Pushing Ice (27 page)

“Or damage the tokamak itself,” Pagis reminded her. “If you win the day, we’re still going to need that for power.”

“Whatever you might have in mind,” Mengcheng Yang said, “it might be best not to talk about it.”

“Yang’s right,” Bella said. “If Craig’s on the ball, he’ll be listening to every word we say, and watching us on the cams.”

“And monitoring our flexy activity,” Pagis said. She gave Bella a pessimistic smile. “But I’ll keep trying.”

The speaker came to life. “This is Schrope. Word is that Svetlana’s ready to push to two gees. We’ll increase smoothly through one gee, but I’d suggest you make yourselves comfortable. The ride may be a little rough until Svetlana fine-tunes the fusion parameters.”

Bella felt a tremor run through the ship as the engine pushed beyond half a gee. It was more power than they had ever generated before, operating well outside their textbook performance envelope. Bella felt her own weight increase. She tried to judge the moment when the acceleration passed through one gee. She sat on her haunches, pushing back against the padded side of a cabinet. Most of her people were in similar positions, dispersed through two rooms.

She thought about destroying the engine, and realised with bleak resignation that it was already far too late for that.
Rockhopper
had gained enough speed to escape the weak gravitational field of Janus. Even if the engine cut out now, the ship would continue on its drift to the edge of the slipstream.

She had lost. It was just a question of accepting it now. Her weight increased until even sitting was unpleasant. Slowly, Bella stretched out until she was lying flat, with only a pillow under her head for support. It was easier that way: breathing still felt more difficult than normal, but at least now her weight was distributed more evenly across her whole body.

Pagis was still trying to crack the ShipNet lockout. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is too difficult. And it doesn’t look as if Ungless made any silly mistakes.” She put the flexy down, groaning with overworked muscles.

“No one’s going to make any silly mistakes,” Bella said. “We’re too good a crew for that.”

Now and then the floor kicked up at them with renewed force as the thrust became momentarily unsteady, but the jolts gradually became less severe and less frequent as Svetlana adjusted the details of the fusion reaction.

“Bella,” Thom Crabtree said, his voice just loud enough to carry over the background noise, “there’s something you should know.”

Bella smiled reassuringly at the taphead. “I’m glad you sided with me, Thom. It counts for a lot. You don’t have to explain yourself.”

“I’m siding with the rightful authority on this ship,” Crabtree said, his nervous, feral eyes still not meeting hers. “But that isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“What, then?” she asked.

“I can do something. Something that might make them stop and take us back to Janus. But I’ll need your permission first.”

She kept her expression fixed, her voice level. “What do you think you can do, Thom?”

“I can destroy the ship. There’s a robot — Nick’s free-flier, the one he sent out to look at the forward face of Janus.”

He had her full attention now, but she could not show it. Microphones probably wouldn’t pick up their conversation above the noise of the ship, but the webcams would reveal the slightest hint of conspiracy.

“You can control it?”

“Yes.”

“From
here
?”

“I’m in contact with it all the time.”

“But Saul Regis locked you out of control,” Bella said. “That was why you came to see me — to complain about not having enough to do. All you had were the virtuals.”

“I did something about it,” Crabtree said, with an easy shrug. “Saul wasn’t really very thorough. I found a way around his blocks. I’ve been doing it for days now, looking through robots, making them move — not enough to be noticed, but enough to remember how it feels to do something.”

Bella looked around, but Regis was in the next room. “But we’re locked out of ShipNet.”

“I don’t need ShipNet. The only way they can lock
me
out would be with a skull saw — or a hammer to the head.” Crabtree had the glazed and absent look that told her he was only partly present in the room. Much of his sensory world was already focused on a point of view beyond the hull.

“Are you keeping up with us?”

“Yes. I’m burning fuel pretty quickly, but I should be able to shadow
Rockhopper
for another ten minutes.”

“What can you do?”

“Nothing subtle,” Crabtree said, closing his eyes tightly.

Bella called Svetlana to medical.

