Pushing Ice (6 page)

By the time they reached Janus, they would be thirteen light-hours from home: far enough that a round-trip signal would take more than a day. And they would be moving at
three per cent
of the speed of light, a figure that was enough to put the fear of God into anyone. Three per cent of the speed of light was nine thousand kilometres per second.

With every minute that passed, they’d be falling further from home than the distance between the Earth and its Moon.

A minute or two had passed since the tremor; the ship’s ride was now limousine-smooth once more. Everyone was waiting for her to continue speaking, their faces expectant. It was a nice show, but she doubted that any of them were convinced. Their nerves were already stretched paper-thin. For three days the ship had been creaking and groaning like a submarine sinking to crush depth.

“Where was I?”

“Janus,” someone said helpfully.

“Right… right. It’s just that until four days ago our best guess was that the two moons must once have been part of the same body.”

Craig Schrope had done his homework as well. “A bigger moon — maybe something Charon-sized. A few billion years ago something must have hit it, smashing it into pieces. The two largest chunks drifted apart from each other on nearly identical orbits.”

“Hence your co-orbital moons,” Bella took up the discussion again. “But the Janus event shows that it didn’t happen like that. It was setup to look that way, but the co-orbital situation was clearly staged: an engineered occurrence designed to look natural.”

“Before any of you ask,” Schrope said, “there are teams crawling over Epimetheus even as we speak.”

“With kid gloves, I hope,” Nick Thale said.

“I think we can assume that they’re exercising all due caution,” Bella said. “Not that it seems to matter: nothing they’ve done or observed in any way suggests that Epimetheus is anything but what we always thought it was. Unless the interior mechanisms are spectacularly well camouflaged, it’s just a lump of ice.”

“The best guess,” Schrope interjected, “is that Epimetheus is just an ordinary satellite. The Janus artefact must have been introduced from outside the Saturnian system, and its orbit carefully tuned to produce the co-orbital situation we thought we understood.”

“There are other situations like that, right?” asked Parry.

“No,” Schrope said, “at least not in our system. Janus and Epimetheus were the only two moons that acted like that.”

“And elsewhere? In other systems?”

“The data isn’t good enough for us to tell,” Bella said. “We have some images of the big Jovians in nearby systems, good enough to pick up major weather systems, ring complexes and Titan-sized moons, but we still can’t begin to resolve Janus-sized objects.”

“So in other words this might be unique,” Parry said.

“Or it might be a common enough situation that you can expect to find one or two co-orbital pairs in every system,” Bella said. “Right now we have no idea.”

“But it could be unusual,” Parry persisted, “in which case, doesn’t it begin to look like maybe that was the point?”

Bella leaned forward, interested. “A calling card, you mean?”

“I’m just saying we shouldn’t rule anything out.”

She nodded sagely. “Parry’s right. We keep open minds and we consider all possibilities, no matter how outlandish. The instant we start making assumptions is the instant we’re going to run into trouble.”

“But we’re not trained for this,” Svetlana said, looking around the room. “We’re tool-pushers. Bella says we have to keep open minds. I say it isn’t our job even to
worry
about that.”

“It isn’t that simple,” Bella said, “although God knows I wish it were. We have just five days at Janus; less if the moon speeds up. That’s one hundred and twenty hours, of which every single minute will be precious.”

“The problem is timelag,” Schrope said. He spoke softly, but with a measured ease that suggested a planned statement. “We’ll be too far out to phone home.”

Bella nodded. “We’ll be compressing and transmitting all our data back home, of course, from the moment we’re in sensor range, and the experts in near-Earth space will be on it like a pack of hounds, but the earliest we’ll hear from them is twenty-six hours after we send back the first images. Once we reach Janus, we won’t be able to afford to wait that long for instructions.”

“Still won’t make us specialists,” Svetlana said.

“But we’re still eighteen days from our objective,” Bella said. “That’s why I’ve called you here. I want you to start thinking like specialists.”

Parry laughed. “Just like that?”

“You’re all smart cookies,” Bella said. “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have got within a country mile of my ship.”

“None of us knows the first thing about alien life,” Svetlana said.

