Pushing Ice (8 page)

“The RTI has demanded inspection rights,” Cagan said. “They’ve credible evidence that the Chinese have put a forge vat aboard so that they can grow equipment after the ship’s left Earth orbit. Beijing’s stonewalling, unsurprisingly. Inga will keep up the squeeze to get those inspectors aboard, but even if she fails, it doesn’t look like the Chinese will be going anywhere fast.

“Our analysts say their tokamak design’s flawed — they’ll be lucky if they get that thing out of orbit, let alone onto a Janus intercept. But in the unlikely event that luck turns out to be on their side — and if our political leverage fails — you’ll need to be prepared for a more complicated scenario than we originally envisaged. I’m pressing Inga to rubber-stamp an upgrade to your status: if we can rebrand
Rockhopper
as an official UEE expedition, that will give us a lot more room for manoeuvre.”

“How so?” Bella mouthed soundlessly.

“There’s still some fine print to be looked at,” Cagan said, “but our reading of the situation is that UEE expeditionary status would automatically designate an exclusion volume around
Rockhopper
. If they ignore it, you’ll be authorised to use reasonable force to prevent commercial claim-jumping. Of course,
Rockhopper
is not
technically
an armed vessel —” Cagan paused. “I’ll speak to you as soon as I have word from Inga.”

He signed off.

Bella sat staring at the blank flexy in a stunned funk. She had not asked for her ship to be reclassified as an instrument of the UEE, nor had she asked for permission to shoot another ship out of the sky if it violated her company’s interests.

Rockhopper
had been under way for a week now. Around the system, a massive coordinated observation programme saw every large civilian telescope trained on the fleeing moon. Even military spysats had been pressed into service, diverted away from the monitoring of hair-trigger frontiers and treaty-violation hotspots to peer into deep space, in the direction of Virgo. Commercial communications networks had been reassigned to cope with the mammoth effort of merging the data from this awesome concentration of surveillance. From near-Earth out to the cold, dark territory of the outer system, space hummed with intense, fevered scrutiny. Every day took Janus further away; but every day also saw more aperture and processing power coming on line, and for a little while the human effort outweighed the moon’s increasing distance.

The images had sharpened, revealing the urban intricacy of the Spican machinery under the now broken and incomplete icy mantle. What they were looking at was definitely alien, but at least it stayed still and allowed them to feel as if it obeyed something like logic. The newest images uploaded to
Rockhopper
came with nomenclature: features in the machinery that had been given tentative, resolutely unofficial names.
Junction Box, Radiator Ridge, Big North Spiral, Little South Spiral, Spike Island, Magic Kingdom, Crankshaft Valley
. None of it meant anything, but it was comforting to put some human labels on the alien territory.

Bella thought she could deal with the alien territory — she had signed up for that when she agreed to take
Rockhopper
out to Janus. But no one had warned her that she might also become embroiled in a hair-trigger standoff with Beijing.

Not technically armed
, Cagan had said, but both of them knew full well what that really meant.

She looked at the fish tank, idly contemplating the mistake everyone made in assuming she’d used part of her mass allowance to make it happen. That wasn’t the case. As she’d explained to Svetlana, everything in the tank was already mass-budgeted into the ship, except for the fish. Even the glass was surplus window material, stored here as opposed to somewhere else aboard
Rockhopper
, glued into a temporary watertight box. If refurbishment ever came calling for the glass, they’d have a fight… but it
was
theirs, in the small print.

No, the tank hadn’t cost her one gram of her mass budget, but she’d had to pull some serious strings to make it happen. It was a perk. So was the big room with the carpeted floor. No one else on the entire ship had a carpet. No one else had decent soundproofing. This, she supposed, was when she started paying for the perks. She had always known it would happen one day.

That didn’t mean she had to like it.

* * *

“Sorry to dump on a friend,” Bella said when Svetlana arrived in her office, “especially when you’ve just got off-shift, but I need your help with something.”

“What are friends for, if not for dumping on?” Svetlana scrunched a finger through her hair, still wet from the shower. She wore jogging pants and a dive-chick T-shirt printed with a mermaid and moving shoals of animated fish. “What is it now: someone wants another slice of you?”

