Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Is there anyone anywhere else?”

  “Just us. We all made our way here from different parts of Eddytown. None of us saw any other survivors on the way over.”

  Bella nodded sadly. “Then the suits won’t be a problem.”

  She resealed the inner door, cycled through the airlock and crossed quickly to the other dual lock, where Svetlana was waiting on the other side of the jammed door with the first batch of flat orange rectangles. She had eight of them, stacked in her hands like a pile of library books. “Parry’s on his way with eight more,” she said, handing them over carefully.

  Bella could only manage four of the suits at a time — they were dense with Thai nanotech, heavy as paving slabs in the local field. She put the others down at her feet, to collect on the next trip.

  “Tell Parry we’re already more than halfway there — there are only twenty-seven survivors.”

  “You reached them?”

  “All of them — including Emily. She’s going to be okay, Svieta.”

  Svetlana studied Bella for a long moment and then let out a gasp of pleasure and relief as the weight of all that worry was removed from her. Bella remembered how she had felt when she learned about the lock of hair in Garrison’s hand. For the first time in more years than she cared to think about, she felt an empathic connection with Svetlana.

  “Thank you,” Svetlana said eventually.

  “I’m glad she made it. Glad all of them did, but especially Emily. She’s a good kid.”

  “She’s older than I was when we were aboard Rockhopper, Bella.”

  “We were all still kids back then. Even me.”

  The ground shook with a force that nearly upended her. “Mike says the lander’s here,” Svetlana said. “I guess we’d better speed this up.”

  “Send the word to Nick that we’ve found survivors and we’re bringing them out in suits.”

  “I will.”

  “Then tell him to send word to Wang that we’re on our way back to Crabtree. If he doesn’t have the passkey ready, we’ll evacuate him anyway, along with the last few stragglers.”

  “And if he does have it?”

  “I hope Jim’s going to be able to show us how it works.”

  Bella turned to go. Through the gap, Svetlana reached out and touched the arm of her suit. “Bella —”

  “I should be going.”

  “Everything that’s happened between us —”

  “Now isn’t the best time, Svieta.”

  “I need to say it. I just need to say that… it isn’t as if I think things could ever have been any different.”

  Bella thought about that, then nodded solemnly. “Given everything I know about me, and everything I know about you… I think you’re right.”

  “But that doesn’t mean I have to like what happened. I liked having you as my friend a lot more than having you as my enemy.”

  Bella stepped away from the lock, watching her footing. “I know how you feel,” she said.

  Svetlana started to say something else. “Do you think —”

  “Fetch the other suits, Svieta. We’ve got lives to save.”

  Svetlana nodded and backed away to meet Parry, who had arrived with the next batch of suits. Bella steadied herself, the load weighing heavy on her arms, and set off back to the survivors.

  When she reached the lock, she carried the suits inside and waited for the pressurisation cycle to run again. Emily Barseghian reached in and took the first four suits as soon as the door opened.

  “Okay, listen carefully,” Bella said. “There are another twenty-three suits on their way. They’re all identical, all good enough to keep you alive until you reach the lander. Here’s how you activate them.” She pulled the tab on one suit, engaging the Thai nanotech, letting it unpack from the dense orange rectangle into a suit like the one she was wearing. She showed them how to put it on, how to control its rudimentary systems. “You’ve got more than enough air and power in one of these things, so don’t worry about that. Just watch out for obstructions on the way out. We experienced pretty sharp gravity eddies getting here, so watch your step.”

  “Guess we’d better start deciding who goes first,” Emily said.

  “No,” Bella said firmly. “That’s not how it’s going to happen. Get four people prepped, by all means, but if we cycle you through the lock in ones and twos, it’s going to take way too much time. It makes more sense to wait until I’ve shipped over all twenty-seven suits, get everyone inside a suit, then blow the pressure here. You can all leave in one go.”

  “What about the other locks?” Emily asked.

