Launch Pad (3 page)

Lee stared out across it, marveling. It showed no signs of age, but certainly it must be ancient. Who had made it, and when? Sedna was one of the more eccentric objects in the solar system’s Kuiper belt, a dwarf world in a long slow orbit that took it to a farthest point nearly a thousand astronomical units from the sun, barely bound to the sun at all. Probably it had once been an interstellar wanderer, captured by the sun millions or even billions of years ago from the cold darkness between the stars. Where had it come from? What unknown race had built such a gargantuan telescope mirror, and for what purpose?

He leaned over to put his faceplate right against the mirror surface, steadying himself with one hand carefully wrapped around the taut safety line. The surface was perfectly smooth, perfectly reflective.

And suddenly the line was slack.

He stood up, and saw the snowcat looming towards him in the darkness. He had anchored the cat against a hummock of ice, but waste heat from the reactor had melted it free, and it lurched downhill now, staggering drunkenly toward him. Without thinking, he took a step back away from it.

He realized his error instantly. His cleated boots found no purchase, the surface of the mirror slicker than ice, and his feet shot out from under him. He reached out wildly as he fell. In the low gravity, everything happened in slow motion. With one hand, he grabbed onto the tool pack he had set down on the edge. For a moment he hovered there, on his belly, his feet dangling down the slope of the enormous mirror, hanging on with his left hand clutching the tool pack on the edge of the slope, the right still clenched tightly on the now-slack safety line.

The snowcat slid forward, bounced against a ripple in the ice, toppled over onto its side, and ground its way to a halt with a silent spray of crimson snow.

It rocked a little, and then settled into place.

It seemed stable. Very slowly, trying not to move, he gathered up the slack in the safety cable and gave it a very careful tug. The snowcat stayed firmly in place. Working one-handed, he fixed the cable onto his belt clip.

Gravity on Sedna was miniscule, less than a twentieth of a standard Earth gee, and it would be easy enough for him to pull himself out of the pit, even one-handed. He relaxed for a moment, the danger temporarily at bay. His left arm was getting stiff from the awkward position holding onto the tool pack on the rim, and he shifted it minutely.

The pack that anchored him broke loose from the snow.

In gloriously slow motion, the toolpack, and Lee, slid down onto the mirror. He flailed for the lip of the pit, seeking anything he could grab onto, but ended up with only a handful of snow. In the process he released the tool pack, and it slid away down the slope, spinning slightly and gathering speed as it slid.

The safety line was still clipped to his belt, the other end attached to the snowcat. He slid down into the mirror, and when the slack in the safety-line had played out, it caught with a jerk, stretching slightly, but held. Above him, at the other end of the rope, the snowcat shuddered slightly, but didn’t move, stuck in the ice. He was swinging at the end of the line. He stretched out his arm, but the rim was just out of the reach of his outstretched fingertips. With one hand, he reached out and grabbed the rope to pull himself up.

And the clip broke.

The line whipped away from him, sliding through his fingers as if it had been greased, and with a slow, easy grace, Lee Rockross slid down the frictionless surface of the mirror.

As he slid, he tried to scramble up the side of the slope. The rim of the dish was only inches away, but despite his frantic flailing he could get no purchase at all, and he coasted smoothly down, gathering speed at a slow but inexorable pace. It was maddeningly frustrating.

I screwed up, he thought.

Sliding down the mirror, he had time to contemplate his life, and the ports he had visited, and his sins, both the ones he had accomplished, and the ones he hadn’t gotten around to yet. All of them seemed petty and meaningless.

All that took him about twenty seconds, as he slid, face down, still scrambling against the surface with a futile, reflexive motion.

After a while he gave up. He twisted around and with some amount of effort managed to sit up. Moving on the frictionless surface was like moving in free-fall, and he’d had plenty of experience with that. By working on it for a while he managed to get the hang of it. He windmilled around until he was facing almost in his direction of motion, took stock of his situation, and tried his best to calm himself down. The emergency protocols had been drilled into him, and he chanted them silently like a mantra.

