Launch Pad

by Jody Lynn Nye

  Lee was smart enough in his own way, but he knew that shift leader was as high as he could climb with only his self-education, learning about whatever subject caught his attention. For the long voyage out to Sedna, he had signed up to take university classes, the first step up toward supervisor and, eventually, running his own ship. Now his personal databot had a load of material for him to study in his spare time: literature, structural mechanics, and physics, to start. Studying should have accounted for his off-shift hours—he had a lot to catch up on—but with the discovery of the strange black circle on Sedna, he was thinking of changing his plans.

  The radioed instructions from back in-system, he knew, were more properly a suggestion, not an order. The crew of Ramblin’ Wreck weren’t subject to orders from scientific institutions a few billion kilometers away.

  The union mandated that, even mining high-grade ammonia, they had to be paid triple-overtime at hazardous-duty rates for shifts longer than eight hours, and the flint-eyed wretch Kellerman wasn’t about to pay overtime. Lee and his crew got sixteen hours off for every eight working, and the union steward watched damn carefully to see that they weren’t given unofficial duties in their off time. So he had the time.

  They finished their shift, bringing back the ice cores for the cryomineralogy lab to analyze, and Dinky and Adrian headed off to unsuit and hit the showers. Lee watched them head in, but didn’t follow.

  Lee figured he could skip one day of studying, and bypass the after-shift perpetual floating poker game. There was something interesting out there, and he would be damned if he wasn’t going to go take a look. Although this was a mining operation, not prospecting, Lee was fully certified for solo prospecting and didn’t have to tell anybody what he did in his off-shift hours, if he didn’t want to. And so he slipped away, without telling anybody.

  The artifact was half a world away, far from the Ramblin’ Wreck’s position near the ammonia deposits. He topped off his suit batteries and then checked a snowcat out of the equipment depot. It was technically theft, maybe, if you looked at it one way, since he wasn’t actually on shift, but it wasn’t as if he wasn’t going to return it—where could he possibly go? He wasn’t even using up fuel, since the snowcat had a little nuclear generator that gave out a constant 14.3 kilowatts of power whether it was being driven or not.

  That had been his first mistake, going out alone. A few hours later, it was beginning to look like it may have been a fatal one.

  The drive was a thrill; a little under three hours at an average speed of almost two hundred kilometers per hour. In the low gravity the sled bounced up on every little hummock of snow. The first hour he had steered carefully to the smoothest paths, and the bumps had scared him nearly out of his wits. But the sled had attitude control thrusters that kept it from spilling over when it was airborne (or, technically, vacuum borne, he supposed, since the microbar pressure of mostly helium surrounding Sedna was nothing that could vaguely be given the nomenclature of air.) After a while he realized the snow pack was so thick, it had smoothed out the planet’s hills into natural ski jumps, and he had gotten more and more adventurous. Now he was picking jumps that gave him a hang time of five seconds, ten, thirty.

  A hell of a lot more fun than studying, he thought.

  Viewed through his intensity-enhanced goggles, the landscape was low rolling hummocks of a deep dusky red, the color of Georgia mud. Sedna was beautiful. Lee saw a landscape of soft hills lit by urgently brilliant stars, speckled in colors: the glistening white of water-ice snow splashed across through scars in the surface of red tholins. He tried switching the image intensifier off. At first all he could see was darkness, and the sense of speeding across darkness, trusting in the autopilot to avoid obstacles, made his heart hammer. After a minute he began to make out the smudges in the darkness, and in a few minutes more, even though the sun was billions of miles away, he discovered that he could still see. Without the image intensifier, the surface was colorless, a pale ghostly glistening in the starlight, with sun so small he could have covered it with the head of a pin.

  It seemed more real to him this way, so he left the image intensifier off. The heads-up display told him the topography, and the autopilot picked out the smoothest path across the snow.

  “You guys should have come with me,” he said, speaking to the empty air. “Poker’s no fun, not until after payday, anyway.”

