Pushing Ice Read online

“Well, let’s not the jump the gun,” Bella said. “We may decide we’re not going anywhere. Or have you reached a collective decision while you were waiting for me?”

  The team chiefs glanced at each other, but no one volunteered to speak for the group. Bella looked at Parry Boyce. His people were the workers who actually had to crawl into comets, taking core samples and figuring out the best way to anchor the unwieldy mass driver if a comet turned out to be worth steering home. They were tough; they formed the largest and most volatile element of the crew.

  Beneath his red diver’s cap, Parry’s open and friendly face gave nothing away.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “I’ve a small majority in favour of chasing Janus,” he said, “split down aquatic and orbital lines, with a narrow win for the orbitals.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we should do it. I think it’s madness, but I still think we should do it.”

  “You had high hopes for this comet,” Bella said.

  “There’ll be others. There may never be another Janus.” She thought Parry was done, his verdict delivered, but after a moment he spoke again. “We still want guarantees. We want that triple-bonus agreement in writing. We want it paid even if something prevents us from catching up with Janus.”

  “We’ll have to be under way before I have any of that confirmed,” Bella said.

  “Fine. But if we don’t like the terms when they’re rubber-stamped, we turn the ship around.”

  “Acceptable to me,” Bella said, before Schrope could contradict her.

  “That means no company horseshit in the small print.”

  “Fine. Anything else?”

  “Just a bit.” He handed her his own flexy. Bella stared at the numbers Parry had blocked in: a sliding scale of danger terms, linked to proximity to Janus, far exceeding the bonus she had offered in the gymnasium. “It’s all nonnegotiable,” he added.

  Wordlessly, Bella passed the flexy to Schrope, who glanced down at it and pulled a sour expression.

  “You’re talking about terms that will bankrupt the company.”

  “It’s the company’s call,” Parry said easily. “If they feel Janus is worth our time, they’d better be ready to pay for it.”

  “If you bankrupt the company, you won’t have jobs to go back to when we get home,” Schrope said.

  “The idea is that we won’t need jobs,” Parry said.

  Bella scraped grit from her eyes. “You should listen to Craig,” she said. “This isn’t only about the company. We just happen to be the one ship with a chance of doing this. The fact that there’s a company logo on the side doesn’t matter. We’re representatives of the entire human species.”

  Parry laughed at her. They all laughed at her. She felt like a child in a roomful of adults, coming out with something I and touching.

  “I’m serious,” she said, feeling her cheeks redden.

  Parry shrugged. “So are we. Deadly bloody serious.”

  “Parry did the sums,” said Denise Nadis, the head of mass-driver operations. “In accountancy terms we’re still a blip. No one’s coming out of this bankrupt.”

  Bella sighed, knowing there was no point fighting this one. She looked around at all the other chiefs. “Let’s hear your piece, Denise.”

  Nadis leaned forward on the robot arm she had picked for a support. She was thirty-one, a small, intense black woman with long purple fingernails that she somehow managed to keep intact despite being one of the best teleoperators on the ship. She had a nose stud, eyebrow ring and tribal tattoos, worn as a tribute to her late grandmother. “My people overwhelmingly say no,” she said. “We push ice. It’s what we do, what we came here to do. But if we have to accept — if the final result is ‘yes’ — then we’ll expect the same terms that Parry’s proposing.”

  Bella turned to the bald man sitting next to Nadis: Nick Thale, the unassuming head of remote cometary geoscience.

  Thale’s small but dedicated team used remote-sensing techniques — radar, lasers, spectroscopy — to survey comets from a distance of many light-seconds.

  “We say go for it,” he said. “My team would actually kill for the chance to turn their expertise onto something other than another dirty snowball. If you can get us close to Janus, we’re confident that we can do some real science for once.”

  “Good,” Bella said.

