Pushing Ice (28 page)

“We have fifty thousand tonnes of ship that DeepShaft ain’t getting back in one piece.”

That got a muted cheer that echoed around the ship.

“We dock
Rockhopper
with Janus just the way we’d dock a mass driver: dig a deep pit and line it with sprayrock. Then we back the ship in, engine-first, nice and easy.

“Then we’d better start learning to like Janus, because we’re going to be here for a while.”

* * *

Svetlana’s speech did not work miracles, but Bella had to concede that there was a subtle shift in the tension levels throughout the ship in the hours that followed. Minor rumbles of dissension were swiftly quashed. Svetlana had indeed taken a spanner (or more likely a teleoperated fist) to some delicate part of the fusion engine, rendering it unstable for sustained thrust. Bella wondered how much pain that act of tactical sabotage must have caused her.

So Svieta had come round to Bella’s point of view. In a perfect world, that would have been enough to let them see eye to eye again, but Bella knew better than that. It would take more than unity of purpose to heal the rift between them.

“I wasn’t expecting
you
,” Bella said as Parry slid aside the compartment door.

Parry removed his red cap and scratched his scalp. He looked dog-tired, waxy and unshaven, stress oozing from his pores. “Craig didn’t want to talk to you,” Parry said, and she picked up something in his words beyond the surface content of the statement. Bella thought of everything she knew about Craig Schrope, everything she knew about the type of man he was, and nodded.

“Craig doesn’t want to talk to anyone, does he?”

“Craig’s having a tough time adjusting,” Parry said. “Which isn’t to say that it’s exactly easy for the rest of us, but —”

“It’ll be harder for Craig. Much, much harder. He’s company to the marrow, Parry. But the company doesn’t exist any more — not as far as we’re concerned. It’s just us and
Rockhopper
. Craig’s little world is falling further away with every passing second.”

“We’re working without him. Maybe he’ll come round — maybe he won’t.”

“You never liked him or his kind.”

“I’m just trying to find a way to run this ship. If Craig makes that easier, he’ll become a part of it. If he doesn’t, we’ll manage without him.”

“And where does Svetlana fit into this? Or the other chiefs, for that matter?”

“You know who came with us and who didn’t,” Parry said, with no apparent rancour. “Right now, Svetlana and I are running operations. We have the support of two-thirds of the crew, more or less.”

“Two murderers amongst them.”

“They’ll be dealt with.” The way he said that scared her more than anything else. “You know I did everything in my power to prevent what happened.”

“If you’d sided with me, Thom Crabtree wouldn’t have had to do what he did.”

“And if you’d listened to Svieta we’d never have ended up where we are today. Let’s not play the blame game, shall we?”

“Fine with me,” Bella said. “What game would you rather play?”

“The one where we pull this ship together. The people who sided with Craig can run things for the time being, but we’ll need everyone’s help if we’re to start looking beyond the next few weeks. That’s why I need to start healing wounds.”

“Beginning with me,” Bella said.

“I need something to appease the returners, bring them back into the fold.”

“My head on a plate?”

“No,” he said, but without the reflexive dismissal she had been expecting, as if her execution had at least been one possibility for discussion. “What we need…” Parry stumbled, and was suddenly unable to meet her eyes. “You’re going to stay here until we’re down. I’ll make sure you’re kept comfortable, in better conditions than you’ve been in for the last day.”

“I’m hearing a ‘but’.”

“You won’t be allowed contact with anyone. The only people you’ll speak to will be me and someone from the medical section.”

“I need to talk to Svieta,” Bella said urgently. “She doesn’t want to talk to
you
. Ever again.”

“This ship needs me, Parry. I know I’ve burnt our friendship, but this is about more than that. I’ll submit to Svieta’s authority if that keeps her happy, but give me enough power to make a difference. Give me enough to help.”

“You’ve been deposed, Bella. The way Svieta sees it is you blew critical command decisions when there was still time to make things right. You took us deeper into the incident pit when we could still have climbed out. Deeper and deeper, until the sides were too steep.”

“I also saved this damned crew from a slow death in deep space. Doesn’t
that
count for something?”

