Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  “We’re just small parts in a big machine, Jim. None of us is invulnerable.”

  He studied her with fierce intensity. “I can see this puts you in a bind. Can’t have been easy, I guess.”

  “She didn’t take it well. She said things.” Bella swallowed. “I nearly hit her. I nearly hit my best friend.”

  “Whatever you did, I’m sure you acted in the only professional way possible.”

  “That’s what I keep telling myself.”

  “But it doesn’t help.”

  “No.”

  He reached out and took her hand. In that moment of human contact Bella felt some tiny relief from her distress. She was glad, selfishly, that Jim Chisholm’s illness had eased him from duty. It allowed them talk like this, unstifled by the protocols of command.

  “Cut yourself some slack, Bella Lind,” he said. “That’s an order.”

  * * *

  She e-mailed the letter of apology to Schrope, then made the mistake of trying to sleep. When the alarm pulled her back into consciousness she felt worse than when she had gone under. Her dreams had been fitful and repetitive, replaying the day’s events over and again, so that she saw the demise of the Shenzhou Five from different angles. Then the dream lurched narrative tracks, conflating the attack on the Chinese ship with the downing of the plane in the high mountains of the Hindu Kush, and she trudged knee-deep in snow, shining a searchlight into wintry darkness, looking for a survivor. The dream kept ending just at the point when she found Wang Zhanmin, entombed in snow but still wearing his spacesuit. Somehow she always knew the exact spot to start digging. She would smear the snow from his visor and see that he was still alive behind the glass, his expression relieved and forgiving, simply glad to have been saved. Then she would wake, very briefly, and she would slip back into sleep, and the dreams would resume. As she crawled from her hammock, she felt a chemical burden in her body, a debt that had only been partly repaid.

  If this, she wondered, was the price they were paying to catch up with Janus, what toll would it ask of them when they arrived?

  * * *

  Svetlana ripped away the adhesive monitoring patches Axford had pressed to her skin. Immediately the machines launched into a shrill, affronted chorus. She clattered them aside and climbed from the bed. Her clothes were still neatly folded on the bedside table: jogging pants, T-shirt, a plaid shirt that she wore unbuttoned. She felt light-headed, but that was to be expected after the length of time she had spent in bed. Opening the air-sealed door between isolation and the rest of the medical centre, she heard Jim Chisholm stir behind his partition curtain.

  “Svetlana?” he asked in a pale croak of a voice. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, Jim,” she said.

  “What are you doing? You sound like… is something wrong?”

  “It’s better that you don’t ask,” she said, “much better.”

  “I know why you’re here,” Chisholm said. “I know that you’re here because you’ve had some falling out with Bella, and —”

  She pulled the curtains far enough apart to see his face, half-swallowed by the pillow, with a damp grey patch next to his mouth. For the first time he looked properly ill to her, as if his condition had finally forced itself to the surface. What had looked like a sure thing three weeks ago — that Chisholm would survive the trip to Janus and the return journey to Earth — suddenly felt infinitely less certain.

  “There is something wrong,” Svetlana said. “Something that I’ve —” But now that she was on her feet for the first time in many hours, something stalled her thoughts. Something was different, but at first she attributed it to her light-headedness. “The gravity,” she said, at last.

  “You noticed, too,” Chisholm said, nodding as best he could: a vague adjustment in the angle of his head in its nest of a pillow. “I thought it was just me.”

  “We’re not running at half a gee any more.”

  “No. A bit less — two-fifths, perhaps? Maybe even less than that?” His eyes were uncomfortably wide as he sought confirmation.

  “It’s still only day twenty,” Svetlana said. “We’re a full day from the encounter.”

  “There’s got to be a reason for it.”

  “There must be a problem with the engine: there’s no other explanation.” And then a vile thought occurred to her: the engine had been throttled back because the fuel reserves had suddenly begun to run low. One of these minutes, one of these seconds, the engine was going to just snuff out and suddenly Rockhopper would be free-falling into the night, the terrible realisation setting in that there was no way to stop, no way to turn around.

