Pushing Ice

  Unlucky thirteenth: 13/03/36. The date was burnt into her brain like a brand.

  People assumed she didn’t miss having a partner, as if the occasional and necessary coldness of her decision-making implied that she was herself frigid. A handful of them understood: Svetlana, Chisholm, Axford, Parry. They did not know everything, nor would she have wished them to. Not even Svetlana knew about the argument Bella and Garrison had had — drawn out by the agonised timelag of an Earth-Mars conversation — just before Garrison left for his final mission. If only they had at least made up before ending the link, before Garrison departed. He’d still have died, but she wouldn’t have been left with this twisted feeling of something unresolved, as if that unpleasant conversation was still waiting to be terminated, somewhere in the space between Earth and Mars.

  Bella stopped herself before her thoughts fell deeper into that poisonous spiral. Nothing could undo what had happened, but every time she felt as if she had dealt with the matter and was finally ready to safely close the book on Garrison’s death, it would return again to haunt her. She had to accept that it probably always would. There were times when she could shut the past out with work and duty, thinking about what might happen rather than what might have been.

  But today was not one of those days.

  Bella had just finished the letters to Takahashi’s distant relatives when she noticed that a communication had arrived from DeepShaft, addressed to her. It concerned Svetlana’s technical query about the pressure in the fuel tanks — Mike Takahashi’s accident had almost driven Svetlana’s questions from her mind. She speed-read the document, then called Svetlana to tell her that the report looked very thorough, and appeared to allay the concerns she had raised.

  “My concerns?” Svetlana asked.

  “I’m dumping the technical report to your flexy. The executive summary makes the gist of the report adequately clear.”

  “Adequately clear,” Svetlana said, pulling a face. “Well, that’s a relief.”

  “There’s no mystery,” Bella said. “The way the pressure sensors are rigged combined with the way the software is configured was guaranteed to smooth out a sharp pressure event from the mass-driver impact. The good news is that there’s no cause for concern.”

  “Really?” Svetlana sounded intrigued. “No cause at all?”

  “The simulations show that the impact wouldn’t have led to any structural fatigue in the tanks.”

  “There’s no impact in the world that wouldn’t have caused some fatigue.”

  “But fatigue we can live with.”

  “I’m still not happy, Bella.”

  “I’m not asking you to be happy: I’m just asking you to stop worrying about this one incident. If anything, we’ve overestimated the likely effects. Why are you so convinced someone’s keeping something from us?”

  “Call me cynical, but do you really think DeepShaft’s going to be thrilled at the idea of us turning back now?”

  “They also want this ship back in one piece.”

  “After we reach Janus.”

  “Svieta —” Bella began before giving it up with an exasperated glance at the ceiling. “I should know better by now, shouldn’t I?”

  “With me? Definitely!” Svetlana said.

  * * *

  Svetlana followed Parry through the lock and onto the dizzying tower of the spinal truss. The engine section looked a frighteningly long way below: much further away than it had when the ship was drifting. Parry secured one end of the tether to a truss node and the other to the harness point on Svetlana’s suit. She used the ladder that ran parallel to the car line to climb down the truss. At first every step sent a stab of agony into her chest, but after a while she worked out the best way to move to alleviate the pain of the damaged rib.

  At one hundred metres Svetlana halted, secured herself to the nearest node and waited for Parry to descend. Then Parry waited in turn while Svetlana moved down another hundred metres. Halfway down the spine a team was working on repairs to the car line amidst robots and flickering cutting tools. Svetlana expected them to show some curiosity as she and Parry passed them by, but they acknowledged their presence with only the briefest of hand gestures before returning to their duties.

  Parry and Svetlana continued their descent until they reached the level of the tanks, then the place where Takahashi had died, and then the heavy-duty airlock into the pressurised work environment of the sweatbox.

  Once safely inside, the two of them cracked open their helmet seals and lifted their visors. Their breath jetted out in white clouds. No one had visited the sweatbox since the accident with the mass driver, and the environmental system had responded by cooling the room down.

  The sweatbox’s curved green walls were studded with read-outs, keyboards, telescope-like viewing devices and dark portholes. There were pages of printout, sheathed in plastic and annotated with scribbled corrections in magic marker, stuck to the walls with geckoflex. There were safety notices and bad-taste cartoons, like the one that showed a nervous-looking scientist working on some kind of atomic bomb while his colleague sneaked up behind him, ready to burst a huge paper bag.

  Svetlana ripped it from the wall and crumpled it into her pocket. Not the kind of humour she needed right now.

  “We can talk here,” she said. “I’ve disabled the webcam feed to the rest of the ship.”

  “Wasn’t that a bit naughty?”

  “Not at all. We lost some bandwidth during the accident — the driver severed some of the fibre-optic lines running down the spine. All I’m doing is making sure we use the remaining capacity in the most efficient way.”

  “I doubt that the webcam made much difference to the bandwidth,” Parry said. “Not that I’m going to quibble.”

  “Very sensible of you.” Svetlana tugged her flexy from the storage pouch below her chest pack. “Are you going to wait here, breathing down my neck, or is there something you can do outside for the next half-hour?”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know. Listen to some Howling Wolf. Watch the stars go by or something.”

