Frozen Orbit

by Patrick Chiles

“I wasn’t aware it was a demand. I thought this was a discussion.”

  Bledsoe cleared his throat to draw her attention away from Owen. “Dr. Cheever, believe it or not I do appreciate your concerns. I also believe taking this course of action would be an unconscionable overreaction. It would throw away any benefits we’ve gained and make a monumental waste of the work and expense that has gone into this mission.”

  “I suspect you’re afraid it would show human space exploration to be a monumental waste in itself.”

  A cold look from Bledsoe. “A little uncalled for, don’t you think?”

  “No, I don’t,” she finally admitted. “I have always been skeptical of the value of putting humans on unexplored worlds. We can sterilize robotic landers, we can’t do the same with human beings to any reasonable extent. No matter how hard we try, we will inevitably contaminate whatever we touch.”

  “Leave no trace?” Bledsoe asked. “This isn’t a Boy Scout camping trip.”

  “And this is about more than just cleaning up after ourselves. A human presence among unknown organics at this stage could alter their entire evolutionary path.”

  “Except it’s all in deep freeze,” Owen reminded her. “Nothing’s evolving in that environment.”

  “You can’t possibly—”

  Bledsoe held a hand up, signaling their debate was finished. “I’ll make this simple. We make operational decisions to ensure the success of the missions we’re tasked with. Again, I appreciate your concerns and we will take every precaution within our power. But what you’re asking for is a political decision that we simply cannot make.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  31

  Mission Day 319

  Pluto

  Swinging an excavation tool as carefully as he could manage, Roy chipped away at a thin layer of ice that had quickly frozen over the Surface Exploration Package bay. Of all the places for sublimating gases to settle and refreeze . . .

  “You think we’d have seen this yesterday,” he said, keying the microphone switch on his wrist. “We stirred up just enough atmo to give us icing problems.” Unlocking the SEP bay would hold the key to how long they could remain on the surface. Besides the experiment packages, it held an ingeniously folded six-wheeled rover for longer trips away from their landing site. He freed the locking handle and moved on to the rim.

  “Progress?” Noelle asked hopefully. Roy’s agitated sigh told her all she needed to know. The entire descent stage was coated with varying layers of frost and ice. She pulled a rock hammer from her own excavation kit and began chipping away at the hinges. “The rest of the stage is about the same.”

  “Yep.” His breath came hard between words. “This is gonna slow us down.”

  “The nice thing about being so far away is not having Capcom pestering you to hurry up,” Jack cut in. “On the other hand, hurry up.”

  “Not helping,” Roy said.

  “You’re going to burn into your O2 reserves soon. Any signs of ice collecting on the ascent stage?”

  They stopped, gaping at each other: How’d we miss that? Roy stepped back to inspect the upper half of the lander while Noelle went around to do the same on the opposite side. “There’s frost underneath the engine fairings, some on the undersides of the antenna blades. Basically anything facing the surface.”

  “How about the egress hatch?”

  Noelle’s eyes widened. Per NASA SOP and basic manners, she’d shut the door on her way out. Without a word, Roy bounded up the ladder in a jump that would’ve been impossible even for an NBA forward on Earth.

  “Light coating on the handle. I can brush it away with my glove, but we’re going to have to rethink our EVA plan.” They always left the ship powered up and warm, but keeping the door open even just a little bit hadn’t been part of the plan. It meant limited EVAs and a shorter stay.

  “We’ll leave the latch mechanism open, but you’ll have to keep an eye on cabin temps and let us know if they start to become a problem,” Roy said as he finally freed the locking lever. “Have Daisy search the spacecraft certification records, look for the cold-soak data and assume worst case. And let Houston know,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

  Unlocking the equipment bay had taken some muscle, but once it was freed the six-wheeled rover unfolded itself like an origami insect of aluminum and carbon fiber. As Roy activated its radioisotope generator and began checking out its related machinery, Noelle trudged around to the rover’s front end, climbing up between the open-frame seats to erect its comm antennae and recording equipment. “We’re go for surface ops,” Roy called up to Magellan.

