Frozen Orbit

by Patrick Chiles

  At the end of the tunnel was a hatch that appeared much heavier than the others, marked with a circular placard divided into alternating yellow and black pie wedges in the international warning sign for radiation hazards. They had expected this from studying the ship’s design: All those nuclear fuel pellets had to be stored somewhere. Beyond this door would be another layer of radiation shielding, a hardened airlock that opened to vacuum. Inside were supposed to be a pair of rad-hardened spacesuits in case maintenance had ever been needed around the drive system. Judging by the mission records, they’d gotten quite a workout.

  Jack waved a Geiger counter across the hatch and around its rim. A steady clicking sounded in their helmet radios. “A few millirems higher than background, but nothing too bad.”

  “We’ll leave that part alone, all the same,” Traci said. A grunt from Roy over their headsets signaled his agreement.

  It was the final storage module that gave them pause—different from all the others, this one had been kept under power and was quite cold. A biohazard label had been taped to the hatch, and Jack studied the handwritten instructions beneath it. The first word, in Cyrillic, read Образцы: “Samples.”

  Jack traced a finger down the list of instructions. “It’s not actually hazardous, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Meaning I don’t believe there’s some extraterrestrial super-virus stored in there. No mention of egg sacs filled with alien face-huggers either.”

  “So what do you think?”

  Jack considered his words carefully. “If there’s actual biological hazards, then these are pretty benign instructions. More about protecting the contents than the cosmonauts.”

  “But they still had to wear pressure suits inside.”

  “Because it’s really cold in there. Look at all the conduits plugged into here—this accounts for most of the kludge we found up front.”

  “So nothing about decon? Postexposure protocols?”

  “Nothing,” Jack said, reading down the list one more time. “Just do a leak check and keep your suit heater cranked up.”

  Traci nodded her assent, then turned as she called back to Magellan. “Roy, I’m recommending we—”

  Before she could finish, Jack had begun spinning the lock open. “We’re running out of time,” he told her over their private channel. “Max heat is going to drain power fast, and I don’t feel like doing this again.” He pulled the portal open and floated through. Traci swore under her breath and followed.

  It was by far Arkangel’s best-kept compartment, noticeably missing the scrapes, smudges, and other random blemishes found throughout the rest of the spacecraft. Its walls were bare aluminum with no insulating fabrics or interior panels. There was nothing else between them and open space—a big reason why it was so much colder in here than anywhere else. The other reason was the module’s beefed-up air exchangers. Whatever purpose they’d devised for this chamber, they’d wanted it to stay good and cold.

  Jack checked the thermometer on his wrist. “Minus forty C.” He whistled. “I’d say it’s like a meat locker in here, but that would be warmer.”

  By the looks of it, storage shelves had been brought in from other compartments and mounted to every available flat surface, leaving only a tight walkway aligned with Arkangel’s vertical axis—again, set up for a ship that spent much of its time under gravity from constant acceleration. Traci steadied herself against a ledge that ran the length of the module—apparently meant as a work surface, she’d almost expected it to hold a microscope and racks of test tubes. “Reminds me of a laboratory.”

  Jack studied some of the labels that had been taped to each drawer and storage bin. Most were empty; the few left had been sealed from the outside with silicone repair caulk, most likely lifted from the ship’s repair kit. “Specimen labels,” he said, as if to support her point.

  “Labeled as what?”

  “Nothing yet,” he said. “Just date, time, and location.” It didn’t look as if they’d planned to find anything, as very few were written on any kind of preprinted cards. Many were scrap paper torn from personal notebooks. Judging by the dates they’d quickly started to run out of spare paper, so most ended up just been written on duct tape. “If I had to guess—which I do—they were surprised at how much they found. I don’t think they came prepared for this.”

  “Whatever this is,” Traci said.

  Jack silently moved among the drawers and bins. “They went to a lot of trouble to preserve these samples,” he finally said. “Why do that for a bunch of ice and dirt?”

