Pushing Ice (37 page)

In one direction, the line curved away to the horizon. In the other, it vanished into a blocky, ice-covered chunk of Spican machinery the size of an office block. Where there was no ice build-up, the lava lines were observed to float just above the underlying machinery, unsupported except at the point where they entered or left the interior of Janus. Robots had been sent under the lines, but had detected no peculiar field effects.

Ahead, something was wrong with the line. Instead of following a customarily straight or gently curving trajectory, the line suddenly kinked, veering to one side at almost a right angle. After the kink, there was something subtly amiss with the line: the orange had taken on a pink tinge, and the diameter of the fiery tube was pinched. It looked stressed, like something about to snap.

Svetlana allowed Thale to step ahead of her and lead the way, traversing the path that the line would have followed were it not for the kink.
Don’t straighten out now
, she thought.

“Nothing’s come out to fix it,” he said. “Maybe it’s on a to-do list somewhere inside Janus, or maybe it just doesn’t know or care about this one breakdown.”

“Ice did this?” Parry asked.

“Ice and rock,” Thale said. “Sometime when Janus was parked around Saturn, a piece of chondrite rubble must have splatted onto the ice. When this part of the shelf collapsed, it took the boulder with it. The boulder smashed into the lava line just as a transit was passing.”

Parry and Thale had been doing most of the talking since their departure, filling awkward silences with a strained attempt at small-talk. Thale and Svetlana still didn’t see eye to eye, despite his release from custody and the grudging changes Svetlana had made to the terms of Bella’s exile.

Six years into the human settlement of Janus, the wounds were still raw. For months on end the colonists would muddle along as if the old grievances were history. For many of them — with their marriages and children — that was the case. But a few could not leave the past alone. Every now and then, something would happen to remind Svetlana that the crisis on
Rockhopper
had not been forgotten; would never be forgotten. Even if the troublemakers had no intention of changing the political situation in Crabtree, there were still scores to be settled.

Most of the time, their actions never went beyond threats and intimidation, but occasionally something more significant happened. Every apparently accidental death on Janus had to be examined in the light of past events. Meredith Bagley had been the latest unfortunate victim. She’d been working on routine centrifuge repair, squeezed deep inside the drive mechanism, when the centrifuge started up. The preliminary investigation revealed that certain safety interlocks had not been set, implying that she’d been in too much of a hurry to get the job finished.

Meredith Bagley had been known as a conscientious and thorough worker, but there was also the matter of what she had done on
Rockhopper
. When Bella had gone behind Svetlana’s back to check the sweatbox numbers on the fuel tanks, she had done so with Bagley’s visible assistance. Svetlana’s allies had viewed it as a kind of treachery. Most of them had forgiven Bagley by now — she’d been young, newly rotated aboard the ship and consequently unlikely to refuse a direct order — and most were content simply to give her the cold shoulder. But that still left the possibility of a small core of loyalists who might feel that Bagley hadn’t been adequately punished. Loyalists who thought they were obeying Svetlana’s private wishes. Already there were rumours that she wasn’t exactly displeased with the outcome.

More than likely the death was exactly what it looked like: an accident rather than murder. Even good workers cut corners when they were behind schedule with someone shouting at them to get the centrifuge up and spinning again. But even the slightest suggestion of murder could not be discounted. The Judicial Apparatus had to look into all the angles before it closed the book.

Bagley was just one case. Every accidental death was investigated with the same diligence. Likely suspects were brought to the High Hab and quizzed. No one liked it, and it certainly wasn’t helping to erase the old divisions, but it wasn’t the duty of the judiciary to bury the past.

Dealing with men like Thale didn’t make it any easier, either. He’d nailed his colours to the mast pretty clearly when he tried to spring Bella from prison. No doubt where
his
loyalties lay, Svetlana thought acidly. But no one else on Janus had spent more time studying the lava lines than Nick Thale, and the knowledge he had accumulated was simply too valuable to lose by shutting him away.

