Pushing Ice (13 page)

Takahashi’s backpack was still largely buried, but his much smaller chestpack was fully exposed. Axford flipped aside the plastic cover that protected the chestpack’s diagnostic traces. He raised a hand to his visor, shielding his gaze as he tried to make sense of the trembling histograms and snake-like pulses. With surprising deftness he tapped commands into the little keypad next to the read-out panel, cycling through display options.

After a few moments he paused long enough to look up and make eye contact with Takahashi. Axford nodded once: an acknowledgement that promised no miracles, but that he would do all he could.

Axford then turned to Parry and tapped a finger against his sleeve. Parry spooled out the fibre-optic line and plugged in.

“He doesn’t need to hear this,” Axford said, “but it isn’t good. He’s already suffering the early stages of heat exhaustion. It’s like a hot day in Manila in that suit.”

“It’s only going to get hotter,” Parry said.

Axford looked at the abandoned excavation. “You can’t get him out, can you?”

“It’s not looking good.”

“Then I may have to euthanise him.”

Parry thought he had misheard. “I’m sorry?”

“I can put him under quickly if I alter his gas mixture. He’s already in pain.”

“Let me get this straight.” Parry strove to keep the edge of hysteria from his voice. “You’re talking about killing him.”

“I’m talking about shutting down central-nervous-system activity. We do it cleanly and quickly, and then we crack open that suit and pump it full of hydrogen sulphide.” Axford touched the metallic-blue gas tank. “He’ll cool quickly. Then we cut him out as fast as we can. Once he’s back aboard the ship, I’ll run a saline flush to remove the remaining blood oxygen from his system.”

“And then you revive him?”

“No. That’s not something I’m capable of doing. That’ll have to wait until we get back home.”

“Jesus, Ryan. Is that the best you can offer?”

“If he burns up in that suit and suffers cardiac arrest, ischemic damage will destroy critical brain structure within four to six minutes. I’m giving him a shot at surviving.”

“Some shot.”

“It’s a high-risk procedure designed for situations just like this.”

“And you know what to do?”

“It’s already in the book. Operation Frost Angel.”

After a horrified silence, Parry said, “How many of these have you done?”

“This’ll be my first.”

“And now you get to test this on Mike?”

“Don’t sound so horrified, Boyce. I’m trying to save his life.”

It was the first time he had ever heard Axford angry. Parry had the uncomfortable realisation that he had trespassed into the area of another man’s professional expertise: just as if Axford had tried to lecture him on the right way to dig a mass-driver pit. “I’m sorry. It’s just —”

“Clinical? Yes, that’s rather the point.”

Parry found that he needed to get his own breathing under control before he tripped his own suit’s heat overload. “How much time before you have to do that to him?”

“The sooner the better. It’ll take time to put him under… I wouldn’t want to run the hydrogen sulphide exposure while he’s conscious. There’s something else, too. This may be the hard part.”

“What?”

“We’ll need consent.”

Parry closed his eyes and wished he could be somewhere else. “I’ll issue it, if that’s his only way out.”

“Not from you,” Axford said. “From Mike. He has to know what he’s getting himself into.” He reached into the medical case and removed a plastic laminated card the size of a dinner menu. He opened it and passed it to Parry. The card was printed with bold text accompanied by simplified medical diagrams in primary colours. It looked like the kind of thing they put in aircraft, showing how to use the escape slides. The figures in the diagrams had the same look of blank, fatalistic serenity. Attached to the sheet by a nylon line was a magic marker, chunky enough to be gripped in a spacesuit glove.

“Oh, no,” Parry said.

“Oh, yes,” said Axford. “This is the only way he gets a ticket back home.”

“And when he gets home — what then?”

“We hand him to the Chinese. Or keep him on ice until we can bring him back to life ourselves.”

“There is no other choice, is there?” Parry said heavily after a few moments.

Axford shook his head.

Parry unplugged from the medic. “Mike… Are you still hearing me?”

“I’m here,” Takahashi said faintly. “Is that Ryan with you?”

