Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  There was still no news from home.

  The technical team had been working on the problem for nineteen hours, but — so Svetlana’s informant told her — nothing they had done had shed any light on the problem.

  Parry passed her a flexy. “Bella’s beginning to stew. If she wasn’t, she’d never have agreed to this.”

  “She wants me to take a look at it?”

  “She says that if you can find something, that would be good.”

  As Svetlana’s hands moved over the hide-like skin of the display, she tumbled through ShipNet layers without obstruction.

  “How long is she giving me?”

  “As long as it takes,” Parry said. “There’s a technical note in your inbox — everything they’ve tried so far. It may give you a head start. There’s no point trying to slow or stop the ship, Bella says — as soon as you go anywhere near critical systems, they’ll lock you out.”

  “Who led this repair team?”

  “Belinda Pagis and Mengcheng Yang. They’ve been working around the clock.”

  She nodded, for those were the names she would have pencilled in for the repair duty. “Did anyone EVA?”

  “No — too dangerous under thrust, given the location of the antenna. I wouldn’t sign off one of my people to go outside, put it like that.”

  She had expected as much. “Robots?”

  “We’ve already had Jens Fletterick look at it with one of the free-flier remotes — there’s a video clip in the tech note. Doesn’t seem to be any external damage to the antenna, no blown servos, but maybe you’ll see something everyone’s missed.”

  “I’ll look at it,” she said dubiously. “Is Jens still on shift?”

  Parry glanced at his big multi-dialled diver’s watch. “I don’t think so. Should be catching up on some sleep now. Why?”

  “I’d like to talk to Jens, or anyone in Saul’s robotics team.”

  “That’ll have to go through Bella, I’m afraid. What are you thinking?”

  “Something we should try,” she said.

  * * *

  Janus loomed as large in Rockhopper’s sky as a full moon seen from the Earth: a bright clenched fist peppered with tiny islands of ice amidst seas of dark, glinting mechanism.

  Rockhopper was unspeakably close to it now: a mere twenty thousand kilometres from the object’s machine-clotted surface. Soon they would halve that distance and come to a watchful halt relative to the moon. There had been no hint of a reaction from the alien thing; no warning to keep their distance. Equally, beyond the fact of the moon’s slowing, there had been no invitation to come closer either.

  Bella finished a cigarette as the nurse arrived with Svetlana. There was no physical contact between Svetlana and the nurse, but Judy Sugimoto never strayed more than a metre from her charge. Discreetly, but not so discreetly that Svetlana wouldn’t have been aware of it, Sugimoto carried a sedative syringe, ready to be jabbed into the other woman’s arm if she turned difficult.

  “You didn’t have to go to all this trouble,” Svetlana said. “We could have met at my place.”

  “If I could have kept this to just the two us, perhaps that might have worked,” Bella said. “Obviously, that wasn’t an option.”

  Craig Schrope clicked his pen. He sat behind Bella’s desk, leaning back in the seat. “Parry said you might have an angle on the uplink issue.”

  “I asked to see Saul Regis.”

  “Saul’s on his way. In the meantime, we’d like to know why you think he can help. We’ve already had a robot look the thing over, and there’s no sign of damage. Diagnostic software hasn’t flagged any mechanical issues.” He fingered his clean-shaven jaw. “So what’s the deal, Barseghian? Can a robot help us, or have you just cooked up some new scheme to sabotage the mission?”

  He had said her surname with exaggerated care, as if everyone else in the world mispronounced it. Svetlana took an angry step closer to Schrope. “I’m trying to help here, you sanctimonious prick.”

  “Easy,” Schrope said, snapping his fingers at Judy Sugimoto. The nurse took gentle hold of Svetlana and pulled her back, bewildered but obedient.

  “I appreciate that you offered to look into this,” Bella said, choosing her words diplomatically. “I removed you from duty and placed you under arrest. At that point your obligations to me ended.”

  “Where is this going?” Svetlana asked.

  “I’m just saying: you’ve never disappointed me. No matter what happens to us, I’m still proud that we were friends. I’d like to think that one day we might be able to put —”

  “Did you look at the video feed?” Schrope asked Svetlana, cutting across Bella.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see anything wrong with the uplink system?”

  “Nothing,” Svetlana said, speaking to Bella rather than Schrope. “The system looks okay, inside and out. That’s why I wanted to bring in Saul. I had another idea, something we should at least rule out.”

  “Go on,” Craig Schrope said.

  But Bella spoke before Svetlana had a chance. “According to Parry, you wanted to talk to Saul about the feasibility of dropping a free-flier behind the ship, possibly to a distance where we’d run a risk of losing the flier. Is that the case?”

  “It wouldn’t have to be a robot, if we could instrument a package and send it back instead. But a robot would be quicker.”

  “What are you worried about?”

  “I’ll tell you,” Svetlana said, “but I want to negotiate first.”

  Schrope nodded curtly at Sugimoto. “Take her away. I’ve had enough.”

  Sugimoto was moving apologetically towards Svetlana when Bella raised a hand. “I can’t let you go free. You know that much.”