  “There aren’t any. You’ve got a clear run through vacuum all the way to the ship.” She paused. “It is a bit of a squeeze at one point, but you should all cope fine.”

  “Thanks, Bella,” Emily said. She didn’t sound keen, but at least she understood why they had to wait.

  “Start getting suited,” Bella said. “I’ll be back with the next batch as quickly as I can. I won’t be hanging around once I’ve left the last batch in the lock, so don’t expect to see me again after that until we’re all aboard the ship ”

  “Where are you taking us?” Emily asked.

  “Crabtree,” Bella said. “But we won’t be getting out to stretch our legs.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  Svetlana hugged her daughter as soon as she was clear of the airlock in Star Crusader. They were still on the ground, but the pilot kept the thrusters running all the while, ready to shift them fast if the local field showed any signs of climbing higher. If it exceeded three gees, the ship would be pinned down, unable to pull away from the side of Junction Box.

  Inside, the ship reeked of fear and exhaustion. Nick Thale was counting heads, making sure all twenty-seven of the Eddytown survivors were through the lock and secured for takeoff. The ancient lander had never been designed to take more than a dozen bulkily-suited people, but in the years since her last cometfall, Star Crusader had been stripped and refurbished as a passenger-carrying transport. That had been when there was still hope that the Fountainheads would permit — or at least not actively discourage — human exploration beyond the confines of the present shaft. Where once a large fraction of her internal volume had been occupied by DeepShaft equipment: drills, stowed robots, suit ballast, sprayrock applicators, decompressed and folded tents, and the occasional handy ex-MIRV nuclear device, the lander was now outfitted with additional seats, berths and extra life-support systems. Not that it wouldn’t be a squeeze by the time they’d picked up Wang and the other survivors — but Svetlana wasn’t hearing any complaints.

  “I thought you were dead,” she said to Emily. “When it happened, we didn’t think anyone could have survived. I know I should feel sorry for the people who didn’t make it, but right now the fact that you got out is all that matters to me.”

  “We didn’t know about what was happening to the rest of Janus,” Emily said, tearing her way out of the emergency suit. “We knew there was something going on under Eddytown, but we assumed it was because of the accident.”

  “Some of it probably was. Not all of it, though.” Svetlana felt a bracing sense of freedom as she spoke the truth. “I made a mistake when I talked to the Musk Dogs. They lied to me, Emily. They’ve put something inside Janus: not to tap energy like the Fountainheads, but to make it blow up.”

  Emily appeared to accept this unquestioningly. “Why would they do that?”

  “They’re trying to blow a hole in the Structure. Janus is their one best shot at escape, until the next moon rolls in. Which might be a long, long time from now.”

  “And they didn’t think to mention this to us?”

  “I guess they knew what we’d say.”

  “It’s still going to happen, right?”

  “Looks like it. Bella’s been advised to evacuate everyone. Everything we’ve made, everything we’ve built, every place that we’ve tried to make feel like home — it’s ending today.”

  “I ca
n’t deal with this. It’s too sudden.”

  Svetlana kissed the side of Emily’s forehead and ran a hand through her tousled hair, straightening it. “We’re all going to have to deal with it sooner or later.”

  “Where will we live? How will we find enough energy and power to stay alive?”

  “We’ll just have to figure something out, the way the Fountainheads did.”

  “We’ll be poorer, though, by losing the one thing we have that makes us worth talking to.”

  “In which case we’re about to find out who our friends really are, I suppose.”

  “How long before we’re all off Janus?”

  “Bella was talking in terms of hours. The sooner the better, I think.”

  “And you still came back for us?”

  “I was hardly going to abandon you, was I?”

  “Not you,” Emily said. “But Bella — why did she come back, when she could have left with the others?”

  “Ask her yourself,” Svetlana said, looking over the heads of the evacuees, trying to locate the small woman she knew had to be somewhere inside. She drew a blank, then looked harder.

