Spindrift

by Allen Steele

  “Very well. When you make contact with them again, please advise Mr. Harker that we’re changing orbit with the intent of rendezvousing with the starbridge.”

  Stunned, Emily stared at the screen. “Do I understand you correctly, sir? You’re planning to change the orbital parameters?”

  “You understand correctly.” Lawrence uncrossed his legs, then turned his head to the right and made a small gesture to someone offscreen. “I expect we’ll be approaching our target within the next three orbits. Do you copy?”

  “I…yes, sir, we copy.”

  “Very good, Ms. Collins. Make sure Mr. Harker gets this message.” As if she were little more than a London taxi driver, waiting at the curb while her passengers went shopping at Har-rods. “Good luck with your mission. Galileo over.”

  His voice cut off, yet his image remained on the screen. Arkady looked up at the camera again; a discreet nod, then he briefly raised two fingers. The secondary com signal would remain active so long as Galileo was above them.

  A perfect red rose, indeed…complete with thorns.

  ELEVEN

  JANUARY 8, 2291—SPINDRIFT

  The world was a cold and lightless plain, its horizon discernible only as a jagged line where the stars rose from the darkness. Caught within the beams of their helmet lamps, Larry’s tracks ran straight ahead of the three men as a pair of shallow furrows through charcoal black dust, swerving every now and then to avoid a boulder too large for the probe to climb over. Shoulders bowed by the weight of the equipment cases, their boots scuffing up tufts of regolith, they followed the tracks through a land of perpetual night.

  “I don’t care what my suit tells me,” Ramirez grumbled. “My feet are freezing. If I don’t get warm pretty soon, I’m going to come down with frostbite.” He hesitated. “Maybe I’ve got a suit leak.”

  “Your suit’s rated for-240° Celsius.” Harker didn’t look back at him as they trudged along. “If there was a leak, you’d have worse problems than cold feet. It’s all in your head.”

  “You sound like the prison shrink,” Ramirez replied, and that evinced a dry chuckle from Cruz. “Don’t laugh until you’ve been there,” he added. “Five years of psychotherapy is no fun.”

  “Tell us about it another time.” As curious as he was about Ramirez, Harker didn’t want to get distracted then. Most EVA accidents occurred when guys forgot where they were and what they were supposed to be doing. “Right now, I just want to reach the crater.”

  Although he couldn’t see it yet, a glance at the pedometer and the translucent map displayed on his visor’s heads-up told him that the crater should be less than a hundred meters away. Once again, he paused to turn around and look back the way they had come. A couple of kilometers away, he could make out the lights of the Maria Celeste; it should have been a comforting sight, but for some reason it only added to a growing sense of foreboding. That lonesome shuttle was all that kept him and the others from being marooned on this rock for the rest of their lives. Which would be very short, indeed, once their suit batteries went down and the rebreather units failed…

  Stop scaring yourself, he thought. You’ve got Ramirez to do that for you. “Onward and forward,” he said, forcing himself to be cheerful as he turned around again. “‘Half a league, half a league, half a league onward…’”

  His voice trailed off as he remembered the rest of the verse. Much too grim to be repeated, under the circumstances. But Ramirez had apparently read Tennyson as well. “‘All in the valley of Death rode the six hundred,’” he finished.

  “Thanks for those happy thoughts,” Cruz said. “Last time I go for a hike with you guys.” Of the three of them, the geologist was the most upbeat. His curiosity insatiable, he’d already stopped a couple of times to collect rock samples, and when they’d located Larry he had taken a couple of minutes to download the probe’s memory directly into his suit comp. So far as Jorge was concerned, everything about Spindrift was a source of wonder; if the relentless cold and dark of this castaway world dispirited him at all, he didn’t show it.

  “Sorry ’bout that,” Harker said. “I’ll try not to…”

  A double beep in his headset, then he heard Emily’s voice: “Maria Celeste to EVA team, you copy?”

  “Right here, Sister Maria,” Harker replied. “What’s up?”

  “You should be close to the crater by now. Seen anything yet?”