  “Okay, now you’re worrying me. Where’d this all come from, anyway?”

  Jack stopped at the shelf farthest from the entrance. Apparently the earliest collection, this one had neatly lettered signs on actual preprinted labels. His eyes grew wide as he looked inside. “Whoa.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure.” A translucent orb glittered beneath the beam of his helmet lamp, in size and shape resembling a Christmas ornament. Almost perfectly round, it appeared to be made of ice encasing a ruddy brown core. “Same general coloring as the planet surface,” Jack said. “Hand me a hazmat bag.”

  Traci removed a heavy plastic pouch with a zip closure and held it over the drawer. Jack pulled it open, gave it a tap beneath, and the icy sphere floated into the bag. “Tell Noelle she’ll want to see this.”

  26

  Mission Day 305

  Col. V. Vaschenko—Personal Log

  What is human nature? Is all work equally valuable? If the State tells a man to go dig a hole, then fill it back in, is that the same as a man who lays railroad tracks or tends a farm? Or removes a diseased appendix?

  That is what I fear we are finding out. Of course some work is more valuable than others—I hope our comrades who assembled this magnificent spacecraft had more incentive to do good work than the man digging ditches just for the sake of it. Pride in their jobs only goes so far when their families are hungry, or they have to scrounge for new shoes for their children.

  As a Cosmonaut Hero of the Soviet Union, my family is doing quite well. I look forward to returning to them and retiring from my duties. My next homecoming will be my last. Our son has left for pilot training while our daughter, bless her, has put off going to university in order to remain home with her mother until my return.

  It has become impossible to maintain the fiction that I make these sacrifices for them. No, I do this for me.

  My path began before our family did, and I did not hesitate when it led me into spaceflight. I did not resist when the missions became longer and longer, and I would have buried anyone who stood between me and the command of this vessel. At first it was for the challenge of riding a rocket into orbit, eventually it became my one true freedom.

  No matter how hard Moscow tried to control us, they could not see into our minds. They could not hear our thoughts, peek into our journals, or listen to our conversations—not when we knew how to cut them off. Cosmonauts are nothing if not resourceful. And clever, particularly when surreptitiously defying our would-be masters. No one knows a spacecraft better than the men who live in it for months on end. We could always count on at least one module in Salyut to remain mysteriously silent to ears on the ground.

  Writings were another matter. Any journals that we did not want to be seen on our return had ways of disappearing in space. Who knows how many samizdat texts are still in Earth orbit after being “lost” during an EVA? Unfortunate that so much work should be cast into the void, like messages in bottles tossed upon the sea.

  That is why we all developed such impressive memories: It was the only way to carry our work with us. It is never talked about back on Earth, but I’ve no doubt most of my comrades of an independent bent made it a priority to write down the passages they’d memorized before casting the only extant drafts into space.

  I can say it worked well for me.

  Noelle had requested an early shift turnover briefing for
reasons she quickly made clear: “They’re organic.”

  Roy’s utter lack of reaction hinted at the hushed conversations the couple no doubt had as she was developing her hypothesis.

  “Okay,” Jack said warily. Why did his philosophical debates with Traci have a way of coming back like this? “But we’ve found lots of organic material all through the solar system. You know better than any of us that it’s not the same thing as finding life.”

  “Those were just chemical precursors,” Noelle said. Her body quivered as she impatiently tapped a foot against the floor restraint. “And I didn’t say ‘life.’ Not yet, anyway.”

  “So not the same thing as complex hydrocarbons on Titan?” Traci asked. Saturn’s largest moon was drowning in liquid methane.

  “This is different.” She let the word hang for effect.

  Jack was feeling impatient. “I’ll bite. What’s different about it?”

  Noelle considered her answer. “There are traces of hydrogen sulfide and hydrogen cyanide all over the surface, and liquid water beneath it. Those are essential nucleic acid precursors. Judging by where they found the samples, they segregated materials by type: nucleic acids, amino acids, lipids . . . if someone wanted to build a storehouse for life’s building blocks, it couldn’t have been done any better than Pluto.”

