Pushing Ice (3 page)

“Sorry to bring you inside at short notice,” Schrope said, his voice a low, throbbing, catlike purr.

Svetlana shifted on her folding seat, but didn’t reply.

“How’d the shift go?” Bella asked. She wore shark’s teeth around her neck and a faded red lumberjack shirt, open over a black vest embossed with a gold foil picture: the Titanic Bar and Grill.

“I’ve had better. Blacking out isn’t one of my favourite ways to spend EVA time.”

Bella raised a knowing eyebrow. “The eighteens again?”

“Same old trimix problem.”

“Don’t forget to file the LOC log. Headquarters may make us use that reconditioned shit, but we don’t have to like it.”

“Everything’s industry standard and space certified,” Schrope said, picking a speck of fluff from his crisp blue DeepShaft zip-up. “On
Hammerhead
they make do with a lot older than Orlan eighteens without bitching and moaning.”

“That’s
Hammerhead’s
problem,” Svetlana said.

“The difference is they don’t make an issue of it,” Schrope said evenly. “But since it’s clearly an issue here, I’ve okayed a consignment of new twenty-twos on the next rotation.”

Like ticking that one box on a consignment spreadsheet had been the favour of the century
… “Which would be when, Craig?” Svetlana asked, sweetly. “Before or after Jim gets his ticket home?”

Schrope batted aside her question with a flick of the pen. “Bella, maybe you should fill Svetlana in on developments. Since this does, obliquely, concern Jim —”

“What developments?” Svetlana interrupted.

“We’ve had a request to disengage,” Bella said. “They want us to tag the driver and leave it out here.”

“And the comet?”

“Plenty more where that one came from.”

Svetlana shook her head in disbelief. “We can’t just abandon it, not after all the work we’ve put in. Driver pit’s dug, parasol’s already locked in and prepped for spin-up —”

“Could be we’ve bigger fish to go after. I need some tech input.”

Schrope took over. “Could we move quickly, if we had to?”

“We’re always ready to withdraw to a safe distance,” Svetlana said.

“I mean immediate full power, for an extended cruise?”

Svetlana worked her way through a mental checklist.

“Yes,” she said, cautiously. “Normally we’d run a few more tests, especially after an extended shutdown like this one —”

“Understood,” Bella said, “but there’s no compelling reason why we can’t fire up?”

“No. But Parry and the others —”

“
Avenger’s
on its way back up. They’ll be aboard shortly. One more thing, Svieta: specs say we can push the engine to half a gee, if we talk to it nicely…” Her voice trailed off; Svetlana knew what she was asking.

“Theoretically.”

Bella narrowed her eyes. “Yes or no?”

“All right, yes, but it’s not something you’d want to do for more than a few hours. You’d be looking at accelerated wear in expensive, non-replaceable components… elevated risk of mission-critical failure modes — not to mention the increased structural load on the rest of the ship.”

Bella tapped a finger against a hardcopy of a plaintext e-mail. “Lockheed-Krunichev tell me the loads are within design lims. If you tell me the engine can hold, I’m a happy bunny.”

The document was upside down from Svetlana’s perspective, but she could still make out part of the subject line: something about Janus. Mythical and Roman, she thought. The two-faced god of ..‘. what?

And the name of one of Saturn’s moons.

“It’s doable,” she said.

“Good,” Bella said. But Svetlana noticed that she said “good” with a sigh, as if she had secretly been hoping for a different answer.

TWO

Svetlana pushed her way through the crush of people until she spotted Parry.

At the last rotation there were one hundred and forty-five souls on the ship, most of whom had gathered to hear Bella’s announcement. They were plastered around the inside wall of the cylindrical gymnasium, tethered in place with hooks and Velcro and geckoflex and the friction of body on body. The gym — which doubled as a commons and radiation storm shelter — was normally spun to provide centrifugal gravity, but that would have kept Bella from floating into the middle to address the crowd.

“I’m sorry about —” Parry began hesitantly when Svetlana reached him. “You know… that little
thing
earlier. I guess you didn’t need
me
giving you a hard time on top of everyone else.”

“No. Not today.”

“It’s just that we badly wanted to play with our comet, babe.”

“Boys will be boys, I suppose.” She gave him a quick squeeze, letting him know it was all right.

