Pushing Ice (70 page)

“What can it do?”

“Anything. A reeve can shape itself into any enforcement device, for any legally sanctioned purpose.”

“What could it do against Eddytown, if I sent it in?” Bella had already informed Chromis of the worsening situation.

“After a certain amount of time,” Chromis said, “there would be no Eddytown. But one reeve can only do so much. It cannot replicate: it’s forbidden to transmute local matter except to facilitate self-repair. But the cube can make many reeves. This unit only masses fifty kilograms. The cube could produce a regiment of a thousand reeves before its own mass was depleted by one quarter. They would already outnumber the entire human population of Janus. If that were deemed insufficient, I could issue an emergency directive and instruct the cube to convert its entire mass into reeves. There would be four thousand of them.”

Bella looked at the cube. “What would happen to you, Chromis?”

“I would continue to run on the reeves until they returned to the cube. I wouldn’t notice any difference, provided a significant number of reeves did not come to harm.”

“How can one of
those
ever come to harm?”

“It probably won’t, not here, provided we move quickly, before the Musk Dogs give Svetlana weapons that might trouble the reeve.” Chromis paused. “But you needn’t worry about me. I am more resilient than you can imagine. I had to be, to last all this time.”

“I’m glad you found me, Chromis, no matter how long it took.”

“I’m glad as well,” the politician said. “I just wish there was a means to send a message back to those obstinate fools who nearly blocked the memorial project. Not enough funds, they said. A pointless gesture, doomed never to succeed. Belts need tightening. Perhaps in
another
ten thousand years. Build a monument instead, or a civic amenity. A nice ornamental fountain.” Chromis snorted her derision. “As if that was ever going to stop me.”

“You were right to push.”

“I was, wasn’t I?”

Axford coughed a little boy’s cough. “Are you going to tell me what that thing is, Bella, or do I have twenty guesses?”

“It’s a tool,” Bella said. “A robot. Chromis says it will be enough to pacify Eddytown, to seize control. There’d be a good chance of obtaining the passkey by force if Svetlana has already copied the file into the forge vat.”

“Just that one robot?”

“Chromis can always make more of them.”

“How many more?”

“Lots.”

“Good. Then let’s send this one in before things get any worse. We know she has a forge vat, and we can be pretty sure she’s brewing something unpleasant in it.”

Bella looked back at Chromis. “How long would it take for this thing to reach Eddytown? She’ll be leaving on the maglev in under the hour.”

A breeze touched Bella’s cheek. The reeve had flicked to the other side of the room with no hint of intervening motion.

“Reeves usually need the element of surprise to enable effective pacification,” Chromis explained. “It reshapes itself to move from point to point, like water being poured from one glass to another. In vacuum, it’s even faster. It could be inside Eddytown within five minutes, if you wished.”

The horror of what she was on the verge of doing was enough to make Bella feel sick. “How would it… operate?”

“It can stun or incapacitate,” Chromis said. “If it does not encounter significant opposition, there need be no casualties.”

“But it will encounter opposition. They’ll already be expecting a police action. They won’t have weapons — yet — but they’ll have drills, cutting torches, mining armour —”

“Then there may be casualties. Reeves know that when they encounter significant resistance, it is better to accept a small number of deaths before stray fire causes many more deaths and injuries. But they never kill needlessly.”

Bella turned to Axford. “It can take care of Eddytown, but there’ll almost certainly be deaths.”

“There’ll be deaths if Svetlana moves against Crabtree,” Axford said. “Even if you give her what she wants, even if you hand over the High Hab in exchange for the passkey, there’ll still be people who won’t go easily. You’ve earned their loyalty, Bella. They won’t go without a fight, no matter what Svetlana might think.”

“I’ll surrender rather than see more blood spilled.”

Chromis interrupted gently. “Your primary concern, Bella, is not political control of Crabtree, but intercession to gain the passkey file. Then you must erase all the other Musk Dog construction blueprints before they do any damage.”