  “If it’s all right with you, I’ll stay and keep an eye on you.”

  “I’m not going to get myself into trouble.”

  “You’re already in trouble,” Parry said. “So am I if Bella ever finds out I faked Ash’s sig on that suit-release form.”

  “Ash owes me one,” Svetlana said. “When he’s back on shift I’ll remind him that I didn’t enter a complaint into the LOC log after that little blackout around the comet. Then we’ll see how loud he squeals over one faked sig.”

  “You could give scheming lessons to Machiavelli,” Parry said.

  “I did. He flunked.”

  Svetlana unscrewed her suit gloves and hung them on her belt so that she could work the flexy with her hands. The HUD would alert her if she tried to leave through the airlock without replacing the gloves. She activated the flexy and paged through to the heavily annotated technical read-outs concerning fuel pressure. Then she moved to one of the instrument-crammed walls of the sweatbox and tugged out a fibre-optic line.

  “You ready to tell me what this is all about?” Parry asked, his arms folded across his chest. “Because none of this feels routine.”

  Svetlana clipped the fibre-optic line into a port on the underside of the flexy and touched menu buttons to upload new data. “We tore up the book on routine when we pushed the engine to half a gee,” she said.

  “It’s to do with the ship, then? You’re afraid she’ll fall apart?”

  “Not that. I just have a suspicion, a bad one, and I haven’t been able to shake it.”

  “This suspicion being?”

  “That someone’s screwing with us.” She closed her eyes, willing the flexy to finish uploading the data and prove her wrong. “I started worrying about possible damage to the fuel tanks.”

  “Reasonable, after what happened.”

  “So I checked. I called up the numbers on my flexy when I
was in the medical centre and looked for any anomalies in the pressure data around the time of the accident.”

  “And you found — ?”

  “Nothing. Not even a blip. Nothing to indicate we’d even had an accident.”

  “There must be some reason why the impact didn’t show up,” Parry said.

  The flexy pinged: it had finished uploading data from the sweatbox. Svetlana pulled out the fibre-optic line and allowed it to spool back into the wall. “I thought of that,” she said heavily. “Looked into it, too. And I saw no logical way that a pressure spike could have happened and not shown up in the data.”

  “Did you talk to Bella about this?”

  “Of course. She found it pretty odd as well, but she figured there had to be an explanation.”

  “Which you haven’t found yet.”

  “Bella sent a message back home, outlining our concerns. A while ago we got the reply”

  “And?”

  “Not to put too fine a point on it, it’s a crock of shit.”

  Parry looked confused. “You mean they don’t understand what happened either, but they’re trying to gloss over it?”

  ‘That’s it exactly, and my nasty suspicion is that they’re doing it because we can’t be allowed to know the truth. Because if we did, this entire mission —” Svetlana took a moment to view the newly uploaded data on her flexy, superimposing the pressure-time curves over those she had already analysed. ”I was hoping this would prove me wrong,“ she said heavily, ”but it doesn’t.“

  “What’s going on?”

  She breathed in deeply, feeling the cold air fill her lungs. This was it: the crux, the point at which she was about to reveal herself in all her paranoid glory. “The data has been tampered with.” She held up the flexy, dragging a finger across the curves she had already annotated. “All these numbers are made up.”

  Parry did not ask her to repeat what she had just said, or accuse her of being mad. She was grateful for that. He just nodded slowly and worked a finger against his moustache, as he always did when he was puzzled.

  “And you think the company’s behind this?”

  “It’s the only explanation that makes sense.”

  Now that she had said it out loud, now that her suspicions were in the open, she felt a thrilling sense of liberation.

  “Okay. Explain it to me — start with how they’d change those numbers.”

  “No big deal: there are plenty of ways of hacking into the ship. It’s happening all the time: routine software uploads, bug fixes, patches, that kind of thing.”

  “Could they sneak something like that past you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe there’s a dedicated backdoor channel that bypasses the logging system. Or maybe they uploaded a piece of software that infiltrated the logging system itself, so that they could sneak a lot of other stuff in without our noticing.”

  “I hope you have some watertight evidence for this,” Parry said.

  “I have plenty of evidence,” she said, and passed him the flexy.

  Parry lowered his eyes. “This is supposed to mean something?”

  “I’ve superimposed two sets of data that should be identical. They’re not. The curves don’t overlap.”

  “One is real?”

  She nodded firmly. “The data I just uploaded from the sweatbox is what I expected to see. It shows the pressure data for the fuel tanks, including the glitch when the mass driver hit us.”

  “And the other curve?”

  “That’s the data that shows up if you query ShipNet. It’s what Bella sees. It’s what Bella believes.”

  Parry touched the curve that showed the mass-driver impact. “How come this data didn’t get changed as well?”

  “It’s buffered,” Svetlana said, “stored in a short-term memory cache as a protection against a shipwide systems meltdown. Only way to get at it was to come down here. Whatever they used to overwrite the other copy couldn’t get at this one. Or they didn’t think about it.”

