Pushing Ice (32 page)

Svetlana and Parry bade farewell to Ungless and rode a car up the spine to the hab. Although the Janus machinery gave off its own glow, none of it reached Crabtree. The ice around the little community was as dark as space, lent only the faintest midnight sheen by the cluster of red-shifted stars in the stern hemisphere. A few transponders winked out of the darkness like distant lighthouse beacons. As the car rose higher, Crabtree looked like the only human artefact in the universe.

Svetlana had timed her return well: she was only a minute late for the meeting with the other members of the Interim Authority. They had assembled in what had once been the captain’s office and private quarters. The cramped old room was twice as large now: internal partitions had been torn down throughout
Rockhopper
, the material used elsewhere. The old carpet no longer met the walls, but it remained the focus of the room. Even the fish tank was still there, and there were even some fish in it. Some parts of the old ship were routinely spun to provide centrifugal gravity — Axford insisted on having such a facility since calcium loss was a real concern under the weak pull of Janus — but this was not one of them. The fish did not appear to mind too much.

Ryan Axford was present, along with Saul Regis, Nick Thale, Denise Nadis, Jake Gomberg and Christine Ofria. Like Axford, Regis and Thale had both been old-regime loyalists, but their expertise was too essential to ignore. Sometimes there was tension between the three of them and the rest of the Authority, but they were usually pragmatic enough to put such things aside if it helped Crabtree.

Svetlana and Parry took their places around the table, moving with the effortless glides that characterised locomotion on Janus. Svetlana lowered herself into her seat, folded her hands on the table before her and nodded briefly at the other members.

“I’ve just returned from the Maw,” she began, “and for once it looks as if we might have discovered something that could almost be described as good news. To put that into the proper context, though, I must emphasize how truly shitty things really are. Parry: will you do the honours?”

Parry removed his cap and scratched a finger into his moustache. “I won’t even attempt to put a positive spin on any of this, and I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise to any of you that fuel is our main problem. Before we landed on Janus, we had high expectations of tapping the moon’s energy for our own uses. That was a nice idea, but it hasn’t turned out to be so simple in practice. The Spican machinery is hellishly efficient: it doesn’t give off a lot of waste energy for us to exploit. The only area where we’ve had much luck is with the thermoelectric generators — they exploit the heat difference between the Spican machinery and the icecap. But the heat difference isn’t huge, and we don’t have enough superconducting cable to run any more lines out to the edge of the icecap. If we were going back to square one now, we might choose a different landing site, closer to the shelf… but since we don’t have a time machine —”

Nadis tapped a stylus against her flexy. “How much power are we getting now?”

“From the thermocouples? Depending on fluctuations in the machinery, anything between three to five megawatts, which isn’t enough to run Crabtree. We’re fine at the moment because we can still run the fusion engine — we’re easily extracting a hundred megawatts. But it isn’t efficient: Lockheed-Krunichey built that engine to move
Rockhopper
around, not light up a village. We waste far more energy than we extract.”

“The fuel won’t last more than fourteen months,” Svetlana said bluntly. “Eighteen if we eke it out with even more power outages and shut down some of the outlying domes.”

“We might as well stop rationing the coffee, in that case,” Nadis said.

“There’s no hope of squeezing more power from the thermocouples?” Thale asked.

“Even if we get the forge vat running and scrape together the raw materials and power to spin out more superconducting line, we’d only be looking at doubling our capacity from the thermocouples,” Svetlana said, “which won’t even get us through to next summer. We’d still be relying on the fusion engine.” Parry cleared his throat. “We’ve been looking at other options. Heat isn’t the only thing Janus has to offer us. As most of you probably know, we’ve had a team looking into the possibility of extracting power from the lava lines — either directly, or by tapping the motion of the transits. So far we’ve had no success, but it
is
a possibility for the future. We just have to stick around long enough to get there.”

“Hence this meeting,” Svetlana said. “Two weeks ago, we learned something significant about one of the structures in the Maw chamber: it’s rotating. It’s slow — almost too slow to notice — but it’s regular and it appears to have immeasurably high torque. If we can tap that motion, there is every chance that we’ll be able to turn off the fusion reactor and save the remaining fuel for the day when we really need it.”