Protocol for an emergency: first, take whatever immediate actions are needed to prevent the situation from deteriorating, and compartmentalize the damage.

Well, that was simple. He was sliding down toward the bottom of a mirrored pit, and there was nothing for him to grab onto. There wasn’t any way the situation could get much worse.

Second, activate dual-band emergency locator beacon on broadcast channels 121.5 MHz and 406 MHz.

The snowcat, already out of sight above him, had his emergency beacon, along with the rest of the long-range com gear. The spare emergency beacon was in his tool pack, sliding along the mirror somewhere ahead of him in the dark

His suit had a low-power ultrawideband link for voice. It was meant for miner-to-miner conversations, but it had been deliberately designed for near-field transmission only; a hundred miners would pollute the radio spectrum otherwise. He recorded a brief call for help, and set the suit-to-suit link to squawk it out in five-second bursts twice a minute. That was a useless task, but at least something he could do to calm himself down. There was no chance it would be heard. Ramblin’ Wreck was over the horizon, way out of radio range. Since nobody was supposed to be out on the surface, there was no com relay in orbit.

Emergency protocol, item three: survey your situation; ascertain your location and velocity relative to possible sources of assistance.

There were no possible sources of assistance. Still, his suit did have an inertial navigation unit; he could check his location and velocity. He verified that it was on, and brought up his position and velocity in the heads-up display. The dim red figures glowed in his faceplate, floating above the darkness. He was sliding down a slope at an angle just under twenty degrees, currently moving at eighteen meters per second relative to the ground. As he watched, the inertial guidance unit updated his speed. Eighteen point three meters per second. Eighteen point six meters per second.

He had no sense of his speed. Except for the slowly incrementing number in his display, it felt like he was motionless.

That wasn’t doing him any good. He had the computer display a plot of his position as a function of time. His path across the surface of mirror was in the form of a perfect parabola. That made sense. Of course the mirror would be a paraboloid; it must be the reflector of an enormous telescope. He extrapolated the parabola forward, and plotting his motion as a tiny moving dot. He was moving faster and faster every minute, but his acceleration was slowing down as he headed toward the bottom. Extrapolating from the shape of the curve, he would reach bottom in about four minutes, or just a little over six minutes from when he had slipped off the edge. And then his momentum would carry him up the other side of the slope.

Emergency protocol, item four: check consumables. Take action to minimize use of critical supplies until help is effected.

Lee checked the status of his suit. He didn’t have consumables in any real sense of the word. His oxygen supply was a zero-buffer in-line rebreather; every breath he exhaled was stripped of carbon dioxide, which went through an electrolysis cycle that broke it down and immediately recycled it to his next breath. The whole thing was run from a solid-state battery, the same battery that also powered his suit heaters. So it was the batteries that were his ultimate consumable. He checked his battery status: green, at 76% full charge. The batteries were sized to run for two full mining shifts plus a little margin, so that gave him a bit over twelve hours of remaining power for life support. Was there any chance somebody would deduce where he was, and assemble a rescue before he ran out of power? Unlikely. Nobody would even notice that he was missing until the start of his next shift, which was—he checked the time—another thirteen hours. And even then, it would wait until the end of the shift before somebody would check his quarters to find out why he’d missed work.

Item five: appraise resources. Apply the resources available in the most efficient way to effect rescue.

Fine. His resources was his suit, and—and nothing else, really. Everything else he carried had been in the tool pack he’d lost, or was left with the snowcat. If he’d been wearing a suit for free-space operation, he would have no problem; the maneuvering thrusters would be enough to push him across the slope in any direction he wanted. But the surface suit he wore had no thrusters.

Item six: when the emergency is over, contact Spacewatch to cancel emergency call for assistance.

He figured he could ignore that part of the emergency protocol.