  “So the Russians came all the way to the end of the solar system forty years ago to build—what? A dry cellar?”

  “You’re missing my point: They didn’t formulate any of this. According to the logs you translated, these all came from the surface.”

  Roy had arrived at the same conclusion. “No question they did,” he said with a sidelong glance at Jack. “But you haven’t found anything new yet?”

  “Lots of questioning the system, nothing on the organics that wasn’t already in the official logs,” Jack said. “I must have missed the chapter on Hey Comrades, we just found alien life.”

  “Not alien,” Noelle corrected him. “Certainly these compounds could combine to evolve into anything, but it would still be something we’d be familiar with. These could be the same precursors that eventually populated Earth.”

  “So is this evidence for panspermia?”

  “I’ll have to wait on the carbon dating, but it’s a strong possibility.”

  Roy studied the diagram of Arkangel taped to a nearby bulkhead. “We have to find that lander.”

  // MSG TXMIT 181304Z //

  ATTN/ MAGELLAN CREW

  FROM/ NASA HQ

  VIA/ JSC FCR

  SUBJ/ SAMPLE COLLECTION

  1. RECEIVED YOUR 1933Z TRANSMISSION. DIRECTOR’S RESPONSE FOLLOWS:

  2. NO INDICATION MOSCOW WAS AWARE OF 2ND SURFACE OP OR SAMPLES HELD IN Z-4 LOG MODULE.

  3. AGREE THIS IS UNUSUAL GIVEN LEVEL OF CONTROL NORMALLY EXERCISED BY MOSCOW TSUP BUT NOT SURPRISING GIVEN DISTANCE INVOLVED.

  4. ADVISE CAUTION. TREAT SAMPLES AS BIOHAZARDS UFN.

  // MSG ENDS //

  “Thanks for the warning,” Roy said. While Noelle had readily determined the nature of the samples from Jack and Traci’s EVA, they’d studiously avoided the implications.

  Traci looked out at Arkangel. “So if they took their lander to the surface, then where’s the ascent stage?”

  Noelle had been wondering the same thing and shuddered at the implication: Both the lander and the extended-duration Soyuz were gone, along with the cosmonauts needed to operate them. “I didn’t think LK had that much onboard storage. Could they have made more than one trip to the surface?”

  “Pluto’s about two-thirds the size of our moon,” Traci said. “Maybe that left them enough delta-v to lift off with the descent stage? Could they have brought the whole stack back up here and refueled?”

  Roy grunted a “maybe.” Though not likely, as they’d tended to build things heavy. “Let’s keep our imaginations on the leash. The simplest explanation is a surface expedition went pear-shaped. That would explain the missing Soyuz/LK stack.”

  Still, they’d gotten all that mass up here somehow. “Now what?” Jack wondered. “At some point they had almost a hundred cubic meters’ worth of volume over there stuffed to the rafters and locked behind a door with a big biohazard label pasted to it.”

  “Which they neglected to tell anyone about,” Traci said. “This is huge. Why keep it from Moscow?”

  Roy’s arched eyebrow spoke volumes: Russian mission control had a notorious reputation for micromanaging their cosmonauts to a degree that made Houston look hands-off. Why share anything with a bunch of control freaks if you didn’t have to?

  “So they didn’t plan on coming back?”

  Roy grunted another “maybe” and pointed at the logbooks Jack retrieved. “I suspect the answer’s somewhere in there.”

  27

  Mission Day 308

  Col. V. Vaschenko—Personal Log

  Life. We have found the seeds of it here, of all places.

  Our results are preliminary and will need to be reproduced by more capable labs in Moscow, but what we have observed here is unmistakable. Chemical signatures of ribose sugars, purines, pyrimidines and phosphates appeared after several layers of the snowball had sublimated away. It is as if the nitrogen ice and these “tholins” act as a preservation medium.