Svetlana let the little party absorb that glimmer of good news. It was all they were going to get from her. “Okay,” she said after a few moments, “now for the hard part: actually doing it, and doing it before we all die anyway. It isn’t going to be easy, but we think we have a roadmap.”

“There are two difficult parts to this operation,” Parry said. “The first is tapping that rotational motion and converting it into electrical power. The second is getting that power out of the Maw and back to Crabtree. The first part is where most of the headaches are going to arise. Problem number one is that the spire — the rotating structure — is turning very, very slowly. But we think we can deal with that.”

Svetlana called up a diagram on their flexy and projected it onto the wall behind her. She leaned back in her seat, twisting her neck to take it all in. It was a crudely drawn sketch of the spire in the Maw chamber, with something approximating a set of gear teeth fixed around its base.

“We’ll begin by attaching cogs all around the structure,” she said. “They’re basically just chunks of machined metal. We know glue works, and we know what kind of torques the adhesive bonds can tolerate before they fail. Ramos and the others say it can be done. That gives us a system for coupling a second, smaller wheel to the spire’s rotation. That wheel will turn faster.”

“But still not fast enough,” Parry said. “We’re going to have to lash up loads of these things: a clockwork gear train like nothing you’ve seen since the sixteenth century. We’re going to need a gear ratio up in the millions.” There were exasperated sounds, but Parry pushed on. “We’ll strip out one of
Rockhopper’s
main centrifuge rings and the associated drive system: that should give us the building blocks, or at least enough to make a start. Whatever we come up with, it’ll have to work flawlessly. And at the end of it we’ll need an output shaft turning at around one hundred hertz.”

“To which we can couple as many industrial-capacity dynamos as we can put our hands on,” Svetlana said.

“I expect there are some lying around here somewhere,” Nick Thale said, his voice dripping sarcasm.

“There are,” Parry said firmly. “We used them every time we pushed ice.”

Thale’s eyes narrowed. “Mass drivers? I don’t see how linear —”

“The parasol spinners,” said Nadis, nodding appreciatively. For the apparent benefit of Thale and Regis, she added, “The electric motors we use to spin up the sunshade parasols, to shield the dayside of the comet during the infall cruise.”

“That’s the idea,” Svetlana said, nodding approvingly. “We reverse them, use them as dynamos instead of motors. We’ll have to beef up some of the components, but I’m told it’s workable. If we can solve the drive-shaft problem, we can tap fifteen to twenty megawatts. That’ll free us from any further dependency on
Rockhopper’s
fuel — but only if we can convey that power to Crabtree. For that, we’ll need about four times our current mileage of superconducting cable.”

“Then it’s hopeless,” Nadis said, exasperated. “We can’t even fix the existing cables, let alone make more of them.”

“Not yet,” Svetlana said, “but if we can get the forge vat running, we can spin out all the cable we’ll ever need.”

“Have you spoken to Wang lately?”

Svetlana did not care for the tone of the other woman’s voice. “Not for a few weeks,” she said defensively. “The last I heard, he was making good progress.”

“Maybe you should visit him one of these days,” Nadis said. “I think you’ll find it illuminating.”

“I will,” Svetlana said, annoyed with herself for not having kept a closer watch on Wang’s stumbling progress. “As soon as we’re done here. Assuming we can get the vat up to speed, I take it everything I’ve proposed here has the committee’s approval?”

“It’s not as if we have much choice,” Parry said. “If we don’t tap Janus, we’re finished within a year and a half.”

“I agree that it looks clear cut,” Thale said, “but let’s not underestimate the risks. So far we’ve barely scratched Janus. Sometimes I wonder if it’s even
noticed
us yet. But if we start interfering in more obvious ways —”

“We have no choice,” Svetlana said.

“I’m just saying — there may be consequences.” Thale looked at the others, inviting support. “We shouldn’t kid ourselves that this is a risk-free strategy.”

“We all grasp the risks,” Svetlana said impatiently, “but whatever we do in the Maw will be nowhere near as risky as sitting here hoping for something else to drop into our laps.”