“Maybe not now,” Bella said, “but a lot can change in eighteen days. No one’s expecting green monsters to come crawling out of that moon when we pull alongside, but we have to be ready to answer if Janus says ‘hello’. We have to be ready with
something
.”

Saul Regis fingered his elaborate beard. He wore a
Cosmic Avenger
sweatshirt showing the fictitious crew standing around the workstations of their sleek thirtieth-century star-ship. “How would this work? Us becoming specialists, I mean.”

“As of now,” Bella said, “I’m putting together a contact working group. I want to keep it small and flexible, which is why I haven’t invited all the chiefs to this briefing.” She nodded at Regis. “I want you to chair it, Saul. I’ve looked at the background files of everyone on this ship and of all of us you look to be best equipped for the job. You’ve studied cognitive science and artificial intelligence at research level — and our best guess at the nature of Janus is that it’s some kind of robot.”

“I feel overqualified already,” Regis said.

“I’m not expecting blinding insights — just some basic familiarity with the landscape. Does anyone have any objection to Saul chairing this working group?” She waited a heartbeat. “No? Good; that’s settled, then.”

Regis held up his hands in mock surrender. “I still don’t know what you actually want me to
do
, Bella.”

“Start by assembling your team. I think we can take it as a given that the people in this room ought to be on it, if only because we’ll be the ones at the sharp end when we start near-Janus operations. I want you to keep the team focused and agile, but you shouldn’t discount bringing in anyone else you feel can add something.” Bella flicked her flexy across the table. “There are some names you may want to look at.”

Regis peeled his own flexy from the wall: it had fluttered there to recharge its batteries, drinking power from the embedded grid. When he touched it, the two devices exchanged secure data via the myoelectric field of his own body, bypassing ShipNet’s open channel.

“I still don’t know where to begin,” he said.

“Let me show you something,” Bella said. She turned to the year-old image of Janus on the wall. Her hands moved across the keys on her desk. With a flourish of flickering hexels, the image changed abruptly. It was still Janus, but now the image was fuzzy, like a photo of a stone taken through smeared glass.

“This is a synthetic image,” Bella said, “a visible-light composite assembled using long-baseline optical interferometry, put together from data obtained by six different deep-space telescopes within the orbit of Mars. It’s the most recent long-range picture we have of Janus: it was taken less than a day ago.”

The picture showed a different angle from the fly-by snapshot, so the shape of the moon and the distribution of craters looked different, but more than that had changed. There were dark patches in the ice that had not been there before. A second glance showed that the patches were actually wounds: voids where huge scabs of ice, kilometres thick, had come free, or boiled off, or simply ceased to exist. In the dark zones, suggestions of mechanical structures twinkled at the limit of clarity: enormous dark machine parts, curved and coiled, nestling tight as intestines.

“Definitely the money shot,” Parry said.

“The camouflage is breaking away,” Bella said. “Janus — whatever it is — is starting to show its true form. We already have something to work with: the fact that we really are dealing with an alien artefact, and not some bizarre physical process we just didn’t understand.”

“That’s not much,“ Parry said.

“There’s more. I mentioned that Janus is leaving our system at a shallow angle to the ecliptic. Well, now we have a much better handle on the trajectory.” Bella made the image shrink until it was an off-white pinpoint against a star map marked with star names, constellation boundaries and faint lines of right ascension and declination, the astronomical counterparts to latitude and longitude. “Ladies and gentleman: we have a star, and we have a name.”

“Which is?” Parry asked.

“Alpha Virginis, the brightest star in Virgo.” Bella highlighted the relevant star: it was the nearest one to the small image of Janus. “Now, I’ll admit it’s not exactly the kind of sun we’d have expected aliens to come from,” she said. “Not only is it hot, heavy and blue, but it’s also part of a binary system. Maybe they didn’t evolve there. But we can’t ignore the evidence. That’s where Janus is heading. That’s the place it now calls home.”

“So the Janus builders,” Svetlana said, “what do we call them? Virgins? Virginians? Alphans?”

