Cloudfall: Chapter 1
Planetfall: Mariner Station to Venera City.
Contents | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2
He was there, then out of grasp, too far, falling, backwards…Dad!
Shay McLaren lurched awake, pulling out of the terminal backwards freefall, thrusting forwards to consciousness, straining against the chunky restraints. Panic flooded her head, dreams of her father opening the spigot.
A hand landed on her shoulder, “You ok, Shay?”
Was she? Her head ached, her muscles throbbed, and her mouth was parchment dry. She nodded to the face floating at her shoulder. The Australian pilot. She forgot his name. She made to shake the inertia of slumber from herself, but the safety belt tightened—momentary panic, then something like realisation. This was the drop ship. Laughter, relaxed banter and unfamiliar tones flowed from behind her front-row seat. Through sleep-heavy eyes, she saw bare metal bulkheads and pillars, warning labels, exposed cable trays and arcane-looking valves, and floating past her, the pilot. He was all skin and bone, cargo trousers hanging from his emaciated frame like washing drying on a line — a real zero G dweller.
“Planetfall in five minutes. Your first time, eh? Don’t worry; I haven’t messed up a single one for… oh, four hundred or so yet,” said the pilot, weightless and seemingly careless.
He moved to the front of the windowless cabin. Cabin? More like a coffin, thought Shay as she tried to turn around but couldn’t. The tall chair coddled her tightly, a ‘precaution for planetfall,’ she was told, just as she left Mariner Station. Perhaps planetfall was not a wise choice of words, given what happened to her father. But she was too numb for that and too terrified, trapped in the moment. The most alien moment she had ever experienced. Weightlessly drifting into the tiny, tinny ship, she knew she stood out, not just because of who she was or what had happened to her, but because she looked and felt terrified. A windowless ship, tin foil thick walls, plunging towards the roiling mustard clouds of a hell world. In front of her, the pilot easily somersaulted into his seat, buckled up and flipped a chunky switch. An analogue gauge twitched in the spartan control panel, and Shay’s stomach lurched. They had entered the atmosphere of Venus.
The vessel felt like a stone skipped across a lake, creaking, humming, whining, and shuddering as it skimmed thickening layers of noxious atmosphere. The pilot’s arm juddered as he wrestled with the antique-looking control stick. Shay closed her eyes, never a fan of flying, especially not now. The small craft moved as if thrown by some petulant, angry god. She had been told there were no computers on this ship, no holographic displays and their reassuring readouts. Just analogue dials and steampunk indicators, basic needles roving static numbers. All unhackable, all inviolable.
How is he flying this thing?
This crewed bullet was the only thing to pass through the ‘air gap’ between Mariner Station and Venera City. Once per fortnight, this journey was made, sometimes with supplies, more often with people. Venera City was self-sufficient among the toxic cloud tops of Venus. The only need it couldn’t reasonably float above was that of new people.
Shay screwed her eyes tightly shut, knuckles white and hands aching as she throttled certainty from the thick safety straps. Fixtures rattled, and deck plating thrummed and vibrated between bangs as the ship bounced from one pocket of pressure to the next. The atmosphere seemed harder than a brick wall, and the vessel felt flimsier than a cardboard box — each thump ending in a stomach-lurching drop.
“Not often this bad. Be out the chop in a jiffy!” the pilot shouted over the clattering and roaring.
He turned and threw Shay a winning smile. Her briefly open eyelids slammed shut again, not reassured. Had her father, Ben, ever mentioned such a horrific landing? They spoke via video message, the light-minute delay making full-duplex impossible. She was sure she would have recalled such a harrowing detail of planetfall. As the drop ship crashed against air currents, she turned her thoughts from their terminal velocity to those of training and other things.
I don’t want to be here. Especially not now.
But that wasn’t helpful. No reassurance came from what she had been told. Thinking of the salary offered no respite either. It wasn’t the money she had in a previous life, but it was good, enough to make her wealthy if not for her debt. Her staggering debt. And she was here. Was she to die in this narrow tube filled with strangers on a strange planet? Oh god, no…
And then, as if by magic, the violent, gut-wrenching motion became calm. Shay felt heavy again, for the first time in days, as the pilot steadied his grip on the control stick.
“Steady,” he muttered to the vessel, eyes consumed by the basic dials. The ship squeaked and grumbled as it sank into the rapidly thickening atmosphere.
“Okay, folks, you’ll hear two chimes. One in thirty seconds to let you know we’ve acquired Venera and another in sixty seconds. Stay in your seats until after the second chime; sometimes the crosswinds up here aren’t kind, and there’s more than one second chime… if you catch my drift,” said the pilot.
