Noelle’s stomach fluttered as the Enhanced Vision System overlaid her window with a pixelated monochrome image of the ground beneath them, an artificially generated picture of what their landing radar saw as they hovered in the icy haze. Her husband might have been trained to implicitly trust the machinery, but she would’ve been much more at ease with being able to see this with her own eyes.
“I’m worried about blowback,” Jack told them. “If you blast open a large enough nitrogen or methane pocket . . . ”
“Nothing we could do about it anyway. Our landing engines will just beat it to death,” Roy said, cutting him off. “We’re committed. One hundred meters.” They were in the “dead band,” the zone close to the surface where there was not enough time to abort and have their ascent thrusters fly them to safety before the whole contraption fell out of the sky.
As they drew closer, the force of their descent rockets blasted the surface, carving a smooth depression into the icy crust and flinging the debris cloud away from them. “Clearing up,” Roy said. “Starting to see flat ground beneath us.”
“Twenty meters,” Noelle said. “Down at two. Fuel eight percent.”
They were close enough now that Roy didn’t care how much they burned into their reserves. “We won’t be needing it anyway. Taking her down nice and slow,” Roy said as the surface crept toward them.
“Six percent,” Jack’s voice said as an alarm sounded. Roy punched the master caution annunciator to silence it. They were at bingo fuel, but this close they could shut down and probably fall to the surface with no consequence. Probably.
“Five meters.” Noelle’s voice rose excitedly.
“Good visual on the surface,” Roy said. “Looks like we’re taking a sandblaster to it.”
“Contact light!” She was up a solid octave now.
“Shutdown.” Roy chopped the throttles. The ship settled gently beneath them as its landing skids absorbed the rest of their inertia. “We made it, bubba.”
29
Mission Day 317
Pluto
“Egress and closeout checklists complete. Standing by to depressurize.”
Traci answered from their perch in stationary orbit aboard Magellan. “You’re go for depress.”
He lifted the cover of a protected switch on the environmental panel. “Venting now.”
“Copy that. You’re well ahead of the timeline. Keep up the good work.”
“Not that hard,” he said. “Everything about this thing is dirt simple.”
Traci must have heard the disdain in his voice. “Just the nuisance work,” she said. “But who needs complications, right?” Roy had been famously put off by just how much actual piloting had been eliminated in this newest generation of spacecraft.
“Push a button and watch it go.”
“Hey boss, that was all you flying it down. Be happy for the break.”
She was only partially right. Landing on an unexplored planet, random bits of which threatened to blow up beneath you in protest? Lesser beings would’ve augured in or hit the big red “abort” button once things got dicey.
Surface EVAs sounded as easy as donning a spacesuit and heading out for a stroll; “easy” ended with the suit. The egress checklist had taken the better part of an hour, most of which had been devoted to meticulously inspecting each other’s suits and surface protective garments. They were particularly ready to be done with the final check: suit heaters, now running full-tilt against the extreme cold they were about to expose themselves to.
Roy turned clumsily to his wife. “Ready to get out of here? I’m starting to feel parboiled.”
Behind her visor, Noelle’s face shone. “Unless I can open my faceplate and let in a little fresh air.”
Roy checked the outside readings. “Pressure less than ten millibars, temperature is minus two hundred twenty-three degrees Celsius. So it’s only fifty shy of absolute zero.”
“And me without my bathing suit.” She gave him a thumbs-up. “Let’s go.”
Roy moved to vent the cabin’s remaining air. There was a barely perceptible hiss as a ring of LEDs around the hatch turned green. He gave Noelle one last look—as in are we sure about this?—which she answered with an excited nod: Yes, now. Before we change our minds.
“Cabin secure. Preparing to egress,” he announced over the radio, and opened the hatch. It rose up and away on electrically articulated arms to lock itself in place above the rim.
