Pushing Ice (76 page)

Parry reached for a helmet stowed on one of the equipment racks. “I’ll go back for her. Tell the pilot to keep the lander down until the last possible moment. If he has to leave, I’ll carry Bella beyond the wheels.”

“You’ll never get through that half-open door,” Svetlana said. “I’ll go out in one of the emergency suits, same as Bella was wearing. Mike brought some extras aboard the lander, right? It’s the only way.”

“Not going to happen, babe. Don’t want you falling the same way she did.”

“We don’t know what happened yet, which is why one of us has to go back to look. Could be she’s just trapped, or disorientated. She didn’t know Eddytown the way we did.”

Parry held his resolve for a moment longer before giving in. “I’ll sweet-talk the pilot into keeping us grounded for another six minutes. If you haven’t found Bella in three, you turn around and head back. That’s not negotiable.”

Svetlana started removing her Chakri five, ready to slip into an emergency suit as soon as it had assembled itself. She did not care who she elbowed in the process, or even hear the disgruntled noises they made. Barely two minutes later, she was back on the surface, looking for Bella. Retracing the course they had followed before, groaning with the effort of walking through the high-gee zones, heedless of whether or not she was repeating herself enough to provoke the machinery, she found her way back into the admin core, to the jammed door that she had not been able to squeeze through before. Now it was easy.

It did not take long to find her. As Emily had guessed, Bella had fallen not far from the route that the evacuees would have taken from their place of shelter through the admin core to the lander. In the darkness, with all their concentration focused on getting to safety, it did not surprise Svetlana that none of them had noticed the fallen woman, lying amidst the debris and clutter of the depressurised building. As Svetlana put her hand into the space above Bella’s fallen form, she understood instantly what had happened: the field strength was much higher there — three or four gees, easily. One errant footfall into that region of influence and Bella would have been ripped from her feet. She would have hit the ground with calamitous force. The emergency suit was not designed to protect her from that kind of harm. Nor had it.

With great effort, Svetlana dragged Bella’s body back onto the path, without exposing herself to the field gradient. But even then Bella was almost too heavy to carry unassisted. By the time she got her through the jammed lock, Svetlana had passed through every state of exhaustion she had ever experienced and into some strange new landscape of fatigue. Afterwards, she remembered very little of the journey. It was only much later that she learned that Parry had been waiting for her in a Chakri five, ready to carry the two of them back to
Star Crusader
.

Bella was dead. The impact of the fall had driven a piece of debris into her skull like a piton.

But what, Svetlana wondered, did it mean to die on Janus?

Aboard the lander, Svetlana insisted that they must do what they could, no matter how futile it might prove. Bella had died instantly, but even though her suit had been punctured, even though all the breathable air had flashed into vacuum, the trace oxygen in her body would have continued to trigger a damaging cascade of cellular processes. Those processes were continuing even now, still working their harm.

Those last traces of oxygen had to be flushed out; the cellular receptor sites blocked. Moving more by reflex than conscious direction, Svetlana pushed her way to the nearest medical kit and ripped it from the wall. She fumbled it open and tugged out the Frost Angel kit, with its childishly lucid instruction sheet. They’d had better methods of immersion for decades, but the equipment on the lander had barely been touched since the settlement.

Parry took her arm, squeezing it gently. “It’s too late, babe. She’s been under for too long.”

“We can do this.”

He spoke with a calm insistence. “This isn’t the way it’s meant to happen. Frost Angel is for preserving structure before it collapses. In this case the collapse has already happened.”

“Then we don’t allow it to get any worse.”

“I know you want to do all that you can. But we’ve lost this one. Bella would have seen that.”

“Parry,” she said, her temper snapping, “either let go of me or start doing something useful.”

“Babe…”

She shouted now, loud enough that it silenced all other talk in the ship, even against the background of roaring machines. “Parry — listen to me. Fucking
listen
. Bella Lind isn’t dying on my watch. Either accept that or get the fuck out of my way.”

