Pushing Ice (77 page)

They let McKinley aboard, squeezing the travel sphere into the last available space in the lander’s already overcrowded cargo bay. Then they pulled away from the embassy, accelerating hard away from the Iron Sky until it became nothing more than a black circle falling away beneath them, back-dropped by the distant orange light of the shaft.

“You must have come here in a Fountainhead ship,” Svetlana said, as she showed Chisholm to the passkey. “Why aren’t we leaving in one? Wouldn’t it be faster?”

“McKinley thought about that and suggested it might be better if the Musk Dogs continued to believe that this was a purely human evacuation vehicle, with no Fountainhead presence.”

“Apart from McKinley, it is.”

“Not quite. When you landed, McKinley attached something to the lander’s hull. It’s small enough that the Musk Dogs won’t see it until much too late, if at all, but it’ll make quite a difference to our ability to overtake them.”

“What did he do?”

“Loosely speaking, he bolted a small frameshift drive onto
Star Crusader
. It’s a human invention, so don’t feel bad about that. Chromis would have given the technology to Bella sooner or later, I’m sure of it.”

“A frameshift drive.” She remembered that the Musk Dogs had promised her something like that, in return for further negotiations. More teasing lies, she now realised.

“Like I said, it’s only a small one: not enough to go gallivanting around the galaxy, but certainly enough to make a difference to the acceleration this lander can sustain, with its engines cranked to maximum.”

She thought of the Musk Dogs, still somewhere between Janus and the endcap door. “Why do we need to overtake them?”

“Because they’ll be hoping we don’t make it through the door ahead of them.”

“They’ve already lost, if you’ve got the Uncontained under control.”

Chisholm looked pained. “I didn’t say we had them under control, just that things were going more our way than theirs. The arrival of the Musk Dogs — let’s assume that we can regard them as strategic allies of the Uncontained, at least until Janus blows up — would be a complication we could really live without.”

“So what’s your plan?”

“My plan is punishment,” Chisholm said.

They reached the passkey. Chisholm ran his hand over the glass intricacy of the Whisperer instrument, as if luxuriating in the erotic contact between skin and sleekly transparent machinery. Once, his fingers strayed into one of the absences where it appeared more machinery should have been crammed and he withdrew them sharply, as if he had touched live wires or hot water. But the passkey was cool now — cool enough to chill flesh, as if in some arcane way it was self-refrigerating. It had survived transportation from the forge vat to the lander (so far as Svetlana could tell) and was now mounted on a rigid framework of perforated spars, hastily adapted from the kind of cradle that would have held a FAD warhead.

“I can tell you one thing,” Chisholm said, looking back at Svetlana. “It looks real. If it isn’t a functioning key, it’s a damn good imitation.”

“Now tell me it works.”

“We really won’t know whether it works until we see a measurable result at the endcap.”

“How do we operate the thing?”

“Point and click, really. Just like a garage-door opener, only the garage is more than two light-minutes away and the door’s wide enough to drive Madagascar through in one piece. Otherwise… piece of cake.”

“If it works.”

“Yes,” he said, as if the remote possibility of failure had only just occurred to him. “There is that.”

“The Musk Dogs must have their own passkey, right? How else would they hope to close the door after them?”

“The Musk Dogs or the Uncontained.”

“So why haven’t they used it yet? Bella said we’d need to start closing the door before we got there. Doesn’t the same thing apply to the Musk Dogs?”

“They aren’t close enough yet. If they started the closure now, the door would be shut tight before they got there. Not clever, even by their standards.”

“So why not just wait until they’re safe and sound on the other side?”

“That would involve taking too much of a risk of Janus blowing first. They’ll be aiming to time it very tightly indeed.”

“And us?”

“We’ll just have to do better.”

Chisholm took hold of one heavy end of the machinery and applied a firm twist to it. Along lines of separation Svetlana had not even noticed, one part of the passkey rotated against another. Like some cunningly assembled puzzle, the shape of the thing altered out of all proportion to the change in orientation of the two pieces. A lemon-yellow glow spread through the glass whiskers and intestinal coils, edged in blue wherever it met the abrupt disjunctions between different matter phases. The passkey trembled, as if it sought to break free from its cradle.