  “Roger that,” Jack answered. “And you’ll be glad to know Houston finally got around to approving your EVA plan.” They’d meticulously crafted a survey grid using surface maps updated with LIDAR scans from orbit. Roy and Noelle would take the rover out and plant radio beacons at the outside corners of the grid to keep from getting themselves lost, take core samples at each spot, and begin spiraling their way toward the center of the grid where a forty-year-old Soviet spacecraft awaited them.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Noelle took little comfort in the fact that Sputnik Planum was more accurately described as a frozen sea, often with no clear demarcation between ice and dry land.

  As Roy drove them across the survey grid, she navigated with digital maps that were notably missing Pluto’s countless pools of frozen nitrogen or methane, hazards marked by occasional feathery geysers of sublimating gas that dotted the surface like fountains in a garden of ice.

  As she marked each new hazard, Noelle grew more dissatisfied. There was so much potential here, and so many risks to be avoided. It had started as a well-ordered survey, but as Roy had reminded her no plan survives first contact with reality. She had at least taken two more core samples and collected another half-dozen of those odd snowballs. And in the end, she knew they weren’t here only to explore an alien landscape.

  She updated their digital map as they set the last corner, automatically synching it with Magellan and noting terrain features the old-fashioned way: with a grease pencil on a laminated chart. It was clumsy, but it would make a nice supplement to the handwritten survey notes she planned to make at the end of the day. It was important to her that neither could disappear if the power went out. She placed another core sample in its container in back of the rover and turned to Roy. “Ready?”

  He held up one finger, gesturing for her to wait. “Almost. Just recording this ice cliff for posterity.”

  “It’s called a penitente, love,” she chuckled. “More like a spire.” Easily a hundred meters high, it resembled a sail gracefully carved out of the ice. Dozens more dotted the landscape beyond, seeming to grow despite their distance. Their first appearance in the old New Horizons images had estimated them to be well over five hundred meters tall, almost a quarter mile high.

  “Penna-what?”

  “Don’t roll your eyes at me. I’m striving for scientific accuracy.”

  “You could see my eyes?”

  “You forget we don’t need our sun visors out here.” Noelle shook her head—fully visible behind the glass—and climbed back into her seat. “If you’re striving for accuracy, then can you be in charge of the maps so I can drive for a bit?”

  Roy hopped over beside her and studied the rest of their route. “Sure.” They expected to find LK over the next rise. While Noelle was here for the science, Roy was more interested in the comparatively pedestrian task of locating missing cosmonauts.

  The next rise turned out to be larger, steeper, and even sharper than could be imaged from orbit or seen from their vantage point aboard the lander. The same forces—even here on the ground it felt wrong to think of it as somehow atmospheric—that carved those giant ice spires in the distance had also done its work on this frozen mound. It was capped with an elongated dome of more nitrogen and methane ice, ending with a sharp overhang that would have been crazy for them to drive under.

  As No
elle steered clear, the rover bounced along a debris field strewn across the lee side of the ridge. The smaller rocks were easily crushed beneath their aluminum mesh wheels while the larger ones sent them heaving up, down and sideways. “I’m going to have to say something to the roads department about this.” Her voice shook with the vehicle.

  “We’re definitely not in France anymore,” Roy said as they rounded the hill. The terrain smoothed out ahead into a stark field of white that presumably was supported by solid ground and was not just another lake of frozen nitrogen. “Better stop here. And break out the snowshoes.”

  Noelle’s eyes grew wide. “Roy, it’s . . . ”

  “I know,” he said, and switched over his radio to Magellan’s frequency. “Jack, we are at grid square AA13 and have the LK in sight.”