“Ryan’s here.”
But that’s as far as the good news goes
, Parry thought. “Mike, there’s something I need to talk to you about. Ryan says it’s too dangerous to get you out with cutting torches. I don’t like it, but I think he’s right. None of us are good enough to guarantee that we won’t touch your backpack or pierce your suit. So we’re going to try something different, if you agree to it.”

Takahashi must have heard something in his voice. “And if I don’t agree to it?”

“Then we’ll do our best with the torches.”

“Tell me what the other plan is.”

“The other plan is —” In his hands, the laminated sheet trembled uncontrollably.

“Parry, just tell me.”

“There’s a contingency for this, a procedure. Ryan will put you under… render you unconscious.”

“He needs to know the
facts
,” Axford said firmly. “We need to be clear that we’re not just talking about unconsciousness here.”

Parry held the medical sheet up to Takahashi’s faceplate and tapped his finger against the cartoon man whose head was a cross section, revealing roselike whorls of brain and brainstem. Boxed and arrowed flatlines indicated the absence of activity in the CNS.

“Ryan will use your suit controls to euthanise you. It’ll be painless… like going to sleep.”

“No —” Takahashi began.

“Listen,” Parry insisted, “there’s a good reason for this. When you’re out… when you’re under… Ryan can preserve you. You stay like that until we get you back home.”

“I’m dead,” he said numbly.

“You’re in stasis,” Axford said, working the Frost Angel tank from the medical case. “What matters to me is that there’ll still be a chance that you can be brought back.”

“What kind of a chance?”

“Better odds than if we try to cut you out of this. That’s the one thing I’m certain of.”

“He’s right,” Parry said. “This is the way it has to go down, Mike.”

“There must be something else you can try before we take that route,” Takahashi said desperately.

‘There isn’t,“ Axford said. ”And we’re already short on time. You know this, Mike. If our places were reversed, would you trust yourself to cut me out?“

“I’d try.”

“I wouldn’t let you,” Parry said. He pushed his faceplate as close to the other man’s as he could. It looked warm and wet in there, like the inside of a greenhouse. “Ryan needs your consent. You have to read this and sign it.”

“No.”

Parry pushed the magic marker into Takahashi’s glove and squeezed the fingers until they gripped. “Just sign the damned thing, Mike.”

Takahashi let the pen go. “I can’t.”

Parry grabbed it and forced it back into Takahashi’s glove. “Sign it, goddamn you. Sign it and live.”

“I can’t.”

Red lights were pulsing all across Takahashi’s chestpack. The suit was beginning to fail, relinquishing its duty of preservation. Parry closed his own gloved hand around Takahashi’s and steered the tip of the pen towards the consent box.

All they needed was a mark… an attempt at a signature.

“Mike, do this for me. For all your friends.”

Another red light lit up on the chestpack. Then all the lights flashed once and faded to black. Deep in the suit, some critical circuit had just failed. Parry pushed the pen towards the sheet and started to form the upsweep of an M, and then felt — he hoped — Takahashi’s hand move with some intent of its own. The tip slid across the consent box, forming a mark that could almost have been Takahashi’s signature.

Almost.

Parry let Takahashi’s hand drop the marker and turned back to Axford. “It’s your show now, Ryan.”

Axford waved Parry aside and began to tap commands into the chestpack keypad. The lights flickered back on again, dimmer now. Axford entered some more instructions and then the full significance of what was happening must have dawned on Takahashi, because he tried to push Axford away, out of reach of the chestpack. Axford fell back on his haunches.

“Help me,” he said to Parry. “Hold his arms.”

Parry looked at his friend, taking in the utter fear he saw behind the steam-smeared faceplate.

“I don’t think he wants this to happen any more,” Parry said.

“It doesn’t matter what he wants,” Axford answered. “I’ve got consent now.”

SIX

It was not the first time that someone had died during
Rockhopper
operations, and Bella doubted it would be the last. But that didn’t mean it would be business as usual from now on: although Bella had seen her crew snap back into action only a day or two after a death, sometimes it took much longer. The process of recovery never appeared to have much to do with the popularity of the crewmember involved, or the circumstances in which they had died; it was governed by subtler forces than that, and Bella did not have their measure.

