Pushing Ice Read online

  “He’d already have been proud of you.”

  “That’s what I keep telling myself — as if I haven’t already lived up to enough imaginary expectations.” Bella looked carefully at Svetlana, seeming to wait until a lull in the music before continuing. “I’ve never told anyone this, okay?”

  Svetlana nodded and said nothing, almost holding her breath in expectation.

  “Ten or twelve years ago — maybe longer than that — I went through a bad patch.” Bella paused and lit a cigarette. “Garrison was always the more ambitious one. He was the one with the big ideas, the big dreams. I never saw myself sitting aboard a ship like Rockhopper, with a hundred and fifty people under me. Even Garrison would have considered that somewhat optimistic.”

  “Times change,” Svetlana murmured. She didn’t want to interrupt the story.

  “Not as much as all that.” Bella smoked unhurriedly before continuing, “After Garrison died, I kept on moving. Mostly it was sheer momentum, not looking back, making all the right career moves. Earth to near-Earth ops. Near-Earth to the Moon — I hated it. I can still feel that dust in my eyes.”

  Svetlana smiled. “Everyone hates the dust.”

  “So I skipped to Mars. Then skipped Big Red to deep system. And then this thing happened. All of a sudden I crashed and burnt. Couldn’t function for shit. They cycled me back to Earth and the tender mercies of the company shrinks — depression, they said. Trying to live up to Garrison’s lost potential, they said. Like I was trying to have his career since he couldn’t.”

  “Were they right?”

  “I think they were half-right. Another part of me thinks they just couldn’t deal with me. Little Bella Lind, daring to have a career in space.” She let out a self-deprecating laugh. “Okay, so I burnt out, but the men around me were burning out as well. You didn’t hear the shrinks telling them they were trying to live up to someone else’s potential.”

  “It’s still a man’s world out here,” Svetlana. said. “Every now and then something happens to remind me of that. Like I’m on some kind of probation. We’ll let you manage this expensive toy for now, but the moment you slip up —”

  “I know you work twice as hard as anyone else in your team.”

  “Not because the work’s that difficult,” Svetlana said, though she knew there was no need to explain, “just because they won’t tolerate one single mistake.”

  “I know. I know exactly how you feel.”

  Svetlana sipped at the whisky, determined to make it last. “I get a bit defensive sometimes. Before this Janus thing happened, I snapped at Parry. He was on my case about the repairs taking too long.”

  “Probably because I was on his case,” Bella said.

  “We were both to blame, Parry for not knowing that I was already doing everything possible to get that work finished, and me for not understanding how much pressure he was under to get that driver tapped.”

  “You squared things with him?”

  “You know how it is with Parry and me. We’re pretty tight. Things like that don’t last long.”

  “You’re a good couple,” Bella said. “Takes some doing, keeping a relationship together out here. Not many places you can sulk on a ship.”

  “I guess if we were going to murder each other, we’d have done it by now.”

  “That’s a good sign.”

  “Parry wants to go home. Says he’s soaked up enough sieverts for one lifetime. He’s talking about putting in for transfer.”

  “I heard,” Bella said quietly. “He’s flagged Mike Takahashi as a possible successor. I suppose he wants you to go with him?”

  “That’s his plan: move back down to Earth, get married, have a kid or two. Parry says he can find work at one of the training centres. Failing that, he says we should open a dive school, dust off those PADI certifications.”

  “Sounds pretty idyllic to me.”

  Svetlana sighed. “The trouble is, I worked damned hard to get out here. I’m the chief of flight systems on a fucking nuclear-powered spaceship, Bella. It doesn’t get much better than that.”

  “Except when someone’s squeezing you about repairs.” She smiled and Svetlana grinned back.

  “Okay, so that part sucks. But the rest of it’s pretty good.”

  Bella stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. Svetlana wondered if the cigarettes came up on the cargo shuttle with the Glenmorangie.

  “So what’s the plan? Rotate or stay?”

  “We keep putting off having a proper discussion about it — or rather, Parry does.”