Bella shook her head grimly. She had already farmed out several interview requests to her senior officers, including Svetlana, and they’d lapped her up: the bright Armenian-American girl with the mind of a nuclear engineer and the body of a one-time champion free diver, one who just happened to be romantically entangled with a space miner with several commendations for bravery during EVA operations. Now even the diffident Parry was getting his fifteen minutes, squirming like something found under a stone.

Too good to be true, they said.

Bella pulled a thick stack of printouts from her desk. “This is a bit different, I’m afraid. It’s delicate — very, very delicate. It can only be entrusted to a safe pair of hands.”

“Suddenly this is beginning to feel like a
major
dump.”

“They don’t get much more major.” Bella passed the stack to Svetlana. “What you’ve got there are copies of one hundred paintings, selected from over fifty-six thousand individual entries submitted by American school kids between first and third grades. Artistic media range from finger smears to… well, something approximating brushwork.”

Svetlana slipped off the rubber band and leafed through the first few sheets. “Aliens,” she said, in a numbed tone of voice. “They’ve got the kids painting aliens.”

“It’s educational,” Bella said.

“It’s scary.” Svetlana held up one of the pictures: something that resembled the business end of a blue toilet brush, smeared with enthusiastic daubs of green. “Aren’t we supposed to be stopping the kids getting nightmares, not encouraging them?”

“That’s for the education system to decide, not us. Our job is to grade the efforts, that’s all.”

“Oh, right. So: five minutes’ work, right? We just pull a few out at random —”

Bella grimaced. “There’s a bit more to it than that, I’m afraid. They’d like us to comment on the pictures — say something nice and constructive about them. All of them — even the more —
ahem
! — artistically challenged ones.”

“
All
of them?”

Bella nodded sternly. “All of them. In enough detail that no one’s going to get offended… no one’s going to think we’re not approaching this with due diligence.”

“Holy shit, Bella.”

“And we’ll be steering clear of expletives, obviously.”

“We.”

“Oh, I’ve got my own stack of homework to grade, don’t you worry. You drew the long straw on this one. I’m the one who’ll be up all night reading creative assignments about me and my ship meeting aliens.”

Svetlana slipped the rubber band back around the printouts. “This can’t get any worse, can it? I mean, as if we didn’t have enough to be doing as it is.”

“This is nothing. Yesterday I had the
Cosmic Avenger
fan club on my back. They wanted me to comment on which of my crew members best approximated the various fictional characters… and how I’d have dealt with scenarios from the show, if they happened to me.”

“I hope you told them where they could shove it.”

Bella feigned horror. “Oh, no. I just put Saul Regis on the case. Man for the job.”

“Man for the job,” Svetlana agreed, nodding. “Well, I guess that made him happy.”

“As a pig in shit.”

“Talking of which, I do hope you’ve lined up something nice and juicy for Craig Schrope. There’s a man with way too much time on his hands.”

Bella leaned back in her seat, sensing an opportunity to get something out in the open that had been troubling her lately. “You and Craig… it’s not exactly an eye-to-eye thing, is it?”

“We’ve been over this.”

“I know, I know — he’s a suit, you’re a hands-on type. But we need suits as well as tool-pushers. Craig’s a damn good asset to this company. As bitter a pill as this might be to swallow, he’s actually quite good at his job.”

“We’re off the record now, aren’t we?”

“Absolutely.”

“He rubs me up the wrong way. He’s always giving me shitty looks, especially if I venture even so much as an opinion in his presence — as if I wasn’t head of flight systems, but some lower-echelon grunt with only a few hours of wet time under my belt.”

“Craig gives everyone shitty looks. I think it’s genetic.” Bella paused, wondering how much it was wise to disclose. “Look, I’ll let you in on a secret. He’s not had an easy ride out here. DeepShaft tried to keep a lid on it for obvious reasons, but his last assignment on Mars —”

Svetlana looked mildly interested. “Go on.”