  “I know you won’t turn this ship around, either: not until you’ve had a closer look at Janus. So I’ll work with what’s on the table. I’ll help you with the uplink if you agree to something else.”

  Bella waited. She made a little inviting gesture with her hand. “I’m listening.”

  “You cut down the time at Janus, from five days to one. We spend only twenty-four hours at the initial study point.”

  “Completely unacceptable,” Schrope said.

  “Hear me out,” Svetlana said. “What I’m proposing will still give you solid science. Even if you don’t put people down on Janus, you can still send robots. It doesn’t matter if we abandon them there: we can keep teleoperating them until we reach an unworkable timelag, and even then we can still upload command sequences. They can carry on exploring Janus while we’re on our way home.”

  “That was always the plan,” Schrope said. “You’re not giving us anything that we didn’t already have.”

  “I’m giving you an uplink.”

  “If you can fix it. From where I’m sitting, this looks like a bluff.”

  “I can’t do what you’re asking,” Bella said, shaking her head. “I can’t come all this way, representing the entire human species, and then say that we decided to turn tail as soon as we arrived.”

  “I’m talking about twenty-four hours, Bella — that’s still a lot of time. Throw some of that caution away and I’m sure you can still achieve most of the objectives.”

  “Look at the damned thing,” Bella said, gesturing to the image of Janus. “Look at that and tell me it’s going to take anything less than a century to do it justice.”

  “Then five days won’t be enough either,” Svetlana said reasonably. “Given that, the difference between one and five doesn’t seem so bad.”

  Bella closed her eyes, wondering how things had ever come to this. She wanted to be able to walk out of her office, take a holiday and then return to this precise moment in the conversation, only this time sharpened like a new tool.

  “I can give you something,” she said, “but not everything you want. I’ll concede to three days at Janus.”

  “Still unacceptable,” Schrope said.

  “For the first time in my life, I agree with
Craig,” Svetlana said, with what sounded like genuine regret. “Three days is too long.”

  “That’s my final offer,” Bella said.

  There was a knock at the door. Saul Regis entered and studied the room’s occupants with his usual reptilian equanimity, betraying neither surprise nor particular interest.

  “You had a shot at redeeming yourself,” Schrope told Svetlana. “You blew it. But it doesn’t matter. I think I know what you have in mind.”

  “Svetlana,” Bella said, “please: I’m giving you one last chance. Help us. Help us and then maybe we can talk again.”

  “Sorry,” she answered. “Cast-iron guarantees up front. That’s the only thing I’ll settle for.”

  Schrope clapped his hands together. “Okay, looks like we’re about done here. Saul: can you spare a free-flier? I’ll bet money that Svetlana’s idea was to drop a robot behind the ship, carrying a radio transmitter configured to match the output frequency and strength of the Earth uplink signal. Am I right?” He looked at her for a moment, then turned back to Regis. “She thinks the uplink antenna might be working fine, but that there might be a problem with the signal.”

  “What kind of problem?” Bella asked, instinctively directing the question to Svetlana.

  Svetlana, to her surprise, answered. Perhaps she realised she had nothing to gain from silence. “The uplink system is working normally,” she said, sounding defeated. “The problem isn’t at our end.”

  “Earth has a problem?”

  “That’s the idea,” Schrope said, “but we won’t know for sure until we test it.”

  Bella shook her head, unable to accept that this was the answer. “Earth has gone off-air before,” she said, “but only for minutes at a time, when they have a problem with the alignment. This has been going on for twenty-three hours now.”

  Schrope shrugged. “So it’s more than a glitch.”

  “Surely they’d have locked a back-up dish onto us by now.”

  “If they know there’s a problem. Maybe everything looks fine at their end. We’re thirteen hours out now. We’ve been sending error signals back to Earth ever since we lost the feed, but even if they got those messages and acted on them immediately, we won’t know about it for another three hours.”

  Bella absorbed the information, mentally conjuring up a picture of the system’s web of radio transmissions. Telecommunications around the Sun were pushed to the limit of data-crammed efficiency, which meant high-power signals squeezed into tight, pencil-thin beams between designated senders and receivers. Only one transmitter had been assigned to Rockhopper, and that beam carried every byte of information uploaded to the ship, from personal plaintext messages to the flood of data from the global news networks. Rockhopper was too far out to intercept any other communications unless they were deliberately aimed at the ship.

  “There’s nothing else we can tap into?” Bella asked. “No omni-directional signals?”

  “Too faint,” Schrope said. “All the catalogued beacons are too far away for us to pick up at this range.”

  “All of them? What about the beacon we left behind — the one we tagged on the mass driver we were going to use on the last comet —”

  “It’s a long way behind us now.”

  “But closer than anything else. Did anyone remember to check the beacon?”

  “I’ll refer it to the technical team,” Schrope said.

  “You still want my free-flier?” asked Saul Regis, his voice characteristically slow and somnambulant.

  “As soon as you can prepare it,” Bella said. “I want it rigged to match the output frequency and strength of the Earth uplink. Make sure you adjust for Doppler shift, of course.”

  “Of course,” Saul Regis said laconically.

  “Trivial?”