  Harker had been caught up in the conversation; he’d failed to notice anything more than the rover tracks. Looking up, he caught sight of a moundlike bulge only a few dozen meters away. “Got it. Very close now…”

  “Whoa!” Cruz stopped, tilted back his head so that his helmet faced upward. “Switch to IR…you gotta see this!”

  Putting down the equipment cases, Harker raised his left hand to the side of his helmet and found the recessed stud that activated the visor’s infrared filter. Immediately, the landscape became more visible, albeit tinged pale green; the mound was obviously the outer wall of a small crater, gently sloping upward about ten meters above the ground. Yet that wasn’t what caught his attention, but rather a shaft of light, pale yellow and rippling like a desert mirage, that rose above the crater’s center.

  “That’s heat,” Cruz said. “Coming from the same place as the carbon-dioxide emissions.”

  “Volcanic?” Harker stared at it in puzzlement.

  “I don’t think so.” Setting down his own equipment cases, Cruz opened one of them, pulled out a portable UV spectrometer. Aiming the gun-shaped instrument at the crater, he raised his visor so that he could study its luminescent readout. “No. Not hot enough. Only sixteen-point-two degrees Celsius. Practically room temperature.”

  “Wonder why Larry didn’t pick this up,” Harker murmured.

  “Perhaps because it wasn’t there yesterday.” Ramirez’s voice was low. “If it’s some sort of radiator, it may open only periodically. To keep the interior from overheating.”

  That fit with Ramirez’s theory, yet Harker still wasn’t convinced. “Right,” he said dryly. “You getting all this, Emcee?”

  “Loud and clear.” A brief pause. “Ted, may I have a chat with you, please?”

  “Yes, of course.” Through Cruz’s faceplate, he caught a glimpse of a wry grin before the geologist looked away; Ramirez said nothing. Harker raised his right hand, touched a stud on the suit’s wrist control unit that switched the comlink to a private channel. “I’m here. Do you read?”

  “Copy.” Emily’s voice sounded distraught. “Ted, I’ve made contact with Galileo. They’re changing orbit.”

  “What the hell?” Harker was astonished. “Why?”

  “They’re repositioning in order to rendezvous with the starbridge. Lawrence told me so himself.”

  “For the love of…” Harker bit back his words. “Doesn’t that idiot know what he’s…?”

  “You think I don’t know that?” Her voice rose sharply, taking on a scolding tone he’d seldom heard before. “You realize how much more fuel we’ll have to burn in order to get back to…?”

  “Calm down. I’m sure you’ll be able to work out a new return trajectory.” He let out his breath. “What do you want to bet that this is why he wanted us off the ship?”

  “I’m not following you. So he could bring Galileo closer to the starbridge? He could have done that even while we…”

  “I don’t know. But this isn’t good.” Touching his helmet again, he reverted the visor back to visible light. A quick check of the direction finder on the heads-up display, then he turned away from the crater until he looked due west. Raising the visor, he peered up at the sky. For a few moments, he saw only familiar stars and constellations—Polaris, Vega, Ursa Majoris, Andromeda—but then he saw a bright spot of light falling toward the horizon.

  “Galileo’s still there. Hasn’t changed orbit yet.” He paused. “Did you work things out with Arkady?”

  “Affirmative. He’s put me on an audiovisual patch to the command center.” A mo
ment passed. “Not that it will do us much good.”

  “Better to be forewarned. Keep on top of things, all right? Let me know if anything else comes up.”

  “Right…”

  “Look, when we’ve set up the LRC, I’ll talk to Lawrence, find out what’s going on up there. And once Arkady manages to realign the laser and we’ve reestablished contact with Mare Muscoviense, they’ll get an earful about this.” Harker grinned. “I’m telling you, after I’m done with Little Lord Ian, he’ll be spending the rest of his days riding the fox around the family estate.”

  “Wouldn’t that be grand?” A short laugh, then a nervous sigh. “God, I wish you were back here…”

  “Want me to scrub the EVA?”

  “No, of course not. You’re onto something out there.” A moment passed. “I’ll keep working at it from my end, and let you know if something turns up.”

  “Sure. Do that.”

