Launch Pad Read Free Page A

After a minute he began to make out the smudges in the darkness, and in a few minutes more, even though the sun was billions of miles away, he discovered that he could still see. Without the image intensifier, the surface was colorless, a pale ghostly glistening in the starlight, with sun so small he could have covered it with the head of a pin.
    It seemed more real to him this way, so he left the image intensifier off. The heads-up display told him the topography, and the autopilot picked out the smoothest path across the snow.
    “You guys should have come with me,” he said, speaking to the empty air. “Poker’s no fun, not until after payday, anyway.”
    He was lucky he didn’t sled right into the artifact. He’d been having such a good time hot-dogging the snowcat, he’d stopped paying attention and had lost track of how far he’d come. Fortunately his navigation computer hadn’t, and warned him when he was approaching the artifact.
    Once cued to look, he could see it: in the distance, the horizon cut off abruptly. Lee flicked the image intensifier back on, and suddenly it was impossible to miss, a sharp black line across the red horizon. He slowed down to approach it cautiously, edging up to the razor-sharp edge between the snow and the black, and finally getting off the snowcat and creeping forward slowly.
    He looked down.
    The black was speckled with stars.
    For an instant he thought it was a hole straight through the planet, and then he wondered if it could be a portal to another universe.
    Lee anchored the snowcat, and clipped a safety tether to it. His toolpack carried all his gear, but carrying the pack made it too awkward for him to bend over, so he took it off and wore only the skin-tight nudie suit. Making sure that his tether was secure, he kneeled down at the edge, and leaned over to look down.
    He saw a golden helmet faceplate—his own faceplate—looking up at him.
    The black surface was not black at all, but a gargantuan mirror reflecting the blackness of space, angled steeply away from him. Close up, he could see the sharp image of stars reflected in it. He was so close to it that it seemed perfectly flat, but looking across in the distance he could see the subtle curve.
    He put his hand on it (the mirror-image hand coming up from below to touch his), and it was perfectly smooth and perfectly slick. Absolutely smooth, slicker than oil, as if he was touching nothing, no resistance at all to him sliding his palm across the surface.
    Through his glove he couldn’t sense the temperature. His suit was a near-perfect insulator; it had to be, of course, to operate in the outer solar system, where the miners walked the cryogenic ice fields of trans-Neptunian and Kuiper objects.
    Lee checked the external temperature meter on the fingertip of one glove. Pressing his finger to the mirror’s surface, the gauge read five Kelvin. The reading was so unlikely that he pulled his hand away to try another spot. The next spot was still five Kelvin, as was a third spot, and a fourth.
    “Sonnabitch,” he said. “Colder than a loan shark’s heart.”
    His meter wasn’t broken; he checked a patch of the crusty snow surrounding the pit, and got the right number, thirty Kelvin. The surface of Sedna was colder than the caves of hell, but the temperature of the black surface was twenty-five degrees cooler yet, far lower than it had any right to be.
    Slowly, he worked it out. The surface was not black; it was reflective, and only appeared black in that it was reflecting the starry sky. It must be very close to a perfect mirror indeed. Far as they were from the sun, the snows of Sedna still absorbed sunlight, and that heated them a few degrees above absolute. But this perfect reflector must absorb no light at all, and stayed cold. Somewhere in the far infrared, it must radiate away a tiny amount of heat, he realized, but in all the wavelengths in which the sun shone, it absorbed nothing, and so was colder than the