  “We do, however, want a modifier to Parry’s terms.” Thale glanced at the other man. “In general we find the terms he’s suggesting acceptable. Our quibble is with the clause for surface conditions. As soon as surface operations commence, we demand that everyone is paid at the same rate, irrespective of whether they’re in a suit or not.”

  “You call that a quibble?” Bella said.

  “As Denise pointed out,” Thale said, “no one’s going to lose any money over this.”

  “I don’t like it,” Parry said, turning to the other man. “Nick, I know your people are good at their work, but it won’t be any of your guys sweating in a fucked-up Orlan nineteen when we reach Janus.”

  “Those are the conditions you work under anyway,” Thale said. “If Janus reacts we’ll all have to deal with it.”

  “We could use a little less speculation,” Schrope said.

  “Right now speculation’s the only game in town.” Thale shifted on his perch. “Here’s another thing, too. Whatever happens when we get to Janus, it isn’t going to be the usual drill. We won’t be running core samples or scouting out locations to attach a driver, so why assume that Parry’s people are automatically the ones best suited to go crawling over the thing? The one thing we know about Janus is that it isn’t a comet.”

  Parry started to interject, but Bella cut him off. “Parry’s people have the most experience at EVA,” she said.

  “But there isn’t a person on this ship who hasn’t been trained in basic suit functions,” Thale said. “Face it: we’ll be dealing with an environment completely unfamiliar to all of us. It seems to me that we’ll be making a terrible mistake if we don’t make maximum use of our scientists.”

  “By putting them in suits, you mean?” Bella asked.

  “I’m just saying I don’t think it should be a foregone conclusion who gets to wear those suits.”

  “It isn’t,” Bella said, “and nor is it a foregone conclusion that there’ll even be surface operations. Maybe once we get a close look at this thing I’ll decide not to send people out at all.”

  “What about robots?” asked Saul Regis. “Do robots count as surface operations?”

  “Saul,” Bella said, with a straight face, “please don’t tell me you want danger money for the robots now?”

  Regis answered in his usual borderline autistic monotone. “I mean we should all be on Parry’s maximum rate of pay even if we only send robots into the vicinity of Janus. Robots are just as likely to provoke a hostile reaction as people.”

  “Robots — and people, for all I know — have crawled over Janus in the past. They didn’t provoke any kind of reaction.”

  “Janus was hiding then. It isn’t now.”

  “Maybe we’ll all go onto danger money as soon as we look at Janus,” Bella said, tired of arguing. “Or as soon as we dream about it. Maybe we should be on danger money now, just because we’re debating the faint possibility of going there.” There was a chorus of objections, but she shouted them down. “Svetlana, say your piece.”

  “You’ve already heard it. There’s no technical reason why we can’t make this trip.”

  “And your people?”

  “The majority support the Janus operation.”

  Bella wasn’t surprised. Svetlana’s people were engineers, all with an interest in spacecraft design and propulsion. Of course they wanted a close look at Janus.

  “And you?”

  Bella watched a flicker of uncertainty cross Svetlana’s face, as if she had made up her mind, but had just been stricken by renewed doubts. “Yes,” she said, tentatively. “I think
we should go, despite all the risks.”

  “And you’re still happy about the engine output, and the stress loading?”

  “I can’t guarantee anything,” Svetlana said. “All I can give you is probability.”

  “Spoken like a true engineer,” Bella said resignedly.

  “Thank you. And the balance of probabilities is that the ship will hold together, although they may have to scrap it when we get back home.”

  “That’s somebody else’s problem,” Bella said. “All right: anything else to add?”

  “I’d like to check the numbers on the fuel.”

  “Absolutely — I’d insist on it.” Bella turned to face Ash Murray, the head of EVA technical support. He wore a denim shirt open over a yellow T-shirt printed with the ship’s drilling-penguin mascot. Murray’s team was the smallest on the ship, but one of the most essential.

  “You want to go crawling over Janus, we’ll supply the fucked-up Orlan nineteens,” Murray said, looking pointedly at Parry Boyce.