Thale closed his eyes. “I’m just saying —” he began again, before shaking his head. “Never mind. You wouldn’t go for it anyway.”

Svetlana sensed a trap, but spoke anyway. “Go for what?”

“This is too big a decision to be left to a handful of people sitting around a table.”

“You mean we should poll the rest?”

“No… not that.” He spoke with infinite caution, as if every word might trigger the most devastating of reactions. “I mean we should consider bringing other opinions into the debate. I’m talking about Wang, of course, and perhaps one or two others, but mainly I mean
her
.”

“No,” Svetlana said.

“You won’t even consider it?”

“No,” she repeated. “Not now, not ever.”

Thale shrugged, as if this was no more and no less than he had expected. He sank back into his seat. “Fine, then.”

Svetlana felt a hot blush sear her cheeks. She was grateful when Parry filled the silence, sparing her the duty. “We’ve been over this, Nick,” he said. “We all know that some of us felt more loyalty to her than others. But that was then. Everything is different now: her opinions just don’t have any further relevance.”

“You’d love to believe that,” Thale said. “You’d love to believe that we can just put her in a box and forget about her, like an old toy we don’t want to play with any more.”

“She had her chance to turn us around,” Parry said. “Instead she dragged us into this mess.”

“She acted on the best information available to her,” Thale said.

“Nick’s right,” Axford said. “Nothing Bella did was motivated by greed or self-interest. She only ever did what she thought was best for her crew.”

“She couldn’t face the idea that DeepShaft was screwing us,” Svetlana said. “I gave her all the evidence she needed, and she blanked on it.” She thumped the table with her fist. “Why the hell are we still talking about this? We’ve been over it a thousand times. She had her chance. She blew it. End of story.”

“Look,” Parry said, talking directly to Axford, “I agree completely that Bella didn’t act out of self-interest. No argument there.”

“Fine,” Axford said briskly.

“But she still made bad decisions. Maybe her heart was in the right place. So what? It was the decisions that mattered. That alone should disqualify her from having any further say in our affairs.”

“You just don’t get it,” Thale said.

“No, Nick,” Svetlana answered, “
you
don’t get it. We all know where your basic loyalties lie. You just can’t let it go, can you? You just can’t accept that things are different around here now.”

“Maybe it isn’t me who has trouble letting go of the past,” Thale said.

“Meaning what, exactly?” Svetlana said, her voice low and dangerously sweet.

“When we grounded
Rockhopper
, you made a big speech about how we all had to pull together, how we had to heal old wounds and face the future with clear hearts, clear minds. I remember it well. It was a damned effective piece of sloganeering.”

“Careful, Nick,” she said.

He shrugged and continued speaking. “I remember one other thing you said, about how we had to use every resource available to us, every possible means of staying alive. Well, some of us listened to you. Some of us thought you meant it.”

“I did,” she said, on the boiling edge of fury. “Perhaps that’s true, up to a point, but there’s one resource you’ve never had the courage to tap. It’s always easier to hate than to forgive, isn’t it?”

“I think you’ve said enough,” Parry said. “The decision regarding Bella’s exile was unanimous —”

“That was two years ago,” Thale said. He stood up, flinging his flexy across the table. “We need Bella, whether you like it or not. If we all die out here, it won’t be Janus that kills us.”

* * *

Svetlana had regained some scant measure of calm by the time her wanderings took her to the buried laboratory where Wang Zhanmin spent his days and nights. She heard faint Chinese music as she neared the lab. It was on the outskirts of Crabtree, connected to the rest of the community by one ice-walled tunnel and a single superconducting power line as thick as her forearm. The line was glued to the inner surface of the ice tunnel with gobs of geckoflex. Placing her palm next to it, she swore she felt her hand tingle. One-tenth of all the power generated for Crabtree passed along the line.

She knocked politely and stooped into the icy cold of the kettle-shaped room. For all the energy at his disposal, Wang wasted none of it on his own comfort. The only concession was a speaker glued high up on one wall, out of which poured a constant tinny medley of twenty-year-old Chinese pop songs. Svetlana shivered and zipped her coat tighter. Her breath gusted before her in a white flourish. She could still feel the embarrassment on her face, reddened by the cold.