“Head office sent Craig into the Shalbatana bore project. There’d been reports of corner-cutting, dangerous working practices, questionable accounting.” Bella lit a cigarette, taking her time. She always enjoyed spinning out a story. “Craig uncovered a viper’s nest of high-level corruption. At every turn he met with obstruction and hostility, mostly from hands-on types like you and me. Physical violence, death threats, the lot — but Craig sorted that mess out. He turned Shalbatana around. Within six months they were digging faster than any of the other bore sites,
and
they had the best safety record on Big Red.”

“I heard he made a lot of enemies on Mars.”

“Enough that head office decided the only way to keep him on the payroll — and in one piece — was to move him onto another project. Hence
Rockhopper
. But don’t give Craig a hard time because he has a grudge against tool-pushers. Good ol‘ tool-pushers sabotaged his suit, tried to throw him down a service elevator, threatened to get to his family.”

Svetlana looked down. “I didn’t know he had a family.”

“There’s a lot we don’t know about each other,” Bella said. “And he’s wrong about us, of course — this is as tight and well-run an operation as any in DeepShaft. But you can’t blame him for carrying some suspicion over from his last assignment. It’ll just take a bit of time to rub his corners off. Then he’ll fit in, I’m sure of it.”

“Okay, I’ll try to be patient,” Svetlana said. “But I still want to see him getting
his
share of homework.”

“Don’t worry, that’s taken care of. He’s got a list of high-school science questions as long as my arm.”

Svetlana patted the stack of printouts on her lap. “I’m glad we can talk like this… I mean openly, without any barriers.”

“And I’m glad I can dump on you, when needs arise.” Bella sucked on the cigarette. “Like you said: what else are friends for?”

* * *

On the eighth day Bella called an emergency meeting of the chiefs. She gathered them in her office and sat impassive, wondering what
they
imagined the problem to be and secretly relishing their squirming discomfort.

“What is it?” Svetlana asked, the first of them to break the silence.

Bella stood up and peeled her flexy from the wall. It came to life in her hands. She held up the brightening panel to her audience.

“This,” she said.

“There’s a problem with ShipNet?” Nick Thale asked, looking — like all of them — at the top-level menu.

“There’s nothing wrong with ShipNet,” Bella said. “That’s functioning normally. The problem’s more obvious than that. It’s staring you in the face.”

They looked, and looked. They still couldn’t see what she was talking about.

“Do you think the menu structure needs to be reorganised to take account of our new mission profile?” Regis asked.

“Perhaps, but that’s not why you’re here.
Look
.”

“The flexy needs regenerating?” Parry offered.

“Yes, it does, but that isn’t the problem either.” Bella sighed: they weren’t going to get it. “The problem is the mascot. The problem is the penguin?”

“I don’t —” Svetlana began. “Oh, wait a minute. You don’t think — Oh, Christ. Why didn’t we think of this before?”

Parry looked at Svetlana. “I still don’t get it. What’s the problem?”

“You really don’t see it?” Bella asked incredulously. “Don’t you see what that mascot actually looks like?”

“It looks like a penguin to me.”

“And what’s the nice penguin doing, Parry?”

“It’s holding a drill… a jackhammer… Oh, hang on.”

“Look at it through alien eyes,” Bella said. “The way that penguin’s grinning: don’t you think it looks just a tiny bit fierce? It even has
teeth
. Whose funny idea was it to put teeth on it, anyway? And that drill: don’t you think there’s a danger it might be mistaken for some kind of —”

“Weapon,” Svetlana breathed.

“Holy shit,” Parry said, and started laughing.

“They might think we look like that,” Bella said. “They might think we’re the penguin.”

“And that we’re armed,” Svetlana said.

“With flippers?” Parry asked.

“What about the flippers?” Bella returned.

“Don’t you think they’ll find it rather odd that we’ve managed to build and fly a spaceship with just flippers? I mean, that would take some doing, wouldn’t it?”

“Maybe they’ll assume we bio-engineered ourselves to have flippers once we’d achieved a sufficiently advanced technological support society,” Saul Regis said. “You
could
go back to flippers if you had robots to take care of you. In
Cosmic Avenger
, season two —”

“The issue is not the flippers,” Bella said firmly. “The issue is the fact that our mascot might give cause for concern to our friends from Spica. It might just make them decide to shoot us out of the sky.”