  Bella nodded, knowing that was as close to a “yes” as she was going to get.

  That left Axford and his medical team. “Ryan,” she said pleasantly. Axford was a man she liked and trusted. “We’ve talked already, and I think I know where you stand. Have you changed your mind?”

  “I have a sick man in my care whose best hope of survival is to get back to Earth as quickly as possible,” Axford said. “Since you can’t turn the ship around, and since DeepShaft won’t send out an unscheduled shuttle, Janus represents his best hope.”

  “Is that what you told him?”

  “I didn’t pull any punches,” Axford said. “I don’t think he’s any happier than I am about nosing around near that thing, but he recognises the lesser of two evils when he sees it.”

  “Then you’d vote against the mission if Jim wasn’t ill?”

  “I’m voting to safeguard my patient’s life. You have my word that the people under me feel the same way.”

  “I’ll see that we don’t let Jim down,” she said. “Or any of your team, for that matter. We have leverage now. It’s too late to send out a shuttle, but they can damn well send one to meet us on the way home.”

  “You’ll guarantee that?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Then you have my consent to take us to Janus.”

  That was Axford done: he would shrink back into the scenery now, just the way he had been before she talked to him, listening intently, but with a distracted, faraway look that suggested (quite wrongly, as it happened) extreme inattention.

  With Ryan’s vote in, it was clear that Janus had won the day, though not by an overwhelming majority. In Bella’s estimation some sixty per cent of the crew were in favour of the mission, subject to haggling over bonus pay and working arrangements near the moon. Twenty per cent were unenthusiastic, but would go along with it. The other twenty per cent were strongly opposed, irrespective of the bonus terms.

  Bella would have preferred a stronger majority, but at least the ship wasn’t split down the middle — and she knew exactly how she felt: Janus was an unprecedented opportunity, not only for her crew, not only for her company, but for humanity as a whole. She’d believed that before she entered the room, and she believed it now.

  She held up her flexy, showing the tally of poll results to the assembled chiefs.

  “Back to your teams, people,” she said, “and tell them to start battening down the hatches.”

  * * *

  When Rockhopper pulled away from the comet four hours later, a robot had already dropped the fragmentation-assistance device into the shaft that Parry had dug to take the mass driver. The nuclear device was military surplus, recycled from the decommissioned warhead of a forty-year-old NATO surplus Bush III MIRV. It had been dialled to its maximum civilian yield of ten megatonnes.

  The comet went up nicely.

  That was one piece of ice no one else would be getting their hands on.

  THREE

  “It’s the last good close-up picture we have,” Bella said, “taken about a year ago, when a cargo slug swung by on a routine slingshot.”

  The object displayed on her wall was irregular in shape: two hundred and twenty kilometres across at its widest point; one hundred and sixty at its narrowest. The surface was lightly cratered and gouged, the craters soft-edged and shallow. The ice was a tarnished grey-white, the oily colour of roadside snow. “What was a slug doing taking pictures?” Svetlana asked.

  “University of Arizona paid to piggy-back a cam: some kid finishing off a Ph.D. thesis on dynamic ice chemistry. There are better images on the feeds, and maps that cover the entire thing down to a rez of a few metres, but this is the most recent snapshot in existence.”

  “Still looks like a piece of ice to me,” Saul Regis said.

  “That must have been the point,” Bella said. “Janus is about the last place in the system we’d have thought to look for signs of alien intelligence.”

  Nick Thale stirred in his seat. “If they meant to camouflage their activities, why didn’t they pick something a bit less weird than a co-orbital moon?”

  “I don’t know. Hide in plain sight? Pick the one place we wouldn’t seriously consider looking?”

  The image revealed no hint of wrongness: no suggestion of alien mechanisms lurking just beneath that shell of icy camouflage.

  Regis tapped a stylus against the flexy he had spread across his lap. He was a burly man, bald at the crown but with his remaining long black hair worn in a ponytail. His goatee beard tapered to a long braided tail. “I’m not sure I follow,” he said. “What was so unique about Janus? Aren’t there a bunch of water-ice moons orbiting Saturn?”