He opened his mouth as if to answer her, but at first nothing came. Then, quietly enough that only she could have heard him, he said, “What do you want me to do?”

She lowered her voice. “Get her out of that suit, quickly. Get her into a hardshell so we can flood it with H2S. And do it
fast
.”

“Okay,” he said, and started moving.

They had her in the suit, flooded with hydrogen sulphide, by the time
Star Crusader
touched down at Crabtree and took aboard the handful of people who hadn’t already left for Underhole via the maglev. The people — as well as the BI robots that had accompanied them to the lander — were all carrying as much as they could salvage from Crabtree’s great arboreta and aquaria. It was pathetic how little they’d be saving — a few twigs from a forest, a few fish if they were lucky — but everyone who had left the city had taken something, often at the expense of their own belongings. Perhaps it was a pointless gesture — perhaps the settlement could never be remade the way it had been until today — but sometimes a gesture was better than nothing, no matter how hopelessly futile it might have been. It was the human thing to do, as Bella had said. The twigs and fish were a promise that whatever happened here, whatever the next few days or weeks had in store, there was still a future. Somewhere else in the Structure, they’d find a way to make Crabtree again, or die trying.

First, though, they had to make it through the next day.

By the time they landed, Wang Zhanmin was ready with the passkey, still hot from the subnuclear fires of its creation. They got their first good look at it as the robots carried it with reverent care aboard the waiting lander. It resembled an insanely complicated piece of abstract sculpture in delicate blown glass: a cylindrical thing the size of a jet turbine, ripe with intertwined pipes and flanges twinkling with chromatic flashes of refracted light, and yet conveying the sense that it was not
quite
all there: clefts and gaps in its elusive shape hinted at missing structures, like a three-dimensional jigsaw with some of the pieces missing. It was only later that Svetlana realised that the Whisperer artefact was made of materials from both sides of the matter gap, and that the missing pieces were in fact fully present, integrated into the whole by gravitomagnetic coupling fields and trans-gap energy ducts, sharing some but not all of the same spatial volume as the visible parts. On any level of analysis, the passkey was at least twice as complex as it appeared. The Whisperers, had any of them been present, would have seen the other half of the machine, and wondered about the ghostly parts intruding into the universe on the human side of the gap.

“I was expecting to deal with Bella,” Wang said, with no apparent rancour, when Svetlana quizzed him about the passkey.

“Bella’s dead,” she told him, the words themselves tasting sordid in her mouth, like something she needed to spit out.

“Can she be saved?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and for the first time she began to wonder if Parry hadn’t been right after all. “We froze her… did all that Axford would have done. Maybe it’s better than nothing.”

“There were times when you must have wished her dead,” Wang said, and all she could do was nod, for the truth of it was unavoidable. Then he added, “But this isn’t one of those times.”

“No,” she said, softly. “It isn’t.”

They left Crabtree, pulling away from the landing pad, thrusting slowly so as not to damage the delicate-looking passkey before it could be properly cushioned and stowed. Through one of the lander’s armoured portholes, Svetlana watched the settlement fall away and below. From the High Hab to the outlying suburban domes, the lights of Crabtree were still burning, as if there were still people down there. It would have been pointless and time-consuming to power-down the community now, given its likely fate. But to Svetlana there was something wrong, something almost disrespectful, about abandoning Crabtree in this way. After all the years that it had sheltered them, it was as if they had all simply tired of it and decided to leave on a whim, before it noticed their absence. Life-support systems were still running, oblivious to the fact that the city’s human burden was now zero. There should have been some ceremony of closure, with all of the colonists turning back for one last solemn nod of thanks before they fled Janus completely.

Even after all this time, it occurred to Svetlana, Crabtree had only begun to feel like home at the moment of its abandonment.

From Crabtree they flew directly to the hole that the Musk Dogs had made and passed through to the other side of the Iron Sky. They traversed an ocean of curving black Spican material until the remains of the Fountainhead embassy came into view, twenty kilometres over Underhole. Every now and then, the black surface lightened perceptibly. From overhead, in the direction of the endcap, stray emissions were still reaching Janus from the next chamber.

