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Alone above the sky, Cendrillon worked quickly. She'd practiced the procedure.
First, refill personal air tank from main air tank and reset the timer.
Then, get the fragile stuff - digital camera, solar panels, sensors - out of the capsule.
Then, wire it all up. With the primary battery gone, the plan to leave it up there to act as an additional continuity box had to be scrubbed - the sensors would only be able to transmit when the Sun was up.
Carefully, Cendrillon removed most of the electronics from the capsule and moved them over to the surface setup, using the camera tripod to make another hole in the ice with the pick and letting the plumb-bob antenna dangle down again. The last part of the procedure was check voltages - a little low, but with tolerance - and turn the radio on again. There had been no time to set up repeaters, so the only way for Cendrillon to talk to Earth was to tether her suit to the radio box via headphone jack.
"Glass Slipper Base here. It's beautiful beyond words. We should have sent a poet."
"We're reading you four by five, Glass Slipper. And yeah, we heard you the first time. Confirm getting visual on SSTV. Can you wave for the camera?"
Cendrillon could hear the cheering and high fives in the background of the CAPCOM microphone. Awkwardly, she loomed over the digital camera, held up a hand, waited until a blinking LED told her that a frame had been sent, and then moved her hand, a few seconds later. No video - not enough bandwidth - but slow scan would do. She double checked the photocells that would prevent the camera from being aimed directly at the Sun; hopefully, the rig would last long enough for a second mission to be set up.
A pang of worry. What if she didn't have enough time to take her findings, and conclusion, to the Temple? She might just have to ask for the recovery car to drive her there directly.
Cendrillon took another breather, but this time the stillness and silence above her felt ominous. Calm before the storm, even though the stars above and ice below still scintillated like the jewels behind the Throne.
"Right. Physics experiments."
These would get filmed; hopefully the film roll would make it home intact.
Hold up a measuring tape - millimeters, of course - to the tripod, use a rat trap mechanism to drop a small rock and a downy feather, keep a chronometer in frame: enough to show that gravity up there was a good ten percent less than on the surface, and that there was no appreciable atmospheric pressure up there. A basic science demo, and one that Cendrillon hoped would be shown in school, but also a confirmation that the laws of physics as known still applied. A few steps away, a suite of basic sensors confirmed Cendrillon's findings.
"... We've done the math on the timing test, gee local is approximately nine meters per second. You've lost weight!"
"Gee thanks, CAPCOM! Okay, I'm going to try a jump now." Putting the camera on the tripod, she stepped away from any cracks in the ice, dared to jump - and almost fell flat on her bum.
Why do the saved say that those who aren't are lost? Cendrillon wondered. Confirming to the ground station that she was fine, she felt that she was exactly where she belonged.
Cendrillon recharged her air pack, left the camera pointed at the Milky Way so that the low resolution digital camera could be used to aim the high resolution film camera, and announced that she would take a walk to shave an ice sample for spectroscopy and see if she got lucky enough to find a micrometeorite.
Down below, the ground crew took turns aiming the pan/tilt contraption. Cendrillon walked. No wonder that the ancient believed that God resided in the heavens... the spectacle above her was grand, glorious. And yet, now God had decided that humanity didn't need to see it anymore, and His Son dwelled in a temple, far below and slightly to the East. Cendrillon looked at the appropriate point, roughly.
After the Glorious Appearing, the world had been mercilessly flattened - no more mountains, fjords, waterfalls - so that Greater Jerusalem and her Temple would stand tall above all. Was it blasphemous to look down on the house of God? Probably not - air travel was very much still a thing, after all. Surely the security corridor around the Temple wasn't wide enough to span a horizon at airliner height? Would people be permitted to build a permanent base up here?
Would people care if they weren't? Cendrillon felt like she was at her destination - all that her and her friends had said, done, been, had been for this - but in truth, there were many like her. Many waiting to fly. This trip wasn't even the end of the beginning. It was just the start.
She felt a pang in her heart, and her next breath came belabored. Low pressure on her personal tank? Not according to the timer... Must be a diffusion leak. Cendrillon took strong steps back to the capsule, and quickly recharged her tank.
"CAPCOM, I've got some sort of air issue. Assume halved personal tank capacity. Can I stay until sunset? The Moon isn't up yet."
"Stand by, Glass Slipper... Yes, but don't tarry until morning."
This cut astronomical observation down by a third, but that was just how it was going to be.
"Sergei... Thank you. Thank you."
