Antonio loved her all the more for bringing him, regardless.
The remote-sensing station was a kludge, the first among a whole constellation of kludges. Once Dana had it checked out, they would hop Endeavour a third of the way around this little moon and deploy a second station. Then take another hop, to deliver a third.
It wasn’t bad enough that Aristophanes, orbiting so near Dark, precluded siting their sensor suites where above any rational planet they belonged: aboard synchronous satellites. Aristophanes also had an unhelpful rate of rotation; it didn’t present a constant face to the world below, as the Moon presented to Earth. Only with three well separated stations would some one of them at all times have the planet under observation. Each station had to store its readings until Dark’s rotation, the moon’s rotation, and the moon’s orbit combined to provide a line-of-site downlink opportunity to the settlement.
After finishing on Aristophanes they would get to reprise the triple deployment on Aeschylus and again on Euripides. And on occasion, parts of Dark would still go unmonitored.
Three fascinating little worlds, Antonio thought, sad that no one shared his fascination.
While Dana, with a multimeter in hand, fussed over some calibration, Antonio wandered about gathering rocks for his collection. As feeble as was Aristophanes’ gravity, not even a klutz like him could trip off or leap free of it. He could, if he lost focus, bound high enough to spend a long while drifting back to the surface. And so he shuffled, sweeping aside ancient regolith with his boots, leaving sloppy troughs in his wake. His tracks shone paler than the undisturbed surface.
“Almost done here,” Dana called. “How about you?”
Done scuffing up the surface? Done collecting rocks? “Ready when you are.”
They remained suited up for the jaunt to their next landing site, sparing themselves another round of checkouts. Here they were on the moon’s night side, with the planet half below the horizon. Antonio could still see clearly by—the word tickled him—Darklight.
He helped Dana carry their second station to an area clear of stony rubble. While she configured the unit, he resumed pebble collecting. Here, too, the ruts left by his plodding gait were paler than the undisturbed surface.
When, with an abrupt sneeze, Dana let fly the removable clasp of an access panel, he helped her search for it. When they gave up the fastener for lost, swallowed by the thick dust or hiding in the inky shadow of some boulder, he scavenged nuts and bolts for her from ship’s stores. He found a spare thermocouple when an instrument failed diagnostics; without accurate temperature readings here, they could not calibrate long-range readings they made of Dark. Then, having bagged and labeled every interesting-looking pebble in the vicinity, he tried to entertain himself by tracing geometric shapes in the dust with his boot tip.
“Ready to move on?” Dana called.
“Sure.”
Their third landing returned them to sunlight and gave them a line of sight to the settlement. Dana called down.
“How’s it going, Endeavour?” Blake answered, yawning. He had gray bags beneath his bloodshot eyes, and his beard looked overdue for a trim. Maybe a shearing.
“Everything seems fine on this end,” Dana said.
“With you, too, Antonio?”
“Indeed. Apart from the inefficiency of it all.”
“Don’t blame me. I didn’t put the moons there.” Arching an eyebrow, Blake leaned toward the camera. “What do you two crazy kids have planned, all unchaperoned?”
Dana and Antonio exchanged glances.
“Looking around a bit,” he said. That sounded frivolous, even to him. “Survey the…area for useful minerals.”
“Getting finished,” Dana said firmly, “as fast as we can. Maybe a quick nap before the flight to Aeschylus.”
“What is this nap thing of which you speak?” Blake yawned again. “Before you depart lovely Aristophanes, let’s run an end-to-end system test of at least one station.”
“Copy that,” Dana said. “We’re at station three. From my end, everything is a go.”
“Power…check,” Blake said. “Comm…ditto. Primary control…check. Moving on to the instruments. Radiometer…check. Scatterometer…check. High-res multispectral imager…looking good. Nice sharp image. Doppler radar…”
As the recitation droned on, as motes glinted in the furrows of his aimless shuffling, Antonio’s thoughts wandered. Many instruments. Much data to come. And one Big Question.
Rock strata and ice cores: each sample told a tale, and no two stories ever quite agreed. Dark was a living world, on which storms and weathering, quakes and floods, volcanoes and even meteor strikes had all left their marks.
Read enough stories, though, and for all their idiosyncratic plot twists they confirmed what astrophysics predicted: that Dark experienced Milankovitch cycles. That the global climate had warmed and cooled, warmed and cooled, warmed and cooled, like clockwork, for as long—half a million years!—as the record could be reconstructed. That by its ancient rhythm, Dark was due, indeed, well into, a new warming era.
How pronounced were the historical climate swings? Antonio refused to guess. To infer anything about past average global temperatures from such paleogeological proxies as ice cores, he would first need to calibrate modern ice cores against years, at the least, of direct temperature measurements.
“Atmospheric sounder…check,” Blake continued. “Wideband, ground-penetrating radar…”
Many, many instruments.
And yet Antonio had his doubts whether, even working together, the sensors they deployed could resolve the anomaly in the geological record of the past few centuries. That the sensors could explain why the climate had been steadily cooling. Or that sensors would answer the Big Question.
Just how frigid would Dark get?
31
At the soft scrape of approaching footsteps Carlos took a swig of vodka, then screwed shut the flask and stashed it inside a cabinet. He popped a breath mint into his mouth. The vodka was inferior, despite his best efforts. The mint tasted worse but smelled better.
He was in no mood to be lectured about his drinking. If and when he chose to, he’d stop.
Rikki loped through the lab door. Something about her (the berry-dark tan? the pouty lips? the long, high ponytail? the long legs in taut slacks?) reminded Carlos of a grad student he had had. And had and had and had. Very lithe
