Descent to Venus

 

James had just taken his seat in the Lander when he looked over at Penny beside him. She was settling in, strapping herself down. They weren’t wearing suits. There was no point. If there were a hull breach, they would fry in an instant, no matter what suit they wore. The only suits that could withstand the temperature and pressure of Venus were stored away—there was no room for them here. Penny looked over at James.

“Well, here we go. Are you ready?” Her face couldn’t manage the smile that she had tried to put into her voice.

“I’m fine. I’ll be okay. You?”

“Yes, I’m ready.”

“Good.” The tension was worse for the specialists. They didn’t have anything to do; there was nothing to distract them on the descent. Scott, Adam and Peyton were running through final countdown checklists and verifying status with Brodie on the com.

James swiveled to look at Donatella, her normally bubbly self seemed to be caked in concrete.

“Clear for lock-down?” asked Natasha from just outside the Lander hatch.

“Clear,” was the reply from Scott.

All three specialists watched, mesmerized, as the hatch began its silent hydraulic closure. Fear and hope were about to be trapped in this oversized diving bell. The mind couldn’t help but think back to other catastrophic failures in the space program. How had those poor bastards felt as doom waved hello?

A deep, rich, thunk, almost melodic, reverberated through the ship as the heavy, heavy door shut tight. Eyes roved up, down and around as each of them applied their own unique, personal way of coping with fear.

“I wonder what they will be like?” Donatella asked.

There was a pause. Then from James, “I assume you are referring to the Aliens…. Actually, now that I think of it, I guess we are the Aliens now. We are going to be setting foot on their world, walking on their land.” James continued on, not waiting for a reply from Donatella. “I’ve thought a lot about it. Of course there is no way to know for sure, but to survive the temperature and pressure of Venus they would have to be very stran…well, very different from us.”

“Yes…. Yes. They couldn’t have blood…as a matter of fact they couldn’t be water based at all. They would boil!” Penny’s voice grew animated as she shed her fears. “As a biologist, this is an incredible opportunity—to see and study a race that is completely different from us. I hope there will be some way to get samples of skin, organs and tissue.”

“I imagine they will want the same from us,” James replied thoughtfully.

“Oh! Yes…. I hadn’t considered that.” A look of concern flashed over Penny’s face.

The conversation died as quickly as it had started.

“Okay everybody, we are starting final count down. Sixty seconds from separation.” Scott had a quick look around the control room, verifying that they were all locked in their seats.

Sixty seconds ticked away. Ten, nine, eight, seven…. This won’t be bad. Just a bit of a kick then we are on our wa…. A short, sharp sound, like balloons popping, echoed in the Lander. The jolt wasn’t bad at all.

Several minutes passed, then came a whoosh and a stronger push. The engines had begun to decelerate the Lander. The Lander would now lose its orbit lock and start to fall toward Venus. There was little for anyone to do; the release and deceleration was precisely timed to drop the Lander within a mile of the target—the location of the radio transmissions. Once they reached the atmosphere, a parachute would eject and the Lander descent would slow. Peyton would use the rockets to fine-tune the Lander’s placement and to ensure that the landing velocity was within tolerance.

 

All they could do was wait.

 

A slight, almost imperceptible shudder ran through the Lander. Then stillness. Another shudder. A little stronger? Stillness…stillness…quiet…just strained breathing…a shudder, strong enough to rattle a few items…stillness…then a hard BANG! Suddenly, the shudder had become a shaking, rattling, banging pandemonium. Heart rates jumped into the two hundreds. They had entered the Venus atmosphere.

The bouncing and jouncing increased, then died off, then increased, varying unpredictably as they dropped through different layers of the atmosphere. Shrieking, screaming, moaning sounds joined the chorus of rattles, bangs and thunks as the shipped ripped open the atmosphere. It was bad, it was scary, but it was tolerable.

Scott, Peyton and Adam were watching the monitors intently. Checking air pressure, temperature and most importantly, the velocity vector. They had to land within a few miles of the site or the entire mission would be wasted.

Peyton, voice rattling over the mayhem of sound, warned, “Chute deployment in one minute.”

They braced for the impact. “Three, Two, One….” Wham! They were driven into their seats, their bodies briefly compressed into blobs of Jell-O, then reformed, human again, as the Lander slowed.

 

Two minutes passed,

 

Then doom spoke.

 

Simple, little, words. “Something’s wrong.”

“Be a bit more specific, Adam.” Scott’s voice was calm and cool as if he were lying on a beach getting a good tan.

“We’ve slowed but not enough!”

“Peyton, check the chute monitor,” Scott said.

“It looks fine, it’s fully deployed, nothing wron…. Wait! Wait! I see a tear! Yes! Yes! A rip…. It’s getting bigger! The chute is disintegrating!”

“Our velocity is increasing!” cried Adam.

Scott looked at a display to his right. “Yes, we are already off course. Wait…wait….”

Ages of time seemed to slip by…then Scott, still composed, “It’s getting worse. Peyton, you’re going to have to engage the engines. Use the engines to slow the Lander and bring it back on course.”