Not for the first time, Svetlana was grateful to have Parry around — he was the one crew member no one had a problem with. The Lind loyalists knew that he’d been generous to Bella, so they forgave him his choice of wife. Even Nick Thale appeared relaxed in his presence; far more so than when he was forced to deal with Svetlana.

But in spite of her husband’s comforting presence, Svetlana would still be glad when this particular expedition was concluded.

They could see the transit now, stalled a little further along the lava line from the kink. It was the first time she had seen one up close: normally they were moving too fast for the human eye to follow. Knocked off its course by the boulder, this transit had come to an abrupt halt, lodged against a chunk of protruding machinery. The transit’s outward form was very simple: a pair of thick coin-shaped endplates, floating independently of each other, with the “cargo” trapped inside a suspension field stretched between the inner faces of the end-plates. But this transit was damaged, bent out of shape by the impact — the endplates were twisted at an angle to each other. The stressed, constricted lava line had broken up into fingerlike tubes, playing over the endplates like Saint Elmo’s fire and etching a weird pattern of bronze-coloured erosion into their pewter-grey surface. Beyond the transit, the line kinked back onto something resembling its original path.

The broken transit had spilled its cargo. The suspension field was still active — a flickering, writhing cylinder between the endplates — but the freight had escaped from its confinement through some point of weakness on the nearside. Plates, coils and tubes of dull material lay scattered in a fan-shaped pattern on the ice, like an eruption of entrails through a hernia. “You think we can just… take it?” Parry asked, when they had come to a halt, the toes of their boots only a few metres from the edge of the cargo.

“My guess is nothing will stop us,” Thale said. “When the ice thins out, maybe this stuff will be reabsorbed into the normal machinery. Or maybe it’ll just form a garbage layer on top, like dead skin.”

Parry fiddled with his helmet visor, snicking glare filters in and out. “No other transits have come out on this line?”

“Not since the boulder came down. There was never much traffic on this one anyway — maybe one or two transits a week. If they’ve been re-routed onto other networks, we’d have a hard time spotting the difference.”

“Any idea what the stuff is made of?”

“Difficult call unless we take some of it back to Wang’s lab.”

“It looks like metal,” Parry said. “Lead, or something. My suit isn’t picking up any rise in the background rads, so I guess it probably isn’t radioactive.”

“Or the suit’s faulty,” Svetlana said.

“Yeah, that too.” Parry managed a gallows laugh. “You think we should try to take some back now?”

“I’d rather we sent in the robots first,” Thale said. “If this is some kind of trap or set-up, or if the materials turn out to be toxic — better to let
them
take the risk.”

“I don’t know if Saul can spare any robots for a few days,” Parry said.

“C’mon,” Thale said, his tone sceptical, “is it really that bad? I thought that was just the party line, to keep us knuckled down.”

“It’s worse,” Parry said.

In the last few months, breakdowns and accidents had thinned the robot pool to a dangerous low. Complex artefacts such as microprocessor boards needed equally complex blueprints, specified down to atomic scales. For most of their machines, no such blueprints existed. Wang was doing his best, combining the vat’s built-in library files with a certain amount of reverse engineering, but so far he hadn’t come up with much that actually worked.

“You must be able to pull some strings, though.” Thale pointed at the strewn cargo. “This is raw material. It’s what we’ve been waiting for.”

“I’ll see what Saul can spare you.”

“We don’t have to wait for Saul,” Svetlana said. “There isn’t time. We need to know if this stuff is any good, and if it is we need a strategy for stealing more of it.” And then she walked forward.

“Svieta —” Parry began.

But she was already on her knees, pushing her gloves into the ice under the nearest dark-grey slab. “Feels okay,” she said. “My fingers aren’t tingling or anything weird. It just feels like a chunk of metal… really hard. It’s moving, I think.” She whistled. “Fuck, it’s heavy — must be denser than anything we use.”

Parry and Thale stood either side of her, caught between fascination and alarm. She heaved at the slab until it lurched free from the ice in which it had buried itself. It came up easily then, although it still felt heavier in her hands than anything she had ever handled under Janus’s gravity. “Feels like a slab of concrete, or something. I don’t want to even think about what this would weigh under a gee. We’ve got to be talking tonnes.”