“That’s… that’s by the by.”

“I expected better of you, Parry.”

“This is the best you’re going to get. I’m sorry, Bella. This isn’t exactly a picnic for any of us. It’s not as if we’ll be partying it up while you’re locked away. We’ll be surviving. That’s all. You’ll have the easier time of it, frankly.”

“Look into my eyes and say that.”

He shook his head, not looking her way. “When the ship’s down, when we’ve established some kind of stable presence on Janus, you’ll be taken away somewhere. Svetlana doesn’t want you around any more.”

* * *

Svetlana sat in Bella’s old office, wondering what she should do with the fish. For now she fed them as best she could, and ignored their dim, accusatory expressions, the way their constantly working mouths seemed to whisper conspiracies.

The Ship was quieter now than it had been in weeks, and for the most part the crew had come round to her authority. They were even calling it the Interim Authority. It had nothing to do with DeepShaft, and everything to do with survival. Pushing forward, breath by breath, inch by inch, no matter what it took.

Saul Regis knocked on the open door. A Lind loyalist, Regis had never needed persuading that Janus was their only hope of survival. But the death of Crabtree had touched him on some emotional register Svetlana had barely recognised in him before.

“They’re going to pay, Parry told me.”

“Yes,” she said. And it was true: the two men were in custody; no matter what else happened, they would never see Earth again.

Regis pushed a flexy across to her. “Then it has to be done properly.”

“Properly, Saul?”

He scratched at his gut through the thin fabric of his sweatshirt. “You can’t just… do it to them. There have to be words. There has to be a ceremony.”

“We’re miners, Saul. No one gave us the book on capital law.”

“Then we have to make our own book. No waiting for instructions from home. This has to be something
we
do. Communities make law. We need law, some kind of judicial apparatus.”

Something about his presence made Svetlana shiver, and she looked down at the flexy with dread. A static frame filled the image window: a group of figures crowded around a campfire in some weirdly lit desert landscape, with a cloud-streaked pink sky and too many moons. The figures wore body-hugging costumes and kinky boots, with lots of equipment and weapons hanging from their belts, sleekly moulded in matt silver. Their hairstyles and makeup were meant to look futuristic, but actually looked twenty or thirty years out of date. One man knelt by the campfire while another pointed a weapon at the side of his head. Next to the man with a gun, a tall, black-clad, clerical-looking alien read from a kind of scroll.

“Fuck, Saul,” she said, as recognition clicked in, “this is —”

“
Cosmic Avenger
,” he said, before she had a chance to continue. “Season four, episode five.
Avenger
drops through a plenum gash into the Unmapped Zone, out of range of Terrafleet communications. With the ship damaged, Lieutenant Theobald attempts to seize control from Captain Underhill —”

“Saul,” she said, softly, as if speaking to a sleepwalker, “Saul… this is just a TV show. A bad TV show from my childhood, which no one even took seriously back then.” She handed back the flexy with a shudder of distaste. “This is not some kind of… life manual. What are you actually suggesting — that we all start acting as if we believe that this is real?”

“The execution scene’s an acknowledged classic,” Regis said. “The writing in that fourth-season arc… Underhill’s speech at the execution… I know a lot of people think
Star Crusader
was better, but it really wasn’t. Of course, they’ll never
understand
that.”

She kept waiting for Regis to blink, to show some indication that this was at best a sick joke at an inappropriate time. But there was no crack in that mask of sincerity.

She tried again. “You really think this speech —”

“I’m not saying copy it word for word.” He shook his head, as if
that
was absurd. “It’s just that when Underhill said what she said — how things were looking for the crew, how Underhill knew what she had to do but regretted having to do it all the same… the template of it…” He trailed off, with the air of someone who thought they had made their point convincingly enough. “We could do a lot worse.”

“I’m sure we could,” she said. “Thank you for the input, Saul. Now please — get out of my office.”

He pressed the flexy to his chest, where it softened to bend itself around him. “I just think it needs to be done right,” he said. “For Thom Crabtree.”

She watched him leave, aghast at what had taken place but not entirely surprised by it either.

