Mission: Tomorrow - eARC

Our journey begins at the far end of our solar system on Pluto the past and future planet, you might say, where astronauts start dying and their colleagues investigate the incidents around . . .

TOMBAUGH STATION

by Robin Wayne Bailey

The smooth, nitrogen/methane surface of Kenyata Plain glittered under the headlights of James Dayton’s ice sled as he raced alone across the solemn, frozen expanse with Tombaugh Station at his back. His thoughts weren’t on the station, though. He fixed his gaze ahead. In the distance, the Burney Mountains loomed sharp as razors against a star-flecked sky, and at his nine o’clock, half of Charon arced above the horizon, perpetually unmoving, never climbing, tidally locked in its orbit with Pluto.

He tried not to look at those sights for too long. It was easy for a man to lose his mind out here. More than one had done so, and James Dayton did not want to flirt with madness. He jerked his attention back to the green and gold indicators on his console, checked his GPS coordinates, noted the temperature readouts of his environmental suit—all that kept him warm and alive. Yet, after a moment, he looked outward again.

Like flying an aircraft back on Earth
, he thought.
Look at the horizon; look at the gauges; back and forth, always watchful, but never look too long at either.
He missed flying. It was the only thing about Earth he missed.

He seldom thought of Earth anymore. His home, such as it was, was here at Tombaugh Station. Nobody came to Pluto on a round-trip ticket. It was still strictly one-way. No matter—James Dayton had been the first to sign up.

The GPS indicator on his console chimed and flashed. He cursed himself for letting his thoughts wander and for sliding a half-kilometer off course. Even as he corrected, a voice spoke through his com-set. “Are you napping out there, James? I just got tracking back online here, and you’re off your mark.”

“You sound like air traffic control,” Dayton shot back, recognizing Kate Beck, on the other end of the com at Work Unit Three. “Always blame the pilot. It took you six seconds to notice the deviation
after
I corrected course. Pretty shitty ATC, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t,” she responded. “I asked you to marry me once, but you declined. Since then, you’re lucky I haven’t run you over a crater, and don’t think I haven’t considered it.” She paused. In a quieter, more serious voice, she asked, “Are you all right out there?”

He hesitated, unsure of how to answer. He
had
been off his game lately, distracted and unfocused. This wasn’t a place that forgave you for losing your focus. “Are you all right in there?” he said, answering her question with a question.

“Sure, I’m just fine here alone in the dark.” She poured on the sarcasm. Kate Beck always had a smart mouth. “Well, not really alone, I guess, but Doctor Atsuka doesn’t look so good. He’s kind of pale and not too conversational.” She paused again, and then came back, serious once more. ”I’m getting some of the other systems back online.”

Back on course, Dayton twisted the throttle to increase his speed. “Are you showing any other sleds are in the area?”

“Negative,” she answered. “All the traffic is out at the Burney where it should be. Everybody’s working.”

Dayton thought to himself as he gazed toward the horizon again. Tadeo Atsuka, head of Data Analytics and Imaging, had been on duty at Work Unit Three. Now, he was dead, the third death in three months. Death was an occupational hazard on Pluto, but usually among the newcomers. Among the Old-timers, the ones who had come down with
Tombaugh One
, accidents didn’t happen.

The work unit looked like a metal shed—plain and windowless. In the field beyond it, a trio of ice movers stood, giant spidery machines that cut and sliced immense blocks of nitrogen/methane from the surface and transported them to the Burney site. They were powered down, and Dayton wondered why they were not in operation.

As he parked close to Kate Beck’s sled, he unplugged his heating unit from his vehicle’s battery pack and retracted the power umbilical. A lighted readout appeared briefly on the inside of his faceplate to inform him of the power shift. His environmental suit’s internal batteries contained enough juice to keep him alive for two hours in minus three hundred eighty degrees, but he never relied just on his internal power longer than necessary. He was too careful for that.

His cleated boots bit into the crisp surface as he stepped down from the sled and crossed the short distance to the work unit’s airlock. Stopping at a red panel mounted on the wall, he pressed it. After a moment, the outer door unsealed and opened, and he stepped inside a tubular chamber. When the outer door resealed, an inner door opened.