  “Very. I can have the free-flier outside in an hour.”

  “Do it,” Bella said, “and then maybe we’ll get somewhere. I don’t like being cut off for this long. It makes me nervous.” Then she turned back to Svetlana. “I’m sorry. I’d like to have worked something out. But you had your chance.”

  “So did you,” Svetlana said.

  * * *

  Bella watched as the three robotics technicians completed their preparations. Jens Fletterick and Eva Hinks stood next to each other in the cargo airlock, comparing read-outs on their flexies, linked by data spools to ports in the robot’s chrome-yellow tubular chassis.

  Saul Regis stood behind his two team members, saying nothing but watching everything with narrow-eyed intensity, ready to intervene if he saw one of them make a mistake. They all had the slightly unnatural postures of people standing up under weightless conditions, glued to the floor by their shoes.

  Calling the cupboard-sized thing a robot was something of a stretch, Bella thought. The free-flier was mostly fuel tank, feeding a tiny nuclear-assisted gimballed rocket motor. At a quarter of a gee, the free-flier could shadow Rockhopper for six hours before it needed refuelling. That wouldn’t be an issue now: having reached the initial study point, the ship was in free fall, apart from the small amount of thrust required to hold itself at a constant distance from Janus. But the technical team assured Bella that the free-flier would need to reach a significant distance behind Rockhopper before its own radio emissions could be considered a realistic approximation to the uplink signal. Bella didn’t want to wait for the robot to crawl out to that distance on a fuel-conserving cruise.

  Regis turned back to her. “We’re go. It took a bit longer than I was expecting: we had to load new software to allow for the expected timelag at the end of the burn.”

  Bella looked at her watch: by her estimate, Regis was within a minute of his promised delivery time. “You understand you won’t be getting this machine back? I mean, if there’s anything valuable aboard it —”

  “We’ve stripped it of everything it doesn’t need for this one mission,” Regis said, directing her attention to a tiny cluster of processor boards floating at eye-level next to Hinks. “You still want to go ahead with this, right?”

  “We haven’t had any luck picking up the omni-directional transmitters,” Bella said.

  “Doesn’t that mean there has to be a problem at our end after all?”

  “Not necessarily. The detection probabilities were already marginal, and we might not be looking in exactly the right direction, or the beacons might have failed, or someone else might have claim-jumped our property. I admit it’s a little puzzling, but that’s why we need to run this experiment as well.”

  In five minutes they had cleared and depressurised the airlock so that the wide outer door could be opened to space. Fletterick had strapped himself into a teleoperations couch in the puppet booth and was already lifting the free-flier from its pallet using micro-bursts from its chemical steering thrusters. Flexies on the wall showed cam images of the free-flier from different angles as it turned its long axis through an arc of ninety degrees. Above the drone of pumps Bella heard Fletterick say, “Hold.”

  He flipped up the visor of the immersion headset. “She checks out okay. Star-trackers are off-line, but we should be able to rely on the inertial gyro.”

  “Star-trackers are down?” Bella asked.

  “Hinks the Jinx must have removed the wrong board.”

  “Hey, don’t blame me,” she said. “I removed exactly what we agreed to remove.”

  “We can live without the star-trackers,” Bella said. “Just get her on a solid gyro heading and fire up the main rocket.”

  Fletterick lowered the visor again and returned to the telepresence realm of the robot. “Resume,” he said, and began delivering another series of clearly enunciated verbal commands.

  The cams showed the robot drifting to a safe distance from Rockhopper before engaging its main rocket. It fell rapidly away at one gee, as if it had been dropped from a tall building on Earth. The nuclear rocket would burn for ninety minutes before exhausting its fuel, and by then the free-flier would have put half a light-second between i
tself and Rockhopper: more than a second of timelag for its telepresence operator. It would have achieved a terminal speed of more than fifty kilometres per second relative to its current motion.

  That sounded fast, and by any sane measure it was, but Rockhopper — and the alien machine it shadowed — were both moving eighteen times faster than that. When it finished its burn, the free-flier would still be moving with them into interstellar space, just a bit slower.

  It would still be headed for Spica.

  Bella returned to her quarters in the centrifuge section and waited for news. She pottered with her fish. After ten minutes, she learned that the uplink antenna aboard Rockhopper was successfully receiving the test signal from the free-flier. Nothing about the detection revealed any anomalies.

  Earth was still silent.

  After thirty minutes she called Belinda Pagis. The woman looked exhausted. “It’s only telling us what we already knew,” she said. “The antenna’s working fine. Every single test has confirmed that.”

  “But you can’t test the sensitivity at the low end,” Bella said, fingering a hardcopy of the earlier technical note. “Not without something like the free-flier.”

  “Agreed — but we’ve no reason to assume a problem with the sensitivity. And the uplink signal should be well above our noise limit.”

  “Then there must be extra noise leaking in from somewhere.” Bella glared at the technical note: it swam in and out of focus like a fish under water. “Have you looked at the cooling system on the pre-amplifier box?”

  “Yes,” Pagis said with a heavy sigh. “In fact, that was about the first thing we looked at.”