  “Maybe putting it off isn’t such a bad idea,” Bella said. “To a certain degree, we’re going to be famous when we get back. Not all of us, but certainly the senior crew… you’re going to need a damned good agent, put it like that. There’ll be book and film deals. Chat shows. Lecture circuits. Game development. A lot of possibilities are going to open up.”

  “That’s what Parry keeps telling me.”

  “I’ll be sorry to lose him from the team, if it comes to that, but my loss would be your gain.”

  “I could do a lot worse than Parry.”

  “You making it work gives me hope for the human species.”

  After a moment, Svetlana said, “You could make it work too, if you wanted to.”

  Bella smiled tightly. “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not? You’ve got a good few years ahead of you.”

  “Let’s not go there, all right?”

  Svetlana persisted. “You still turn heads. I know you’ve had relationships since Garrison died: we’ve talked about them often enough. What would we do without in vino veritas?”

  Bella shrugged philosophically. “Right now there isn’t time in my life for anything but this job. Especially now.”

  “Okay, fair enough, but what about later, when this is all over? Like you just said: a lot’s going to change.”

  “I worked hard to get here, Svieta, just like you did. I’m not sure I could give all of this up.”

  “You’ve run this ship for four years without a hitch. If there was ever a point that needed making, I think you can consider it adequately made.”

  “Time to move on, you mean?”

  “Like Parry says, there are only so many sieverts you can soak up in a lifetime.”

  Bella gazed at her fish, dark shapes patrolling the unlit gloom of the tank. “It’ll be good to get back home for a while, that’s for sure.”

  “But sooner or later you’ll want to come back out here.”

  “I want to see the things Garrison never got to see. Before it’s too late.”

  “I understand,” Svetlana said. And she knew that whatever emotional ties still bound Bella to her dead husband, whatever matters of the heart remained as yet unresolved, they were too complex, too fraught, to be unknotted in a single conversation. Even between the closest of friends.

  Bella’s tone lifted. “Before I forget — I wanted to thank you. You could have made life a lot more difficult for me with that tech input. Instead you came through and gave it to me straight. I appreciated that.”

  “I guess we’re all in the same cattle boat.”

  “All the same — it was appreciated.” Bella leaned over to pat the wall of her office, her hand dimpling the soft display surface. “And — barring the occasional tremor — she seems to be holding together pretty well, doesn’t she?”

  “She’ll hold,” Svetlana said. “Lockheed-Krunichev build them good.”

  * * *

  Powell Cagan had attached a media file to his latest message: an image of the rival spacecraft, captured during engine startup tests by the long-range surveillance cameras of the UEE’s Replicating Technologies Inspectorate. The new ship looked recognisably Chinese; some lingering influence in its pale blue-green architecture spoke of dynasties and dragons.

  “The unofficial word is that they’re calling it the Shenzhou Five” Cagan said. “It means ‘Sacred Vessel Number Five’, apparently, and that name has some
historical significance for them.”

  From time to time an irregular stutter of hot white light shone from the flared trumpet of the ship’s fusion drive. Chemical rockets, stationed around the hull, counteracted the impulse from the fusion motor. The Shenzhou Five was still encased in a cradle of support modules, with a mothlike shuttle docked at the largest habitat block. It looked tiny next to the looming new spacecraft.

  “The RTI has demanded inspection rights,” Cagan said. “They’ve credible evidence that the Chinese have put a forge vat aboard so that they can grow equipment after the ship’s left Earth orbit. Beijing’s stonewalling, unsurprisingly. Inga will keep up the squeeze to get those inspectors aboard, but even if she fails, it doesn’t look like the Chinese will be going anywhere fast.

  “Our analysts say their tokamak design’s flawed — they’ll be lucky if they get that thing out of orbit, let alone onto a Janus intercept. But in the unlikely event that luck turns out to be on their side — and if our political leverage fails — you’ll need to be prepared for a more complicated scenario than we originally envisaged. I’m pressing Inga to rubber-stamp an upgrade to your status: if we can rebrand Rockhopper as an official UEE expedition, that will give us a lot more room for manoeuvre.”

