Frozen Orbit

by Patrick Chiles

  They’d found complex organics out here, a frozen world full of the stuff you’d need if you were planning to seed your own planet. Was that it, then? Proof of the panspermia theory? Alien overlords? An omniscient Creator?

  He slammed down the cover over the porthole by his bunk. Space was just too big.

  Noelle had been uncharacteristically quiet, both captivated and shaken by what they’d found. She was preoccupied to the point where Roy had rejiggered the activity roster to allow her more time to investigate. He and Traci were taking “port and starboard” shifts, evenly dividing the day so one of them was always minding the spacecraft while Jack and Noelle remained cloistered in her small lab: he read while she methodically examined the curious compounds recovered from Arkangel.

  Lately, every trip into the lab had resulted in a “eureka” moment.

  “It’s all categorized,” Noelle announced over breakfast.

  Jack shrugged. “That’s just what the storage compartment looked like. They had everything sorted and catalogued.”

  “That’s not what I meant. The vessels these samples were recovered in—”

  “Vessels?” Traci interrupted.

  “Ampules, pouches, sacs . . . whatever you want to call them.” Noelle tried not to become flustered. “I don’t have a better analogy. They’re not artificial, but they’re not random either. Each category of organics is contained within naturally formed mineral vessels having different geological characteristics.”

  “It would make sense if they were taken from different surface formations,” Jack said, “but it’s not like they had the fuel to just go hopping all over Pluto. LK’s a single-pilot vehicle, and the logs say it was on the surface for barely two days. A single cosmonaut couldn’t have gone very far.”

  “Have you found their landing site yet?” Roy asked.

  “Not yet. I imaged the region they were supposed to have set down in and traced a grid pattern over it, down to the arc-minute. Searching each grid square visually takes time. The terrain’s full of nooks and crannies.”

  “Ironic that we named it ‘Sputnik Planum’ without even knowing the Russians made it here first,” Traci said, eliciting a tired smile from Noelle.

  “We only had those passing shots from New Horizons years ago,” she said. “The cellular pattern covering the plain is formed by a network of pits and troughs that are hundreds of meters across. There’s still no evidence that they’re artificial; we can explain their formation by sublimation of gases. But to find so many organics nested within each pit—”

  “So is there a natural explanation?”

  “There’s always a natural explanation,” she said, her tone suggesting she was trying to remain convinced herself.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “So it’s space aliens, then?”

  Having let his mind wander during his daily workout, Jack snapped back into the present where Traci appeared beside him, offering a bulb of juice. “What?”

  “Space aliens,” she said. “I’m guessing that’s why you’re floating around muttering to yourself. You stopped the treadmill five minutes ago and have been staring at nothing ever since.”

  He took a deep drink. If only he could stare into space, instead of at another gray bulkhead.

  “I’m not used to you being this quiet.”

  Jack wiped his face with a towel and wrung it out into the reclamation cycler. His sweat would be added to the rest of the crew’s bodily fluids and eventually reused as potable water. It didn’t taste all that different than tap water, though it helped if he didn’t think about it too much.

  “Did I do something wrong?” she asked seriously.

  After months out here in the Big Empty, he’d learned to judge time by the tone of her voice. Right now she was hushed, which meant Roy and Noelle were at least two hours into their off time and asleep in their cabin. “Not at all,” he finally said, unhooking himself from the complex arrangement of bungees that kept him from bounding off the zero-g treadmill. “I’m done translating the logbooks, but that’s the easy part. Now I have to try and make sense of it all.”

  “So what did Vaschenko think they’d found?”

  “Space aliens.”

  “Cute.”

  “Let’s say it is. Do you still have a problem with that?”

  She looked away, just long enough for him to see that she did indeed have trouble with the idea. “Quit rubbing it in. You know I do.”

  “I’m not needling you, it’s just the issue at hand. We’re out here at the edge of the solar system, crawling over a derelict from the last century, and that’s not even the weirdest thing we find: Turns out that Pluto is one big cold storage facility.”