Now open to the outside, Roy struggled to comprehend what he saw. His helmet cam relayed everything he saw to Earth via Magellan, yet he was still expected to narrate. There was no way to describe it other than alien, a frozen desolation that made Earth’s moon look positively welcoming. There, at least home still dominated the sky. Here, the Sun itself would’ve been barely distinguishable amongst the stars if it weren’t for the faint haze of dust that ringed the inner planets.
He took a deep breath. “Okay, I’m standing in the hatch now, looking east over Sputnik Planum. I can see what appears to be a frozen sea ahead of us, which our spectroscopes tell us are nitrogen and carbon dioxide.”
“Can you see the lander?” Traci asked through the radio.
Roy leaned out as far as he dared. “Negative, not from this vantage point. It’s over a rise about a full klick to our three o’clock.”
“How does the landing site look?”
“Clean,” he said. “Looking down, we’re sitting in a shallow depression created by our landing rockets. It appears we blasted a pretty significant area smooth out to at least fifty meters.”
“Understood. We’ll keep an eye on surface phases.”
He turned to face Noelle, clipped his safety harness to an inertia reel, and slid the toe of one boot into a recessed foot restraint. He kicked at the non-skid coating and was satisfied with his purchase. “Ladder’s stable. Starting down.”
“Careful, love,” Noelle said nervously. “You’ve always been clumsy on the ice.”
Roy’s answer was not the usual one-small-step astronaut-speak: “Yes, dear.” He strengthened his grip around the handholds. Another couple of meters to go. The rails ended at the lander’s base, requiring a short hop down to the surface. Roy kept his hands on the rail as he dropped onto the landing skid, now sunk several inches into the gravelly slush that had partially melted from their rocket exhaust and refrozen around it. “Feels good,” he said. “Only a couple of feet, but a long fall in one-tenth gravity.”
He eased the toe of his boot off of the skid and cautiously poked at the surface: a dense compaction of ice and rock that had formed and reformed over who knew how many billions of years. “Surface is stable in the landing zone. No sublimation, and no suction when I remove my boot,” he said. “Stepping off now.”
Roy swung his other foot out and let go of the ladder.
“Well . . . ” he hesitated, “it’s been a long way, but here we are.”
Jack’s voice crackled over the radio. “Absolutely poetic, Roy. You’ve just inspired a whole generation of children back on Earth.”
“He’s been thinking about it a long time,” Noelle deadpanned.
Roy, slightly annoyed: “Are we on vox?”
The incessant static paused a beat. “Not anymore,” Jack said.
“Good. Because my first thought was that this place looks as cold as a grave digger’s ass.”
“We’ll make sure the official transcripts stick with ‘Welp, here we are.’”
Roy moved on quickly. “I’m taking the contingency sample.” If anything were to force an emergency return, they wouldn’t be leaving without taking a small piece of Pluto with them.
It worked as well as he’d been promised, which surprised him: Extend the T-handle, place one boot on the foot rest, then push and twist into the surface until it stopped. Roy tapped the sample tube until about a half-meter of Plutonian permafrost came loose. “Got it.” As rehearsed countless times, he placed the core sample into a pouch hanging from his waist. “Guess we
can go home now.”
“Not on your life!” Noelle protested. “Am I safe to come down or not?”
“If m’lady insists,” he sighed dramatically.
She was headed down the ladder before he finished talking. She skipped the last two rungs completely, sliding down with her hands and not even bothering to stop on the footpad before leaping out onto the surface.
One advantage of being so far from home was that they had little need for the gold sun visors that typically hid their faces. Noelle’s practically glowed, her eyes wide with wonder.
In the distance, nitrogen and methane icebergs piled against a far shoreline. A thin haze of blue along the horizon faded to black, starry sky overhead. Wisps of cloud hung low, more volatile gases sublimating from a vent in the distance, no doubt driven by some kind of subsurface volcanism. What meager sunlight that existed out here was reflected by the ice, giving their surroundings a luster reminiscent of fresh snow beneath a full moon. And on a dwarf planet smaller than their own moon, the horizon wasn’t all that far away. The distant blue haze highlighted Pluto’s curvature against the black sky.