She coped in her own way. Takahashi’s medical status might be open to debate, but in her heart, Bella believed it to be permanent and irreversible death, and she treated it as such. She composed letters of condolence, trying to strike the right balance between respectful formality and the personal touch. It was easier than with some of the dead; Mike Takahashi had no close family, so the letters were going to distant relatives and friends.

Sometimes, writing those letters of condolence, Bella found herself wondering who they would find to write to if she were to die. She knew what it was like to be on the receiving end of such a message: she had been expecting a call to tell her when Garrison was being rotated back from Big Red. Instead she heard that his shuttle had smeared itself over half of the Sinai Planum after an aerobrake failure. He’d been returning from Deimos.

Unlucky thirteenth: 13/03/36. The date was burnt into her brain like a brand.

People assumed she didn’t miss having a partner, as if the occasional and necessary coldness of her decision-making implied that she was herself frigid. A handful of them understood: Svetlana, Chisholm, Axford, Parry. They did not know everything, nor would she have wished them to. Not even Svetlana knew about the argument Bella and Garrison had had — drawn out by the agonised timelag of an Earth-Mars conversation — just before Garrison left for his final mission. If only they had at least made up before ending the link, before Garrison departed. He’d still have died, but she wouldn’t have been left with this twisted feeling of something unresolved, as if that unpleasant conversation was still waiting to be terminated, somewhere in the space between Earth and Mars.

Bella stopped herself before her thoughts fell deeper into that poisonous spiral. Nothing could undo what had happened, but every time she felt as if she had dealt with the matter and was finally ready to safely close the book on Garrison’s death, it would return again to haunt her. She had to accept that it probably always would. There were times when she could shut the past out with work and duty, thinking about what might happen rather than what might have been.

But today was not one of those days.

Bella had just finished the letters to Takahashi’s distant relatives when she noticed that a communication had arrived from DeepShaft, addressed to her. It concerned Svetlana’s technical query about the pressure in the fuel tanks — Mike Takahashi’s accident had almost driven Svetlana’s questions from her mind. She speed-read the document, then called Svetlana to tell her that the report looked very thorough, and appeared to allay the concerns she had raised.

“My concerns?” Svetlana asked.

“I’m dumping the technical report to your flexy. The executive summary makes the gist of the report adequately clear.”

“Adequately clear,” Svetlana said, pulling a face. “Well, that’s a relief.”

“There’s no mystery,” Bella said. “The way the pressure sensors are rigged combined with the way the software is configured was guaranteed to smooth out a sharp pressure event from the mass-driver impact. The good news is that there’s no cause for concern.”

“Really?” Svetlana sounded intrigued. “No cause at all?”

“The simulations show that the impact wouldn’t have led to any structural fatigue in the tanks.”

“There’s no impact in the world that wouldn’t have caused
some
fatigue.”

“But fatigue we can live with.”

“I’m still not happy, Bella.”

“I’m not
asking
you to be happy: I’m just asking you to stop worrying about this one incident. If anything, we’ve overestimated the likely effects. Why are you so convinced someone’s keeping something from us?”

“Call me cynical, but do you really think DeepShaft’s going to be thrilled at the idea of us turning back now?”

“They also want this ship back in one piece.”

“After we reach Janus.”

“Svieta —” Bella began before giving it up with an exasperated glance at the ceiling. “I should know better by now, shouldn’t I?”

“With me? Definitely!” Svetlana said.

* * *

Svetlana followed Parry through the lock and onto the dizzying tower of the spinal truss. The engine section looked a frighteningly long way below: much further away than it had when the ship was drifting. Parry secured one end of the tether to a truss node and the other to the harness point on Svetlana’s suit. She used the ladder that ran parallel to the car line to climb down the truss. At first every step sent a stab of agony into her chest, but after a while she worked out the best way to move to alleviate the pain of the damaged rib.

At one hundred metres Svetlana halted, secured herself to the nearest node and waited for Parry to descend. Then Parry waited in turn while Svetlana moved down another hundred metres. Halfway down the spine a team was working on repairs to the car line amidst robots and flickering cutting tools. Svetlana expected them to show some curiosity as she and Parry passed them by, but they acknowledged their presence with only the briefest of hand gestures before returning to their duties.