  Bella wasn’t on the ship.

  “Where is she?” Svetlana asked. “She should have been with you, after she handed over the last set of suits.”

  “She said she wouldn’t be sticking around while we got into the suits,” Emily said. “I assumed she’d have come aboard ship before any of us arrived.”

  “But she didn’t. Didn’t you notice?”

  Emily pulled away from her mother. “She could have been anywhere aboard.”

  “She isn’t on the flight deck. Where else could she be?”

  Emily looked affronted. “Don’t give me a hard time — I had twenty-six other people to think about.”

  “But Bella somehow escaped your attention.”

  Parry pushed through to them, steadying himself via an overhead handrail. “We’re about ready to dust off, unless there’s a problem I don’t know about.”

  “Bella isn’t aboard,” Svetlana said.

  He looked around, his expression hardening. “You double-checked?”

  “She isn’t here. She told Emily she’d be back on the ship before any of the evacuees.”

  “Who was the first through?”

  “Elias Feldman’s son. Bella definitely wasn’t with him.”

  “Fuck.” He looked stunned, as if the universe could not possibly be doing this to them, after everything they had already been through on this day. “Something must have happened to her between the two airlocks.”

  “It was dark,” Emily said. “If she’d fallen, stumbled away from the track we were following… we were moving quickly, not paying much attention to what was on either side of us. Jesus, don’t look at me like that! No one told us she was going to fall!”

  “Easy,” Parry said. “No one’s blaming you.”

  “She damned well is,” Emily said, looking pointedly at Svetlana.

  Parry reached for a helmet stowed on one of the equipment racks. “I’ll go back for her. Tell the pilot to keep the lander down until the last possible moment. If he has to leave, I’ll carry Bella beyond the wheels.”

  “You’ll never get through that half-open door,” Svetlana said. “I’ll go out in one of the emergency suits, same as Bella was wearing. Mike brought some extras aboard the lander, right? It’s the only way.”

  “Not going to happen, babe. Don’t want you falling the same way she did.”

  “We don’t know what happened yet, which is why one of us has to go back to look. Could be she’s just trapped, or disorientated. She didn’t know Eddytown the way we did.”

  Parry held his resolve for a moment longer before giving in. “I’ll sweet-talk the pilot into keeping us grounded for another six minutes. If you haven’t found Bella in three, you turn around and head back. That’s not negotiable.”

  Svetlana started removing her Chakri five, ready to slip into an emergency suit as soon as it had assembled itself. She did not care who she elbowed in the process, or even hear the disgruntled noises they made. Barely two minutes later, she was back on the surface, looking for Bella. Retracing the course they had followed before, groaning with the effort of walking through the high-gee zones, heedless of whether or not she was repeating herself enough to provoke the machinery, she found her way back into the admin core, to the jammed door that she had not been able to squeeze through before. Now it was easy.

  It did not take long to find her. As Emily had guessed, Bella had fallen not far from the route that the evacuees would have taken from their place of shelter through the admin core to the lander. In the darkness, with all their concentration focused on getting to safety, it did not surprise Svetlana that none of them had noticed the fallen woman, lying amidst the debris and clutter of the depressurised building. As Svetlana put her hand into the space above Bella’s fallen form, she understood instantly what had happened: the field strength was much higher there — three or four gees, easily. One errant footfall into that region of influence and Bella would have been ripped from her feet. She would have hit the ground with calamitous force. The emergency suit was not designed to protect her from that kind of harm. Nor had it.

  With great effort, Svetlana dragged Bella’s body back onto the path, without exposing herself to the field gradient. But even then Bella was almost too heavy to carry unassisted. By the time she got her through the jammed lock, Svetlana had passed through every state of exhaustion she had ever experienced and into some strange new landscape of fatigue. Afterwards, she remembered very little of the journey. It was only much later that she learned that Parry had been waiting for her in a Chakri five, ready to carry the two of them back to Star Crusader.

