Launch Pad Read Free

shift leader was as high as he could climb with only his self-education, learning about whatever subject caught his attention. For the long voyage out to Sedna, he had signed up to take university classes, the first step up toward supervisor and, eventually, running his own ship. Now his personal databot had a load of material for him to study in his spare time: literature, structural mechanics, and physics, to start. Studying should have accounted for his off-shift hours—he had a lot to catch up on—but with the discovery of the strange black circle on Sedna, he was thinking of changing his plans.
    The radioed instructions from back in-system, he knew, were more properly a suggestion, not an order. The crew of Ramblin’ Wreck weren’t subject to orders from scientific institutions a few billion kilometers away.
    The union mandated that, even mining high-grade ammonia, they had to be paid triple-overtime at hazardous-duty rates for shifts longer than eight hours, and the flint-eyed wretch Kellerman wasn’t about to pay overtime. Lee and his crew got sixteen hours off for every eight working, and the union steward watched damn carefully to see that they weren’t given unofficial duties in their off time. So he had the time.
    They finished their shift, bringing back the ice cores for the cryomineralogy lab to analyze, and Dinky and Adrian headed off to unsuit and hit the showers. Lee watched them head in, but didn’t follow.
    Lee figured he could skip one day of studying, and bypass the after-shift perpetual floating poker game. There was something interesting out there, and he would be damned if he wasn’t going to go take a look. Although this was a mining operation, not prospecting, Lee was fully certified for solo prospecting and didn’t have to tell anybody what he did in his off-shift hours, if he didn’t want to. And so he slipped away, without telling anybody.
    The artifact was half a world away, far from the Ramblin’ Wreck’s position near the ammonia deposits. He topped off his suit batteries and then checked a snowcat out of the equipment depot. It was technically theft, maybe, if you looked at it one way, since he wasn’t actually on shift, but it wasn’t as if he wasn’t going to return it—where could he possibly go? He wasn’t even using up fuel, since the snowcat had a little nuclear generator that gave out a constant 14.3 kilowatts of power whether it was being driven or not.
    That had been his first mistake, going out alone. A few hours later, it was beginning to look like it may have been a fatal one.
    The drive was a thrill; a little under three hours at an average speed of almost two hundred kilometers per hour. In the low gravity the sled bounced up on every little hummock of snow. The first hour he had steered carefully to the smoothest paths, and the bumps had scared him nearly out of his wits. But the sled had attitude control thrusters that kept it from spilling over when it was airborne (or, technically, vacuum borne, he supposed, since the microbar pressure of mostly helium surrounding Sedna was nothing that could vaguely be given the nomenclature of air.) After a while he realized the snow pack was so thick, it had smoothed out the planet’s hills into natural ski jumps, and he had gotten more and more adventurous. Now he was picking jumps that gave him a hang time of five seconds, ten, thirty.
    A hell of a lot more fun than studying, he thought.
    Viewed through his intensity-enhanced goggles, the landscape was low rolling hummocks of a deep dusky red, the color of Georgia mud. Sedna was beautiful. Lee saw a landscape of soft hills lit by urgently brilliant stars, speckled in colors: the glistening white of water-ice snow splashed across through scars in the surface of red tholins. He tried switching the image intensifier off. At first all he could see was darkness, and the sense of speeding across darkness, trusting in the autopilot to avoid obstacles, made his heart hammer.