“All ancient history now, though.”

“So Bella tells me. Any idea what this is all about?”

Parry’s concerned expression softened — he knew he was off the hook, for now at least. “Didn’t get a chance to check ShipNet. Was there — ?”

“Nothing. No CNN, no Space.com, no nothing. Guess Bella pulled them.”

“That’s what I figured. The football fans weren’t happy, I can tell you.”

Svetlana tried to look concerned. “They weren’t?”

“Bella pulled the plug on the Kiev game halfway through the shoot-out.”

“The poor darlings.”

Parry scratched his moustache, looking endearingly puzzled. He was a short, stocky man with an open, friendly face, clean-shaven save for the moustache, with a thatch of unruly black hair bursting from underneath his knitted red diver’s cap.

“You think something’s happened there?” he wondered. “An accident, something like that?”

“Don’t think so. I pulled up a system map — we’re on the other side of the Sun from Saturn, so Earth and Jupiter are a
lot
closer. Red could get a ship to Saturn quicker than we could.”

“Clever girl.”

“That’s all I’ve got. I think Bella would have opened up more if Terrier-boy hadn’t been there with her.”

“Maybe we should leave the little shit behind on the comet,” Parry said, voice low. “You know, send him out on an errand, say someone left some paperwork behind. Then forget to pick him up.”

“Unfair to micro-organisms, though. The complex molecules might get upset.”

“Good point, babe. Wouldn’t want to offend those poor, unsuspecting pyrimidines, would we?”

“Absolutely not. Even pyrimidines have feelings.”

Parry looked up as a hush fell across the gymnasium. “Here we go. Guess we’re about to find out what’s got the little lady in such a tizz.”

Bella coughed. “Thanks for your attention,” she said. The pumps had been turned off ahead of schedule so that she could be heard without having to shout. “I’ll keep this brief, since we’ll have a lot to discuss.”

Floating free at the core of the gymnasium, Bella had her arms folded and one leg tucked behind the other. By accident or design, she had retained a slow residual spin so that she faced everyone in the room once a minute.

“Eleven hours ago,” Bella continued, “I received a message from headquarters. The message was — to say the very least — startling. Even more startling was the request that followed. I’ve had half a day to digest this information, and I’m still only starting to get my head around it. I’m afraid the rest of you have even less time.”

Somehow, amongst all the people crammed into the room, Bella managed to spot Svetlana. She made brief eye contact, nodding her head so slightly that the gesture would have been imperceptible to anyone else.

“Once I heard the news,” she went on, “I took an unprecedented step. As some of you will have already realised, I blocked all outside news from ShipNet. I didn’t do this lightly, but please believe it
was
necessary. Shortly after the initial announcement, it became clear the networks were contributing nothing useful to the discussion, and what we need now is clarity —
absolute clarity
— because we have a very difficult decision to make.”

As Bella paused, Svetlana looked around, picking out faces. Tethered near her were Chieko Yamada and Carsten Fleig, from her own flight-operations team, lovers who went everywhere together. A little further around the curve of the gym was Josef Protsenko who, despite looking like a potato farmer, was one of the best mass-driver specialists in the business. There was Reka Bettendorf from EVA ops: one of the three people responsible for checking out suit safety and making sure people didn’t black out because of malfs in the air trimix. There was Judy Sugimoto, from the medical section; she’d taken off her glasses and was rubbing away a smear on one lens against the collar of her smock.

There was Thom Crabtree, the taphead, standing alone and isolated, as always.

None of them looked as if they were in on any secrets. Svetlana turned her attention back to Bella, who was speaking again.

“I’ve talked to my technical team,” Bella was saying, “and they tell me what we’re being asked to do
is
feasible — risky, but feasible. But so is
everything
we do.” Bella closed her eyes, as if she couldn’t quite remember the next line in her script, then took a breath and went on. “Now we get to the difficult part. It concerns Janus, one of Saturn’s moons.”

Svetlana allowed herself a small, guilty flicker of pride. She’d figured that much out, at least.

“Or rather,” Bella interrupted Svetlana’s thoughts, “Janus
used
to be one of Saturn’s moons. Now we have to redefine it. About thirty hours ago, Janus’s orbit began to deviate from its expected trajectory around Saturn.”