  “How so?” Bella mouthed soundlessly.

  “There’s still some fine print to be looked at,” Cagan said, “but our reading of the situation is that UEE expeditionary status would automatically designate an exclusion volume around Rockhopper. If they ignore it, you’ll be authorised to use reasonable force to prevent commercial claim-jumping. Of course, Rockhopper is not technically an armed vessel —” Cagan paused. “I’ll speak to you as soon as I have word from Inga.”

  He signed off.

  Bella sat staring at the blank flexy in a stunned funk. She had not asked for her ship to be reclassified as an instrument of the UEE, nor had she asked for permission to shoot another ship out of the sky if it violated her company’s interests.

  Rockhopper had been under way for a week now. Around the system, a massive coordinated observation programme saw every large civilian telescope trained on the fleeing moon. Even military spysats had been pressed into service, diverted away from the monitoring of hair-trigger frontiers and treaty-violation hotspots to peer into deep space, in the direction of Virgo. Commercial communications networks had been reassigned to cope with the mammoth effort of merging the data from this awesome concentration of surveillance. From near-Earth out to the cold, dark territory of the outer system, space hummed with intense, fevered scrutiny. Every day took Janus further away; but every day also saw more aperture and processing power coming on line, and for a little while the human effort outweighed the moon’s increasing distance.

  The images had sharpened, revealing the urban intricacy of the Spican machinery under the now broken and incomplete icy mantle. What they were looking at was definitely alien, but at least it stayed still and allowed them to feel as if it obeyed something like logic. The newest images uploaded to Rockhopper came with nomenclature: features in the machinery that had been given tentative, resolutely unofficial names. Junction Box, Radiator Ridge, Big North Spiral, Little South Spiral, Spike Island, Magic Kingdom, Crankshaft Valley. None of it meant anything, but it was comforting to put some human labels on the alien territory.

  Bella thought she could deal with the alien territory — she had signed up for that when she agreed to take Rockhopper out to Janus. But no one had warned her that she might also become embroiled in a hair-trigger standoff with Beijing.

  Not technically armed, Cagan had said, but both of them knew full well what that really meant.

  She looked at the fish tank, idly contemplating the mistake everyone made in assuming she’d used part of her mass allowance to make it happen. That wasn’t the case. As she’d explained to Svetlana, everything in the tank was already mass-budgeted into the ship, except for the fish. Even the glass was surplus window material, stored here as opposed to somewhere else aboard Rockhopper, glued into a temporary watertight box. If refurbishment ever came calling for the glass, they’d have a fight… but it was theirs, in the small print.

  No, the tank hadn’t cost her one gram of her mass budget, but she’d had to pull some serious strings to make it happen. It was a perk. So was the big room with the carpeted floor. No one else on the entire ship had a carpet. No one else had decent soundproofing. This, she supposed, was when she started paying for the perks. She had always known it would happen one day.

  That didn’t mean she had to like it.

  * * *

  “Sorry to dump on a friend,” Bella said when Svetlana arrived in her office, “especially when you’ve just got off-shift, but I need your help with something.”

  “What are friends for, if not for dumping on?” Svetlana scrunched a finger through her hair, still wet from the shower. She wore jogging pants and a dive-chick T-shirt printed with a mermaid and moving shoals of animated fish. “What is it now: someone wants another slice of you?”

  Bella shook her head grimly. She had already farmed out several interview requests to her senior officers, including Svetlana, and they’d lapped her up: the bright Armenian-American girl with the mind of a nuclear engineer and the body of a one-time champion free diver, one who just happened to be romantically entangled with a space miner with several commendations for bravery during EVA operations. Now even the diffident Parry was getting his fifteen minutes, squirming like something found under a stone.

  Too good to be true, they said.

