Acid Sky
Picture: Olympus 240V spaceplane
Picture: USSV Langley plan view
Picture: USSV Langley side views
Picture: USSV Langley deck plans
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ACID SKY
MARK ANSON
GF
Glenn Field Publishing
First published 2013 by Glenn Field Publishing
Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk
Copyright © Mark Anson 2013
All illustrations by the author.
Cover image: ‘Eruption on Venus’ copyright © John E. Kaufmann.
The right of Mark Anson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-9568898-3-6 (Paperback original)
ISBN 978-0-9568898-4-3 (e-book edition)
First Edition
www.glennfield.co.uk
In memory of
Gerry Anderson
1929–2012
whose imagination inspired a generation
FAB, Gerry
PREFACE TO THE E-BOOK EDITION
This book includes several illustrations by the author. In the print book, these are located in the text in the appropriate place. In the e-book edition, to avoid inconvenient breaks in the text when the font is changed, the illustrations are placed at the start of the relevant chapter rather than in the body of the chapter text.
Kindle Fire users may wish to lock the display rotation so that the drawings in landscape format can be viewed more easily.
Readers may be interested to know that a sequel to this story is also available on Kindle, titled
Below Mercury
, in which we find out more about Clare Foster’s later career.
A further story in the series
, set beyond Mars, will be published in late 2015.
Mark Anson, November 2013.
Acid Sky
PROLOGUE
June 14, 2141, was a routine day on board the USSV
Langley
, on station in the upper atmosphere of Venus, high above the cloud deck. The
Langley’s
complement of over 120 crew and passengers in transit were working, eating and sleeping on board the giant carrier as it circled slowly round the planet.
First Lieutenant Elizabeth Keller was a pilot in the
Langley’s
small wing of Frigate aircraft, providing ferry and logistics services between the
Langley
and the two other carriers on the planet. Life as a carrier pilot kept her busy; if she wasn’t flying crew and materials between the
Langley
and the two other carriers, she was honing her skills on carrier takeoffs and landings. Landing an aircraft on a moving flight deck where the target touchdown spot was barely six metres long was a skill that needed constant practice.
In the landing pattern around the
Langley
, other Frigate aircraft were circling or coming in to land, and the crew in the air control tower, high above the
Langley’s
flight deck, were kept busy marshalling the incoming aircraft and issuing instructions for landing. Others tracked the aircraft through camera and binoculars, watching for any problems.
Keller had taken one of the trainee pilots out for a navigation exercise earlier that morning, and having dropped him off back on the carrier, was doing a few landings to meet her quota for that month. She had made over four hundred landings before, but like all carrier pilots, she always strove to improve and never took any chances. On Venus, there were no ejector seats, no parachutes and no second chances; if you screwed up, you doomed yourself and anyone with you.
She had practised several landings with the arresting hook raised to check her missed trap procedure, and was making her last landing of the morning, which was a routine test of a full automatic landing, letting the aircraft’s autopilot take her all the way down to touchdown. She was the last aircraft to recover and the most experienced pilot in the air that day; nobody anticipated any problems as she completed the landing checklist and reported ready for landing.
In the air control tower, the flight operations officer watched as Keller’s Frigate made the final turn, crossing the carrier’s wake and coming down the glideslope towards the flight deck.
‘Zero Eight, ball, fuel state zero decimal nine, established.’
Keller’s voice came over the control tower speakers, showing that she could see the flight deck and the visual landing aids, even though the aircraft was coming in automatically.
‘Zero Eight, land.’ The tower controller glanced up at the situation board, checking that the flight deck was clear and the arresting wires ready to catch the incoming aircraft.
The flight operations officer watched as the aircraft came in, sliding down the invisible radio beam of the glideslope, unerringly towards the arresting wires stretched across the deck. It would be like it had been countless times before, the harsh slam into the deck, the sound of the engines spooling up, and then the deceleration as the hook caught the wire and the aircraft was hauled to a stop. The autopilot was bringing the ship in precisely down the groove.