  “Please be careful. This place is too weird.”

  “Tell me about it.” He looked back at the nearby crater. “Have to run now. Keep on the primary channel, right?”

  “Sure. Over.”

  Harker switched off, then turned toward the two men. “Sorry, lads. Just a com check, that’s all.”

  “With the girl he left behind. Of course.” Cruz looked at Ramirez. “When we get back, I think we’re going to be slinging up our hammocks in the aft section.”

  Before Harker could manage a retort, Emily’s voice came over the line. “Keep that up, Jorge, and you’ll be sleeping in the airlock. Copy?”

  “Umm…well, if you…”

  “Enough.” Harker bent down to pick up his cases. “We’ve got a mystery on our hands. Let’s get to it, shall we?”

  They set up the LRC at the base of the crater, aligning its dish antenna so that it was oriented with the local ecliptic. There was no point in trying to establish contact with Galileo, though; checking his suit chronometer, Harker calculated that the ship was on the other side of Spindrift and therefore out of radio range. Galileo’s new trajectory shouldn’t put it beyond acquisition, or at least so he hoped.

  Once they completed a quick systems check, the three men began their ascent of the crater rim. It was more difficult than they had expected; although the slope wasn’t particularly steep, the powdery regolith and the burden of their equipment made the climb particularly treacherous; for every two or three steps they took, their boots slid back a step. They had to stop now and then to wipe dust from their faceplates, and their suits were filthy by the time they reached the top.

  Below them lay the broad expanse of the crater. As they’d seen from Larry’s cameras, its floor was covered by a thick blanket of particulate dry ice, resembling snow yet far colder. If Spindrift ever came close to the Sun, solar radiation would gradually evaporate its carbon-dioxide deposits, perhaps giving the asteroid a faint corona much like that of a comet. This far from the solar system, though, the snow remained undisturbed. Beautiful, but nonetheless a potential hazard.

  They’d come prepared for it, though. Opening one of the cases Ramirez had lugged up the slope, Harker removed three fifty-meter coils of nylon rope and three half-meter titanium-alloy pitons. Using a rock hammer, he drove the pitons through the dust until they were securely planted within bedrock; once he fed the ends of each rope through the loopholes and knotted them, he tossed the coils down to the crater floor. Now they had a safe means of descent, and an easy way to get back out again.

  Within one of Cruz’s cases was something Jorge and Martin had cobbled together the night before: a battery-powered vacuum cleaner, the type normally used to collect detritus within the ship, only now with its fan reversed so that it would blow instead of suck. Coupled to the unit by a short length of airtight hose was a tank of compressed halon siphoned from Galileo’s fire-control system; since the tank was good for only so long, a couple of spares had been included. Because no one knew how just well the improvised snow-blower would work, Cruz’s other case contained a pair of collapsible shovels normally used to gather surface samples, yet Harker hoped that the dry-ice layer was as powdery as it appeared. If not, they’d have to dig their way through the crater.

  Once the three men used elastic cords to lash the three remaining cases against their backs, they grasped the ropes and, carefully moving backward, rappelled down the crater’s steep inner slope. Ramirez was more cautious than the other two, and Harker had to coax him along the first half of the way down, but it wasn’t long before he joined him and Cruz at the bottom.

  They set out for the crater’s center, again following Larry’s tracks. At first, it seemed as if the snow wouldn’t be an obstacle; as expected, it lay only a few centimeters deep at the outer edge. Yet they were only thirty meters from where they’d left the ropes when they found themselves calf-deep in icy particles that, through the soles of their boots, made a dull crunching noise that sounded as if they were walking through rice kernels. Feeling his feet getting numb, Harker glanced at his heads-up display, saw his suit’s thermostat was nearing the red line. Time to see whether the snow-blower would work.

  Much to his surprise, it did. Holding its nozzle close to the ground and slowly weaving back and forth, Harker whisked away most of the dry ice before them, forming a narrow trench through which they were able to walk in single file. He used the snow-blower sparingly, firing it in short spurts in order to conserve the first tank as long as he could, but because the halon froze instantly, he found that he was able to build embankments that would restrain the powder from cascading back into the trench.

