Crimson Phoenix

NASA astronaut Emily Blakely has made it back to Earth safely after a failed mission to Venus.  Her brother Win Blakely was lost during the mission and Emily is angry, depressed and determined to get back to Venus.  She wants to recover the remains of her brother and confirm an observation of bird-like creatures flying in the Venusian atmosphere, which no one believes.  NASA is uninterested in another mission, pending investigations into the failed effort.

Emily is a lifelong bird-lover and meets a Russian engineer named Alex on an expedition into the deep woods of British Columbia. They become close and Alex invites Emily to visit him in Russia, at an institute where he works on nanometer-scale robots (nanobots) for future Russian Venus missions.

Emily spends months trying to scare up interest in another Venus mission, even meeting a casino magnate who is interested in financing such a mission.  But it is the Russian plan to use Venus as a control center for a network of sunpower stations in close orbit around the Sun that finally moves NASA to propose a joint effort to return to Venus.  The Russians agree, hiding their real long-term plans, which include additional control stations at Mercury.  The Russians intend to make large parts of Venus and Mercury sovereign Russian territory, in violation of international treaties. 

Emily becomes pregnant by Alex but through a new technique called Induced Neo-Natal Stasis, is able to have her fetus removed and held in stasis long enough for her to be selected for the new mission.   She plans to have the fetus reimplanted just before departing, have the baby in space and present her child as a memorial to her brother Win, who she is certain has somehow managed to survive the earlier airship crash on Venus.

Alex has been assigned to a Russian mission to Mercury, paralleling the Crimson Phoenix mission to Venus.  But the Russian mission to Mercury undergoes a catastrophic failure in Mercury orbit and Emily, now in Venus orbit, uses one of Phoenix's landers to rescue the father of her child, an attempt to make up for failing to rescue her brother at Venus years before.

Now, strange developments are occurring on the surface of Venus, around the crash site of an earlier Russian unmanned mission, called Venera 22.  The crashed ship contained canisters of Russian nanobots who were programmed to fabricate and replicate structures for a future Russian base.  But the surviving bots have become corrupted by the extreme conditions at the surface of Venus.  

On the surface, Emily fails to find any remains of her brother but finds instead strange hybrid creatures, part human-like and part bird (later proven to exist, the birds of Venus are called thermosaurs).  She is convinced Win still exists in another form and after a series of mishaps, finds that she eventually has no real reason to return to Earth…her brother Win is gone, she loses the baby and boyfriend Alex dies on the surface of Venus.

Emily's final, inevitable decision is difficult, even insane but she has never been one to look back and try to re-live the past.  Instead, she uses the name of her ship, Crimson Phoenix, and its reference to the mythical bird phoenix, consumed in fire and re-born from ashes, as a guide for what she is about to do…to raise new life from old life.