  “What if it’s all naturally occurring?”

  Jack shook his head. “We can’t know that based on what we have here. We’ve got to get down there and see.”

  “Agreed. So let me propose this: Assume Pluto has all the necessary ingredients to seed a planet with life, kept safely in deep freeze. It’s so isolated that we’d never get our hands on any of it until we have the ability to leave the solar system. What does that mean for us?”

  “That whoever left it here wanted us to keep away from it?”

  “You’re half right,” Traci said with a confidence he hadn’t seen in a long time. “It was here for us once we were ready to be trusted with it.”

  28

  Mission Day 315

  Acceleration 0.0 m/s2 (0 g)

  Pluto Orbit

  They finally located the Russian landing site near the southeast corner of grid square AA13, a plain of what spectroscopes showed was predominantly water ice. Low resolution, but it clearly showed the circular shape and spindly legs of an LK-M. While Traci refined its position down to the arc-second, Roy began the slow work of coordinating their landing plans with Houston.

  “Owen had SIMSUP generate some likely scenarios that they’re going to transmit in the next data packet,” Roy said, laying out the operational concept for the others. “Surface escape velocity is only 1200 meters per second. Puffy has plenty enough delta-V to get two of us down there and back again, and a couple of dry runs should help us squeeze out more. They agree we should take one pilot and one scientist. Given the circumstances, I believe that should be Noelle and me.”

  Jack and Traci hadn’t planned to argue. Their pair included the actual scientist, and she was the one who needed to be on the surface. “I can get you some more margin by cleaning out part of the trunk,” Jack offered, referring to the lander’s oversized service module.

  “We ditch the flyaway kit?”

  “At the least the parts you won’t need. Keep one of the medical kits and just enough rations for a surface sortie,” Jack said. “It’s equipped to support all four of us for up to sixty days. Unless you’re planning on taking an extended vacation down there, that’s a lot of redundant mass.”

  “I never wanted to have to try out the whole ‘Dragon Lifeboat’ scenario anyway,” Roy said, grimacing at the thought of months of confinement inside a glorified camper.

  “Agreed,” Noelle said, looking at Jack and Traci. “You guys have no idea how gassy those survival rations make him.”

  “Speak for yourself, princess,” Roy said as his wife blushed. “But yes, the extra uplift mass might be nice to have. I have a feeling we’re going to be busy down there.”

  Puffy, a Dragon III built for taking people and cargo to the surface of just about any solid planet in the solar system, was in outward appearances not terribly different from the capsule from which it evolved. The gumdrop-shaped passenger vessel, with its large oval windows and powerful ascent engines hidden beneath bulbous streamlined fairings, was mounted atop the frustum of its descent and landing stage that formed a natural extension of the standard Dragon crew capsule. Almost doubling the original vehicle’s outer diameter, the skirt was fitted with extensions of the same type of aerodynamic fairings that protected its landing engines. Recessed in between the engine fairings w
ere landing skids, which when retracted were flush with the vehicle’s skin. Its base was formed by a convex heat shield made of rust-colored ablative tiles.

  Earlier versions of this same vehicle had already returned astronauts to the Moon and taken the first human expedition to the largest known main-belt asteroid, Ceres. NASA had been oddly reluctant to use it for Mars expeditions, not being convinced of its ability to return valuable payloads such as people from the surface. Undeterred, the manufacturer had taken it upon themselves to go on their own: Much to NASA’s chagrin, the first humans to set foot on another planet had thus been private contractors.

  In that sense, it was the catalyst that had led to the construction of Magellan in the first place. Congress, in a fit of pique, had in turn slashed the agency’s human exploration program until they could show actual results that weren’t decades behind the private sector. Forced to fall back into its original role as a research and development agency, NASA ironically began nurturing a flair for improvisational genius not seen since its early days. Purchasing vehicles off-the-shelf and modifying them for their own purposes, pulling the covers off of advanced propulsion and nuclear power systems that had lain dormant for decades, and turning the aging International Space Station into a privately run national laboratory had revived a sense of adventurism that had been missing for decades.