  Bella was dead. The impact of the fall had driven a piece of debris into her skull like a piton.

  But what, Svetlana wondered, did it mean to die on Janus?

  Aboard the lander, Svetlana insisted that they must do what they could, no matter how futile it might prove. Bella had died instantly, but even though her suit had been punctured, even though all the breathable air had flashed into vacuum, the trace oxygen in her body would have continued to trigger a damaging cascade of cellular processes. Those processes were continuing even now, still working their harm.

  Those last traces of oxygen had to be flushed out; the cellular receptor sites blocked. Moving more by reflex than conscious direction, Svetlana pushed her way to the nearest medical kit and ripped it from the wall. She fumbled it open and tugged out the Frost Angel kit, with its childishly lucid instruction sheet. They’d had better methods of immersion for decades, but the equipment on the lander had barely been touched since the settlement.

  Parry took her arm, squeezing it gently. “It’s too late, babe. She’s been under for too long.”

  “We can do this.”

  He spoke with a calm insistence. “This isn’t the way it’s meant to happen. Frost Angel is for preserving structure before it collapses. In this case the collapse has already happened.”

  “Then we don’t allow it to get any worse.”

  “I know you want to do all that you can. But we’ve lost this one. Bella would have seen that.”

  “Parry,” she said, her temper snapping, “either let go of me or start doing something useful.”

  “Babe…”

  She shouted now, loud enough that it silenced all other talk in the ship, even against the background of roaring machines. “Parry — listen to me. Fucking listen. Bella Lind isn’t dying on my watch. Either accept that or get the fuck out of my way.”

  He opened his mouth as if to answer her, but at first nothing came. Then, quietly enough that only she could have heard him, he said, “What do you want me to do?”

  She lowered her voice. “Get her out of that suit, quickly. Get her into a hardshell so we can flood it with H2S. And do it fast.”

  “Okay,” he said, and started moving.

  They had her in the suit, flooded with hydr
ogen sulphide, by the time Star Crusader touched down at Crabtree and took aboard the handful of people who hadn’t already left for Underhole via the maglev. The people — as well as the BI robots that had accompanied them to the lander — were all carrying as much as they could salvage from Crabtree’s great arboreta and aquaria. It was pathetic how little they’d be saving — a few twigs from a forest, a few fish if they were lucky — but everyone who had left the city had taken something, often at the expense of their own belongings. Perhaps it was a pointless gesture — perhaps the settlement could never be remade the way it had been until today — but sometimes a gesture was better than nothing, no matter how hopelessly futile it might have been. It was the human thing to do, as Bella had said. The twigs and fish were a promise that whatever happened here, whatever the next few days or weeks had in store, there was still a future. Somewhere else in the Structure, they’d find a way to make Crabtree again, or die trying.

  First, though, they had to make it through the next day.

  By the time they landed, Wang Zhanmin was ready with the passkey, still hot from the subnuclear fires of its creation. They got their first good look at it as the robots carried it with reverent care aboard the waiting lander. It resembled an insanely complicated piece of abstract sculpture in delicate blown glass: a cylindrical thing the size of a jet turbine, ripe with intertwined pipes and flanges twinkling with chromatic flashes of refracted light, and yet conveying the sense that it was not quite all there: clefts and gaps in its elusive shape hinted at missing structures, like a three-dimensional jigsaw with some of the pieces missing. It was only later that Svetlana realised that the Whisperer artefact was made of materials from both sides of the matter gap, and that the missing pieces were in fact fully present, integrated into the whole by gravitomagnetic coupling fields and trans-gap energy ducts, sharing some but not all of the same spatial volume as the visible parts. On any level of analysis, the passkey was at least twice as complex as it appeared. The Whisperers, had any of them been present, would have seen the other half of the machine, and wondered about the ghostly parts intruding into the universe on the human side of the gap.