“But we need the fuel to get us back! Back to the Orbiter!”

Scott looked over at Peyton, his face a mask of calm, “One problem at a time. First let’s land intact.”

The ship was churning its way to the Venus surface, every nut, bolt and screw stressed to its maximum. The sound was incredible—screaming, howling, banging, grating—every noise known to man was being reproduced in that small space. The shaking was so violent that the Astronaut’s vision was starting to blur.

 

“Skinnn temmmmperrrrature at maxxxxximum!” Adam could barely spit the words out without chewing his tongue in half.

 

“Ennnnngagggging Ennnggines!” Peyton shouted.

 

A quiet sound slowly grew until it became a roar—swallowing all others. It was the engines, wide open, at full power. Gravity ripped at the Astronauts, crushing them into their seats. Everything was a blur. A communal thought blew through the Astronauts, How can the ship take this? It’s going to be torn to pieces!

 

But they were slowing! They were slowing! Another thirty seconds passed before the engines were backed off. The ear-splitting cacophony of sound, the shaking, the rattling was becoming tolerable again.

 

“I don’t want a soft landing! I want you to bang this baby as hard as you think possible into the surface. I want to save every possible drop of fuel!” Scott yelled.

“Roger,” replied Peyton.

“Adam, give Peyton continual velocity readings.”

“Will do.”

 

“We’re still off course. Do you want me to use the engines to redirect the trajectory?” asked Peyton.

“How far off target are we?”

“About five miles.”

“Wait…. Let me think…. That’s just under the round trip limit of the Rover vehicles. Okay we take a chance; we have to save fuel. Continue on the current course.”

“Roger.”

 

The specialists watched helpless as this drama of life and death swirled around them. Penny thought that she had heard someone screaming at one point. Was it her?

“Okay, everybody. As the boss said, I’m going to make a bottom-buster of a landing. Brace yourselves. Landing is in two minutes!”

James locked his mind. Refused to think of anything. He waited.

He heard Peyton, “There’s the surface!”

“Surface area is flat. Excellent! Finally, something in our favor! Bring her on in Peyton!” shouted Scott over the noise.

 

“Okay, twenty seconds folks!”

 

A huge clang, bang, whump blasted through the ship. They were driven the hardest they had ever been into their seats. Some creaks and groans escaped from the horribly strained vessel; then it was quiet, finally quiet.

It was a short blessing; audible alarms started to complain with their high-pitched shrill voices. Any major alarms? Any leaks? For a heart-stopping moment, they waited while Scott and Peyton checked.

“Minor alarms, nothing life-threatening!” yelled an exuberant Peyton.

“We made it!” Penny shouted.

The room filled with happy, congratulatory human sounds. Donatella was clapping her hands—that wonderful smile back on her face.

As they slowly calmed, a new feeling predominated; it was their bodies finally reporting in, with some aches and pains, but most of all, a strange sensation that they had almost forgotten. It was gravity. It was real gravity, not the simulated gravity of the Renaissance living quarters. Movements weren’t so easy anymore. They were all feeling weak and tired; excitement, fear and now gravity had stolen all their strength.

“Okay, we need to do a damage check,” Scott said, “Peyton, check the alarms. Adam, use the external cameras to survey the exterior of the Lander.”

A couple of minutes later Adam said, “Well, the first thing I can tell you is that three of the ten cameras have failed. It should be okay though; the other cameras can cover the field of view—okay, yeah, two of the six Lander legs are buckled pretty badly. They must have hit solid rock. The rest are driven about eight feet into the soil. That’s why we aren’t listing as badly as we should be; by fluke we’ve managed to balance the broken legs with dug-in ones.”

“Good, good, so long as we are reasonably level, I don’t care too much about the bottom three quarters of the Lander. It’s not coming back with us. What I do care about is the release mechanism for takeoff; is it functional? Can you see any damage at the join between the lower part of the Lander and the escape pod? Can you see that part of the ship, Adam?” Scott asked.

“No, not well enough.”

“We’ll have to do an external visual inspection once we have settled in.”

“Right, what do you have, Peyton?” asked Scott.

“Well some primary and backup systems have failed but in all cases, we have at least one working unit. One Oxygen tank is unavailable and offline—probably a valve is stuck—I suspect we will be able to fix it. We won’t need that tank for a while, anyway.” Peyton stopped, took a big breath, “Now, I’ve saved the worst for last.”

“What? What!” Penny asked, her voice a bit strained.

“We’ve lost contact with the Orbiter. The transmitter/receivers, both primary and backup, seem to be functional. I think the problem is either with the cable to the antenna or the antenna itself.”

“Okay, that’s definitely a problem,” said Scott, “The Orbiter crew is going to be very worried. I’ll start working on that right away. Now I want the rest of the team to split up and do visual inspections of every inch of the interior of the ship. After that, let’s take a rest for a couple of hours; one of us will have to keep watch—I’m volunteering myself for the first shift, that way I can continue to work on the radio. Okay?”

Scott noted that no one asked about the fuel supply; no one wanted to hear the bad news and he wasn’t going to offer any info. At least not yet. “Well, Let’s go!”