  They’d almost reached the crater’s center when the first tank finally gave out. By then the trench was almost thigh deep; Ramirez and Cruz followed him, carrying their equipment. “Still getting a heat signature?” Harker asked as he plugged the second tank into the blower and knocked the nozzle against the ground to clear away the frozen halon that had built up around it.

  “Uh-huh. We’re almost on top of it.” Putting down his case, Cruz raised his visor, then checked his spectrograph. “Funny, no more CO2emissions. Like it just shut off.”

  “If it’s an exhaust port of some kind, it may open only periodically, to prevent itself from freezing.” Ramirez was becoming impatient. “If we hurry, we might be able to find it before it closes completely.”

  Harker turned to look at him. Through Ramirez’s faceplate, he caught an expression of determination. “You’re quite certain of this, aren’t you?”

  “Never been more certain of anything in my life.” Raising his right hand, he took a step forward. “Allow me, please. With all due respect, I think I know what we’re looking for a little better than you do.”

  Harker hesitated, then extended the snow-blower to him. “Careful. We’ve only got one tank left.”

  “Thank you. I’ll try to be conservative.” Taking the blower in the both hands, Ramirez edged past Harker. He shut his visor, touched the helmet stud to activate the infrared option, then aimed the nozzle low to the ground and fired a short burst to clear away the snow. “Jorge, get up here with me. Keep an eye on the spectrograph and tell me if you spot anything unusual.”

  Cruz moved around Harker and fell in beside Ramirez. Together, they slowly advanced toward the center of the crater, the geologist aiming his instrument past Ramirez’s shoulder as the astrobiologist cleared a path. Harker watched Ramirez for a few moments, then followed them. He seemed to know what he was searching for, even if he didn’t care to share his insights with anyone else.

  They’d walked only ten more meters when Cruz abruptly came to a halt. “Metallic trace!” he yelped, his voice rising in excitement. “Some sort of ferrous compound, about ten degrees to the right!”

  Ramirez raised his head, looked in that direction. “Same place as the heat source,” he said quietly.

  Harker quickly lowered his visor and activated the IR. Just as Ramirez said, the translucent column of hot yellow was emerging from the ground less than five meters away. “Go that way,” h
e said unnecessarily, because Ramirez and Cruz were already moving toward the source.

  The trench was almost deep enough for him to touch its top with his fingertips when Ramirez suddenly came to a halt. “There it is,” he said, then he aimed the blower straight down and gave it a prolonged burst. A cloud of crystallized dry ice rose around him like fog. “Ted! Get up here! I’ve found it!”

  Ignoring the path the others had blazed, Harker plunged through the waist-deep drifts. All at once, the surface became slippery beneath the soles of his boots, as if he’d just found a hidden layer of ice. He lost his balance for a second and almost plunged face-first into the snow before he managed to recover himself. Taking advantage of the lesser gravity, he resorted to bunny hops much like he’d learned to use during basic training on the Moon; inefficient, but it seemed to give him better traction.

  In three short leaps, he was beside Ramirez and Cruz. Ramirez had cleared away a broad patch of snow; both men were staring at the spot in silence. Looking past them, Harker found himself gazing at a hole in the ground.

  No. Not just a hole. Perfectly circular, a little more than a meter and a half in diameter, the edge of the aperture had the unmistakable smooth, dull grey surface of a metallic object. No question about it, this was the mouth of an exhaust shaft.

  “I’ll be damned,” Harker muttered.

  Ramirez looked up at him. “Believe me now?”

  Harker didn’t respond. Instead, he stepped closer to the hole. Raising his visor, he leaned over to peer down into the shaft. Almost at once, his faceplate was fogged over by a blast of warm air, but not before the twin beams of his helmet lamps touched upon something deep within the well. He had a fleeting impression of thin lateral bars, like the slats of black window shades, before his faceplate froze up.

  Blinded, he hastily backed away, raising his hands to his faceplate to scour away the thin patina of frost. “Ted! What’s going on out there?” Emily’s voice in his headset, and concerned for his safety.