  Bella pulled a thick stack of printouts from her desk. “This is a bit different, I’m afraid. It’s delicate — very, very delicate. It can only be entrusted to a safe pair of hands.”

  “Suddenly this is beginning to feel like a major dump.”

  “They don’t get much more major.” Bella passed the stack to Svetlana. “What you’ve got there are copies of one hundred paintings, selected from over fifty-six thousand individual entries submitted by American school kids between first and third grades. Artistic media range from finger smears to… well, something approximating brushwork.”

  Svetlana slipped off the rubber band and leafed through the first few sheets. “Aliens,” she said, in a numbed tone of voice. “They’ve got the kids painting aliens.”

  “It’s educational,” Bella said.

  “It’s scary.” Svetlana held up one of the pictures: something that resembled the business end of a blue toilet brush, smeared with enthusiastic daubs of green. “Aren’t we supposed to be stopping the kids getting nightmares, not encouraging them?”

  “That’s for the education system to decide, not us. Our job is to grade the efforts, that’s all.”

  “Oh, right. So: five minutes’ work, right? We just pull a few out at random —”

  Bella grimaced. “There’s a bit more to it than that, I’m afraid. They’d like us to comment on the pictures — say something nice and constructive about them. All of them — even the more — ahem! — artistically challenged ones.”

  “All of them?”

  Bella nodded sternly. “All of them. In enough detail that no one’s going to get offended… no one’s going to think we’re not approaching this with due diligence.”

  “Holy shit, Bella.”

  “And we’ll be steering clear of expletives, obviously.”

  “We.”

  “Oh, I’ve got my own stack of homework to grade, don’t you worry. You drew the long straw on this one. I’m the one who’ll be up all night reading creative assignments about me and my ship meeting aliens.”

  Svetlana slipped the rubber band back around the printouts. “This can’t get any worse, can it? I mean, as if we didn’t have enough to be doing as it is.”

  “This is nothing. Yesterday I had the Cosmic Avenger fan club on my back. They wanted me to comment on which of my crew members best approximated the various fictional characters… and how I’d have dealt with scenarios from the show, if they happened to me.”
/>   “I hope you told them where they could shove it.”

  Bella feigned horror. “Oh, no. I just put Saul Regis on the case. Man for the job.”

  “Man for the job,” Svetlana agreed, nodding. “Well, I guess that made him happy.”

  “As a pig in shit.”

  “Talking of which, I do hope you’ve lined up something nice and juicy for Craig Schrope. There’s a man with way too much time on his hands.”

  Bella leaned back in her seat, sensing an opportunity to get something out in the open that had been troubling her lately. “You and Craig… it’s not exactly an eye-to-eye thing, is it?”

  “We’ve been over this.”

  “I know, I know — he’s a suit, you’re a hands-on type. But we need suits as well as tool-pushers. Craig’s a damn good asset to this company. As bitter a pill as this might be to swallow, he’s actually quite good at his job.”

  “We’re off the record now, aren’t we?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “He rubs me up the wrong way. He’s always giving me shitty looks, especially if I venture even so much as an opinion in his presence — as if I wasn’t head of flight systems, but some lower-echelon grunt with only a few hours of wet time under my belt.”

  “Craig gives everyone shitty looks. I think it’s genetic.” Bella paused, wondering how much it was wise to disclose. “Look, I’ll let you in on a secret. He’s not had an easy ride out here. DeepShaft tried to keep a lid on it for obvious reasons, but his last assignment on Mars —”

  Svetlana looked mildly interested. “Go on.”

  “Head office sent Craig into the Shalbatana bore project. There’d been reports of corner-cutting, dangerous working practices, questionable accounting.” Bella lit a cigarette, taking her time. She always enjoyed spinning out a story. “Craig uncovered a viper’s nest of high-level corruption. At every turn he met with obstruction and hostility, mostly from hands-on types like you and me. Physical violence, death threats, the lot — but Craig sorted that mess out. He turned Shalbatana around. Within six months they were digging faster than any of the other bore sites, and they had the best safety record on Big Red.”