  But her immediate fears quickly faded: that couldn’t be the answer. The engine would keep running at normal efficiency until the last gasp of pressure from the tanks. And even given Svetlana’s assumptions about the real fuel load, they were still a long way from running dry. They had enough fuel to complete the Janus operations; it was the return trip that was problematic.

  “When did this happen? Is there anything on ShipNet about it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “And neither Bella nor Craig has spoken to you about it?”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed,” Chisholm said, “I’m not exactly in the command loop any more. They don’t want to burden me with the pressures of command. They mean to be kind.”

  He was drugged to the eyeballs, fading in and out of lucidity like a drowning man. More than just kindness, Svetlana thought. She hoped her face gave nothing away.

  “I need to talk to someone about this,” she said. “Maybe they don’t even realise we have a problem.”

  “Bella won’t like you leaving medical.”

  Svetlana smiled at the dying man. “In the long run, I think she’ll thank me for it.”

  No one was on duty as she left the medical centre. Her footsteps fell with dreamy lightness on the catwalk panels. The more she mulled it over, the less likely a technical failure seemed to her. Either the engine worked or it didn’t: there was no middle ground in which it would work at slightly reduced efficiency. And since the fuel could not be running out yet, that left only one possibility: Bella must have given the order to throttle back.

  Bella was beginning to have doubts.

  Svetlana made her way through the interior of the ship, glad that the lights had been dimmed to a gloomy red for the night shift. The only person she met on her way was Brenda Gammel, from Parry’s EVA squad, but Gammel was deep in her own thoughts, giving Svetlana a polite but distracted nod as they passed. Good that it wasn’t someone from her own team. Then there would have been too many awkward questions about where she had been and why she was now up and about.

  As she walked, Svetlana became less certain about how to proceed. If Bella had already begun to come around to her point of view, then it might be best to let events take their course.

  She reached Parry’s quarters and tapped on the plastic door, quietly, until Parry slid it back. He blinked in surprise, then frowned, worried.

  “Svieta,” he said, “why are you — ?” She cut him off. “Let me in, Parry. We need to talk.” He slid back the door as wide as it would go to let Svetlana squeeze into his quarters. “Could I get into trouble for this?”

  “You’re already in trouble. I don’t think a little more will make any difference.”

  “Did Bella give you permission to leave the medical centre?”

  “Never mind that. What’s up with the ship? Has Bella given an order to slow down?”

  “Yes,” Parry said simply.

  She allowed herself an instant of triumph. Bella’s doubts would build like a landslide, from the tiniest of slippages.

  “Has she said anything about it on ShipNet?”

  “She’ll make an announcement at the next shift change, if the situation stays the same,” Parry said.

  “She knows the situation, Parry. It isn’t going away. They can’t unscrew us.”

  “Maybe we’re not talking about th
e same situation. There’s been a development. So far only the chiefs know about it.”

  Her elation drained away to nothing. “What kind of development?”

  “It looks as if we may have enough fuel after all.”

  “No,” she said forcefully, “I know I’m right about this. Just because I can’t prove it to Bella’s satisfaction — Jesus, Parry: you know I’m right.”

  “I believe you — but it may not matter now.”

  “Of course it damn well matters,” she said, and then regretted it, because the one person she did not need to pick fights with was Parry Boyce. Moderating her tone, she added, “Why? What’s changed?”

  “Janus,” Parry said.

  “Oh, great. Tell me.”

  “We’ve been shining a laser onto it for the last three days, a low-energy optical laser, nothing that could be mistaken for a hostile gesture.”

  “I know about that,” she said, remembering that they had gone over the wisdom of this in Saul Regis’s discussion group. “Partly to map the surface details, partly to give us better distance information so we can refine our approach. What’s happened?”

  “Janus is… not exactly slowing, but reducing its acceleration. It’s as if it’s realised we’re trying to catch up and is making it as easy as possible.”