  He was lucky he didn’t sled right into the artifact. He’d been having such a good time hot-dogging the snowcat, he’d stopped paying attention and had lost track of how far he’d come. Fortunately his navigation computer hadn’t, and warned him when he was approaching the artifact.

  Once cued to look, he could see it: in the distance, the horizon cut off abruptly. Lee flicked the image intensifier back on, and suddenly it was impossible to miss, a sharp black line across the red horizon. He slowed down to approach it cautiously, edging up to the razor-sharp edge between the snow and the black, and finally getting off the snowcat and creeping forward slowly.

  He looked down.

  The black was speckled with stars.

  For an instant he thought it was a hole straight through the planet, and then he wondered if it could be a portal to another universe.

  Lee anchored the snowcat, and clipped a safety tether to it. His toolpack carried all his gear, but carrying the pack made it too awkward for him to bend over, so he took it off and wore only the skin-tight nudie suit. Making sure that his tether was secure, he kneeled down at the edge, and leaned over to look down.

  He saw a golden helmet faceplate—his own faceplate—looking up at him.

  The black surface was not black at all, but a gargantuan mirror reflecting the blackness of space, angled steeply away from him. Close up, he could see the sharp image of stars reflected in it. He was so close to it that it seemed perfectly flat, but looking across in the distance he could see the subtle curve.

  He put his hand on it (the mirror-image hand coming up from below to touch his), and it was perfectly smooth and perfectly slick. Absolutely smooth, slicker than oil, as if he was touching nothing, no resistance at all to him sliding his palm across the surface.

  Through his glove he couldn’t sense the temperature. His suit was a near-perfect insulator; it had to be, of course, to operate in the outer solar system, where the miners walked the cryogenic ice fields of trans-Neptunian and Kuiper objects.

  Lee checked the external temperature meter on the fingertip of one glove. Pressing his finger to the mirror’s surface, the gauge read five Kelvin. The reading was so unlikely that he pulled his hand away to try another spot. The next spot was still five Kelvin, as was a third spot, and a fourth.

  “Sonnabitch,” he said. “Colder than a loan shark’s heart.”

  His meter wasn’t broken; he checked a patch of the crusty snow surrounding the pit, and got the right number, thirty Kelvin. The surface of Sedna was colder than the caves of hell, but the temperature of the black surface was twenty-five degrees cooler yet, far lower than it had any right to be.

  Slowly, he worked it out. The surface was not black; it was reflective, and only appeared black in that it was reflecting the starry sky. It must be very close to a perfect mirror indeed. Far as they were from the sun, the snows of Sedna still absorbed sunlight, and that heated them a few degrees above absolute. But this perfect reflector must absorb no light at all, and stayed cold. Somewhere in the far infrared, it must radiate away a tiny amount of heat, he realized, but in all the wavelengths in which the sun shone, it absorbed nothing, and so was colder than the surface it sat on.

  It was an enormous concave mirror. A giant telescope, miles in diameter—built for what purpose?

  Lee stared out across it, marveling. It showed no signs of age, but certainly it must be ancient. Who had made it, and when? Sedna was one of the more eccentric objects in the solar system’s Kuiper belt, a dwarf world in a long slow orbit that took it to a farthest point nearly a thousand astronomical units from the sun, barel
y bound to the sun at all. Probably it had once been an interstellar wanderer, captured by the sun millions or even billions of years ago from the cold darkness between the stars. Where had it come from? What unknown race had built such a gargantuan telescope mirror, and for what purpose?

  He leaned over to put his faceplate right against the mirror surface, steadying himself with one hand carefully wrapped around the taut safety line. The surface was perfectly smooth, perfectly reflective.

  And suddenly the line was slack.

  He stood up, and saw the snowcat looming towards him in the darkness. He had anchored the cat against a hummock of ice, but waste heat from the reactor had melted it free, and it lurched downhill now, staggering drunkenly toward him. Without thinking, he took a step back away from it.