“It’s working now?” Svetlana asked, astonished.

Chisholm touched a finger to his lips and whispered, “Almost. One more twist and it’ll be active, transmitting the closure command. We’ll have to point the lander in the right direction: it’s putting out a very narrow beam and if it doesn’t touch the endcap receptors, nothing will happen.”

“A very narrow beam of
what
?”

“I’d love to explain,” Chisholm said, with no hint of condescension, “but unfortunately we don’t have all day.”

Svetlana let him get on with it.

There was nothing elegant or subtle about his intentions for the Musk Dogs. His plan depended solely on guile and misdirection: the hope that the Musk Dogs would pay insufficient attention to an apparently human vehicle making a feeble attempt to reach the next chamber before Janus went up. The only other thing in his favour was the expectation that the Musk Dogs would do nothing overtly hostile, even at this late stage in developments. If they had been pressed on the matter by the other agencies in the Shaft-Five Nexus, the Musk Dogs would have expressed bemused and plausible ignorance about the transformation of Janus into an instrument of escape. Given all that he had learned of the Musk Dogs through McKinley and the other aliens, he knew the parameters of their slyness. They would claim that they had only ever been trying to tap Janus for energy, in accordance with the agreement they had negotiated with the human population. They would claim that they had been as surprised as anyone when their innocent tinkerings appeared to set the moon on a course for violent self-destruction. Of course they were trying to reach safety — what else were they to do? If it had been within their means to help the poor, beleaguered humans…

It was all lies, but the Musk Dogs had scraped through on lies before: it was one of the reasons they were so tricky to deal with. But if they were to keep up the pretence of innocence, they could not afford to take hostile action against
Star Crusader
while the rest of the Shaft-Five Nexus was watching events.

Which was why
Star Crusader
was able to slip past the gristleship before the Musk Dogs paid due attention to its unusual rate of acceleration. But by then it was too late.

Jim Chisholm made the final alteration to the passkey. The passkey shone a rich brassy gold and shook so violently that it looked about to shatter into a billion twinkling shards. Somehow, it didn’t. Since there was no means of pointing the delicate instrument within the lander, Chisholm directed
Star Crusader
to shut down its engines just long enough for the whole lander to be used to aim the passkey’s beam towards the distant target of the endcap receptors.

There was a minute of gnawing anxiety before word came back from the Fountainheads that the door had begun to close. After that, it was just a question of making it through the narrowing gap in time. Svetlana could not find the self-discipline to sit around waiting for that to happen. Instead, she joined McKinley by the suited, frozen form of her old friend and former adversary.

“I did what I could,” she said plaintively. “Perhaps you can undo some of the damage…”

Even though he remained within his travel sphere, McKinley must have had some means of peering inside the suit, into Bella’s damaged, pierced skull. His tone, when he answered Svetlana, offered little consolation. “You did the right thing. It’s always better to try and fail than not to try. But the damage to the orbitofrontal cortex is grave.”

“Too grave for you to fix?”

“You can’t put together a mind with guesswork. You may resurrect someone, but it won’t be the person you used to know.”

“We’ve lost too many people today, McKinley. I don’t want to lose another.”

“You risked yourself to bring her back. Whatever debt you owed her, whatever debt she owed you… I’d hazard that the slate may now be considered clean.”

She peered through the glass shell at the mass of swishing blue-green tendrils inside. “You’re good at this, McKinley.”

“Good at what?”

“Sounding human, making all the right noises. You’ve been learning ever since you met us, and you’ve got better at it with every passing day. But sometimes I don’t think you understand what makes us tick at all.”

“I understand that you value existence over non-existence,” McKinley said. “We have that much in common, at the very least. Take it from me: it can’t be said for all the cultures you’ll meet in the Structure.”