  She found the news intriguing and troubling in equal measure. “Why would it run all this way and stop now? You can’t tell me it’s only just noticed us.”

  “Maybe that’s exactly what’s happened.”

  “I don’t buy it,” she said. “There’s a catch. There’s always a catch.”

  “I don’t see that there has to be one. Suppose it’s committed to leaving the system, for one reason or another — it’s received an order from Spica, or something like that. It can’t stop running from us, but at least it can slow its departure enough to let us get a better look. A chance to say goodbye.”

  Parry paused: it must have been obvious from her expression that she was not convinced by any of that. “Look, if Janus stops accelerating, we can, too. Every gram of fuel we’d have burnt keeping up with it for the five days of the survey phase is a gram we’ll still have for the journey home.”

  “The bastards couldn’t have known this was going to happen,” Svetlana said fiercely. “And it’ll still be marginal.”

  “You may not have the satisfaction of proving you were right,” Parry said, “at least, not until we get home. But don’t let that cloud what a good thing this is. Janus hasn’t attacked us, or fired a shot across our bows, or made any attempts to outrun us. It wants to meet us. Can’t you see that?”

  “I’m seeing something,” Svetlana said. “Just not sure what it is yet.”

  For a minute they said nothing, then Svetlana moved into the comfort of Parry’s embrace and they held each other. They kissed, then someone knocked on the plastic partition: three authoritative raps, like the visit of a policeman.

  A muffled voice came through the plastic. “Parry. It’s Bella. I’m guessing you know why I’m here.”

  Svetlana slid back the panel. “It’s not Parry’s fault I’m here. He wasn’t sheltering me.”

  “Why do you keep making this so difficult?” Bella asked. She was alone, looking tousled, as if she’d been roused from bed.

  “Because you’re killing us.”

  Bella kept her voice low. “Has Parry told you about the change in Janus?”

  “You still need to turn this ship around.”

  “No,” Bella said firmly, “in a day we’ll know whether Janus really is letting us take a closer look. If that’s the case then we’ll complete the mission as planned.”

  “And if it begins accelerating again, so that we have to burn fuel simply to keep following it?”

  Bella hesitated just a moment too long. Svetlana recognised a fissure in the surface of her surety: the crack of doubt she had opened and had prayed would widen. Whatever Janus had done, it was still there.

  “We’ll review things,” she said.

  “You almost believe me, don’t you? What’s stopping you, Bella? Is it Craig Schrope?”

  Clattering footsteps marked the approach of another figure. Svetlana pushed herself half-out of Parry’s quarters, with her legs dangling into the corridor. The approaching man leaned forward, his hands whisking along the support rails. He wore a blue zip-up jumpsuit, padded around the joints.

  “Hello, Craig,” Svetlana said icily.

  “Problem here?” Schrope asked. He looked at Svetlana without surprise. “Last thing I heard, you were supposed to be in medical. That was the arrangement, right?”

  “She broke it,” Bella said sadly.

  “What exactly is your problem, Svetlana?”

  “Get out of my face, Craig. This is between me and the real commander of this ship, not some jumped-up company sock puppet.”

  Somewhere along the corridor, another partition rasped open. Someone poked their head out, looked at them and then returned inside.

  “Well, we’ve given reasonable a try,” Schrope said.

  “What would you suggest next?” Parry said. “Throwing her out of an airlock?”

  “Don’t be a jerk-off all your life,” Schrope said.

  “Only following your example, Terrier-boy.”

  “Parry,” Bella said, menacingly, “I don’t need this now. Please, just keep out of it.”

  “You’ll have to lock me up,” Svetlana said. “If you don’t, I’ll try to take this ship from you. Just so you know where I stand.”

  “Well, then,” Schrope said, “that settles things, doesn’t it? Thanks for the clarification, Svetlana. I’ve always admired transparency. It makes decisions like this so much easier.”

  * * *

  They locked her down with something close to regret, reminding her of parents banishing a child to her room for some infraction that the child barely comprehended but still had to learn was wrong. This was for her own good, not theirs. She was still allowed access to ShipNet, but only to the shallowest, least secure layers.