  He realized his error instantly. His cleated boots found no purchase, the surface of the mirror slicker than ice, and his feet shot out from under him. He reached out wildly as he fell. In the low gravity, everything happened in slow motion. With one hand, he grabbed onto the tool pack he had set down on the edge. For a moment he hovered there, on his belly, his feet dangling down the slope of the enormous mirror, hanging on with his left hand clutching the tool pack on the edge of the slope, the right still clenched tightly on the now-slack safety line.

  The snowcat slid forward, bounced against a ripple in the ice, toppled over onto its side, and ground its way to a halt with a silent spray of crimson snow.

  It rocked a little, and then settled into place.

  It seemed stable. Very slowly, trying not to move, he gathered up the slack in the safety cable and gave it a very careful tug. The snowcat stayed firmly in place. Working one-handed, he fixed the cable onto his belt clip.

  Gravity on Sedna was miniscule, less than a twentieth of a standard Earth gee, and it would be easy enough for him to pull himself out of the pit, even one-handed. He relaxed for a moment, the danger temporarily at bay. His left arm was getting stiff from the awkward position holding onto the tool pack on the rim, and he shifted it minutely.

  The pack that anchored him broke loose from the snow.

  In gloriously slow motion, the toolpack, and Lee, slid down onto the mirror. He flailed for the lip of the pit, seeking anything he could grab onto, but ended up with only a handful of snow. In the process he released the tool pack, and it slid away down the slope, spinning slightly and gathering speed as it slid.

  The safety line was still clipped to his belt, the other end attached to the snowcat. He slid down into the mirror, and when the slack in the safety-line had played out, it caught with a jerk, stretching slightly, but held. Above him, at the other end of the rope, the snowcat shuddered slightly, but didn’t move, stuck in the ice. He was swinging at the end of the line. He stretched out his arm, but the rim was just out of the reach of his outstretched fingertips. With one hand, he reached out and grabbed the rope to pull himself up.

  And the clip broke.

  The line whipped away from him, sliding through his fingers as if it had been greased, and with a slow, easy grace, Lee Rockross slid down the frictionless surface of the mirror.

  As he slid, he tried to scramble up the side of the slope. The rim of the dish was only inches away, but despite his frantic flailing he could get no purchase at all, and he coasted smoothly down, gathering speed at a slow but inexorable pace. It was maddeningly frustrating.

  I screwed up, he thought.

  Sliding down the mirror, he had time to contemplate his life, and the ports he had visited, and his sins, both the ones he had accomplished, and the ones he hadn’t gotten around to yet. All of them seemed petty and meaningless.

  All that took him about twenty seconds, as he slid, face down, still scrambling against the surface with a futile, reflexive motion.

  After a while he gave up. He twisted around and with some amount of effort managed to sit up. Moving on the frictionless surface was like moving in free-fall, and he’d had plenty of experience with that. By working on it for a while he managed to get the hang of it. He windmilled around until he was facing almost in his direction of motion, took stock of his situation, and tried his best to calm himself down. The emergency protocols had been drilled into him, and he chanted them silently like a mantra.

  Protocol for an emergency: first, take whatever immediate actions are needed to prevent the situation from deteriorating, and compartmentalize the damage.

  Well, that was simple. He was sliding down toward the bottom of a mirrored pit, and there was nothing for him to grab onto. There wasn’t any way the situation could get much worse.

  Second, activate dual-band emergency locator beacon on broadcast channels 121.5 MHz and 406 MHz.