The strip of Plutonian tundra they’d landed on was several kilometers across. The ground itself was rusty brown, a crazy-quilt of gravel and ice that ended at the foot of a cliff perhaps a kilometer away. It was a surprisingly clean edifice, as if purposefully cut from the glacier pressing behind it. Others were simply jumbles of shattered ice, like bergs that churned against each other in Arctic waters. A blanket of methane and nitrogen snow gave the planet an unspoiled flavor like the first snowfall of winter.
Taking it all in, she found herself getting weak-kneed and held on to the ladder.
“You look like a girl that just had her first drink,” Roy laughed. “So, does this make up for not hanging around at Jupiter?”
She bounced over to her husband with a slow-motion bunny hop and caught him in a hug as tight as their bulky suits would allow. She batted her faceplate against his, reflexively planting a kiss. They both laughed at the smudge left inside her visor. “Yes, I think it does.”
♦ ♦ ♦
It was a half-kilometer trot from their landing site down to the frozen shore, where the rusty ground gave way to a sea of ice stretching to the horizon. Looking back up the slight rise their lander appeared pitifully small, silhouetted against cliffs of frozen methane in the distance. Beyond, the Milky Way rose up and arced overhead. Leaning back clumsily in her suit, Noelle’s eyes followed its trail of stars back down to the icy mist that hung just above the surface.
The polygonal features they’d seen from orbit—“hollows,” she’d taken to calling them—dominated the frozen surface. From a distance they’d looked pristine: pools of frozen nitrogen undisturbed by the kinds of meteorite damage common to the inner solar system. As they grew closer she noticed the ice was mottled by submerged crud that had slowly migrated from below, churned up by eons of subsurface convection.
Noelle was careful to stay close to the shoreline, not wanting to test her luck with the annealed nitrogen slush. Falling into one of these pools would be like tossing a bottle of wine into a chiller.
Roy followed her movements closely as she removed samples from the crust, wary of her stepping into some unknowable danger. “You’re kind of close to that ice.”
“I’m being careful, love.” Finally standing before one of the immense hollows they’d seen from orbit, she found it too curious to ignore. The blanket of nitrogen snow had a texture that told her there was something more beneath it. She took an excavating tool from her waist pouch and swiped away a few centimeters of ice crystals. “The ice pack isn’t as dense as I expected.”
“Surface texture changes as you get deeper,” Roy noted. “See that pebbling?”
The snowpack grew denser as she continued digging. “There’s definitely something underneath here,” she said, “besides more ice, I mean.” Hints of color began to appear. “Whatever’s in these hollows, its noticeably different than the surrounding regolith.”
“Frozen tholins, maybe?” Roy wondered. It would match up with what the Russians had described. “These could be lakes, like the gunk on Titan but frozen over.”
“Let’s just see what we find.” Noelle was not prone to speculate on the fly, a tendency she felt was too common among the pilot astronauts like her husband. “Oh my.”
“Noelle . . . ”
She reached into the pool, ignoring Roy’s admonitions. The surrounding nitrogen snow was deeply frozen, well below the triple-point temperature. It wasn’t going to violently change phases just because of the residual heat from her suit. She’d do it quickly, then.
In. Out. Done.
Wisps of sublimating nitrogen curled away from her hands as she emerged with what looked like a large snowball. She swiped away a thin layer of slush. “Look at this!”
Roy came to her side. “What is that?” It was remarkably smooth, a sphere of translucent ice the size of a grapefruit that sparkled beneath their helmet lamps.
Traci interrupted. “We can see it from your cams. It looks like a big snow globe from here.”
“You’re not too far off,” Roy said. “Like a Christmas ornament, similar to what you found on Arkangel.”
“Coloring is variegated across the blue-green spectrum, some yellows depending on how our lights hit it.” Noelle began narrating, subtly curbing their speculation. Better to describe what you saw, not what it might be. It was a habit of self-discipline that kept her mind from racing through the likely possibilities. “Coloring appears to change markedly toward the center. Darker, similar to the soil we landed on,” she said, though that wasn’t quite correct either. It was more substantial. Elemental. He might be right about tholins. “This is consistent with Colonel Vaschenko’s description of the surface samples he took.”