  After burning through several politically connected administrators over a remarkably short period, the woman who’d finally settled into the job had been ruthless in purpose: “If we’re going to all of this trouble to send people up there, then for goodness’ sake let’s make it worthwhile and actually go somewhere,” she’d famously lectured Congress.

  That remembrance of how they got here had crowded its way into Roy’s mind, despite the gravity of his immediate task. He’d represented the astronauts on the administrator’s advisory committee and had been one of many suits by her side in an infamous congressional hearing that had ended with Magellan finally getting the green light. “I don’t care if you fine people want my scalp or not,” she’d said. “I report to the President, and he knows I’m not interested in running an agency that pretends spending a year in Earth orbit is space exploration.”

  Noelle interrupted his reflection. “What are you smiling about?”

  Roy shook his head, almost laughing. “Nothing. Just thinking about how we got here.”

  “Plasma fusion is that amusing to you?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Think bigger. The whole reorganizing NASA thing.”

  “Ah.” She understood. “Penny certainly pulled us out of a tailspin. I’d still be toiling away at Stanford if she hadn’t expanded the astronaut corps.” Not to mention giving it an actual mission, she left unsaid.

  “And I’d be flying airliners full of pasty tourists to see the Mouse,” Roy said, staring at his departure checklist. “Amazing what can happen when you put somebody in charge who knows what they’re doing.”

  Jack cut in on the radio loop from the command deck. “Then why is Traci back here with me?”

  “Adult supervision,” Roy shot back. “I don’t trust you enough to come get us if we need help.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The rest of the countdown went by quickly. By the time Pluto had rotated to the point that required the least amount of fuel for their descent, Roy and Noelle had run through the lander’s onboard diagnostics and rehearsed the final approach twice. The doors separating their lander from its mothership were closed and the remaining air between them vented into recycling tanks. The only thing still holding them to Magellan were the mechanical clamps around its docking rings, which Roy released with the flip of a switch. Spring-loaded pushers simultaneously kicked the spacecraft clear.

  “Undock,” he reported coolly. “Cabin pressure stable, guidance internal.” Holding its own air and being able to navigate were the last, most crucial details before leaving the comparative safety of Magellan.

  “We show you free, Puffy,” Jack replied, mere feet away but now separated by the killing vacuum. He was watching the LIDAR readback from the docking node. “Separation is ten meters, drifting steady at a half-meter per second. You’re clear to navigate.”

  “Roger that.” Roy punctuated his answer with a puff of reaction-control jets, increasing their separation from the big ship. The little capsule spun once around its longitudinal axis, then turned nose-down relative to Magellan. “DG’s are good,” he said, referring to the lander’s directional gyros. A longer puff of gas added another hundred meters to their separation. The lander turned belly first, pointing its convex heat shield toward their direction of travel. “Ready to start descent countdown.”

  “On my mark,” Jack said, acting as their onboard Mission Control. “Three, two, one . . . mark. Initial point in two minutes, on the dot.”

  “Two minutes,” Roy said after a short pause. “We show same. IP’s right in the crosshairs. Nice flying, guys.”

  “An actual compliment?” Noelle asked. “You just made their day. Maybe their week.”

  Roy reached for the comm panel, checking to make sure their mics weren’t hot. A sly grin crossed his face. “That’s why you hold on to them until it’s really important. Otherwise people tend to get cocky.”

  “I think you’re just happy to finally have me all to yourself.”

  “Yeah, there’s that.” His eyes studied her up and down, but it was hard to get past the EVA suit covering her body. He looked down at his own suit then reached for her gloved hand. “For now we’ll just have to settle for this.”