"Thank you, Cindy. Believe me, I'm exactly where I want to be."
Cendrillon could understand that. Two people, fifty miles of sky apart, living the same dream. Okay, let's not get mushy - audio preempts telemetry, so let's not waste bandwidth.
The next few hours went surprisingly fast. Cendrillon cross-checked her observations with a star chart, and reported what discrepancies she could see; notably, either her leveling equipment was off or the precession of Polaris was noticeably less than what it should have been.
Eye protector on, she performed basic solar spectroscopy - nothing new there - and confirmed that in the 93 years since anyone had seen the night sky, there had either been no new supernovae within optical range, or any that happened had already burned themselves out.
"Bummer. We were hoping to put the SN1987A question to rest."
"Ignace, this is Glass Slipper. Only CAPCOM on the horn, please... Didn't fancy you for an astronomy buff, though, I'm impressed."
"It would've been nice to be able to confirm that the universe is older than 6000 years with fresh data, that's all."
That had been a major point of theoretical contention through the space program's development - most believers reckoned that the Glorious Appearing trumped any astronomical data regarding the age of the universe; a fledgling community of skeptical science geeks was starting to disagree, and resurrecting the various arguments for the validity of the Standard Model. Right this minute, Cendrillon didn't care one way or the other. The stars were THERE, it was all that mattered. Besides, would finding a new supernova with cobalt halos even change anyone's mind if the first one didn't?
"We'll need better instruments if we want to catch a Mercury transit precisely enough to witness general relativity. Next mission?"
"We would have to go up with a whole observatory..."
Cendrillon kept collecting data; this was more of an engineering mission than a science one. Any serious astronomical observation would require a permanent presence on the canopy - with any luck, the digital camera would last six months up there and allow for parallax measurements, but there was little guarantee of that. An aluminum disc and a piece of cardboard were used to check whether general relativity still applied when a nearby star transited behind the Sun. Not the sort of thing one could really check with hand instruments...
"Inconclusive, but you're closer to Einstein's number than to von Soldner's. We'll have to do it again."
"Ack that. Setting up the laser: Glass Slipper out for a few minutes."
The Moon was due up soon, and Cendrillon had to work quickly. The simple rig was also the most power-hungry instrument, and they'd be lucky to be able to fire it a few times. The Soviet and American lunar missions had left a number of retroreflectors on the lunar surface: firing a laser at them and measuring the interval of the return pulse could give an extremely precise indication of the distance between the Earth and the Moon. It would also confirm that the equipment left on the Moon was still there.
Cendrillon stopped working just long enough to take a nice, high resolution picture of the moonrise. Below, the canopy's lensing made the Moon look like a white ball of light, much like the Sun would have had pre-Appearing; she was the first in almost a century to see the Earth's natural satellite in its imperfect beauty, dark "seas" of basalt and brighter regolith. Until she got back with the film pictures, the ground crew would have to make do with the grainy broadcast images.
She never could see "the man in the moon", even when she was little, but she'd always taken it on faith that there had been men on the moon. Now, she would no longer have to. "Aiming laser to Mare Imbrium... set. Count to ten and pulse away, CAPCOM."
The powerful diode lasers, scavenged from DVD burners and fed a high-power diet of electricity by a self-thermoregulating constant current driver, ate up enough power that Cendrillon had to turn off everything else other than the telemety radio; this included audio and indicators, so the timing experiment would be directed by the ground. She had nothing to do other than look on - away from the laser, obviously - for the next few minutes.
Mars. She could see the pink dot among the white ones unaided, after having triangulated it the first time. Would they go back to the Moon, or aim for the red planet first. Mars, the god of war, the best place in Cendrillon's opinion to prove that there wouldn't have to be a fight nine centuries from now. She tried to imagine herself as an old granny, watching the ferrous hills from a hab, and found that she couldn't quite manage to. She shifted the image to the coast of Nice, her family's ancestral home, and imagined the short but steep cliffs that constituted its coastline being back there; she found that she likewise couldn't quite visualize it. Why was it so hard to imagine the future? Her brain didn't want to cooperate.
This is wrong, she thought. She'd just opened that very future to nearly endless possibilities. She'd vindicated Galileo and Einstein. She'd flown an actual rocket into actual space! Why couldn't she feel proud of her work?
"I have earned this! I have the right to feel pride! We got here! On our own! By our own efforts! In everybody's face!" Suddenly it was her who wanted a fight. She wanted the VIP treatment when getting home. She wanted to get into an argument with a Geocentrist and slap them in the face with her pictures. She...
