Pushing Ice (11 page)

“I don’t want cutting gear near those tanks,” Svetlana said.

“We thought of that. They’ve taken down powered tools, but nothing that you need worry about. It’s just a question of freeing the pieces.”

The workers had formed an efficient clear-up chain. Five of them were down at the base of the tanks, using hammer-drills to break up the compacted mass into manageable chunks. Once loose, they nudged the chunks back towards the open end of the tank assembly. Five more workers were poised on geckoflex halfway up the inner wall, ready to shove the debris back on course if it looked as if it would scrape against the tanks or the spine. Another five waited at the top, three on geckoflex and two hovering in propulsion packs. They caught the arriving chunks and made a quick assessment of their value. The booty they tossed into a sticky web of epoxy-coated fibres; the junk they threw overboard, obeying the old and largely pointless tradition of flinging stuff away from the ecliptic plane.

“The pile’s visibly smaller,” Parry said.

Svetlana watched on the cam as the workers at the base attacked a piece of debris. “Tell them to take care.”

“Just because they’re fast doesn’t mean they’re not good. These are the same people I’d trust with the trickiest jobs on a comet.”

Svetlana forced herself to nod. She could never quite overcome a lingering prejudice against the comet miners. They were too brave, too courageous. Svetlana thought that the only kind of person you wanted anywhere near
any
part of a fusion motor was someone with a strong aversion to risk.

Cowards were exactly the kind of people you wanted around nuclear technology.

“I’m just saying they need to be careful,” she said. “If there’s a leak —”

“Nothing we saw down there suggested a leak. Do me a favour and stop worrying. You need to rest.”

“I’ve broken ribs before now. They mend.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Yes,” she said sweetly. “You can bring me a flexy, please.”

Parry grimaced. “You’re supposed to be relaxing, babe, not working.”

“To me relaxing
is
working. Just do it, okay?”

Parry gave in and returned a minute later with a flexy. “The little lady won’t be thrilled about this,” he said.

“I’ll square things with Bella. You just worry about your people.”

Svetlana held the flexy before her face, allowing the device to identify her via a combination of fingerprint analysis, hand movement, breath chemistry, voice, face and retinal recognition.

“Anything in particular you’re interested in?” Parry asked.

“Leakage,” she said.

“That doesn’t tell me much.”

“If the fuel tanks really were punctured, and if there was a leak into space, it should show up in the pressure readings.”

“Even a tiny leak?”

“There’s a limit, obviously — the pressure gauges won’t be able to detect a few atoms dribbling into space every second. But it’s foolish not to check.”

“Do you think I should tell my people to stop working until you’ve looked at this?”

“No,” she said, after a moment’s reflection. “It’s probably nothing. Just as long as they’re careful.”

She navigated to the area of ShipNet concerned with the basic technical functions of the engine. A few more taps of her finger brought up four graphics boxes, each of which contained a plot of pressure versus time for the fuel in each of the tanks, with the time axis along the bottom of each box. She zoomed in on the part of the plot that covered the last twenty-four hours.

“When exactly did the accident happen?”

Parry leaned over and stabbed a finger against the time axis. “Six hours ago. Round about here.”

She zoomed in on the two hours spanning the accident. “See that line, Parry?”

“Uh huh.”

“Looks pretty flat to me.”

Parry squinted at it. “As piss on a plate. Is that a problem?”

“We shut down the engine within ten minutes of the accident,” Svetlana said, thinking aloud. “Fuel consumption should have flattened out to zero between then and now.”

“Agreed. But you’d have a hard time seeing that kind of change in slope until a
lot
more time has passed.”

“I know. I was just wondering if there’d be any sign of the event in the pressure data.”

“If there’s a leak, it’s a hell of a slow one,” Parry said.

“Or no leak at all.”

He moved to take the flexy away from her. “And that’s good, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” Svetlana said. But she held onto the flexy tenaciously. “I still want to look at these numbers a little more closely.”

“If it keeps you from climbing out of bed,” Parry said. He rubbed his hands against the pockets of his trousers. “Well, no rest for the wicked.”

“I thought you were done for the day.”