  Still holding his wife’s hand, Roy eyed the event timer as it counted down to the deorbit burn. After a few minutes of steady pushing from the landing thrusters, they each unbuckled and climbed out of their flight couches. Noelle reached for her husband and gave him a long embrace, ending with a kiss. “Visors down,” she lamented. “Time to work, dear.”

  “Visors down,” Roy sighed. He locked down his faceplate.

  “Patience, love,” she said. “We do have a couple of rest periods on the surface.”

  With nothing left to say except for call-and-response checklists, they each turned to pivot their couches upright and facing the windows. Roy moved the instrument panel around its articulated arms to set it back into the ceiling, then activated a secondary set of controls beneath his window. “Meet you on the down side, princess.”

  Given that Pluto is roughly two-thirds the size of Earth’s moon, with correspondingly weaker gravity, their descent and final approach had used significantly less propellant than would’ve otherwise been the case. Pluto made up for this advantage by the fact that it was almost utterly unexplored. Finding a landing site required some up-close work.

  “This reminds me of that time we got lost in North Dakota,” Noelle fretted as they hovered over the frozen wastes. An area that had looked smooth and promising from up high had turned out to be strewn with ice boulders. Roy goosed the throttle, moving their lander farther along its ground track.

  “We weren’t lost,” he insisted. “I just couldn’t finish the trip VFR.”

  “You mean you couldn’t find the field in all that snow without someone vectoring you,” she teased, maybe a little too on point for the present circumstance.

  “Women,” he groused. “It’s always, ‘Look at the map! Look at the map!’ You see where the map gets us?” He stabbed a finger at the chart scrolling past on their multifunction display. “I don’t even know how that Russki made it down here in one piece.”

  “We can’t go much farther from his landing site, or we’ll be outside minimum safe distance for the EVA.” Noelle frowned as she scanned ahead with a pair of range-finding binoculars. “Can you give us a yaw, plus ninety degrees?”

  Roy gave the control stick a quick twist and pivoted them a quarter-turn right. “Thanks,” she said, suddenly becoming excited. “Yes! Keep going, love. There’s a nice clear ice field just beyond this crag. We’ll be in walking distance of LK.”

  He pitched th
e nose down and tapped the throttles. “Thrusting forward.”

  “That’s good,” she said. “Put it right there. Keep going, love.”

  “Eww,” Traci shuddered. “Just—gross.”

  “So it was weird for you, too?” Jack said, reaching up to silence their radios. “Yeah, I’m starting to question that whole ‘hot mics during EVA’ rule now. Those two need to get a room.”

  “Let’s just remember which couches they used so we never have to.”

  His eyes glinted with a hint of mischief. “Never have to what?”

  “You know what I mean!” she said, throwing a checklist at him.

  “Did they actually put us on mute?” Noelle asked glibly. “I didn’t think we were that naughty.”

  Roy was considerably less amused. They were about to commit to a landing site. “Ping the transponder, let ’em know we’re done screwing around.”

  She smiled, doubting he’d picked up on his own double entendre. “As you wish, love.”

  “You two just about done down there?” Jack asked.

  “Just about,” Roy said. “You still watching our feed during that little interlude?”

  “Affirmative. We show you passing five hundred, down at three meters per second, forward velocity zero. You happy with where you’re at?”

  “Took a while, but we finally located some flat ground that isn’t all ice. Fuel at twenty percent.”

  “We show same. Four hundred now, down at two.”

  “Picking up some dust,” Roy said. “I think. Might be snow. Fuel at sixteen now.”

  “Copy sixteen percent. You’re golden, man.”

  “It’s sublimating carbon dioxide,” Noelle said as clouds billowed up from underneath them. “Our exhaust is flashing it to steam. There must be tons of it embedded in the crust.”

  “Whatever it is, we’re in the soup.” Roy frowned as he snapped on a switch above his window. “Switching to EVS.”