They landed at the embassy, using the sole remaining docking connection into the Fountainhead structure. The pillars buttressing the Iron Sky must have been absorbing some of the quakes from within Janus, but it was still trembling under the ship.

“It’s not getting any quieter down there,” Nick Thale said, after he’d checked the latest read-outs on his old flexy. “If we were still in Junction Box, we’d be pinned down by now. We left just in time.”

But they hadn’t left, not really. They were no safer here than they had been underneath the Iron Sky. Sanctuary was still two and half light-minutes away, in the direction of battle.

“Any news on the other evacuees?” Svetlana asked.

“Three hundred and fifty of them are on their way to the end-cap, according to Jim, some of them inside Fountainhead vehicles, the rest squeezed into
Avenger
. We should follow them.”

“We’ll wait for Jim,” Svetlana said.

“I’ve been in touch with him. He said to expect him aboard shortly, and to make room for a guest.”

Svetlana went down to the lander’s cargo airlock. Jim Chisholm was arriving as she got there, removing his glasses to rub condensation from the lenses. He wore no suit, only his usual loose-fitting outfit of nondescript pre-Cutoff origin.

“I hear we have a passkey,” he said, like a man who wanted to get down to business.

“I’ll show you. First, though —” But Svetlana could hardly force out the words. “Something happened, Jim. I’m so sorry.”

He seemed to look through her, as if her soul had become a stained-glass window. “Bella,” he said simply.

“She didn’t make it. She died helping the survivors get out of Eddytown.”

“Nick Thale told me she’d gone inside to help them.”

“She died saving people. She got my daughter out of that place. Even after everything that happened between us, she still did that.”

“Nick told me something else.” He pushed the glasses to the bridge of his nose and looked down at her, over them. “That you went back in to find her.”

“You’d have done the same.”

“The difference is I’ve already died once. You, as far as I’m aware, haven’t yet had the pleasure. That took courage as well, Svetlana.”

“I couldn’t leave her there.”

“Of course you couldn’t. You of all people wouldn’t have been able to do that.”

“Because I hated her?”

“In all the years of enmity, I doubt that you ever stopped feeling some bond of friendship, whether or not either of you would have admitted such a thing.”

Svetlana looked sceptical. “I don’t think so.”

“Then why else did you insist on going back into that building, knowing you might not make it out either?”

Svetlana looked aside sullenly. “It didn’t matter. We’ve frozen her, run the Frost Angel process… but we all know it’s too late. She was hurt really badly, Jim, and she was dead for a long time before we ran the process.”

“They made me good again. Maybe they can do something for her as well.”

At that moment Svetlana felt a spiteful urge to remind him that the aliens had not remade the former Jim Chisholm, but had instead created a chimera of two dead men, of which Chisholm only formed the larger part. The glioblastoma had taken so much of his brain that the aliens had no option but to fill in the missing pieces of his memory and personality with what they could salvage from Craig Schrope. Bella, when she fell, had lost at least as much.

“We should be leaving,” Svetlana said.

He looked out through the window of the cargo lock. “Didn’t Nick mention the other guest?”

Through the window she saw the rolling approach of a Fountainhead travel sphere, with one of the blue-fronded aliens propelling it from within.

“Is that McKinley?” she asked, remembering the alien that had come down for Mike Takahashi’s homecoming party.

“One and the same.”

“I didn’t expect him to come back with you.”

“The Shaft-Five Nexus arrived while you were engaged in Eddytown,” Chisholm said. “They began to turn the tables on the Uncontained.”

“The battle’s still going on.”

“It’s not over yet, but it now looks unlikely that the Uncontained will prevail. Luckily it wasn’t a large contingent, and they’d suffered some attrition during their journey here. McKinley felt it was safe to return here, for now.”

“Are the other Fountaihheads okay?”

“Yes, although that can’t be said for all the elements of the Nexus.”

“But it’s safe to cross into the next chamber?”

“Let’s just say it’s safer and leave it at that, shall we?”