The Frigate was seconds away from the flight deck threshold. In his binoculars, it dropped down suddenly, and he anticipated the rise as the autopilot added more power to counteract the turbulence. But the aircraft didn’t come straight back up again; it stayed down, and carried on sinking. Something was wrong with the autopilot; it was dropping her below the glideslope. He glanced across at the glideslope camera; she was already well below the amber, going down into the deadly red, where her flight path would intersect the back of the ship.
‘Emergency power!’ he yelled, but it was too late – she was too close and too low to recover. There was time for one panicked shout on the radio, and then First Lieutenant Keller’s Frigate slammed into the reinforced ramp at the rear of the flight deck. The impact stove in the nose and cockpit in a crumple of metal. One wing broke off and veered crazily over the deck, its engine still thrusting, while the twisted remainder of the aircraft slid from the
Langley
and spun down and away in a shower of wreckage, a corkscrew of black smoke marking its long fall to Venus’s surface.
The tower controller hit the alarm immediately, and a few moments later the
Langley
banked over hard in an emergency turn, circling back to the Frigate’s last known position, but everyone knew it was futile; they had all seen her go down. If she hadn’t been killed outright by the impact, the fearsome pressure deep in the atmosphere would have crushed the aircraft flat, long before it reached the surface. The control tower crew sat in stunned silence as they made the run past the location; Keller had been popular, and had been coming towards the end of her tour on Venus.
The flight operations officer made the call to the captain, letting him know the worst; there was no sign of Keller and her aircraft.
The next morning, two men sat on opposite sides of a polished desk, steaming mugs of coffee in front of them. One, a tall man with greying hair, stared fixedly at the liquid in his mug. The other man, younger, picked his up and took a slow sip. His gaze was fixed on the older man, and his eyes never moved.
‘This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be,’ the grey-haired man said without looking up. ‘I didn’t want—’
‘You said permanent,’ the younger man interrupted. ‘Forever. For good.’
The grey-haired man closed his eyes. ‘Not like this.’
‘Well, how exactly
would
you have liked it? You left it up to me, remember.’
The older man looked up again. ‘They’re sending an investigation team. They’ll be here in August.’
For a moment, the younger man’s confidence wavered. ‘They’re coming
here?
Why aren’t they letting us do the investigation?’
‘Why the hell do you think?’ the other man snapped. ‘This is the third fatal landing accident on Venus, and it’s scaring the trainees back on Earth. Nobody wants to sign up for tours here any more; they all want to go to Mars.’ He eyed the younger man suspiciously. ‘Anyway, you said there was no evidence. Are you sure about that? Because if you’re not—’
‘Of course I’m sure. I took care of everything. There weren’t any mistakes. Remember, my ass is on the line here as much as yours. They won’t find a thing, no matter how hard they look.’ Under their feet, the ship moved slightly as it came round onto a new heading; the patch of sunlight on the desk crept across its surface, then settled out again.
The older man shook his head and rubbed his thumb over the rim of his mug. ‘I hope so,’ he said distantly. ‘There’s nothing to be done about it now, in any case.’
‘No. We go on as normal. As far as anyone’s concerned here, it appears to be pilot error. We have to keep on flying, keep on training.’
‘Yes … I suppose so.’
‘I’ve been looking through the list of potential replacements.’ The younger man placed a file on the desk, flipped it open. ‘We need to put a request in.’
‘I can’t deal with this right now.’ The grey-haired man looked down again.
‘You have to.’ The eyes staring back at him were cold. ‘You can’t let your own feelings show through, or they really will suspect something. You have to put in a request immediately – you know how long it takes to get a replacement.’ He stood up and went over to the launch window plot on one wall. Twin whorls of contour lines, looking like a weather pattern, showed the optimum transit times and dates for transfers between Earth and Venus for the next year. He traced a line out on the chart with his finger. ‘The September window will get someone here in early December. We’ll still be short of pilots until then.’
The older man flipped open the file, and glanced without interest at the candidate profiles. ‘I presume you have a recommendation?’