“None of the above,” Bella replied. “We name them after the classical name of their destination star. Alpha Virginis is Spica.” She pronounced it carefully, “spiker”, lingering over the syllables. “The Janus builders are the Spicans, and they live two hundred and sixty light-years from Earth.” She beamed at her little gathering. “There. Don’t you feel as if you know them better already?”

“About this mission,” Parry said, “is it too late to change my mind?”

They all laughed. But not as much as Bella might have hoped.

* * *

CNN wanted an interview. Bella took a cam down into the aeroponics lab, attaching it to one of the plant racks with a dab of geckoflex. Aeroponics, with its humid air, mechanical breezes and the soothingly regular chuffing of the aerators, always put her at ease. It was the only place on
Rockhopper
where she could close her eyes and feel, fleetingly, as if she were back on Earth.

“It must be quite a burden, to be leading this mission,” the anchordoll said in her perky, almost cartoon-like voice.

“It’s a responsibility, certainly,” Bella said, “but I have a good crew under me. I couldn’t ask for a better team.”

“You must be apprehensive, though.”

“I have a duty to exercise professional concern. Janus may throw some surprises at us, but that’s been the case with every comet we’ve ever steered home. There’s never been anything routine about pushing ice.”

“How do you think you’ll react if you meet a real-life alien?”

“As opposed to a not real-life alien?” Bella fingered one of the plants on the rack. Patent numbers and copyright symbols were embossed into the glossy green leaf. “I don’t think it’ll happen. I think we’ll find automated systems, that’s all.”

“How do you feel about that?”

Bella shrugged. “We’ll take pictures, run scans, maybe try to extract a physical sample. But I’m not expecting great conversation from a machine.”

The anchordoll huffed. “Well, we machines may have something to say about that!”

“Yes,” Bella said.

The doll brightened again. “Captain Lind, you’re in charge of a pretty big ship. But it was never designed for this kind of mission, was it?”

“Show me a ship that was.” Bella tried not to sound defensive. “But we’re versatile enough. We’re equipped for remote science studies: it’s just that we’ll be doing a different kind of science from the sort we’re normally used to. But we’ll cope. We’re professionals.” She looked into the cam with what she hoped was the right steely-eyed expression. “Out here we have a saying: ‘We push ice. It’s what we do.’”

“You’ll have to run that by me again, Captain Lind!”

“What we mean is this: we get a job to do, and we finish it. My crew are the best. We’ve got people from the Moon, people from Mars, people from the orbitals, people from marine projects… a bunch of underwater guys. Vacuum and water: they’re not that different, really.”

The anchordoll’s face defaulted to one of its blank states: Bella had lost it again. “Could you tell us a little bit more about the rest of your crew?”

“Well, they’re all good people. I wouldn’t want to single any one person out —”

“We’ve had reports that your second-in-command is going to die!” the doll said cheerily.

“Jim Chisholm has a condition, that’s all,” Bella said testily, “one that needs treatment sooner rather than later.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“I’m not thrilled about it, obviously. Nor’s Jim. But we can still get him home in time. In fact — and Jim agrees with me here — Janus is actually our best bet for getting him the medical attention he needs. We’ll be home and dry in six, seven weeks.”

“Let’s hope so, Captain Lind! Moving on, do you deny reports that you’re carrying nuclear weapons?”

“Nothing to deny. We’re carrying FADs — Fragmentation Assistance Devices — that’s all. If we hook up to a comet that’s an odd shape, we might want to chip a few pieces off before we try to push it back home.

“Some sources say
Rockhopper’s
mission is to plant those devices on Janus and destroy it. Can you comment?”

“I can comment by saying I find that a ludicrous suggestion. Isn’t there something more constructive you’d like to ask me?”

“How do you respond to accusations that much of the technology aboard
Rockhopper
that is now being used for commercial purposes was developed with UEE funding specifically ring-fenced for the purposes of averting Earth-grazing asteroids and comets?”

“I can’t comment. I just have a job to do.”

“Thank you, Captain Lind. And now to finish, would you like to issue a personal statement to the people back home? Something that encapsulates the way you feel about this mission, your hopes and fears, as you carry the torch of humanity to a place beyond our wildest imaginations?”