“Will they get to the ring before we do?”
“If deceleration continues at present rate, four of them will reach the ring within one second of our arrival.”
“They mean to escort us back to our system,” said Sandra.
“That’s very thoughtful of them,” I said. I smiled at her.
She shook her head. “That was totally amazing. You’ve regained your co-shower privileges.”
“Is that all?”
“What more do you want?” she asked playfully.
Sandra could turn a scowl into a flirt in ten seconds flat. I loved that about her. “Do you have a twin sister?” I asked.
She looked for something to throw at me, but couldn’t find anything, so she crossed her arms and pouted in her chair for a while. I could tell she wasn’t really upset.
I ordered the Socorro to turn us around again and gently brake the rest of the way to the ring. The Macro ships shadowed us. They meant to meet us and head through together. I sensed they weren’t in the mood for any more funny business. Machines are sticklers for their rules.
I climbed out of my pilot chair with difficulty. I took careful steps under what felt like one G of steady, crosswise force. I used my chair to support myself, and when I’d gone as far as I could that way I sprang from the seat to hang onto a set of handholds I’d placed here and there around the ship. The handholds were rungs in the walls, like cheap towel-racks, but much stronger. I grunted as I worked my way to a spot in the wall and touched it. The metal melted at my touch.
“Where the heck are you going?” Sandra asked finally, watching my efforts to enter the kitchen area. “Don’t tell me you are hungry now.”
I came back out after a minute or so of struggling against the acceleration to get the fridge open. A G of sideways force would have been even more difficult to deal with if my muscles hadn’t been enhanced. As it was I felt heavy, as if I were in a diving suit at the bottom of the ocean.
I came back to the bridge and jumped back to my command chair. I handed Sandra a can of beer then popped mine open. It bubbled weakly. At lot of the stuff in the fridge had been bashed around, but cans always seemed to hold up well under G-forces.
“A celebration,” I said.
“What are we celebrating?”
“Life—while we’re still breathing.”
“I’ll drink to that,” she said, and she tipped her can back. Streams of beer flowed over her cheeks and wet her hair. She patted at the mess and complained. Drinking when G-forces are pushing you back in your chair was an art form she hadn’t yet mastered.
“It’s warm,” she said after a quiet minute. We were close to the ring now.
“Yeah. I think it’s the radiation from the blue giant. The kitchen isn’t shielded.”
“Is it okay to drink this stuff?”
I finished my beer, then tilted my head to one side and crushed my can. I kept crushing it down until it was about the size of a sugar cube. Can-crushing had become a habit of mine.
“Don’t worry about the radiation,” I said. “We’ll have the nanites do a rework on us at the cellular level when we get home.”
“Will that hurt?”
“Hell yeah.”
Then we flew into the ring, and everything changed.
-31-
I hadn’t slowed the ship down enough to safely reenter Venus’ atmosphere. We’d been decelerating, but there was no speedometer on my Nano ship, and using imprecise verbal commands such as take us in slowly proved too vague in this instance. The ship had no scripts or experience to safety-check my decisions when going through a ring. Things went badly.
When I later regained consciousness, I estimated we went through the ring at about Mach 1. That’s a very slow speed in astronomical terms, but when hitting a thick, soupy atmosphere it was much too fast. What passed for air on Venus was similar to water on Earth. Hitting it at speed was like plunging a jetliner into the ocean. We didn’t even slide along the surface, we dove smack into it.
I think what saved us was the thickening of the hull around the bridge. Other areas of the ship were wrecked. When I woke up, drifting over Venus in my crash seat, the forward wall was dented in and blank.
“Socorro?” I asked.
“Responding.”
I felt a moment of relief. At least the brainbox had survived.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Unknown.”
“Why is the forward wall blank?” I asked. As I looked at it, I became increasingly alarmed. It wasn’t only blank, it had big creases in it, lines that poked in toward us menacingly.
“Emergency procedures have reprioritized nanite formation settings. Resetting to standard settings.”
“No,” I said hurriedly. I didn’t know what the emergency priorities were, but I figured they were a good idea right now. “Maintain all emergency priorities.”
“Acknowledged.”
I tried to unbuckle myself with my right arm, but my hand didn’t work properly. I felt bones grind. I figured out my right thumb must be broken. I sweated as I pulled it straight and set it with a click. The nanites in my body would have to work on that one. I used my left hand to unbuckle and levered myself painfully out of my chair. I checked on Sandra next. She was hurt worse than I was, and I felt more guilt than at any point on the trip. She came around at my touch, moaning.
“Are we home?” she asked me.
“Almost. Just relax, you’ve got a few injuries.”
“I don’t care,” she said, keeping her eyes squinched closed. “Just tell me what year it is.”
“Everything’s fine. It’s the same day we left,” I said. I had no idea if I was lying or not.
Sandra smiled with the half of her mouth that still worked properly. Blood ran from her left eye down her neck. Her eyes stayed shut. “Good,” she said, and passed out again.
I gently eased her back into her seat and made her as comfortable as I could. Rivers of nanites flowed over the walls around me in veins that grew, pulsed, and then shrank away to nothing. I knew the ship was reconfiguring and repairing itself as best it could. I questioned Socorro about the status of the ship. We had no communications, no sensors, and only one engine. Worst of all, my flatscreen had a big crack in it.
I checked every camera in turn, and eventually found one that still worked. I managed to get it to feed images to the cracked screen. I had my ship limp back to the ring. The Macro ships were gone. Had they escorted us here and left? Were they up in Venus orbit now, or heading to Earth to check up on things? I had no idea and no way of finding out.
I ordered my last camera covered with a protective nanite dome again. I might need it. I ordered the ship to ease us up out of the atmosphere. The worst part was the high-velocity winds in the acid-clouds. I flew the Socorro through them, then dared to uncover my last camera again. Fortunately, it still worked. Without sensors and with no replicating mini-factory aboard to build new equipment, we might have been unable to navigate home.
We spent the next week limping home, taking sightings on Earth with the camera and realigning our course to glide after her. Like all planets, our world was a moving target, and we didn’t have as much power as before. But we made it home before our food supplies ran out. By that time, Sandra and I had healed up completely and were bored out of our minds. Even acrobatic freefall-sex had worn thin.
It was with great relief that we drifted down out of the sky over Andros Island. I headed for the main base, figuring I had a lot of debriefing to do. We still didn’t have any working communications, so they didn’t know I was coming. Using my lone working camera, I guided us in, giving verbal commands to the Socorro, as the ship was flying blind. The beam turrets homed in on us and followed us down ominously. They didn’t fire, which at least indicated they recognized us.