Pushing Ice Read online

  He voiced on some music from the Orlan nineteen’s files and lost himself in the soaring qawwali of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. After what could have been minutes or hours, the floods picked out the moving shadow of another suit lumbering towards him. Whoever it was had just emerged from one of the dome-shaped surface tents set back twenty metres from the rim of the shaft. Beyond the tents sat the angular, splayed-leg form of Cosmic Avenger, the heavy lander that had carried them from Rockhopper.

  Parry tried to read the walker’s gait before his head-up ID’d the approaching figure. Feldman and Shimozu moved with the cautious economy of underwater workers — they’d been transferred from DeepShaft’s marine division on Earth — but Mike Takahashi was a spacewalker to the marrow. Even wearing a thirty-year-old Russian surplus Orlan nineteen, ballasted with nearly a tonne of depleted uranium, he moved with a loping grace, unafraid to lose contact with the surface for long moments.

  The HUD bracketed Takahashi’s nineteen and appended his name in pulsing blue letters, accompanied by a Manga-style face icon.

  “Nice hole, Chief.”

  “Thanks,” Parry said.

  “Thing is, it isn’t going to get any nicer just because you keep staring at it.”

  “I’m thinking it might need another layer,” he said, hands on his hips. “Maybe just a dab down there?”

  Takahashi stood next to him, their bulky shadows spilling into the abyss. The other man favoured glacial Estonian choral music: Parry heard it seeping over the voicelink.

  “We need you inside,” Takahashi said.

  Parry wondered what was up. Takahashi could have called him inside easily enough without making the trek in person.

  “What’s the story?” he asked, as they walked back to the tent.

  “Don’t know. Something’s going down, that’s all. You checked out the ship lately?”

  “A while back.”

  “Maybe you should take another look.”

  Parry cuffed down the binocs again. Rockhopper leapt into view as the Nikons found their focus. Everything looked the same, except that the flicker of repair torches around the head of the driver was absent — nor was there any sign of Svetlana’s hovering figure.

  “Interesting,” he said.

  “Good or bad?”

  Parry stowed his binocs. “Could go either way.” He reached for the tent flap and pulled it wide enough to admit the two men.

  The tent was unpressurised: a stiffened dome-shaped shelter, fabric wired with superconducting mesh to afford the bare minimum of protection against charged particles. Gillian Shimozu and Elias Feldman sat either side of a plastic packing crate, playing cards spread across the lid. The cards, some faded and crudely redrawn in magic marker, were printed on thick, texturised plastic, better for handling with spacesuit gloves.

  The four suits exchanged protocols with a warble.

  “Still time to deal you in,” Shimozu said, looking up as Parry sealed the flap behind them.

  “I’ll pass.” Behind Shimozu, balanced on a bright-red oxygen pump, a flexy showed a picture of Saturn, with the blue logo of China Daily in the top-left corner.

  “Spoilsport,” Shimozu said, taking a card from the table.

  “Any word from Batista or Fletterick? There are signs we might be in business,” Parry said.

  Feldman lowered his hand, revealing a set of aces. “The driver?”

  “Looks like work’s been called off. Unless Saul’s managed to swing shift changes for his robots, it’s got to mean we have a functioning deployment system.”

  “Whoop-de-doo,” Shimozu said. She had her antiglare visor tipped down: its near-matte coating blocked any possible reflection from the cards in her hand.

  “You could tone down the enthusiasm a smidge,” Parry said. “I’ll ask again: any word?”

  Takahashi pointed at the screen. “Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with the driver at all. They were showing Saturn just now.”

  “That why you pulled me in?” Parry asked.

  “I thought it was weird. Why show Saturn?”

  “Batista and Fletterick,” Parry said patiently. “Anyone?”

  “Maybe there’s been an accident,” Takahashi said, wonderingly. The other two had dealt him into the game, but he appeared to be more interested in the screen behind Shimozu. “Anyone know how to get that feed on my helmet?”

  “Use your drop-down menu,” Feldman said testily, as if he’d been over this before. “Select preferences, then HUD audiovisual display options, then —”

  Parry walked past the game to the oxygen pump and picked up the flexy, squeezing it gently so as not to injure the quasi-living thing. The main image was still Saturn, but now a pundit in an overlaid box was talking. Nobody he recognised. Chinese text ticker-taped along the bottom of the screen.

  Maybe Takahashi was right. Maybe something was happening around Saturn. But what could be big enough to hold the attention of China Daily this long? The major newsfeeds made Bella Lind’s fish look like masters of sustained concentration.

  That was when his HUD rearranged itself spontaneously, a priority window popping open, filled with Bella’s face.

  “Parry,” she said. ‘Thank goodness. I was beginning to think we’d need to send Crusader to pick you up. It appears that the repair squad cut through the power bus to the downlink.“

  “Hope you give them hell.”

  “Ordinarily I would, but… now isn’t the time.”

  No one said anything. They were waiting for Parry to speak for them. The cards were on the table.

  “What’s up, Bella?”

  “Something big,” she said, “big enough that I’m going to need you back on the ship, and quickly. But before you leave, I want the driver shaft prepped to accept an FAD.”

  “We don’t need to chip anything off this one, Bella. She’ll fall nice and stable all the way home.”

  “I’m not talking about reshaping,” she said. “I’m talking about blowing it out of the sky.”

  * * *

  Svetlana Barseghian dabbed bright-green disinfectant onto the pressure sores around her groin, then snapped a dosimeter cuff from her wrist and checked that the mission dosage was still on the low side of four hundred millisieverts. She pulled on jogging pants and a black Lockheed-Krunichev Fusion Systems T-shirt, jammed stained grey sneakers on her feet and raked a hand through hair flat and itchy after the spacewalk.

  She pushed in a pair of pink ear protectors, muting the background noise. Except for the two hours a day when they turned off most of the machines, it was noisier in Rockhopper than in the Orlan eighteen.

  A warren of interconnecting corridors brought her to the number-two centrifuge. When she reached Bella’s office she saw that Craig Schrope was already there. She reminded herself to be on her best behaviour.

  Bella invited her in, pushed a cigarette into an ashtray and said something to Svetlana. Her lips were moving but no sound was coming out — Svetlana realised that she still had the ear protectors in. She popped them out and squeezed them back into their little plastic case, then secured it against the Velcro band of her jogging pants.

  “Sorry.”

  “I was suggesting you might want to take a seat,” Bella said nicely. She waited patiently until Svetlana was settled on a lightweight folding chair.

  Bella’s soundproofed and carpeted office was the largest private space in the ship; it doubled as her sleeping quarters. The walls were pastel-grey, papered here and there with false-colour seismic survey maps: grainy images of shipwrecks and coral reefs grabbed during scuba expeditions. The only fixture that never changed was Bella’s fish tank, all five hundred litres of it.

  Schrope hated the fish tank, Svetlana knew. It was a rule-twisting indulgence, exactly the kind of thing he’d made so many enemies stamping out on Big Red. Terrier-boy, they called him back there. Word was DeepShaft had put Schrope aboard Rockhopper to get him as far away from Mars as possible.

  He sat there now, next to Bel
la, behind the same desk — the one Jim Chisholm should have been sitting behind — twirling a company ballpoint pen and looking pleased with himself.

  “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.”