* * *

Engine down. Full reverse thrust on steering rockets, followed by a slew that must nearly have snapped the ship’s spine.

“Take us back to the initial study position,” Crabtree said. “Take us back to Janus.”

By then they had no choice but to obey. At that point, the superior numbers of the other faction counted for nothing. They couldn’t block Crabtree’s link to the free-flier because it bypassed ShipNet completely. Given hours — or days — Bella was sure that they could have found a way to lock him out, even if it consisted of nothing cleverer than disabling the antenna that was talking to the free-flier, but they didn’t have hours, or even minutes.

Crabtree had demonstrated his complete control of the free-flier by nearly ramming the ship, showing how easy it would have been to achieve a killing impact. He maintained a stand-off for as long as the free-flier’s fuel situation allowed. An hour passed, then another hour. By that time, even the most optimistic flight-dynamics scenarios said that they had no hope of ever making it back home.

Gradually, even the most determined of Schrope’s faction realised that the battle was lost. They were still the stronger party, and many of them probably toyed with taking out their revenge on Bella’s entire faction, but on some level they must have known that there would come a time when the other party’s services would prove useful. They could have taken Bella — she was of no practical use to them, had no skills that she alone possessed — but she was the captain and something made them pass her by, as if to touch her would violate some unspoken taboo.

So they took Thom Crabtree instead. They did it by stealth, when thoughts of revenge were beginning to recede. They waited for a moment when Crabtree was isolated, late in the ship’s night, and grabbed him. It was done soundlessly, and no one was around to stop them.

They took him deeper into the ship, then secured themselves behind airlock bulkheads.

There were two men: Connor Herrick and John Chanticler, both members of Parry’s EVA squad. They had always struck Bella as dependable crewmen, proficient at what they did. She had never imagined that they might be capable of murder.

They’d found an old spacesuit: an ancient Orlan fifteen, forty years old if it was a day, hopelessly beyond repair but kept aboard so that it could be cannibalised for spare parts. They inserted Thom Crabtree into it. They found a panel in the wall and wrenched it free. Behind the panel lay a gristle of coloured flexible pipes, one of which carried superheated steam.

Cams watched the proceedings. No matter where they were in the ship, everyone saw what was happening.

Herrick and Chanticler closed a valve and severed this pipe. They connected one end to the emergency air input on the old spacesuit, using geckoflex and duct tape to seal the bond. Crabtree, even then, could not quite grasp what they had in mind for him. Through the smeared faceplate of the old helmet, Bella thought she could see only puzzled curiosity on his face.

Then they turned on the steam.

Parry took some of his team to make a desperate attempt to stop the torture. No matter what else happened, that would always be to their credit. Eventually they broke through one of the sealed airlocks, but by then it was too late. Stoked up on adrenalin and steroids, the murderers came close to killing Parry as well.

When Crabtree was dead, when he had finally stopped thrashing in agony, they recovered the Orlan fifteen. They took his obscene roasted corpse to the nearest airlock and ejected him into space. But they kept back the suit. Now was not a time to start throwing things away.

TWELVE

Even for the victors, the next three days were not easy. By the end Bella was removed from whatever lingering hold on command she might have retained. She was taken to one of the standard crew sleeping pods and locked inside, without food, water or access to ShipNet. It was a day before anyone came to check that she was still alive, a day before she could ask any questions, but through the thin plastic sheet that served as a door, the ship’s noisy convulsions provided a kind of news service of their own. She was close enough to the gymnasium for sounds to travel and she listened with a quiet mammalian attentiveness, like a shrew in a hole.

She heard Jim Chisholm, his voice strained with effort, desperately trying to forge some sort of reconciliation between the two shipboard factions. Because he was trusted, people were prepared to listen when he urged amity. What was done was done, Chisholm said. A life had been taken: wasn’t that enough blood for one ship?