“I just came inside to take a break. Suit needed topping up anyway.”

“You’ve already been outside too long,” she said. “Here — let me see that dosimeter.”

He snapped the bracelet from his wrist and passed it to her. She studied the coloured display, with its ominous red-tinged histogram.

“Six hundred and twenty millisieverts, Parry. You keep this up and we’ll be able to light the ship with you.” She passed back the dosimeter, her fingers tingling as if the thing itself were a source of radiation. “Parry, please take some rest.”

“I’ll take some rest when you do,” he said, reaching to drag the flexy away from her again. “How does that sound?”

She tightened her hold on the flexy. “A lot like blackmail.”

“I’ll be back inside in six hours,” Parry said. He kissed her and walked away. She stared at his back as he left the medical area, watching as he paused to talk to one of Ryan Axford’s three duty medics. She pushed her head back against the pillow, closed her eyes and allowed the flexy to slip from her hand. She lay like that until the light through her eyelids became darker, as if the sick bay lights had been dimmed. She waited five minutes, then opened her eyes again.

FIVE

Bella visited the sick. She stopped by Jim Chisholm’s bed, intending to talk to him about the accident, but found him asleep with headphones on. She moved on to the next partition, where Svetlana was just finishing off a foil-wrapped dinner spread out on a tray.

“On the mend?”

“Miles better,” Svetlana said unconvincingly. In Bella’s opinion she looked like someone who had been up all night cramming for an exam.

“I thought you’d like to know that the clean-up work’s coming along nicely. We should be under way within six or seven hours.”

“Parry told me they were going to reinforce the tanks.”

“Not a bad idea while we’ve got people down there — right?”

“Provided we can spare the time.”

Thomas Shen, the duty medic, removed the tray from Svetlana’s lap. Beneath it, Bella noticed, was a flexy, its display window crammed with technical diagrams and graphs. Svetlana had scribbled comments and calculations all over the figures.

“Spare the time?” Bella echoed.

“Won’t this delay make our rendezvous with Janus even more tricky?”

“Shorter, maybe, but we’d have heard from home if the mission was no longer feasible.”

“If you say so.”

“Something bothering you, Svieta?”

She looked at Bella suspiciously. “Why? Why do you think something might be bothering me?”

“Browsing through those graphs for fun, were you?” Bella quickly snatched the flexy from Svetlana’s lap and held it up to the light, studying the complex read-outs and scribbled annotations. ‘These are pressure readings,“ she observed.

“I figured there might’ve been a leak in one or other of the fuel tanks.”

“Was there?”

“Looks like they came through all right.”

“You’re still bothered about something. No point trying to hide it, Svieta.” Bella pulled up a chair and lowered herself into it the wrong way around, folding her shirt-sleeved arms across the chair’s back. “I need to know what’s on your mind.”

It was a long while before Svetlana spoke. Thomas Shen came back again and fussed with one of the monitoring machines. Bella bit her lip and looked at the other woman, waiting.

“It’s the pressure in the tanks,” Svetlana said, when Shen had moved away again.

Bella looked at the displays on the flexy again. “So there is a leak?”

“No. That’s what I was specifically looking for.”

“But something else is bothering you.”

Svetlana looked tormented. “I don’t know.”

“Tell me.”

“When the mass driver hit, it was like a liner hitting an iceberg.”

“We all felt the bump,” Bella agreed.

“Right. But where’s the evidence in this data?”

“I don’t follow.”

“When the driver hit, the jolt should have made the gas in the tanks slosh around.”

“And it didn’t?”

“Not according to these read-outs. It’s as if it didn’t happen.”

“Wait.” Bella squinted, forcing her eyes to focus. “Those pressure readings: how are they taken?”

“By pressure meters inside the tanks.”

“How many per tank? I’m guessing more than one, for redundancy?”

“Six,” Svetlana said.

“Located in different places?”

“Yes. Two at the tank poles, four around the mid-section.”

“Well, there’s your answer.” Bella tried not to sound too confident or cocksure. “Each of those pressure curves must be a composite of data from six different gauges. More than likely there’s a lot of software crunching those numbers before you see them, suppressing any readings that look anomalous.”