“If that’s meant to be reassuring —”

“It isn’t.”

She closed her eyes and drew in a deep, weary breath. “I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful. It’s just… she used to be my friend. A lot happened between us, but not so much that I don’t want her back in the world.”

“I’m sorry,” McKinley said, soothingly. “I wish there was something we could do. But organised structure is the most precious thing in the universe. When it is lost, it is truly lost.”

A little later, Svetlana left Bella and the alien and climbed through the innards of the lander until she reached an inspection porthole, far enough from the other people to allow her a measure of solitude. She stared back along the route they had already flown, trying to make out the distant, dark speck of Janus against the dull orange lining of the shaft. They had overtaken the Musk Dogs now, gunning the pocket frameshift drive to the limit of its capabilities. The Musk Dog ship was just visible several thousand kilometres to stern: a tangle of gristle backlit by the glow of its own arcane propulsion system. The Musk Dogs, too, were pushing their ship to the limit: so much so that entire chunks of the gristleship were falling off, leaving a radar-trackable trail of fatty gobbets and meat-wrapped shards of broken machinery.

That same radar also revealed that the Musk Dogs were losing the race to reach the endcap. The door ahead of
Star Crusader
was closing with perilous speed, swiftly enough that Svetlana had cause to doubt the accuracy of Chisholm’s timing.

She needn’t have worried.

Just after
Star Crusader
passed through the narrowing end-cap, Jim Chisholm asked her permission to send a message back to the gristleship.

“Why?” she asked, frowning.

“It’s a matter of form,” he explained. “Doing things by the book is terribly important to the Nexus.”

It was simple to arrange and she had no objections. She had the transmission piped through to everyone on the ship, so that they could all hear what Chisholm had to say to the Musk Dogs. Once again a silence fell across the evacuees.

It was not something she would soon forget.

“This is James Henry Chisholm, human representative of the Shaft-Five Nexus, speaking to The One That Negotiates. In a very short while, you and the other Musk Dogs on your vessel will die. If you are not killed by the detonation of Janus, you will die when you are intercepted by the surviving elements of the Nexus, in punishment for crimes against a client species of that same Nexus, and for negligent actions that permitted the recent incursion by hostile elements of the Uncontained. This decision has been reached unanimously by Nexus tribunal, and is not open to appeal. However, since the Nexus is not without compassion, it has been agreed that you may transmit a final message into our safekeeping; This message will be archived until such time as we encounter any other Musk Dog parties, or specified alien third parties that you may designate as the intended recipient. No restriction will be placed on the message content, and we will continue recording until the moment of loss of contact.” Chisholm inserted a judicial pause before ending his statement. “We will be listening. If we do not detect a return transmission on this frequency within five Nexus standard time units, as measured by our clocks, we will assume that no message will be forthcoming.”

When he was done, Svetlana asked him how long five Nexus standard time units was.

“Just under three minutes,” he said.

Three minutes passed with no word from the Musk Dogs, then four, then five. During the sixth minute, the radar witnessed something catastrophic happen to the gristleship. Stressed beyond the limits of its own structural integrity, it broke into two huge tumbling pieces.

It stopped accelerating. Only in the seventh minute, as the endcap door was almost sphinctering shut, was a fragment of signal detected on the return frequency. Svetlana had it played over the same shipwide speaker. It was a horrible wet, phlegmatic sound, like something being strangled and drowned at the same time. Then Janus went up.

Cams on the inner wall of the Structure caught much of the show and sent images up the shaft towards the lander until the blast scoured them out of existence. For an instant, the detonation shone through the skyholes in two lancing beams of cruel white energy. Then the Iron Sky gave way, shattering into a thousand black shards as it could no longer dam the upwelling energy of the moon’s end.

The endcap door had narrowed to within a few hundred metres of closure when the blast hit. A sharp needle of cruel intensity pushed through the tightening circle in the middle of the irising door, the pure white radiance stained with the trace elements of the dying gristleship.

Then the door snapped shut.

FORTY