Astro-Franklining

Rivulets of acid etch their way along the ground as I scrabble to the top of the scarp. The view is astonishing - a canyon ripples over the horizon, winding between mountains that look more like waves than cliffs. The sun is dipping low on the horizon, illuminating massive spires of mustard-coloured cloud from behind.

But we’re not here for the view.

My partner’s head pokes up over the edge of the hill. With a quick nod, we get to work, securing lines, sinking metre-long spikes into the impacted earth, and securing harnesses. Somewhere in our suit systems an alarm sounds. It’s the Mount Maxwell automated transponder, broadcasting on all frequencies, telling anyone in their right mind to get out of here. Of course, we’re not in our right mind, so we shut it off. For us, it’s a cue. Guy ropes down, lightning rod up.

The storm front’s closing now. It’s moving faster than you could believe, ploughing across the force and colour of a supercharged bulldozer. Lightning sparks in its depths, and the thunder grows from the occasional crackle to an incessant roar. If our hair was exposed to the air it’d be whipping past our faces right now. The howl of the wind permeates our suits- even if we were in the habit of talking, I’d be hard pressed to hear even the sound of my own voice right now. Drops of sulphrous rain start to spatter across our faceplates.

And then the storm hits. The deadly golden rain pours in torrents, it takes all our strength just to stay standing against the wind. The windspeed indicator inches towards the red as bolts of lightning start to blast craters in the soil. Something snaps somewhere, reinforced nanoropes start to creak under the force, and the needle on the windspeed indicator hits the maximum-

“NOW”

I can’t tell if my partner’s released or not. Could he hear over the wind? Is the canopy still intact? Is he even alive? Then something wrenches my arms almost from their sockets. The kite leaps into the air like a wild animal and tears into the cloud layer. I fight it every inch of the way, reeling it in and playing it out, watching the remote altimiter spin even faster than the wind meter.

The force eases off slightly - still enough to drag me bodily into the air were I not literally nailed to the floor, but definitely less fierce somehow. The kite dips in and out of the lowest cloud layer, like a fish. A flying fish, upside down. I pull some loops and some swoops, and take a crack at a dive, but nothing too risky. Even on Venus, a storm like this only comes along once in a decade, and a crashed kite means game over, time’s up- there’s no relaunching in conditions like this.

Something blinks above, once, then again. Then, out of the yellow, a brilliant arc of blue lightning smashes into the delicate foil structure of the kite, and courses down the string leaving trails of St. Elmo’s Fire across the control lines. A thousand tiny aurorae cascade off my suit as the bolt sizzles its way down into the earthing coil linked to my boots. The kite is hit again, and again- sixteen strikes, in total, each one leaving more blazing lines across my vision. The last few strikes almost have me letting go of the kite to cover my eyes, but I fly blind instead, trusting in experience to keep me airborne.

And then for the first time in forty minutes, the dials start to fall. The driving rain peters off the the standard Venusian drizzle, and as we watch, our kite starts to drift lazily down to the ground against the backdrop of the receding thunderhead.

“So now what?”, I ask my launch buddy.

“Well, I hear Neptune’s lovely this time of year...”

And that, my friend, is how you Astro-Franklin.

---

We went kite flying today. In a storm. We decided that extreme kite-flying needed to be a proper extreme sport, and called it Franklin-ing, after Benjamin Franklin, who invented electricity by flying a monkeyfighting kite in a monkeyfighting thunderstorm, while being elected President for pure awesometude.

And then I remembered this article on io9 from about a year ago, and thought, "Hey, who says extreme sports have to limited to Earth?"

And so Astro-Franklining was born.