... Wait, why was she shouting at the heavens again? Check oxygen levels... There, recharged. Diffusion leak bigger than she thought, probably. She was in danger of getting the bends: it would be best to wrap up the science and head home.
The laser stopped pulsing, and Cendrillon plugged in her audio jack again.
"CAPCOM, what's the result?"
"Good job, Glass Slipper. Delta-cee negligible. Accounting for the Earth's loss of mass at the time of the Rapture, the Moon is right where it should be. Can you ping the other retroreflectors?"
"Uh, negative CAPCOM. I'm using up more air than I thought, I think. Not getting hard to breathe, but I have to keep extra pressure in the tank."
"Roger that. Ready to come home?"
"Let me collect ice and water samples first. CAPCOM, a thought, what if I leave the secondary battery up here?"
"Let's see..." Sergei quickly polled the people who'd built the pneumatic systems: could the capsule descend with whatever voltage was available from the stricken primary battery? "I'm getting mixed responses here. Why do you want to?"
"It'll increase the chances of the camera and sensors still working in six months' time. That way we can do parallax measurements."
The capsule was designed to come down without any power - many of the mechanisms that would have been servo-operated on an orbital capsule were run by tension cable and manual grips, to save weight and complexity. If worst came to worst, Cendrillon could swim down to the bottom of the canopy, plummet to the ground, and use a personal parachute for descent. It basically guaranteed frostbite, but losing a few toes was preferrable to death.
"I've got a cautious GO from Engineering, Glass Slippers. Your call."
"I call unpowered descent then. Will wire the primary battery to the radio transponder and hope there's enough juice in it for you guys to find me quickly if you can't see me come down."
Sergei was worried. For the sake of a few more bits of data, her friend was going to come down falling. He heard Elianto and Mercy begin to pray. Had they even ever had simulated an unpowered descent? No radio, no altitude check other than by dead reckoning...
"Ack that. We'll send recovery cars out. CAPCOM out."
"Thank you. I'm going to do a bit of ice shaving and come home."
Cendrillon performed the last tasks. One more stellar transit, which gave much better numbers - Ha, she thought, Einstein is vindicated! Take that, Dr. Hovind! - and a quick weigh-in of a block of ice taken from the top and the bottom of the ice layer. She let the telemetry system pick up the values while she tested the primary battery's cells and excluded the fried ones.
"...Looks like the ice's got a lot of deuterium in it. Good news if we ever need reaction mass. Good job on the science package, we've got a gaggle of giddy geeks down here." That was simple fact: in addition to learning that space's endless possibilities were still available to Humanity, Cendrillon's trip had provided precious engineering data to make them easier to reach. Canopy thickness and composition, flight envelope... The next trip would be easier.
"And one up here, CAPCOM.". Cendrillon felt the cold satisfaction of a job well done, but couldn't really say that she felt giddy. She had a vivid memory of the sheer beauty she'd experienced earlier, sure; she knew exactly what to say and what to write when she delivered her presentation to the Temple, now; but... it all felt cold somehow. Probably something to do with the physical heat loss: the suit had done its job, but she was beginning to feel the chill and with air and power running lower than planned, it was safer to come home. Maybe I'm starting to get old, Cendrillon chided herself.
"See you soon, Cindy.
"I'm going to break the ice and drop home. Beginning unpowered descent in 450 seconds. Glass Slipper over and out."
The small weather station at the top of the canopy would keep providing sensor and image data for a while - months? years? - but there would be little trace of Cendrillon's journey otherwise. With a few strikes of the icepick, the capsule came loose from the thin new ice; Cendrillon got into it, put the film canisters and samples into the "safe" - they would survive even if she didn't - and closed the hatch. The final procedure was to allow both the cabin and the fuel tank to flood, so as to make the fall down.
Cendrillon reset her chronometer - a fancy scuba watch donated for the occasion by an old woman who'd worked mission control for the Shuttle missions - and made sure that it'd start the moment she got out of the water: with no power, the only way she had to know her altitude for drogue and parachute deployment was by dead reckoning.
Working the valves, she noticed that they were harder to move than they'd been hours before; she didn't feel weak, per se, but the evidence said otherwise. Probably the adrenaline rush wearing off.
"We did it! Together! We stand tall!" she shouted at nobody in particular from inside her mask.
On the ground, they only knew that Cendrillon was starting to come home from the accelerometer bump. All other instruments kept recording, too simple to witness.
The capsule flooded up, and began its fall.