Roy reached out with an open sample container. “We need to get this secured, babe. Before we melt the thing.” Meaning he was more concerned about them warming it up just enough for all that nitrogen to go poof and cover them with whatever was flash-frozen inside of it. “How does this even form?” he asked as he snapped a photograph of it, noting their location before she carefully placed it in an insulated bag.
“I’ve seen a similar phenomenon in the Arctic,” she said. “Naturally formed snowballs, churned and shaped by currents and winds.”
Roy jerked a thumb toward the icy expanse behind them. “Not much motion in that ocean. No wind either. Atmosphere’s way too thin.”
Noelle pointed toward the towering spires they’d avoided before landing here, sails seemingly carved out of the ice. “Think of it over time, love. Whatever we’ve found, ‘old’ may not be a strong enough word for it. This is primordial.”
Roy smiled behind the glass of his helmet. “I thought you discouraged speculation during field expeditions, Doctor.”
“I’m always open to suggestions,” she said, fatigue beginning to creep into her voice. “In the meantime, we need to fan out and collect more. Ensure they’re not all from one place.”
Roy nodded and began a low-gravity bunny hop along the frozen beach.
As the first video stream arrived from the surface of Pluto, Owen’s mission management team watched from a closed-off conference room in Houston. The same feed was simultaneously going out live all over the world, which only added pressure to interpret the evidence before wild speculation took over the news cycle.
“Is there anybody in the press we can trust to not screw this up?” he asked, looking at the public affairs officer. “Because it’s about to be.”
“It’s a short list,” PAO admitted. “They’ll be more disciplined, but they’re no less curious. Maybe more so, since they know of which they speak.” He pointed toward the wall screen and its four-hour-old video from Roy and Noelle’s helmet cams. “You think that’s the same stuff the Russians found?”
They watched as Noelle turned over one of the spheres in her hands. An older gentleman from the biology backroom team
reached over to pause the feed. “Possibly. I’ve been wondering if this might be some kind of preservation medium,” he said, “perhaps a type of naturally occurring vitrification.”
“Vitri-what?” PAO asked, slightly annoyed.
“Vitrification,” he repeated, loudly enough for the room. “Flash freezing. It’s an excellent way to preserve sensitive organics like germ plasmas.”
“Hold it,” Owen said. “She could be holding an extraterrestrial petri dish? What happens if it melts?”
He waved a finger at the screen. “There’s not much danger of that out there.”
“I meant aboard ship. I don’t want them thawing out alien sperm samples in a closed-loop environment.”
The biologist sighed, leaned back and steepled his fingers. “If this is the same thing Colonel Vaschenko wrote about, then it’s more fundamental. They might contain amino acids, perhaps even protein chains.”
“You know what I meant,” Owen said. Why did so many really smart people not have a sense of humor? “Either way, it’s a contamination risk.” He turned to the off-duty flight director. “Walt, I want EECOM’s confirmation that the mass spectrometer’s outflow vents are working before Noelle thaws out one of those things. And have Capcom remind them of the biohazard protocols.”
“Might be too late for that,” Flight warned, “but I’ll do it. The surface science packages were nominal in postlanding checks.”
A young woman from the Planetary Protection Office, quiet until now, leaned over the conference table. “We need to consider a good deal more than that,” she said. “It’s PPO’s position that they should immediately cease surface operations.”
If dropped jaws were audible, it would have been cacophonous. As it was, the room went silent for several beats before Owen spoke. “This was already a Category Five restricted-return mission. Has PPO come up with a new double-secret category we don’t know about?”
She looked down at the table at her notes but remained firm. “Pluto is showing evidence of being in a pre-evolutionary state and we are at significant risk of exceeding our ten-to-the-minus-three probability for contamination. It would be irresponsible to introduce uncontrolled variables into that environment.”
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