Let it end with Thom Crabtree. Let it end here and now. She heard Ryan Axford making similar placatory noises. Axford said he would refuse to treat anyone he believed to have perpetrated violence against another crewmember. People liked and respected Axford, too, but he was a doctor, with a duty of care; they wondered if he really meant it. Anyway, he wasn’t the only medic on the ship. There were still doubts about
Rockhopper’s
true situation. The big question — whether to run for home or ride Janus into the night — remained painfully unresolved. Some of Svetlana’s faction were coming around to the idea that Janus was now their only hope of long-term survival, and that it would be suicide to leave the slipstream.

But there were others amongst her people who still thought it was better to try to get home, no matter how unlikely their chances of survival. They still thought Earth would find a way to rescue them, even as they fell away from the Sun like a stone down a well. As each hour passed, their argument became less sustainable, but that did not stop them fighting their corner — and fight they did, too. Bella heard the same frenzied arguments over and over again throughout the long hours of her confinement. They never quite boiled over, but there were times when people had to be restrained from clawing each other apart. And all the while Janus was accelerating, and pulling
Rockhopper
with it.

Then came Svetlana’s speech.

She made it over the shipwide speaker, so that everyone would hear it. Pumps and generators were set to idle. People listened wordlessly, without even a cough of interruption.

“Crew of
Rockhopper
,” she began. “We find ourselves in a situation. We didn’t ask for it; we certainly didn’t want it. That doesn’t mean that some of us didn’t anticipate it, that some of us didn’t try to do something about it. I tried to persuade Bella to turn this ship around before we got to Janus, and I tried to turn it around when we got here.

“I failed on both occasions, and you must believe that no one is sorrier for that than me. I know there are some of you who feel we should make another attempt, that we should turn back around, leave the slipstream and lose as much speed as we can. Believe me, there’s a part of me that feels the same way, that maybe we should just
try
, and see how far we get.

“But we can’t do it.

“DeepShaft screwed us, people. They knew we didn’t have enough fuel to make it to Janus and back, but Powell Cagan wasn’t going to let that stop him. They hacked into us, altered our fuel data, made it look as if we could do this — but we never could. Powell Cagan knew from the word go that this was a suicide mission, and he signed off on it knowing full well what would happen to us. Not just Powell, either, but everyone at DeepShaft who was a part of it. He didn’t put this together on his own.

“Ask yourselves this: do these sound like the kind of people likely to put time and money into a rescue operation? Not just any old rescue operation, but the most technically ambitious mission ever mounted in the system: one that will require a better, faster ship than anything currently sitting on anyone’s drawing board — including the Chinese. And that ship would need to reach us before our last power supplies run dry.

“It isn’t doable, people. No will in the world can save us now.

“But we’re not going to die. Like I said, we didn’t ask for this. But now we’re in it, we might as well make the best of it. Bella dealt us a hand. It’s a pretty shitty one. But we have to play it.

“We’re staying with Janus. There’ll be no further attempts to escape the slipstream. I’ve taken steps to ensure that the fusion engine can’t run in cruise mode again. It’ll keep giving us ship power, and we can use the fuel for
Avenger
and
Crusader
when we need ‘em, but it’ll never push
Rockhopper
again. That’s the hand I’m dealing us. It says we have to stay here, no matter how difficult it gets, no matter how tempting the alternative might be. The alternatives
will
kill us.

“We’re going to land on Janus. There’s still a nice cap of water ice on the sternward face, and we should be safe there. No matter how fast Janus gets, we’ll have two hundred kilometres of shielding between us and the bow. That should be enough.

“We can live. We’ll have power from the engine in the short term, so keeping warm won’t be an issue. We’ll have light and amenities. In the long run, we’ll find a way to use Janus for power instead, but that isn’t a bridge we have to cross tomorrow.

“We have closed-cycle waste-recycling systems. We have aeroponics racks and zeolite beds. As long as that machinery keeps working, as long as the plants keep growing, we won’t go hungry. We’ll lose some water through the hull, but we can top up with Janus ice whenever we need to. We have enough medicine for the immediate future: not enough to work miracles, but enough to keep most of us alive. We have centrifuges for gravity. We have landers and tractors and surface domes. We have robots.