  “Not exactly,” Thale said, turning to face the robotics specialist. “Janus was co-orbital with another small moon named Epimetheus. They shared almost the same orbit around Saturn, at about two and half Saturn radii. One of them was a tiny bit closer to Saturn, so it moved just a little bit faster. Once every four years the fast one lapped the slow one, overtaking it from behind. When that happened, the two satellites exchanged orbits: the slower one became the faster one, and vice versa.”

  “Freaky,” Regis observed.

  “It is freaky. Every four years the same thing happens. The moons take turns going fast, like skaters running a relay.”

  Bella had read up on it before the meeting. “It’s a pretty unusual set-up. Definitely not the sort of thing you expect to happen by chance, just because two independent moons happened to settle into that —”

  She stopped, because they had all felt something shiver through the room. The glass of water on Bella’s desk trembled.

  She looked at Svetlana. “Are we okay?”

  “We’re okay.”

  “It’s just that I don’t remember that sort of thing happening before.”

  “It’s expected,” Svetlana said. “We’re running the engine in a different operating regime.”

  “So it isn’t anything I need to worry about?”

  “No. Just some mixing eddies in the precombustion tokamak.”

  “Fine,” Bella said, but like everyone in the room — with the exception of Svetlana — she had just been forcibly reminded that they were not sitting in some anonymous corporate office building, but were in fact riding fifty thousand tonnes of nuclear-powered spacecraft to the edge of interstellar space, with the pedal to the metal.

  They had been under way for three days now, and Rockhopper had already picked up thirteen hundred kilometres per second of speed compared to their initial vector around the comet. They were travelling at a shallow angle to the ecliptic, in an almost radial direction away from the Sun. Every second they were crossing the width of the Gulf of Mexico: putting that much extra distance between them and their places of birth. And they were still accelerating.

  By the time they reached Janus, they would be thirteen light-hours from home: far enough that a round-trip signal would take more than a day. And they would be moving at three per
cent of the speed of light, a figure that was enough to put the fear of God into anyone. Three per cent of the speed of light was nine thousand kilometres per second.

  With every minute that passed, they’d be falling further from home than the distance between the Earth and its Moon.

  A minute or two had passed since the tremor; the ship’s ride was now limousine-smooth once more. Everyone was waiting for her to continue speaking, their faces expectant. It was a nice show, but she doubted that any of them were convinced. Their nerves were already stretched paper-thin. For three days the ship had been creaking and groaning like a submarine sinking to crush depth.

  “Where was I?”

  “Janus,” someone said helpfully.

  “Right… right. It’s just that until four days ago our best guess was that the two moons must once have been part of the same body.”

  Craig Schrope had done his homework as well. “A bigger moon — maybe something Charon-sized. A few billion years ago something must have hit it, smashing it into pieces. The two largest chunks drifted apart from each other on nearly identical orbits.”

  “Hence your co-orbital moons,” Bella took up the discussion again. “But the Janus event shows that it didn’t happen like that. It was setup to look that way, but the co-orbital situation was clearly staged: an engineered occurrence designed to look natural.”

  “Before any of you ask,” Schrope said, “there are teams crawling over Epimetheus even as we speak.”

  “With kid gloves, I hope,” Nick Thale said.

  “I think we can assume that they’re exercising all due caution,” Bella said. “Not that it seems to matter: nothing they’ve done or observed in any way suggests that Epimetheus is anything but what we always thought it was. Unless the interior mechanisms are spectacularly well camouflaged, it’s just a lump of ice.”

  “The best guess,” Schrope interjected, “is that Epimetheus is just an ordinary satellite. The Janus artefact must have been introduced from outside the Saturnian system, and its orbit carefully tuned to produce the co-orbital situation we thought we understood.”

  “There are other situations like that, right?” asked Parry.