Kate Beck, enclosed in her own environmental suit, tablet computer in hand, looked around to greet him. The lighting was still very dim. “Keep your helmet on,” she warned over the com-set. “I’ve repaired the heating systems and air generators, but they haven’t been online long enough to reach optimum levels.” She went back to work on her tablet. The way her fingers moved over it, she might have been stroking a pet.

The inside of Work Unit Three was a maze of quantum computers, communications and tracking equipment, 3-D printers, satellite monitors and imaging stations. Tadeo Atsuka still stood over one of the consoles, his hand on the back of a chair, his face turned toward the airlock as if to greet Dayton. Unfortunately, his suit was unzipped and he wore no helmet. He was frozen solid.

“It looks like a catastrophic power failure,” Kate Beck reported. “All the power was down and the airlock wide open when I came to pick him up.”

“That’s not supposed to happen,” Dayton answered, fighting a tide of emotion. Tadeo was an old friend from back in the Corporate shipyards on Deimos when
Tombaugh One
was being built. They had come out together. Dayton cursed the torrent of memories. Tadeo had baked cookies with his rations every Christmas long after Christmas ceased to have any meaning to the crew.

Dayton studied the smaller man’s frozen face, the familiar smile still in place, dark eyes twinkling, full of tiny ice crystals. Tadeo hadn’t even had time to look surprised.

“The systems are supposed to be redundant,” Dayton muttered to himself.

Kate Beck heard him over the com-set and waved her tablet angrily. “You think I don’t know that, Commander? “ She only used his rank anymore when she got upset, and Beck didn’t get upset easily. Beck was also an Old-timer, Dayton’s executive officer on the journey out, and Tadeo had been her friend, too.

“Sorry, Kate,” he said. “This one’s got me. Got us both, I guess.” He tried to lighten the mood with a feeble comment, tapping her suit where her name was printed. “Do you write that on your underwear, too?”

The glow of her tablet screen reflected an eerie effect on her features as she sighed and turned away. “I’ve given you every opportunity to find out, James.”

Dayton remembered his heating unit and looked around for a working battery socket to plug into. He glanced for a moment at the power shift readout on his faceplate—
always careful!
—and then, trailing his thin umbilical, he began moving around the shed. Many of the consoles were still black, shut down by the sudden rush of cold. He looked at the computer nearest Tadeo’s hand. “I wonder what he was working on.”

“Same as all of us,” Beck answered. “The Burney is scheduled to go online in seven days. He’s been something of a mad scientist about it, working long shifts alone, checking and double-checking every detail.” She hesitated, looking thoughtful. Then her voice cracked. “He joked to me once that it would see the face of God. I laughed, but then he repeated it. He said the Burney would do that.”

Inside his suit, Dayton nodded to himself. Tadeo was obsessive. Men and women only came out to Pluto for three reasons. Either they were running from something, or they thought of themselves as pioneer-adventurers, or because sheer scientific curiosity drove them. Corporate did their best to weed out the runners. The adventurers usually weeded out themselves. Tadeo had been at the forefront of the last group.

He walked around Tadeo Atsuka again, and stared for a long moment into those frozen eyes. That look, he knew, would haunt him for nights to come.
It’s almost as if he’s seeing the face of God right now.
Dayton flinched from the thought. He wasn’t a religious man at all.

Yet Tadeo was smiling, almost mocking him.

“Go back to the station,” Dayton told Kate Beck. “Inform Corporate. Tell them that we’ve lost a giant.”

Kate Beck powered off her tablet and pushed the device into a pocket on her thigh. Then she unplugged her suit and let the umbilical retract around her waist. At the airlock, she paused and looked back into the shed. Despite a handful of glowing monitors, the interior was still mostly dark. “Eighteen years,” she said with strange wistfulness. “Now we’ve lost Robinson, Tucker, and Tadeo.” She shook her head. “I don’t get it, James. I just don’t get it.”

He couldn’t see her face clearly, yet he sensed that she was crying. The Old-timers, those who came out on the first mission to establish Tombaugh Station, had always shared a tight bond. They knew they were special, a unique breed, and later, when
Tombaugh Two
and
Tombaugh Three
arrived nine years apart to expand the base, the newcomers knew it, too. To them, the Old-timers were heroes and legends.

“I seem to have run out of black humor,” she continued, rambling. “Do you want me to take him back?”

