Lightspeed: Year One

Lvov stood on the surface of Pluto.

The suit’s insulation was good, but enough heat leaked to send nitrogen clouds hissing around her footsteps, and where she walked she burned craters in the ice. Gravity was only a few per cent of gee, and Lvov, Earth-born, felt as if she might blow away.

There were clouds above her, wispy cirrus: aerosol clusters suspended in an atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. The clouds occluded bone-white stars. From here, Sol and the moon, Charon, were hidden by the planet’s bulk, and it was dark, dark on dark, the damaged landscape visible only as a sketch in starlight.

The flitter had dug a trench a mile long and fifty yards deep in this world’s antique surface, so Lvov was at the bottom of a valley walled by nitrogen ice. Cobh was hauling equipment out of the crumpled-up wreck of the flitter: scooters, data desks, life-support boxes, Lvov’s equipment. Most of the stuff had been robust enough to survive the impact, Lvov saw, but not her own equipment.

Maybe a geologist could have crawled around with nothing more than a hammer and a set of sample bags. But Lvov was an atmospheric scientist. What was she going to achieve here without her equipment?

Her fear was fading now, to be replaced by irritation, impatience. She was five light hours from Sol; already she was missing the online nets. She kicked at the ice. She was stuck here; she couldn’t talk to anyone, and there wasn’t even the processing power to generate a Virtual environment.

Cobh finished wrestling with the wreckage. She was breathing hard. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of this ditch and take a look around.” She showed Lvov how to work a scooter. It was a simple platform, its inert-gas jets controlled by twists of raised handles.

Side by side, Cobh and Lvov rose out of the crash scar.

Pluto ice was a rich crimson laced with organic purple. Lvov made out patterns, dimly, on the surface of the ice; they were like bas-relief, discs the size of dinner plates, with the intricate complexity of snowflakes.

Lvov landed clumsily on the rim of the crash scar, the scooter’s blunt prow crunching into surface ice, and she was grateful for the low gravity. The weight and heat of the scooters quickly obliterated the ice patterns.

“We’ve come down near the equator,” Cobh said. “The albedo is higher at the south pole: a cap of methane ice there, I’m told.”

“Yes.”

Cobh pointed to a bright blue spark, high in the sky. “That’s the wormhole Interface, where we emerged: Fifty thousand miles away.”

Lvov squinted at constellations unchanged from those she’d grown up with on Earth. “Are we stranded?”

Cobh said, with reasonable patience, “For the time being. The flitter is wrecked, and the wormhole has collapsed; we’re going to have to go back to Jupiter the long way round.”

Three billion miles . . . “Ten hours ago I was asleep in a hotel room on Io. And now this. What a mess.”

Cobh laughed. “I’ve already sent off messages to the inner System. They’ll be received in about five hours. A one-way GUTship will be sent to retrieve us. It will refuel here, with Charon ice—”

“How long?”

“It depends on the readiness of a ship. Say ten days to prepare, then a ten-day flight out here—”

“Twenty days?”

“We’re in no danger. We’ve supplies for a month. Although we’re going to have to live in these suits.”

“Lethe. This trip was supposed to last seventy-two hours.”

“Well,” Cobh said testily, “you’ll have to call and cancel your appointments, won’t you? All we have to do is wait here; we’re not going to be comfortable, but we’re safe enough.”

“Do you know what happened to the wormhole?”

Cobh shrugged. She stared up at the distant blue spark. “As far as I know nothing like this has happened before. I think the Interface itself became unstable, and that fed back into the throat . . . But I don’t know how we fell to Pluto so quickly. That doesn’t make sense.”

“How so?”

“Our trajectory was spacelike. Superluminal.” She glanced at Lvov obliquely, as if embarrassed. “For a moment there, we appeared to be travelling faster than light.”

“Through normal space? That’s impossible.”

“Of course it is.” Cobh reached up to scratch her cheek, but her gloved fingers rattled against her faceplate. “I think I’ll go up to the Interface and take a look around there.”

Cobh showed Lvov how to access the life support boxes. Then she strapped her data desk to her back, climbed aboard her scooter, and lifted off the planet’s surface, heading for the Interface. Lvov watched her dwindle.

Lvov’s isolation closed in. She was alone, the only human on the surface of Pluto.

A reply from the inner System came within twelve hours of the crash. A GUTship was being sent from Jupiter. It would take thirteen days to refit the ship, followed by an eight-day flight to Pluto, then more delay for taking on fresh reaction mass at Charon. Lvov chafed at the timescale, restless.