  The question that continues to haunt us is: How did they get here? Assuming they are naturally occurring—and I am reluctant to conclude otherwise—what are they doing on Pluto? We have detected signs of other, smaller planetoids out here. There may be a whole belt of trans-Neptunian objects yet to be discovered. Are they similar in makeup?

  There is a theory that water and perhaps even biological precursors were transported to Earth by cometary bombardment. Could life have been delivered to our world from here? If so, we have made a tremendous discovery.

  Jack had retreated to his cubicle, drawing its plastic door shut and turning up a white-noise generator he’d installed on his tablet. He’d tried music at first, but even the wordless movements of classical had been too distracting. The sound of rushing water now filled his cabin, turned up just enough to drown out the incessant rattle of air recyclers and coolant pumps.

  Reading anything else in such an environment would’ve easily put him to sleep, but hidden within the dry recitations of daily life aboard Arkangel could be found the spark of individuality and hints of rebellion to come. It was now clear the crew had elected to stay out here, as he’d seen nothing that could’ve crippled the spacecraft. Which meant they’d elected to defy both Moscow and their own hardwired survival instincts.

  Moscow would’ve been pissed. That it hadn’t come across in any of the “official” documents told Jack . . . what?

  Nothing. Everything. The old regime had been notorious for papering over any evidence of disagreements within the Party, whatever that meant at the moment. Documents disappeared, individuals airbrushed out of photos, entire towns removed from maps . . . if it made the nomenklatura uncomfortable, down the memory hole it went.

  These guys had been determined to not be flushed down the memory hole themselves. Moscow may have removed all official records of Arkangel and its mission, but their reach couldn’t extend to the ship itself. Keeping it safely out here meant that someone, someday, would have to confront the secrets it held. And they clearly hadn’t cared how long that might take.

  Nor had Vaschenko apparently cared how long it took for him to get to the point. For someone as steeped in classic Russian literature as this guy had been, it sure didn’t show up in his writing. Then again, Jack reminded himself, War and Peace wasn’t exactly a quick summer read. And he hadn’t had to actually study a document like this since his days at the Defense Language Institute. Translating was one thing, understanding it took the work to a whole new level.

  The “unofficial” commander’s log was infinitely more interesting than the sanitized reports he’d transmitted back to Moscow. Had they suspected there was an embedded message within? The KGB and GRU would have made cracking it a high pri
ority, right up until the Soviet Union collapsed and irretrievably shifted their priorities with it.

  It must have made the control freaks in the Kremlin nuts. They’d lost control of their most ambitious—and secret—space mission. Once it was made public, they’d counted on it to rekindle pride in Mother Russia and keep the proles’ minds occupied with something other than the misery they lived under.

  Good luck with that, he thought. Those old farts had been delusional. Such was the nature of politicians, particularly the totalitarian variety. Grand visions of Man Conquering Space only went so far when your average Muscovite had to spend all day waiting in line for stale bread and single-ply toilet paper. How many of them looked up and wondered what their brave and glorious cosmonauts were wiping their butts with?

  That would’ve made the space program especially attractive back in the bad old days, he realized: You might be stuck in orbit inside a malfunctioning tin can, but at least you had everything you needed at arm’s reach.

  It was a shame, because these guys were for-real Space Heroes and this was the kind of adventure people write books and make movies about. That the Russians had run with a concept first proposed in the 1960s to send a crewed spacecraft all the way to the end of the solar system? And really, who else would’ve been crazy enough to propel a ship with leftover atomic bombs?

  Yeah, this made Apollo look puny in comparison. He couldn’t blame them for keeping it under wraps: Did anyone think Reagan would’ve bought their line that it was an exotic propulsion system and not an orbiting WMD platform? Not in their lifetimes.

  The original plan had been to fly a grand tour of the outer planets, plant the Commie flag on Pluto just to show who’s the Boss of the Solar System, and do it all in under a year. Thing was, they almost did it. Until, that is, their heroes found something they didn’t expect. And it had been serious enough to cause a mutiny.