“I know. I just —” She shook her head, incensed and saddened. “How did things go from being so good to being so wrong? It only seems like yesterday that Svetlana and I were sitting together in the arboretum, putting the past behind us. Now I’m wondering how many of her people I can get away with
killing.
”

“You didn’t ask for this situation,” Chromis said. “She went to the Musk Dogs, not you.”

“You can’t tell me what to do, can you? For all your wisdom, all the thousands of years you have on me, you can’t and won’t do that.”

“I’m sorry,” Chromis said. “I hope I’ve been a friend to you, albeit for such a brief span of time. But I cannot be your master. You are the captain, Bella Lind. This has to be your call.”

* * *

Bella returned to her office, seeking a few minutes of calm alone with her fish before she had to meet Svetlana. In the office, with the door closed, she could pretend to herself that there was no crisis, and for a moment she allowed herself that solace.

Then Nick Thale knocked on the door and let himself in. “This had better not take long,” she said, knowing that the train was already on its way from Eddytown, knowing also that Thale would forgive her the discourtesy.

He passed her a flexy, letting Bella read the display before he said a word. She studied the data and then looked into his old man’s face.

“I don’t get it. Why are you showing me lava lines?”

“I’m showing you patterns of traffic,” Thale said, with the slightest hint of reproach. “Notice how the activity’s hotted up during the last three hours? The lines are busier than they’ve been since the Sky went up.”

Bella was about to say something when Thale jabbed a finger at the display and made it change. “Here’s seismic data,” he said. “And here’s a plot of grav-field variations at the main eddy points. Every parameter we can measure is spiking at five or six sigma outside normal variations.” He paused, then said solemnly, “If Janus was a brain, and we had it in a scanner, I’d say we were looking at an epileptic seizure.”

As one of her inner sanctum, tasked with preparing the evacuation, Thale knew all the salient details about the Musk Dogs and their intentions regarding Janus. “You think this is it?” Bella asked, warily.

“Something’s happening. You either believe in coincidences, or you conclude it has something to do with that thing that came back with Svieta.”

Bella closed her eyes, willing the world away. But the world had no intention of leaving.

She opened her eyes again to face a stubbornly present reality. “The Musk Dogs have started the countdown. It’s time to say goodbye to Janus, Nick.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

Before she left her office, Bella received disquieting news from the far end of the shaft: the engagement had commenced. Two and a half light-minutes down from Janus, the Fountainheads, and perhaps their allies in the Shaft-Five Nexus, had encountered the Uncontained. Through the still-open door in the end-cap, evidence of the battle leaked through in stuttering flashes: blue-white light shading through ultraviolet into hard X- and gamma-rays, and God knew what else. The radiation took two hundred seconds to crawl its way to Janus, where it was detected by monitoring cams stationed on the surface of the Iron Sky. Cams situated near the endcap door had already expired, fried by stray fire from the battle.

Bella tried to call Jim Chisholm on the embassy channel, but after allowing five minutes for timelag, she concluded that the link had gone down. She did not immediately assume that Chisholm had been killed, although the lack of a reply hardly reassured her. Clearly someone was still fighting someone else, so the Uncontained could not have won yet. Perhaps the Nexus was just cleaning up the last of the resistance. They had already dealt with the Uncontained on an earlier occasion, according to the Fountainheads. They must have learned something of their enemy’s vulnerabilities in that earlier encounter, some data that had tactical value in the present engagement.

But the flashes continued. Now and then there’d be a pause, and Bella would hope (or fear) that the battle had reached a conclusion. Then the flashes would resume, sometimes with renewed ferocity, drenching the still-active sensors with radiation fluxes that would have been lethal even to a suited human. Occasionally, the embassy channel crackled with static, as if something or someone was trying to get a message through but was being jammed.

Even this far from the source of the flashes, Bella felt the ferocity of the engagement. It was bad enough witnessing it from a distance, worse knowing that — if Jim Chisholm was to be believed — Bella and her people would shortly be better off there than here.