  In an absurd twist, she had been assigned two “guards” from Ryan Axford’s medical section: Jagdeep Singh and Judy Sugimoto. Svetlana didn’t care to speculate about what they had been told. All she knew was that when one or the other of them came to escort her to the washroom or the gymnasium, they did so with an exaggerated solicitousness that she had never known as a real patient. During these little expeditions there was never anyone else about, and she had the whole washroom to herself. It was the same in the gymnasium — some pretext had been used to remove everyone else. She could have refused to exercise, but part of her wanted to be strong and so she submitted to the regime they suggested. She jogged and used weights, and then showered away some of her pent-up frustration.

  Parry was allowed to visit her, though only under the supervision of one of the nurses. He came once every six or eight hours, between his own duties with the EVA team.

  “This is ridiculous,” she said. “Bella’s blocked everything. I barely know what day it is.”

  “She isn’t keeping you in the dark as much as you think,” Parry said. “I’m not defending her — I think this is wrong — but I do think she genuinely hated having to do this to you.”

  “She had a choice.”

  “She didn’t, not really. I know this is cutting Bella up really badly. She’s not enjoying one second of it. She thinks she’s destroyed a friendship, a really good one.”

  “She’s the one ignoring the evidence.”

  “No,” Parry said, gently but firmly, “she didn’t ignore it at all. She looked at it, weighed it, took it seriously, but it just didn’t convince her.” He sighed, kneading his red cap between his fingers in a strangely beseeching gesture, as if he had come to her in penitence. “Look, it isn’t all as bad as you think, anyway.”

  “Looks pretty bad from where I’m sitting.”

  “Bella hasn’t shut you out of everything — at least, no more than she has the rest of us. That’s wh
at I meant when I said she wasn’t keeping you in the dark as much as you think.”

  “I can’t see anything,” she said, “not even the news from home. Is that what you mean by not keeping me in the dark?”

  “That,” Parry said, “is nothing to do with Bella at all, It’s the uplink antenna — they’re having problems picking up the signal.”

  “What kinds of problem?”

  “They don’t know what’s going on. It’s just that there’s nothing coming in on the uplink. Like the rest of the system’s gone off the air.”

  “But they must have a team looking into it,” Svetlana said. “Haven’t they figured it out yet?”

  “Doesn’t look like it.”

  “If Bella would only let me back into ShipNet,” she said, “then I might be able to look into it.”

  “You’d do that?”

  “I never asked to be removed from duty,” she said. “I just said I’d do everything in my power to turn us around.”

  “And now?”

  “That’s still true. But if Bella wants my input, she can have it.”

  “I don’t know,” Parry said. “I’ll mention it to her, but I think she’ll probably wait and see what your team has to say first.”

  “It can’t be anything complicated. How long have they been working on it?”

  “About twelve hours,” Parry said.

  NINE

  Day twenty turned into day twenty-one. News filtered through to Svetlana via Parry: Janus had continued its obliging deceleration; in response, Bella had throttled the engine back to one-tenth of a gee. Rockhopper was now making its final approach to their initial study position, ten thousand kilometres astern of Janus.

  If the former moon’s decelerating trend continued, it would soon be moving at constant velocity. The plan was to hold station at ten thousand kilometres for a day, then move in closer, to within a thousand kilometres of the surface. If Janus tolerated that, they would move closer still. By the third day of the five-day encounter, robots and unmanned autonomous vehicles would land on the artefact. If the robots and UAVs were permitted access, then people would follow. On day four they would limit themselves to passive surface investigations. If that went well, then on day five they would attempt to secure a physical sample of the machinery. They’d begin with microscopic scrapings and return each sample to Rockhopper, which by then would be standing off at a safe distance. If those small sample collections were successful, they would increase to larger specimens. On day six, Rockhopper would depart and Janus would fall away into the night, on its long ride to Spica.