentric orbit to really put a damper on your day.

Then he struggled against inertia. His suit had servos, but mainly for the claw mechanisms. Even in zero-gee he had to overcome the enormous weight of Victoria’s surface suit. It was like pushing a car.

He froze as the suit caught in the jamb of the hopper door; if the heavy thing got lodged in there, he might not be strong enough to pull it back out.

Only when it popped back out did Mirabelli breathe again. He struggled the last few meters to the space where the suits connected to the hull and then, cursing under his breath as he missed the clasp time and again, he pushed it into place.

“I’m coming back in. Any signs of life?”

“Telemetry’s still down.”

The airlock wasn’t any faster on the way in. When he finally got through, he broke a couple of dozen years of ingrained habit and simply shrugged out of his suit and left it where it floated. He would put it back in its storage locker later.

The hatch designed to open the back of the hard suits—and to keep both the people working the mechanism and the person inside the suit from coming into contact with the scalding exterior on exit—worked easily.

“Go slowly. If she’s sprung a leak, we’ll lose air.”

“If there’s a leak, I won’t be able to pull the door open against the vacuum.”

Neither of them mentioned that, if the suit had sprung a leak, that would be the late, lamented Victoria, freeze-dried in there.

The door popped open, and Victoria collapsed backwards into his arms. She wasn’t frozen, there was no smell of cooked meat. No sign of rigor mortis.

Of course, they’d only left the surface of Venus fifteen minutes before. She could be dead and not showing signs yet.

As he leaned over to check her breathing, he saw an ugly bruise above her left eye, and a nasty gash on her lip which had bloodied the front of her flight suit.

He placed Victoria against one wall. “She doesn’t look too good.”

“Is she breathing?” Rina asked. Her voice was tinged with genuine concern.

“I don’t know.” He desperately searched for a pulse, got close to try to hear her breathing.

“Put your hand on her stomach, you idiot.”

He did so, and suddenly Victoria coughed.

Mirabelli’s first impulse was to hug her, but until he knew the extent of her injuries, he didn’t dare.

As gently as he could, he brought her to a stretcher on the wall and strapped her down. The mother ship had artificial gravity in one of the pods, and a tele-doctor which would allow them to have real medical professionals on Earth study her and control the waldos…but they were still hours away from docking.

Victoria’s left eye was swollen shut, but her right was looking straight at him.

“Are you awake?”

“Yes.” It was a whisper.

“How do you feel.”

A ghost of a smile. “Alive,” she said. The whisper seemed to be getting stronger. Then she grimaced as he jolted her in the attempt to get her placed. “Arm hurts.”

“Rina, get back here.” The pilot had much better medical training than Mirabelli did. By the nature of his job, he always assumed he would be on the receiving end of any medical treatment.

“Just a sec… There, we’re on our way.”

Rina looked the arm over and pronounced it broken. She made a makeshift splint and headed back to the controls, leaving the two mission leaders alone in the tiny second room.

“So,” Mirabelli asked. “Was it worth it?”

“Hell, we’re getting back alive. I’d say so,” she replied. Then she gave him a look. “This isn’t as addictive as I thought it would be. I don’t ever want to do anything like this again.”

He laughed. “That’s because your name is on the official expedition communiqués. You’ve done what you intended. You can relax now.”

“And haven’t you also done your bit? I seem to recall that the mission is called Mirabelli-Hóng, not just Hóng. Are you going to retire now? First man on Venus. Your place in history is secure, no more of that Elcano stuff.”

“Yes. I guess you’re right.”

And in a way, she was. The sheer relief that everything had gone to plan, and that they’d be remembered together—no martyrs, no dead expedition leaders to stick in the memory—was a huge weight off his shoulder.

But…

Victoria laughed at him. “You’re not going to quit, are you?”

“I…”

“Come on. Are you serious? We nearly got killed back there. Well, I nearly did and that’s enough for me.”

“Yeah, it was close.”

“But you still want to go out again. Why?”

“There’s an ocean on Europa. We can get a submersible in there, I’m sure of it.” His face fell. “It won’t be cheap, though, and it’s not as sexy as going to Venus. I’m sure I’ll get someone to foot the bill after this, though. This is perfection. We even had a terrorist attack. Pure PR Gold.”

She was looking at him with a mixture of shock and amazement. “Do you really think you’ll ever need to find sponsors again? You saved my life back there…. Your expeditions are paid for right until the day they kill you.”

“Wow, thank you.” Then suspicion hit. “Wait. You’re not coming with me, are you?”

“What? Of course not.”

“Oh, good.”

And right then, he began to plan for the next mission out. He had a few weeks before they returned to Earth. Might as well put them to good use.