“Be careful with it,” Thale said. “It’ll still have inertia. If you drop it on your foot, you
will
feel it.”

“Gather up some of this stuff,” she ordered. “We’ll load as much of it into
Crusader
as we can take. And keep an eye on your Sheng boxes.”

They were nervous at first, like children stealing apples from an orchard. But after three or four trips to the lander, following a different path each time to avoid tripping the route-repetition alarms retrofitted on their suits, it began to dawn on them that Janus simply did not care what they did with the spilled cargo. Only a certain disquiet about getting too close to the containment field prevented them from removing the entire catch. That would have to be a job for the robots, when they could be spared.

Back in the lander, as it carried them aloft with tonnes of grey treasure in its hold, they couldn’t suppress an elated feeling of breakthrough. Svetlana put in a call to the crèche and said hello to her daughter, who was busy finger-painting with Danny Mair. Danny and Emily were about the same age, and appeared to communicate on some channel incomprehensible to adults as they explored new parameters of messiness. Emily held her latest creation up to the cam: yellow and orange smudges that might have been flowers, a smear of blue along the top that might have been sky.

She had never seen sky or flowers.

Svetlana wanted to cry, but she kept it together. Then she called Denise Nadis and told her to prepare for their arrival.

“As soon as we’re down I want Wang on the case,” she said. “We have power now, and all the ice we can use. For once we may even have materials.”

“It’s good,” Parry said, when she had finished the call, “but let’s not get carried away with this. We scored lucky this time — maybe. But we can’t expect something like this to drop into our laps every week.”

“That’s up to us,” she said. “Janus has shown us a way. Now all we have to do is copy it. If nature can do that to a lava line, so can we.”

Thale opened his mouth a crack, but said nothing.

“What’s up, Nick?” she asked, missing nothing. “You don’t think we should take what’s there to be taken?”

“I’m not one of those idiotic cultists,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything sacred about this place. It’s a fucking
machine
. On the other hand, I’m enough of a rationalist to believe we ought to be careful about provoking a reaction.”

“I didn’t notice any reaction back there.”

“Maybe we weren’t poking hard enough. Start dropping bombs on the lava lines and maybe you’ll cross that threshold.”

She shook her head, disgusted by his timidity. “Perhaps it’s me, but I don’t remember giving permission for Janus to pull us away from home. We’ve been pussyfooting around too long. It’s time to start making this place work for us.”

“You always did think like an engineer, Svieta.”

She nodded. It was only hours later that she realised he had not necessarily meant it as a compliment.

* * *

One day, halfway into the seventh year, Ryan Axford called Svetlana to the medical centre. He had offered no explanation for the summons, but Axford would not have troubled her without excellent cause. Her contact with him had grown sporadic since Emily’s birth, even more so since the passing of Jim Chisholm, but she still placed complete faith in his professionalism. The medical centre was a different place now that Chisholm was gone. Busier than ever — the influx of the children saw to that — but Svetlana could feel the absence where Chisholm had been. He had spent so much time in this place that he had left a kind of psychic imprint on the surroundings.

“What is it?” she asked when Axford had closed the door behind her.

“You asked to be told,” he said. She looked at him blankly. “Told what?”

“If there was any change.”

“Any change in
what
?” she snapped, a little exasperated now.

Axford’s thin, timeworn face conveyed amusement. “You barely remember, do you? He’s been up here so long, never changing —”

Her jaw fell. “Craig?”

For a moment, boyish enthusiasm stripped away the years and she glimpsed something of the younger Axford. “He’s coming out of it, Svieta. After all this time, I saw something human in there today. I think there’s hope after all.”

“Is he talking?”

“The odd word, a sentence now and then. More than we ever expected — or hoped.”

Svetlana was surprised at how glad she felt. She had never seen eye to eye with Schrope on
Rockhopper
, and Schrope’s strategic alignment with her cause had been so transparently self-motivated that it had done little to improve her respect for him. But what Schrope had become since then was so pitiable that she could not help but feel sympathy for him. “What happened?” she asked.