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atmosphere, in winds that circled Venus every four days. Her plane had dropped into the slower-moving cloud deck beneath and was slowly falling behind her.
    “ Merde! Renaud, the transition layer is higher today! I’m going to fall out of the super-rotating winds.” She did not add, and out of your reach until you’ve circled the planet .
    “How soon?”
    “A few minutes.”
    Where the bottom of the super-rotating winds touched the top of the lower clouds, the smoke column had been torn into a string of eddies, dark berries on the stretched lines of yellow clouds beneath. She rode nothing more than a bit of resined fabric on thin carbon cables. “The turbulence will shred my chute.”
    “I’m on full throttle, Marie-Claude. We’ll get there.”
    She looked up into the yellow-white sky. She couldn’t see any planes. Sixty-one kilometers separated her from the surface of Venus. She had a few minutes before it would become very dangerous for Renaud or any of the other crews to rescue her.
    The factory shrank to a toy-like gray stub far above her, but another shape was growing, resolving into a repair drone, descending on two propellers whirring behind it. Coming toward her. It wasn’t programmed to do that. It was not programmed to do anything but clean and fix simple leaks, unless engineers gave it more specific repair tasks.
    “Renaud! Did you program one of the repair drones to come get me?”
    The radio crackled, echoing lightning from the deep deck of the lower clouds. “No. I didn’t think we’d have enough time to do that. I’ll see if I can have someone on it.”
    “That’s not why I’m asking. On take-off, I collided with a repair drone. It shouldn’t have been anywhere near the launch ramp. I think it grabbed part of my wing.”
    “Are you sure?”
    She hesitated to tell him over the radio. Drones wouldn’t grab her plane unless they were programmed to. Sabotage. Whoever had done this would be as likely to hear. “I think someone tried to kill me, Renaud. I think they reprogrammed the drone. Plant six was added to the inspection route late and my name was put on it. And now this drone is following me down.”
    “What? Hang on. I’ll access it from here.”
    Marie-Claude waited, time ticking below her as the smog thickened and the drone approached.
    “I can’t get in. Its antenna is offline.”
    “I can’t get away,” Marie-Claude said.
    “I’m almost there.”
    The drone neared, only three hundred meters from her. Its grasping claws were open, capable of tearing her parachute. Only a half kilometer below her, the smoke of her plane was a thinning gray streak. She took a deep breath.
    “It’s not going to happen, Renaud. The suit can keep me alive in the upper cloud deck, but without a chute, I’m just going to drop until I cook. I’ve got to save the chute.”
    “Marie-Claude! What are you doing?”
    Instead of pulling on the brake loops of her parachute, she pulled all the suspension wires on one side until the canopy spilled. She fell. Her stomach leapt. Arm over arm, she pulled her parachute close until she hugged it, and only its edges slapped frantically at her arms in the wind. She tucked her legs and tumbled.
    Thinly glowing clouds above. Darkness below. Spinning. Two sides.
    “Marie-Claude!” Renaud yelled.
    Turbulence hit like a fist. She was spinning dust. If she blacked out she was dead. Yelling in her radio. Droplets of sulfuric acid rain streaked the glass of her helmet. The world darkened. The buffeting and spinning wanted to tear her apart, but finally the bumping stopped and she fell again. She let her chute go. The canopy flapped and bloomed and yanked her upright.
    A voice spoke in her radio, nearly overwhelmed by static.
    “I’m through the transition,” she said. “My parachute is okay. The pressure is a tenth of an atmosphere. Temperature is about minus twenty Celsius. I’m not dead.”
    Yet.
    The planes now had a relative wind speed difference to her of