  He handed her the flexy. She could tell by his expression that she had put a dent in his certainty, even if she still had some way to go before he was fully convinced.

  “Why?” he asked. “I don’t get it — why change those numbers?”

  Svetlana held up the flexy again. “The curve of the real data is about fifteen per cent lower than the faked curve. That means there’s less pressure. That means there’s less fuel in the tanks.”

  “Meaning what, exactly?”

  “It was already tight,” Svetlana said. “Based on the numbers we had before the accident, there was enough fuel to get to Janus, shadow it for a few days and then make it back to the inner system.”

  “And now?”

  “I’ll have to re-run the calculations based on the real data, but I have a feeling I already know the answer.”

  Silence stretched between them. She looked into Parry’s wide, trusting face.

  “Which is?” he asked.

  “There won’t be enough fuel to get home again. That’s what they don’t want us to know. They want us to reach Janus and make observations. The data we transmit home will still make DeepShaft’s fortune.”

  “And us?”

  “If they have the data, we’re expendable.”

  * * *

  Bella was with the taphead when the call came in. Thom Crabtree had a fawnlike quality about him: his eyes were large and trusting, but shy of hers; he could not look at her directly, but only over her shoulder, as if addressing someone else entirely.

  “I don’t think I’m making as much difference as I could,” Crabtree said.

  “In what way?” Bella asked patiently.

  “I’m not being allowed to be useful. I might as well not be on the ship at all.”

  “I thought we went over this already,” Bella said.

  “We did. But nothing changed.”

  Bella glanced at an e-mail she had pulled up from her sent folder. “I asked Saul to move forward the integration. It’s important to me that we have you up to speed before we reach Janus. I’m convinced that you can play a crucial role in the investigation when we start deploying robots.”

  “I hope so,” Crabtree said.

  “So tell me how well the integration is going. Are you working with real machines yet?”

  Crabtree shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Not exactly,” he said. “We’re still on virtuals.” He meant the simulated machines.

  “There was a problem with the transition?”

  “Yes — no. I mean, no technical problem. But Saul —” He squirmed, his eyes darting everywhere but her face. Bella felt just as uncomfortable: she took no pleasure in placing the delicate young man in such a conflicted state, but she had to have his side of the story.

  “Saul halted the trials?”

  “Yes,” he said uneasily. “We’ve gone back to the virtuals again.”

  She looked at his head, shaven close to the skull. There was no external sign that he was a taphead, no evidence of the surgery that had taken place back on Earth. The work was too good for that. DeepShaft had invested billions of dollars in Crabtree and his like. The intercranial microelectrode array implants formed an exquisitely delicate loom, wired into ten thousand cortical motor neurons. The IMA and its correlator neurochip allowed Crabtree to move machines with his mind. With proper training, he could control a robot with a fluency of motion that no teleoperator could approach: the robot would be fully assimilated into his own body image.

  It was no wonder that so many of the crew feared Crabtree.

  “Did Saul give a reason for halting the integration?” Bella asked.

  “There was trouble,” the taphead told her. “Threats.”

  “Look, if it wasn’t for Janus —”

  “Janus?”

  “These are extraordinary circumstances. Now we’ve had a couple of accidents… the crew are under a lot of pressure. If things were normal, I wouldn’t hesitate to override opinion and place you in
a position of real usefulness.”

  “But at the moment you have to keep the rest of the crew happy.”

  “Yes,” Bella said lamely.

  “It’s all right,” Crabtree said. “I understand. It’s natural that they resent my presence.”

  “It’s not right, though.”

  Now, finally, he found the strength to look directly into her eyes. His own were as hard and cold as iron, and she felt her body temperature drop a degree.

  “It is right. I’m the future. They should fear me.”

  Her flexy chimed. Bella held up a hand. “Just a second, Thom.” Seeing that the call was from Svetlana, she took it. “Hi, Svieta. Can I get back to you in a few minutes?”

  “I don’t think so.” Svetlana leaned closer to the lens, her face looming large and distorted. “It can’t wait. Not this one. Not this time.”

  Bella made her apologies to Thom Crabtree — he had come to her with a reasonable complaint, and she had done little to assuage his concerns — and showed him to the door. Watching him leave, Bella felt a familiar prickle of guilt knowing that she had ducked a problem, not solved it. Her choice of T-shirt slogan had not been the most apposite, either:

  I can only help one person a day.

  Today is not your day.

  Tomorrow doesn’t look good either.

  She hoped he hadn’t taken it personally. Then she put Thom Crabtree to one side in her mind, warmed herself some coffee and pressed the little nub near the hem that switched the T-shirt to a different slogan.

  I have one nerve left, and you’re getting on it.

  Not much better, she thought, and hopped through the options. Just as she found the blank default, which was what she should have set it to all along, Svetlana arrived, accompanied by Parry Boyce, who filled the doorframe like a bodyguard. Bella blinked at the unexpected guest, but ushered him in all the same. They were both wearing suit inner layers, musty with sweat.

  Bella looked at Parry, wondering what he had to do with all this. “Could you use some coffee?”