The Sunborn (20 page)

Into the silence Jordin said casually, “Y’know, we could use a systems modification. For…defense.”

Shanna said, “What?”

“If the Darksiders are bent on taking down the zand, maybe they’ll come after us, too.”

The crew rustled uneasily. Shanna hadn’t thought of this possibility, and she could tell they hadn’t, either. “So how do we…?”

“I’ll modify the chem launch sequence. Cook up a little surprise just in case.”

Chow-Lin said, “That’s entirely uncalled-for. Not only do we interfere with a sentient alien form, we plan an action against it!”

“Technically,” Jordin said, “the Darksiders are probably the second sentient form here.”

This gave Shanna an opening to help firmly defuse the confrontation. “We just don’t know—and that’s why we’re going.”

She ended the meeting, setting another for the next day.

That gave time for the rest of the crew to argue among themselves, of course. Over the next few hours she spoke privately to several of them and massaged the social angles.

The Kares, Jordin and Mary Kay, were resolutely reasonable. They took it upon themselves to make the diplomatic arguments that Shanna could not, without appearing weak. They had discovered so much already, yes. The surface was treacherous, yes. The Darkside even more so. Yes. So why go? Because it was their job, and anyway, the captain said so.

It took two days of talk and one more of fending off Earthside’s alarm. But she went—with Jordin, again. Earthside wanted to use their experience.

Shanna knew very little out here, but one thing she knew for sure: the zand were worth protecting. What was that saying?
The fox knows many things, the hedgehog one big thing.
Okay, she was a hedgehog.

Darkside beckoned. She was going to become a meteor miner. Crescendo.

ISA PLUTO DAILY SUMMARY

GMT 0940, Thursday, 12 May 2044

All hands on station:

Descent to Pluto Surface

Descent Crew: Axelrod, Kare, J.

State of Ship

• Data systems recycle and purge complete
  

• Thermography and ultrasound integrity check completed 0630 on lander by J. Kare; ready to deploy
  

• Consumables 38 percent above nominal usage rate
  

• Power generation rate 99.67 BOL
  

• Uplink rate maximum of IRSC
  

• Orbital parameters within profile
  

Five-Day Outlook Summary

Tuesday, GMT 0900: Lander profiling and resupply

Wednesday, GMT 1230: Reactor reshipping by robot teams commences—three-day lining tests and monitoring SUBT

Thursday, GMT 10.30: Systems test of optical and infrared sensing

Friday, GMT 1100: Wiseguy update and Earthside UBK

Saturday, GMT 0300: Mechanicals review and monitor reboot

Crew Q&A:

Where to begin, guys?

Quote for the Day: “Details Are Our Business”

The big lander roared as it descended on its steam plume toward Pluto’s nighted surface. They took it cautiously, through step-down orbits, pausing at each one to assess the surface and let the detectors have their feeding time.

Shanna watched somberly, her chair warming her against the seeping cold here in the planet’s shadow. She loved the view this low, skimming. Astronomy’s geometries were the essence of smooth beauties—arcs and ellipses, crescents and circles, orbs round and fat in their perpetual, serene dance. This deep range of pockmarked worlds held steep, chiseled mountains that had endured longer than whole continents on Earth. She was gaining now a sense of the deep reservoir of time sleeping out here.

But perhaps that sleep was over. The astronomers were used to seeing this deep freeze as a tabula rasa, unwritten upon since the solar system’s creation, not as a dynamic realm. But now they knew otherwise.

Their nominal mission was a second sampling of the surface, this time on the nightside. Mission goal: to measure atmospheric changes as night came on, and to search for debris from the mysterious incoming orange packages—the Darksiders, presumably. Or so she had argued to ISA; but, in fact, she was seeking the meaning of this place—how it really worked. Too many things didn’t add up.

“Getting something visible ahead,” Jordin sent on comm.

“I see it—down below the crescent,” she answered.

“Not a reflection of a star, either. Too bright.”

Lights. Brimming yellow dots on the upcoming horizon. Not in the sky; on the ice. A prickly coldness ran through her. In the intense cold below they would have much less time on the surface. ISA didn’t want them to do any EVA unless absolutely necessary.

