Arthur C. Clarke's Venus Prime 1 by Paul Preuss

Author:Paul Preuss [Preuss, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf, mobi
Publisher: ibooks, Inc.

With its mighty torch blazing, the cutter decelerated toward the great rings and spokes and cylinders of Port Hesperus, that whole spinning conglomerate of a space station hanging in high orbit over the dazzling clouds of Venus, with its axis pointing straight at the center of the planet.

At the radiation perimeter the cutter’s torch flamed out. It approached under chemical power, gingerly.

Port Hesperus was one of the triumphs of 21st-century engineering, built almost entirely from the raw materials of captured asteroids. Exploiting the resources of the planet’s surface, it had paid back its cost within two decades; it currently housed a hundred thousand people in conditions that ninetenths of Earth’s population would have considered luxurious. Parks, for example, and green things . . . The great glass central sphere of the station was filled with lush gardens, some of them in tribute to the old dreams of Venus as a world of swamps and jungles. Come to Venus and you could see jungles, all right, as long as you stuck to the paths of Port Hesperus’s brilliantly lit central sphere. Don’t try to visit the surface of the planet, don’t even ask. Of the five human beings who had made the attempt in armored and heat-shielded landers, only two had returned to tell the tale.

Sparta’s cutter matched spin with the star-side docking bay under chemical power; in fifteen minutes, under automated landing controls, it had made it into the huge axial bay, crowded with local traffic.

The high-security side of the docking bay was all business, no nonsense, without amenities–all white steel and black glass, pipes and hoses and blinking lights. A tube like a giant leech closed over the cutter’s lock, the air slammed into it under high pressure, and the cutter’s hatch popped.

Sparta clapped her hands over her painful ears. Floating in the airlock, she found herself suddenly face-to-face with a delegation from the local Board of Space Control headquarters, advancing toward her in the docking tube. They didn’t look all that friendly.

The tallest of the locals facing her was the Port Hesperus unit captain, Kara Antreen. She was dressed in a gray wool suit worth a month of her respectable salary; her gray hair was cut in a severe pageboy, and her pale gray eyes fixed on Sparta from beneath thick black brows.

Even without her hands over her ears, Sparta was at a social disadvantage. It was this matter of her clothes. She had found little to requisition from ship’s stores, despite the commander’s invitation–the quartermaster’s imagination seemed limited to gym shorts, personal care products, near-beer, and “entertainment” items emphasizing soft-porn videochips–so besides picking up a few changes of socks and underwear and acquiring a comb and a toothbrush, she’d arrived at Port Hesperus still wearing the mufti of an assistant inspector assigned to shuttleport customs and entry–that is, the plainclothes disguise of a bribable dock rat: plastic patch-pocket cargo pants, olive drab tank top, polymer canvas windbreaker. The outfit was distinctly on the casual side, but at least it was neat and clean.

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