  The snowcat, already out of sight above him, had his emergency beacon, along with the rest of the long-range com gear. The spare emergency beacon was in his tool pack, sliding along the mirror somewhere ahead of him in the dark

  His suit had a low-power ultrawideband link for voice. It was meant for miner-to-miner conversations, but it had been deliberately designed for near-field transmission only; a hundred miners would pollute the radio spectrum otherwise. He recorded a brief call for help, and set the suit-to-suit link to squawk it out in five-second bursts twice a minute. That was a useless task, but at least something he could do to calm himself down. There was no chance it would be heard. Ramblin’ Wreck was over the horizon, way out of radio range. Since nobody was supposed to be out on the surface, there was no com relay in orbit.

  Emergency protocol, item three: survey your situation; ascertain your location and velocity relative to possible sources of assistance.

  There were no possible sources of assistance. Still, his suit did have an inertial navigation unit; he could check his location and velocity. He verified that it was on, and brought up his position and velocity in the heads-up display. The dim red figures glowed in his faceplate, floating above the darkness. He was sliding down a slope at an angle just under twenty degrees, currently moving at eighteen meters per second relative to the ground. As he watched, the inertial guidance unit updated his speed. Eighteen point three meters per second. Eighteen point six meters per second.

  He had no sense of his speed. Except for the slowly incrementing number in his display, it felt like he was motionless.

  That wasn’t doing him any good. He had the computer display a plot of his position as a function of time. His path across the surface of mirror was in the form of a perfect parabola. That made sense. Of course the mirror would be a paraboloid; it must be the reflector of an enormous telescope. He extrapolated the parabola forward, and plotting his motion as a tiny moving dot. He was moving faster and faster every minute, but his acceleration was slowing down as he headed toward the bottom. Extrapolating from the shape of the curve, he would reach bottom in about four minutes, or just a little over six minutes from when he had slipped off the edge. And then his momentum would carry him up the other side of the slope.

  Emergency protocol, item four: check consumables. Take action to minimize use of critical supplies until help is effected.

  Lee checked the status of his suit. He didn’t have consumables in any real sense of the word. His oxygen supply was a zero-buffer in-line rebreather; every breath he exhaled was stripped of carbon dioxide, which went through an electrolysis cycle that broke it down and immediately recycled it to his next breath. The whole thing was run from a solid-state battery, the same battery that also powered his suit heaters. So it was the batteries that were his ultimate consumable. He checked his battery status: green, at 76% full charge. The batteries were sized to run for two full mining shifts plus a little margin, so that gave him a bit over twelve hours of remaining power for life support. Was there any chance somebody would deduce where he was, and assemble a rescue before he ran out of power? Unlikely. Nobody would even notice that he was missing until the start of his next shift, which was—he checked the time—another thirteen hours. And even then, it would wait until the end of the shift before somebody would check
his quarters to find out why he’d missed work.

  Item five: appraise resources. Apply the resources available in the most efficient way to effect rescue.

  Fine. His resources was his suit, and—and nothing else, really. Everything else he carried had been in the tool pack he’d lost, or was left with the snowcat. If he’d been wearing a suit for free-space operation, he would have no problem; the maneuvering thrusters would be enough to push him across the slope in any direction he wanted. But the surface suit he wore had no thrusters.

  Item six: when the emergency is over, contact Spacewatch to cancel emergency call for assistance.

  He figured he could ignore that part of the emergency protocol.

  Running through the emergency protocols hadn’t shown him any way out of this problem, but it had at least damped down his panic. He was now a minute away from the bottom, moving at a hundred and sixty meters a second. He converted that in his head. Vesta, where he had been raised, had been originally settled by Americans, and had stubbornly refused to switch to metric, even after America itself had joined the European Union. He was sliding along at just over three hundred fifty miles an hour. He checked his display again, and noticed that his path wasn’t actually taking him quite to the bottom. He would miss it slightly to the left. Right, he thought. He’d been swinging when the clip holding the tether had snapped, and the lateral velocity meant that his actual path was an ellipse—in fact, a Lissajous figure—that wouldn’t quite pass through the center. The actual bottom of the mirror would be passing slightly to his right. He inched himself around to look, knowing that it was a pointless move, since there would be nothing to see.