Running through the emergency protocols hadn’t shown him any way out of this problem, but it had at least damped down his panic. He was now a minute away from the bottom, moving at a hundred and sixty meters a second. He converted that in his head. Vesta, where he had been raised, had been originally settled by Americans, and had stubbornly refused to switch to metric, even after America itself had joined the European Union. He was sliding along at just over three hundred fifty miles an hour. He checked his display again, and noticed that his path wasn’t actually taking him quite to the bottom. He would miss it slightly to the left. Right, he thought. He’d been swinging when the clip holding the tether had snapped, and the lateral velocity meant that his actual path was an ellipse—in fact, a Lissajous figure—that wouldn’t quite pass through the center. The actual bottom of the mirror would be passing slightly to his right. He inched himself around to look, knowing that it was a pointless move, since there would be nothing to see.

But there was something to see, something gliding silently past. He couldn’t quite make it out, until he realized his image intensifier was off, and turned it on.

He was racing past a landscape of dark sand and rocks and a few enormous boulders. It seemed to be just meters away from him, but a glance at his rangefinder told him that this was an illusion, and the rubble field was nearly fifty meters off. The bottom of the mirror was not empty, but was filled with a million years of debris that had fallen into the crater and slid to the bottom.

The suit thermostat was working fine, but he felt suddenly cold. Hitting that debris field at three hundred miles an hour would have been an abrupt end to all his problems.

The rubble slid past him—or rather, he slid past it—and dwindled behind him. He had reached the lowest point on his trajectory and was rising now, sliding up the slope toward the opposite rim.

He turned the image intensifier off again, to conserve the tiny amount of power it drew. He was now sliding feet first up the slope. He checked his data. At the lowest point of his slide, his maximum speed had not quite hit a hundred and seventy meters a second, and now he was decelerating as the slope steepened and he slid up toward the opposite rim. He leaned back to think, and caught a glimpse of the sky.

Even with no enhancement, the sky was spectacular. There were stars below him, and stars above him, and it seemed as if he were gliding on a perfectly transparent sheet of ice through endless space. The sun was a speck of fire, so bright that it almost hurt his dark-adapted eyes, and yet so small it shed nearly no light. When he averted his vision, he could see that it was surrounded by a ghostly disk, so faint as to be little more the memory of a glow, the zodiacal light. And surrounding that were stars in their millions, fragments of diamond scattered across the velvet of night, glinting in colors from electric blue to a deep brick red.

Lee stared at the stars, running through the emergency procedure list again in his mind. Stop ongoing damage, squawk for help, check location, conserve consumables, survey resources and solve problem, call home.

Step five, that was the hard one: survey available resources and solve the problem. But he still had no resources to survey. His surface suit had no attachments, not even a spare tank of oxygen he might have been able to use as a cold-gas thruster. It protected him from the cold and vacuum, gave him something to breathe, and that was it. Life support and batteries were integral to the suit; he couldn’t take them out even if he wanted to. And everything else was in the miner’s toolkit.

Stop, squawk, site, safeguard, survey & solve, and finally call your mother to tell her you’re safe.

Survey resources. What about the toolkit? It was sliding across the same surface that he was, with a head start of only a few seconds. It had the tools that might solve his problem—a radio beacon, for one. And, if nothing else, he could use it for reaction mass. If he could hurl it away from him fast enough, he would gain a little bit of momentum to get him to coast over the rim. It was on the mirror with him, maybe only a few meters away.

Lee twisted himself around until he was sitting upright, and snapped his image intensifier on to full. Toolpacks were distinctly colored, to make sure one miner didn’t accidentally grab the wrong one, and his was a bright lime green. It took him only a few seconds to spot it. There it was, no more than twenty meters ahead of him, spinning slightly as it slid.

In fact, since it was ahead of him, it would reach the far lip of the bowl before he did, turn around, and come right back to him.

According to the graph he had made in his display, the rim was about a minute away. He fixed his gaze on the toolpack sliding ahead of him, ready to grab it as it slid back toward him. Yes. There it was, right up at the edge—was it actually going to fly up over the edge and out of the bowl? It just kissed the edge, slid toward the left, and then started gliding back down toward him.