Shay didn’t quite catch his drift, opting to check her fastenings again, more from nerves than anything else. She had never made planetfall on Earth, never mind on Venus. How did she even manage to fall asleep on this vessel? Nothing about the spartan surroundings suggested comfort or relaxation. She concluded that boredom must have played its part since she couldn’t bring anything with her: no devices or anything remotely computational. The most complex device she had on her person was the seat buckle. This meant she had no music either, though perhaps that had been a good thing; the past days had contained too much sad music, and she had grown weary of it. Ballads and laments alone were not enough to sustain a soul; they had helped, though. They marshalled her emotions, something she could not do alone, especially not now. Perhaps that was why she found herself here? Perhaps that failure to achieve calm any other way was how she ended up here. But no, nothing good came from thinking like that.
Despite the warning, the first chime came suddenly. It was more like a muffled screech leaking from a broken speaker than a chime. The second was a stern alarm warning, shrill, urgent and out of place somehow.
Very un-chime-like.
Behind her seat, the shouted bonhomie trailed off in response.
The pilot announced, “Well, just like back home, they can’t predict the weather here either. Wiggle your buckles, folks, make sure they’re in tight. It’s a category six down there!”
She didn’t know what that meant, and despite the alacrity of the pilot’s tone, she was not set at ease. She hadn’t been at ease this entire trip. It had started a week ago on an old hulking chunk of metal called The Aurora, where she had been sat amongst engineers, scientists and technicians, all eager to tell her that ‘Venus ain’t no place for a holiday’.
She had kept herself to herself, exercising, eating and sleeping alone. At first, this was prompted by being recognised by a young ops crew member who thought it a fitting tribute to play Shay Laren’s latest album over the comms system on the first day out of Earth orbit. The album that was most definitely not hers. She was Shay McLaren now, not the product known as Shay Laren.
On the second day from Earth, news reached The Aurora that her father had died. Suicide. But by then, the ship was too far into its acceleration/deceleration phase to turn around. Shay suspected they wouldn’t have anyway, even if they could. The Artemis Corporation was not known for its philanthropy. The self-imposed loneliness was hard on the vessel, with just sad songs for comfort, as her former fame filled each communal space with thick air and claustrophobic stares. The oh-so-long week was broken when they docked with Mariner Station in orbit above Venus. Shay felt incredibly relieved to be diluted once more amongst people barely registering her fame. Gossip, like viruses, spreads quickly in a confined space, and there was no inoculation for it on The Aurora or Mariner Station. So she was back to self-isolating in no time again. Best not to carry the extra weight of unwanted stares or suffer the indignity of half-whispered conversations. Though perhaps the condolences chafed more than the recognition or the fact that people still thought of that AI-powered effigy, Shay Laren, as her. She wasn’t sure, but she knew that if she heard ‘Ben was a good man’ or ‘Sorry for your loss’ one more time, she would scream. Or shrink back to the small and frightened girl she had been all those years ago, back before The Procedure. That was another bitter pill to swallow. Dr Garvey was here, and Dr Garvey would be her boss.
This was all too much. Her father, the situation, the journey, everything, just everything. But tears wouldn’t come. Not now.
The ship began to buck, whirr, shimmy, squeal, and then bang as if on cue. With a dull clang, the pilot declared, “She’s down! Textbook stuff in such a harsh storm!”
The panel before the pilot began to wail a new, more urgent alarm. He used his palm to batter the dull metal instrument casing, and the noise sputtered to silence. With a winning smile, he turned to Shay, “Tray tables up, seats un-reclined and thank you for flying Venusian Air!”
On The Aurora, she became aware of her behaviour: remoteness and lack of friendliness. Several years ago, her image consultants had chided her about this.
‘You’re too isolated, too distant,’ one of the faceless arrays of time-wasters had said. But perhaps they had been right; distance and isolation had become her trademarks. Well, her’s, not her artificial stand-in’s. It, for it was an it, was everything her image consultants and management had wanted from her. It was a licence to print money, had such a practice still existed. And now, here she was, scared out of her mind, frazzled with grief for her father, and all she could think about was perception. She was still the ‘ice queen’.
Bloody marvellous.
It was as discernable as grief at a funeral; the crew and people she had encountered thought her distant, living up to her reputation. Had she spared them any consideration that they didn’t know how to approach her? Maybe some felt bad about Ben and couldn’t say anything to her. What did the perception of others matter here? What mattered was surviving, coming here to rebuild her life, and finding out what happened to her father. And the first steps to this lay beyond the windowless walls of the landed dropship.
Perceptions be damned.