Shanna wished she had questioned Old One more fully before charging off this way.
The fox knows many things…
Could the zand tribal epic, of the great raid from Darkside in the distant past, be true?

But there couldn’t, strictly speaking, be any Darksiders. All the planet was exposed to the sun in due course as it rotated. Surely “Darksiders” could come out in the zand’s own territory after nightfall, right? And day-living borers and flappers and the zand could flourish on “Darkside” when it faced the sun.

Confusing. Maybe a huge mistake in Wiseguy’s interpretation. She fretted. Then something like an answer came. As they drove down farther into the night, the reactor in their belly humming and thrusting, a great, sickly greenish yellow arc rose up before her, blotting out stars.

“Wow!” And just maybe she had part of her puzzle.

Ah. Charon was synchronous in its orbit—the fat gray moon hung perpetually above this area. When the twin worlds swung around into sunlight, Charon—so aptly named after the ferryman of Hades—cast a large shadow, eclipsing the tiny sun. Lightgiver would give even less warmth here than on the opposite hemisphere. This side of Pluto was forever unfavored. It would be far chillier. Even at high noon here methane snow would come drifting down. There was a Darkside, after all.

The sun was still four hundred times brighter than moonlight on Earth, she remembered from one of the briefings. Enough to read a newspaper by, but without much atmosphere, all shadows were sharp, hard.

Okay,
she thought, listening to Jordin bring them down to the preselected landing zone—not far from the odd lights, she noted. The
Darksiders prefer to come in out of the night and land in the coldest portion of the planet. Now think like a biologist.

Life filled its appropriate ecological niches, as Darwin had seen in the Galapagos long ago. One-half of Pluto was home for the zand; the other was the domain of the “Darksiders.”

No, damn it!
That wouldn’t work. She did remember some of the astro briefings she’d had, after all. Viewed from Pluto, Charon had only started regularly eclipsing the sun within the past half century. The astro boys had nailed it finally in 2029, when both the satellite’s orbit and the planet’s axis had begun to drift. Big surprise. The orbital mechanics had changed.

And the waltzing worlds had swung in their crazy, new looping orbits, not giving a damn that the astronomers couldn’t figure out why. By 2042, when their mission launched, Charon was eclipsing the sun regularly each Plutonian day.

Come, now!
Evolution is not that swift, no way.

Unless…

Unless the strange orbital shift was what had brought the Darksiders out of wherever they hid—hibernated?—for most of Pluto’s long orbital year.

Shanna shook her head in disbelief. Centuries ago, had Charon’s orbit similarly moved to screen out the sun?
Are you getting enough oxygen!
her nagging inner voice asked.
This is strange, even for you…

She brushed aside her doubts.
Follow your nose, girl. Damn the inner critics.

Okay.
Did that have anything to do with the odd—but apparently natural—radio emissions that the Space Array had discovered? The whole alarm about the big plasma storms that might be washing into the solar system, if the Voyager data were right?

Put that by for now also. Then… And then Darkside had raided Rendezvous? Old One had said lots about that, clothed in mythic jargon even Wiseguy couldn’t follow. The zand, their battle story told them, had barely survived that legendary Götterd
ämmerung.
Or is my liking for
Wagner
leading me astray here? Twilight of the gods beside a methane sea? Ooooggg…

And this time, Shanna suddenly realized, if the Darksiders moved to the lightside within the next few Earth hours, they would catch the greater part of the zand helpless, immobilized in the rosy afterglow of Self-merge.

Had that happened before? Probably. Something had built those epic poems Old One recited at blinding, Wiseguy-level speed. The zand feared the Darksiders for good reason. They were both predators, but somehow the Darksiders were even better at it.

Jordin was on the comm, passing numbers and “okays” back and forth with Mary Kay on
Proserpina.
When he had a free moment, she asked, “You’re sure the little surprise is ready?”

He grinned. “It’s too simple to go wrong. Just oxy and hydrogen feeds from our reserves. I fitted two small nozzles and tucked them into a spare cylinder I had, to make a reaction chamber. Just a li’l trick.”

“Um. Li’l trick.” Jordin could rig up anything on short notice, it seemed. “Hope we don’t need to use it.”