“I’ll take him,” Dayton said.

He waited until Kate Beck was gone and the airlock resealed. Then he pulled up a chair from one of the consoles and sat down to grieve and to share a few last moments with an old friend. Thanks to Kate, all the power systems slowly came back to life. He tapped the side of his helmet, activating his faceplate readouts, and noted the climbing temperatures and elevating air concentrations inside the shed. They were almost normal. Still, he kept his suit on and plugged in.
Always careful.

After a time, he got up, rummaged around and found a stack of thermal blankets in a storage locker. He wrapped Tadeo carefully and secured the wrappings as best he could with the power umbilical from Tadeo’s environmental suit. As he did so, the quantum computers flashed back online, and various monitors around the shed began to shine with images of deep-space objects. Dayton recognized Andromeda on one of the screens and, on another, the very peculiar galaxy called Centaurus A. On still another, a dark red cluster of nebulae unfamiliar to Dayton—maybe something entirely new.

Dayton unplugged his suit and retracted his umbilical. Then, after padding the storage compartment of his sled with more blankets, he carried Tadeo outside and laid him gently down. In Pluto’s weak gravity, the doctor weighed very little. “Last roundup, Cookie,” Dayton murmured. The Old-timers, especially Tadeo, were all fond of cowboy metaphors.

With Tadeo carefully cradled, Dayton straightened and glanced to his nine o’clock. The dark horizon coruscated with light—intense green and red, gold and stark silver scattering strangely on Pluto’s tenuous summer atmosphere. It looked like a crazy aurora borealis, but with no magnetic field on Pluto, he knew it was no such thing. It was only the work crews firing the polishing lasers, putting the last smoothing touches on the Burney’s gigantic ice mirror. He smiled to himself, although it was a painful smile. “Would you like to take a look?” he said to Tadeo. Then he nodded and forced a smile. “I knew you would.”

Plugging his suit into the sled’s battery pack, he turned on his running lights, twisted the throttle and headed toward the glow, which got brighter and more dramatic as he approached. The outlines of leviathan ice movers rose up as if to block his path, seeming alien on their eight mechanical legs, control cabins gleaming like eyes. He drove his sled with greater care now, watching his GPS, to avoid the ice pits from which the diggers had gouged great chunks.

Still, he found it hard not to let his mind wander. Tadeo dead. And Robinson before him, a suicide, just tired of it all. Then Tucker, crushed at the work site under massive ice when a mover suddenly lost power and dropped its load. All Old-timers and all friends—gone. He had lost people before, but these deaths hurt.

At the top of a shallow summit, James Dayton stopped and turned off his running lights. Once before, he had parked on this same spot with Tadeo as they searched together for the right place to erect the Burney. Now, it made the perfect observation point to watch the construction. Dayton thought of himself as a hard and jaded man, but what he saw when he looked down upon the work site took his breath away every time.

The Venetia Burney Deep Space Cassegrain Telescope, named after the eleven-year-old child who had given Pluto its name in 1931, soared upward from the heart of Kenyata Plain, its immense disc five miles in diameter, made entirely from methane and nitrogen ice. It loomed upward, dominating the planetscape, all of its beams and girders, gears and motors, and nuts and bolts 3-D printed on the site from Pluto’s own materials.

The light show was the result of lasers smoothing the gigantic ice mirrors to micro-meter precision as they fused layer after layer of synthetic mercury, capable of withstanding temperatures as low as minus five hundred degrees, to the ice. Then the mirrors would be finished.

James Dayton knew that he stood in the shadow of Mankind’s greatest achievement. Compared to the Burney, everything else, including Tombaugh Station, felt small.

The lasers lit up the night with mesmerizing fire. Dayton watched until his eyes ached, then he jerked his attention to other details. The ice movers stood in stark silhouettes, and the vehicles and men at work around the site seemed like ants and less than ants.

Yet, those men were giants, too, for they had crossed the three point fifty-seven billion miles and given their lives to establish Tombaugh Station and build the Burney.

“I wish you could see this again, Tadeo,” Dayton said. He remembered the images that had popped up on the monitors back at Work Unit Three, especially the unfamiliar cluster of nebulae, and wondered what the Burney would eventually see when it went online.