People started talking: they couldn’t help it.

Bella held up a hand and waited for silence. “Janus stopped orbiting Saturn,” she said, “and broke away, following what was initially a very sharp course towards ecliptic south, out of the plane of the planets. That didn’t last long, though: after twelve hours, Janus changed direction again, this time turning in the rough direction of Jupiter. The course it’s following is strictly non-Keplerian, which means it isn’t showing any signs of being influenced by the gravitational fields of the Sun or the other planets. All the same, the specialists say they have a good handle on it mathematically. It will miss Jupiter by slightly less than one AU. Assuming that nothing happens during its Jupiter approach, the moon will cross to the other side of the system. By then it’ll be headed out of the ecliptic plane at eleven degrees south, in the direction of the constellation Virgo.”

Bella paused to draw breath, as if even she were having difficulty believing her own words. “Ladies and gentleman,” she continued, “Janus is accelerating. It’s managing around one quarter of a gee. There was no sign of any encounter with another massive body, nor of any natural outgassing mechanism that could even
begin
to explain such behaviour. The simple fact is that it very much looks as if Janus was never a moon in the first place.”

“A ship,” Svetlana said under her breath, along with about half the room.

Parry’s hand tightened around hers. Whatever had happened to sour things between them in the last day was over now, erased into insignificance by this astonishing news.

Bella responded to their murmured speculation. “Yes,” she said, “that does appear to be what we’re dealing with. It even looks as if the icy surface is starting to peel off in wisps, like camouflage. If that continues we might begin to see what’s really underneath.” She smiled at them all. “There’s a problem, though: Janus is getting further and further away, so the view isn’t getting any better.”

“Oh, no,” Svetlana said.

“There’s only one ship in the system in anything like the right position to intercept and shadow Janus on its way out. No prizes for guessing which ship I’m talking about. The plan is we put the pedal to the metal for three weeks. At half a gee, we can meet Janus and still have enough fuel left to shadow it for five days. Then we turn tail and head back home.”

Bella said nothing for another slow rotation of her body, allowing the commons to erupt into noisy questions before speaking again.

“It’s up to us,” she said, raising her voice until the clamour died down. “No other ship in the system, manned or otherwise, can do this.”

Parry raised his voice. People respected Parry Boyce; they fell silent to let him speak.

“This isn’t in our contracts, Bella.”

“Actually, there
is
a clause that covers ‘additional non-specified activities’,” Bella said, “but that doesn’t mean there won’t be compensations. Triple our usual danger bonus, from the moment we commit to chasing Janus until the moment we dock back around Mars, with discretionary rewards on top of that, depending on the conditions near Janus.” She waited a beat, before adding, “That’s a shitload of money, people.”

“Triple our usual danger bonus?” Parry repeated.

“That’s the deal.”

“I’ll buy a nice headstone.”

Bella let them have their laughter. “Parry’s right to mention the danger,” she said, when the room had simmered down. “That’s why this isn’t something I’m going to enforce without a clear mandate. I’m giving you all one hour to think this over. In one hour, report individually to your section chiefs. In ninety minutes the section chiefs will report to me. Based on their findings, I’ll make my decision.” Bella spread her hands. “I wish I could give you more information. I can’t: there isn’t any. I wish I could give you more time, but there isn’t any of that, either. The fuel situation is
tight
.” Bella acknowledged Svetlana again: she had timed the remark with her usual care. “One hour,” she said. “I’m sorry there’s no other way of doing this.”

Bella grabbed a nylon line stretching across the room and began to haul herself towards the wall of the commons. Then she paused and looked back at the gathering. “Oh, before I forget, since I know some of you are dying to find out. It went to Dynamo Kiev, on penalties.”

* * *

Some impulse made Ryan Axford pause on his way to the patient’s bedside. He picked up his flexy from his desk and called up the most recent tomograph of Jim Chisholm’s skull. He stroked his finger against the false-colour image, rotating it so that the intricate three-dimensional structures became clear. The inside of his patient’s skull was now as familiar to Axford as the architecture of his own house, far away on Albemarle Sound. He knew its passages and alcoves, its attic and cellar, its concealed chambers, its cavities, cracks and flaws. He knew its secret monsters.