Motors off.
Click-hum, computers....
Silently.
Wheel your eternal wheeling, stars.
Darkly.
Cold.
The screens showed white, thick white, and the fuel-pumps disgorged the remainder of Vanguard I's life-blood into the roaring combustion chambers. The muted complaining of heavy atmosphere keened up the scale to a banshee's lament and sweat poured from Josh Thorn's half-nude body as his tiny metal cell grew stifling.
Power—how much power to keep from becoming a vagrant meteorite in Venus' milky skies? From flaring, white-hot, and falling ... a cinder from nowhere, with nowhere to go, the last of Earth's ashes....