“I thought of that,” Svetlana said, “but I’ve dug through the source code and there’s nothing that should screen out a major pressure spike. You wouldn’t
want
to screen out something like that: it could mean you have serious problems. What if the tank integrity took a hit from all that gas moving around?”

“All right, but I must still be on the right track. Do these curves reflect the true sampling rate in the tanks?”

“I think so, yes.”

“But you’re not absolutely sure.”

“No,” she said, with a heavy sigh. “There’s a certain amount of stuff I can check out from this bed, but I can’t get at all the code between me and the tanks.”

“Look,” Bella said, her tone conciliatory; “if it makes you happy, we can ask for a second opinion from home. But we’ll have to be moving before they answer.”

“I’d still be happier if I could see the data,” Svetlana said. “I’d be even happier if I knew why I
wasn’t
seeing it.”

“You’ll get your answer,” Bella said, pushing herself out of the seat. “I’ll send a message home immediately. If someone gets to work on it fast you should have a response within half a day.”

“And if I don’t like the response?” Svetlana said again.

“Then you’ll have something to worry about. Now —
please
— get some rest. I’ll let you know as soon as we have any news.” Bella hugged the flexy to her chest. “I’ll take this, if you don’t mind.”

Svetlana started to say something, but Bella was already on her way out of the room.

* * *

No death in a spacesuit is ever good, but Mike Takahashi’s was especially bad.

Parry felt it coming. The metal lining of the tank quivered, then quivered again, and again, the vibration becoming stronger each time. Something was coming down to them: some piece of debris they hadn’t nailed during the clear-up work.

Three of them — Parry, Frida Wolinksy and Takahashi — were laying down sprayrock. They were standing on the side of one of the tanks, attached to it by the soles of their boots with the crowns of their helmets brushing the spinal truss, their faces aimed towards the shield ten metres below. They were tethered to the work crew at the open end of the tank assembly.
Rockhopper
was under thrust again, accelerating at half a gee. The false gravity assisted the sprayrock application, bedding down the layers of the binary compound before they fused.

Parry’s neck twitched as some instinct told him that the danger lay behind him, further up the ship. But his helmet blocked his view, and his tethered position prevented him from twisting around. No more than two seconds had passed since he had first become aware of the wrongness.

His hand moved to shut the trigger of the sprayrock gun. It seemed to take too long. At the same time he intended to speak. He started to say: “Cut the flow,” but he had barely formed the first consonant when he saw a blur of movement in one of his helmet’s HUD windows.

Mike Takahashi was gone.

He had been ripped off the side of the tank. With some spiteful inevitability the debris had caught Takahashi, either bulldozing into him or snagging his tether on the way down. Geckoflex was strong, but its bonds were designed to fail before the seals in a pressure-suit.

Parry’s hand finally closed the trigger on the nozzle and the jet of sprayrock halted abruptly. He reluctantly followed its trajectory, down to the base of the tanks. He could see it all now. There was the object that must have taken Takahashi: a lump of unrecognisable equipment the size of a beach ball, half-submerged in hardened sprayrock. And there, next to it, was Mike Takahashi, spread-eagled in the moment of impact. During his fall he had twisted through one hundred and eighty degrees: his face stared up towards Parry and Wolinsky. His head, shoulders and upper chest were free of the sprayrock. The rest of him lay buried under the blue-grey surface, except for part of one knee and the tip of one boot.

Takahashi was still alive, still conscious — Parry could hear him groaning. Neither the initial collision nor the drop onto the bed of sprayrock had killed him. The sprayrock had probably saved his life, cushioning what would otherwise have been a fatal fall against the hard armour of the shield.

Parry dropped the spray nozzle. Everyone else was talking on the common channel. They all knew something had happened, even if they couldn’t yet see the fallen man on the cams.

“Quiet, everyone,” Parry said, raising his voice. “Quiet!
Quiet
, for fuck’s sake!” When they finally fell silent, he forced calm into his voice and said softly, “Hey, Mike — can you hear me, buddy?”