Ishtar Rising (Book 2) - Michael A. Martin [10]
Great, thought Gomez, her knuckles white as she clung to the armrest of the seat directly behind the two pilot’s stations. The little shuttle lurched and bucked, and Gomez watched anxiously as Corsi piloted the Kwolek through swirls of dense, hot vapor while brief but intense cloudbursts of concentrated sulfuric acid sluiced the hull.
On its way planetward once again—following the same parabola whose upward arc had just enabled the orbiting Ishtar Station to beam the rescued Aphrodite personnel to safety—the Kwolek dived swiftly through Venus’s upper atmosphere. Normally, the Venusian air at this altitude—around eighty kilometers above the surface—would be somewhat calm, a relatively thin haze of carbon dioxide gas and the occasional minuscule sulfurous particle. But with the upward push that Project Ishtar’s force fields were imparting to the lower atmospheric levels, the air at this height was far denser than usual, and had been whipped into a frenzy of chaotic motion. The effect was only intensifying the deeper the shuttle dived toward the upper edge of the planet-girdling force-field network.
“Some stretch of weather we’re having, isn’t it?” Stevens said, glancing out through the forward viewport, whose transparent aluminum was already beginning to show signs of scoring from the increasingly caustic atmosphere. Stevens sat in the secondary cockpit chair, where he worked the console to Corsi’s immediate right.
Corsi said, “Better keep your eyes on the road, Fabe, or you’re walking back to the da Vinci.”
“I may have to let you handle the driving by yourself, Dom,” Stevens replied, not sounding chastened in the least. “Say the word once we reach optimal distance from the field’s equator.”
“When we get there, you’ll be the second one to know,” Corsi said, apparently adjusting the sensors in an attempt to use the nearest free-floating atmospheric probes as navigational aids. “I just wonder why Soloman’s ‘optimal distance’ had to be the one place on this planet where winds are strongest.”
“Chalk it up to Finagle’s Laws,” Gomez said.
“We’re receiving more revised force-field specs from the Bynar,” Tev announced. His rotund body was wedged into one of the port-side chairs, his attention riveted to the console display before him. P8 Blue stood nearby, leaning forward to reach her own customized display. Gomez noticed that her tough, chitinous carapace was marred by sootlike streaks, apparently singed during the rescue of the Ground Station Aphrodite team. Fortunately, the Nasat seemed to be in no pain.
“Good,” Gomez said, refocusing her own attention on the small science console beside her. A new stream of data was marching across the display, moving faster than she could read it, let alone interpret it.
The little ship lurched again, even harder this time. The external noise baffling did little to mitigate the howling of the corrosive Venusian winds.
“Full stop relative to the planet’s surface,” Corsi announced. “I’m keeping station nearly at the dead center of the superrotational layer, just like Soloman asked. I just hope he knows what he’s…what we’re doing.”
An alarm on Gomez’s console suddenly revealed three more key node failures, even as Soloman’s force-field reconfiguration data continued to appear. Soon the node collapses would spread uncontrollably throughout the system, leading to an irreversible planetwide collapse. With the data changing this quickly, if Soloman doesn’t know what he’s doing, then nobody does.
The whine of the shuttle’s overtaxed station-keeping thrusters soon drowned out the keening of the wind as the small vessel struggled to maintain its position. Normally, the winds at this altitude topped out at around three-hundred and fifty kilometers per hour, a respectable velocity. But thanks to Project Ishtar’s atmospheric “blowoff,” the air here was currently moving at perhaps four or five times that speed. As the shuttle jumped and bucked, Gomez began to wonder whether the engine nacelles would fall victim to shearing forces. If we still had the old shuttles, we wouldn’t have been