  Lunniy Korabl’s ungainly landing platform stood at the center of the plain, its barrel-shaped form sprouting two antenna masts that were almost as long as the four spindly legs which supported it. Its design cues were unmistakably Russian, spare and utilitarian, down to the faded olive paint just barely discernible under layers of ice.

  A few meters away, one feature left no mistake of its provenance and stood as a grotesque reminder of who’d been here first: a faded red banner with the yellow hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union. Roy muttered a curse at the sight.

  “What was that?” Jack asked over the radio.

  “I said . . . oh, never mind.” Roy swallowed his editorial comments and stuck with the clinical description as he began recording with the long-focus camera on his chest pack. “The LK’s descent stage is about a hundred meters from our position. Exposed surfaces have what appears to be a uniform coating of frost, about what you’d expect from sitting out here forty years.”

  “Can you get to it from there?”

  “If he managed to land it here without the ground blowing up under him, that tells me this snow is just superficial. Probably no thicker than the stuff covering the lander. We’re going to park the rover here and walk in as soon as we get our snowshoes on.”

  “Copy. You be careful out there.”

  The insulated snowshoes may have kept them safe atop the ice, but it had made walking that much harder. As they approached, Roy clumsily traced a wide circle around the abandoned lander. His helmet camera recorded everything he saw and beamed it up to Magellan for posterity.

  Having had every gram of excess mass stripped away, the old Russian craft looked even more frail for the cold. It was as if every joule of energy had been sapped just to keep from being consumed by the environment; its brittle frame spent on the sacrificial altar of entropy.

  Roy poked at a nearby panel with his sampling tool, not daring to touch it directly lest the temperature differential between his suit and the deep-frozen lander left him permanently affixed, like a kid sticking his tongue on a flagpole. And that reminded him of something he’d decided should be tended to.

  The thin aluminum cracked beneath the pressure, startling him. He’d seen car windows shatter while training in subzero Arctic environments, but had never experienced it to this extreme. He stepped back warily. How fragile had this contraption become over its years in deep freeze? Would the whole thing fall apart on top of them?

  He turned back to the now open equipment bay. It was mostly empty: a few undeployed surface experiments and other odds and ends. Some spare suit batteries—not a bad idea, especially given their state of technology—plus a few tools and spare parts in case something important had broken. He dug out all of the loose items he could and stuffed them into a separate collection bag on his hip.

  An alarm startled him: his suit, reminding him that its own batteries were succumbing to the cold. He looked for Noelle, who was already heading back to their safe haven. “Time to go, love,” she called.

  Roy answered her with a silent thumbs-up and followed her. Noelle was reaching out with a charging cable before he could even make it into his seat. “I’ve still got ten minutes,” he said.

  She plugged him into the rover’s power supply. “I’m not taking any chances. If your heater goes, you won’t last two minutes out here. It’s taking every amp from the RI generator just to keep the rover powered. If we sit for too long, I’m afraid the flywheels will freeze up.”

  Roy didn’t argue. If the rover’s electric motors failed, they’d be forced to hike the kilometer back to their lander, which would leave them entirely dependent on suit batteries that were already draining at twice the normal rate. In an environment featuring random geysers of ice, on top of frozen volatiles that could explosively sublimate if enough heat were applied. He took one final, long look around. “I’ve got one more thing to do.”

  The same frost that had covered the LK coated the old Soviet flag that was hung nearby. They’d used a telescoping pole and support frame similar to what the Apollo astronauts had used to plant the American flag on the Moon. Given the amount of snow and ice coating everything, the scientists had been right about the thin air freezing and falling to the surface. Roy wondered how surprised those cosmonauts had been to find this place had an actual atmosphere, even if it wasn’t nearly enough to fly their flag in a breeze.

  It was all just history, he told himself. Get over yourself. Vaschenko served his country, just as we did. You come all this way, you plant your flag. Even if in Roy’s mind it was hardly better than a swastika.