“Hey—look there, near our LZ.” Jordin pointed. When she looked puzzled, he added, “Landing zone.” And she recalled that he had started out as a Marine flyer.

“This thermal armor is pretty confining.” She felt it pinch at knees and elbows. “I know you think we need it—”

“You may be the cap’n, but I’m the safety officer.” A nod of the head. “Ma’am.”

Small lights moved below. Scurrying patterns. “Those look…alive,” Shanna said.

“Maybe that’s the Darksiders.”

On the attack?
she wondered.
Hey, don’t get ahead of yourself.

She repeated her thoughts to Jordin as they descended gingerly, pausing at each orbital level to assess the landing zone. He said, “You got this place figured out already?”

“Not really. But something tells me we don’t have time to hold seminars on the local biology.”

He grinned. “Not that I’d attend, y’know.”

“I know.”

Shanna’s grandmother had dinned into her “reverence for life”—all life. Suppose the incessant motion below was a battle of some strange kind. Could she make a terrible choice, to save the zand? She gritted her teeth.

A circle of greater darkness yawned below, breaking the thinly moonlit landscape. It moved; she came fully alert. Quickly she called on
Proserpina’s
computer for data. The temperature differentials DIS could measure in the lower infrared and group into a map.

Presto! Inside a minute they had a sketch showing the walls and floor of a deep pit.

“Quite patently artificial,” she said.

“Looks like it to me, and I’m just a physicist.”

“I thought you were an engineer-pilot.”

“Hey, physicists can do anything.”

“Um. So they think. But not biology…” She told DIS to amp the center of the circle, use every pixel. In seconds it did. The screen before her and Jordin zoomed in.

Down at the bottom moved blocky somethings, jointed at odd angles, limbs stubby, each outlined in a blue glow. They moved, slow and deliberate.

“What’s that blue from?” she asked.

“Spectral lines say—let’s ee—argon.”

More movement. Ghostly forms, sluggish, as though underwater. Patterns. The jerky, angular shapes were forming into neatly aligned ranks and files, like an army on parade—or a war fleet.

“Are those organisms or machines?” she asked.

“OP DIS can’t tell us without a whole further set of assumptions, I’d say.”

“I hate to go down there, not knowing.”

He waved a hand at the starlit wastes below. “Out here do such distinctions even matter?”

“Good point. This pushes the boundaries.” She frowned. In cold so deep as to be beyond all human reckoning, maybe there were no boundaries.

The dim forms were moving into an intricate, ordered array. “Looks like a search pattern,” she said.

Jordin was busy with their hovering pattern, but in 5 percent of a g there was time to maneuver. The nuke thrummed at their backs, and its plume caught starlight in a filmy gauze. “Maybe they’re getting ready for dawn,” he whispered.

Too
many possibilities,
Shanna thought. “What
are
they?”

On an inspired hunch Jordin asked DIS to search under “Superconductors.” He added, “And match to the spectral lines below.”

It took only seconds. Good ol’ DIS reported. Yes—there were plenty of compounds down there rich in copper and oxygen, and alloys galore. He grinned and said, “Could be that makes them superconductors, at these temperatures.”

She frowned. “So?”

“So—remember those sparks that zapped us when we were walking, last time? There’s a big potential difference between the top of the atmosphere and the ground.”

“Is that usual? I mean, this place is plenty odd already…” She had never had a really intuitive feel for physics, and it was showing.

“Not so unusual. Earth’s like that, too. When you’re standing on the ground, there’s a couple hundred volts between your feet and your head. When you walk across a carpet and touch a doorknob, you’re just letting electrons from the carpet fibers make their way to the higher elevation. Zap!” He shrugged as though this was obvious.

“So knowing that, you never jump when it happens?”

To his credit he laughed. “Touché! My point here—this is a guess, okay?—is that energy is available to drive anything that can harvest the potential difference—voltage, I mean. We haven’t measured it—I didn’t think to—but from those sparks I’ll bet it’s considerable.”

“But why is it here at all?”

“Umm, good point to you! Pluto turns pretty slow, and that’s the ultimate source of the volts—spinning planets with magnetic fields are like generators whirring away in space. Pluto’s should be weaker than Earth’s…” His voice trailed away in puzzlement.