For some of her crew, the knowledge that they were now prisoners of Janus was already a kind of death. She knew, with an acute sense of precognition, that there would be suicides in the times that lay ahead. She thought she could predict with some accuracy who would choose that option, too.

But for a tiny minority, Janus would be a kind of liberation. The old world, with its bewildering emotional and political complexities, was receding. What lay ahead would be simpler and more emblematic. Just as some people lived a kind of half-life until a war came along, at which point they flourished, so the austere simplicities of Janus might be attractive to a man like Saul Regis. A slate wiped brutally clean.

He had been gone a long time before Svetlana picked up her own flexy and navigated ShipNet, looking for the same ancient media files Regis must have already mined. She had no intention of copying the words of the execution — the very thought revolted her — but there could be no harm in simply looking at what had happened.

Could there?

* * *

Preparations for the mating of Janus and
Rockhopper
swallowed days. Svetlana dreamed multicoloured simulations and woke from fevered hours of stress analysis in which numbers and equations had battled like epic protagonists.

Once
Rockhopper
was down there would be no way of lifting it from Janus again. Gravity on Janus was a feeble three hundred and fifty times weaker than on Earth. A person weighed next to nothing. But a fifty-thousand-tonne space vehicle still needed one hundred and fifty tonnes of thrust to lift itself aloft, which was a lot more than the steering and station-keeping motors could supply. Even using the landers as tugs,
Rockhopper
would come in hard, punching down into the pit with all the force of a skyscraper-sized battering ram. The stress analysis said the ship would hold together, but the computations were mind-numbingly complex, and an error anywhere, however tiny, could mean doom.

As the car took her back to the hab, her flexy chimed unexpectedly. With her head swimming with engineering issues, she had asked not to be called unnecessarily.

She pulled the flexy from her jacket, shook it alive and found herself looking at Denise Nadis.

“You need to see this, I think,” Nadis said.

“What?” Svetlana asked.

“We were looking at Janus, at the icecap, mapping it with the high-res cameras, looking for alternative dig sites.”

“I thought we’d agreed on the site. Haven’t we already got machines down there?”

Nadis blinked and swallowed. “I just wanted to be sure we’d picked the best spot. Once we’re down —”

“I know. No second chances. What is it, Denise?”

“We found… this.” An image box swelled to cover most of Nadis’s face. At first, Svetlana could make nothing of the mesh of false-colour hexels overlaid with numeric codes. “You’re going to have to help me, Denise.”

“I’m sorry — zoom’s too far out. This is a section of the icecap, about fifty klicks south of where we’re planning to dig. That’s the limit of our search area — it was just luck that we happened to find it at all.”

“Find what?”

Nadis whispered a command to her own flexy. The image swelled and zoomed until Svetlana was clearly looking down at something blunt and metallic, mashed into the ice as if it had hit at high speed.

“It’s a ship,” Nadis said. “Part of one, anyway.”

A scale overlay dropped over the image. The crashed ship was only twenty metres across its longest axis.

“That’s not right,” Svetlana said flatly. “We already mapped the ice at enough res not to have missed —”

“We didn’t miss shit.” Nadis interrupted her. She was on firm ground now. “It wasn’t there before. It must have come in since we completed the maps, slipped right past us somehow.”

“While we were otherwise engaged,” Svetlana said, understanding. The ship’s form was familiar to her, albeit as part of a larger whole. She had seen the television pictures from Earth orbit. It was part of the
Shenzhou Five
.

“This isn’t possible. We destroyed it. We shot it out of the fucking sky.”

“We’re only looking at part of it,” Svetlana said. “Like the smallest part of a multi-staged rocket. They must have planned on using one large fusion engine and fuel tank to get them out here, and then returning home using a smaller stage, with its own engine and fuel.”

“It’s tiny.”

“I know. Maybe they weren’t carrying as many people as they wanted us to believe.” Nadis still sounded spooked, as if the reappearance of the Chinese ship violated some fundamental principle of her personal universe. “What the hell happened, though? Bella still shot it. Nothing changes that.”