  He took a long-handled cutting tool and set it around the flag’s horizontal support. With one quick movement, it snapped in two and the red banner fell into his free hand in a cloud of ice crystals. He shook it clean, folded it with care, and placed it into an empty cargo pocket on his hip.

  All just history.

  32

  Mission Day 325

  Col. V. Vaschenko — Personal Log

  Out here I’ve had nothing but time to ponder our fate and write down my thoughts, such as they are. And these writings will not disappear. No matter what, I will never fly again and they dare not spirit me away. Or so I hope.

  The chaos enveloping our country, it pains me to say, is long overdue. Men cannot live long with chained minds. That we endured it for so many generations is testimony to the control this perverse philosophy held over the people it pretended to serve.

  It promised freedom and delivered slavery. Of this, I admit to being vaguely aware during my relatively protected life as an Air Force officer. I once thought being in Earth orbit was a measure of freedom. It is only now, being so far removed from our world that a question posed at breakfast isn’t answered until supper, that I understand. The degree of autonomy we’ve enjoyed has been most unexpected and extraordinary. Yet while this is the ultimate test of our spacecraft, I wonder if our putative masters foresaw what else it might test.

  They can’t see it, only because we have diligently kept our thoughts to ourselves. This is an inherent advantage to the low bandwidth of encrypted frequencies over such distances: We have no time for “small talk.”

  I wonder if they will ever see.

  The commanding strains of the Russian Federation’s national anthem echoed through Magellan’s control deck while Colonel Vladimir Vaschenko was put to rest. He remained encased in the same EVA suit they’d found him in, now with the Soviet flag Roy brought back from the surface wrapped around his torso.

  Jack maneuvered the body into Arkangel’s open airlock with their remote as the music built to its closing crescendo. He released the bot’s mechanical grip and gently nudged Vaschenko back into his spacecraft one final time.

  Roy pulled out a note card he’d clearly marked up several times over. “This was your ship, your greatest adventure,” he recited. “You took it farther and faster than most people could have imagined, and your sacrifice protected the world from it being used in a way far too easy to imagine. You have the thanks of your nation, of the United States, and of Earth. May your eternal resting place be here among the new frontiers which you opened. Godspeed, Colonel.”

  Jack pushed Arkangel’s
outer door shut with the manipulator, sealing Vaschenko in his orbiting tomb. He waited to see if any of his crewmates moved to leave; fortunately none did. He locked down the arm and left his station to float behind them, near the big forward windows.

  “One more thing,” he said, more awkwardly than he’d hoped. “I’ve gotten to know Vaschenko as much as anyone can just from reading a man’s diaries. You know he was dedicated to his country and to space exploration, but he wasn’t just a drone.”

  Jack reached into a waist pocket. “The man appreciated good literature. He was as much of a thinker as someone could be in that kind of system. Most of the mass he was allotted for personal effects went to books, and most weren’t exactly party-approved material.” He lifted a worn, clothbound volume from his flight suit. “This is an anthology of Russian poetry. One page in particular was so dog-eared, he would have come back to it often.”

  Jack let the book fall open and read:

  “. . . Before the morning star I went;

  From hand immaculate and chastened

  Into the grooves of prisonment

  Flinging the vital seed I wandered—

  But it was time and toiling squandered,

  Benevolent designs misspent . . . ”

  “Is that Pushkin?” Roy asked.

  “It is,” Jack said, unable to mask his surprise. “You read it?”

  “I flipped through a few pages,” he said. “Good choice.”

  “I thought it was a fitting eulogy,” Jack said, slightly embarrassed. “He deserved more than official boilerplate from their ambassador.”

  “He left a wife and kids behind,” Traci said, staring out at the old vessel. “Do you think they accepted the official story?”

  “I suppose it’s easy enough to let life get away from you. Especially in this business.” He watched Roy and Noelle share a knowing look. Would either one of them had married outside of the space agency? Could they even conceive of it?