Bella had often contemplated the shape and texture of her life and wondered how it might one day come to an end. She’d always imagined soft light and hospital drapes, fake smiles and plastic flowers, sad visits from well-wishers. Somehow — even given what had happened to Garrison — she had never imagined dying in space,
because
of space. And it had certainly never occurred to her that she might become collateral damage in a strategic conflict between warring alien cultures, so far into the future that her own species was little more than an archaeological data point.

Perhaps she was being ungrateful, but this development did not necessarily strike her as a positive one.

She wondered how Svetlana felt about it.

* * *

The train arrived on time. Doors aligned precisely with luminous docking apertures etched into the side of the tube. Glass barriers whisked open, accompanied by warning chimes.

No one on the platform moved or spoke. There were eight of them: Bella, Ryan Axford, Liz Shen, Mike Takahashi and another four of Bella’s closest allies. She had asked Takahashi to come along because he’d been one of Parry’s old EVA miners and was liked by everyone, and she hoped that his presence would defuse some of the tension. Parry was also present: the Judicial Apparatus of the High Hab had just handed him over. He stood a little back from Bella’s party, detained by a hatstand-shaped robot bailiff. No one was wearing spacesuits, as per Bella’s orders. They wore normal clothes, markedly bare of ornament or ostentation, so that the absence of weapons or instruments of mass disorientation might be obvious.

Three figures stepped from the train wearing suits of the Chakri five series — white and smooth-limbed as soapstone figurines. The suits carried no external equipment that might have been mistaken for weapons. Bella had examined Jim Chisholm’s original Chakri five and she knew that while the suit was capable of protecting its occupant against all manner of hostile environments, it was not in itself capable of inflicting serious harm on others.

The three figures stepped away from the glass partition and the train doors chimed and closed behind them. They formed a triangle, one figure ahead of the other two, and walked slowly towards the committee, stopping when they had covered half the distance. By the manner of her walk, Bella knew that the person in the lead suit was Svetlana.

Bella spoke first. Her throat felt dry, but she forced out the words. “Thank you for coming. As you can see, we’re all unarmed and unprotected. You have nothing to fear from us.”

Svetlana’s amplified voice boomed from the first suit. “You’ve brought Parry. That’s good.”

“We had a deal,” Bella said. “I’ve every intention of sticking to my side of it.”

“Then you’re ready to hand yourself over?”

“Just as soon as you hand over the passkey. We need it more urgently than ever now. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but Janus is showing worrying signs of instability.”

“Not that story again.”

“It’s the truth. The first evacuees are already on their way to Underhole. When you assume command, I want you to continue with the evacuation plan. Leave Nick in charge: he’ll see it through.”

“You presume to tell me what to do when I take over?”

“I have a duty to Janus until the last second of my command.”

“Fine. It’s coming up fast.” Svetlana’s tone became businesslike. “I have the data in my suit: standard constructor format. If you try anything, I’ll erase the file. You won’t be able to recover it.”

“I’m not going to try anything. All I want is that passkey. Nothing else matters to me except evacuating this colony and getting us behind that endcap door.”

“She’s telling the truth,” Mike Takahashi said.

Svetlana reached up slowly and released her helmet. She lifted it free and touched it against the hip of her suit, where it formed a temporary adhesive bond. She glanced back at her companions, who reached up and removed their helmets. Denise Nadis shook free her dreads, letting them spill out over the suit’s neck ring. Josef Protsenko was the third member of the party. He nodded at Bella with no visible animosity, as if this was all simply some mildly unpleasant bureaucratic necessity, like a bankruptcy hearing.

“I’ll give you the passkey,” Svetlana said, “but not in one go. I’ve split the document into two. Neither half is any use without the other.”

Bella shrugged. “However you want to play it.”

“Send Parry over to me. I get him back, you get one half of the file.”

Bella motioned to the bailiff robot. The machine escorted Parry across the platform to a point just in front of Svetlana.

“Release him,” Bella said. The Judicial Apparatus had already given her verbal authority over its bailiff. The robot released Parry’s restraints and stepped back on its spindly black hatstand legs. Freed, Parry stretched his arms and examined his wrists where the bonds had been applied.