Pushing Ice

  “We’re okay,” Svetlana said. “I don’t have much of a stomach for food or drink right now.”

  Bella indicated that they should fold down seats and face her across her desk. “That bad?”

  “Much, much worse.”

  Svetlana passed her a flexy. Bella only had to glance at the display to recognise the familiar curves of pressure data. “Not this again,” she said, a little crossly. “I thought we’d moved on.”

  Svetlana told the story while Bella copied the data onto her own flexy. Parry filled in details, confirming that he’d been with her when she had gathered the evidence.

  Bella poured herself some more coffee and drank half a cup before answering. She watched the electric flicker of her tetra fish, nosing inquisitively up to the glass.

  “That’s insane,” she said finally.

  “I completely agree,” Svetlana said. “It’s still true.”

  Bella pushed a finger to the bridge of her nose, digging the nail into the skin. “But the report on the pressure spike —”

  “They’ve been massaging that data ever since we got the call to go to Janus. But when the mass driver hit, they had to upload a new set of faked numbers to cover the fact that we turned off the engine after the accident. That was when they forgot to include the glitch due to the mass-driver impact.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “It’s my job not to forget little details.” Svetlana glanced at Parry. “I’m sorry about what happened to Mike, but if the driver hadn’t broken off, we’d never have suspected anything was wrong with the data; that’s what’s saved us.”

  “You say ‘saved us’,” Bella said tactfully. “I’m not completely sure I follow.”

  Parry cleared his throat. “We have to turn around. There’s still enough fuel left to make it back now, but every hour that we push further from home gives us less and less of a margin for error.”

  “Turn back?“

  Svetlana picked up the flexy and allowed it to fall back onto the desk with a hollow thump. “They’re screwing with us, Bella. DeepShaft is lying to us, letting us think we have a hope in hell of getting back from this.”

  “Let’s not jump to melodramatic conclusions,” Bella said. “There could be a million explanations. How can you be so sure, anyway?“

  “Because these curves don’t match. Because one is real and one is false.”

  The coffee lent Bella’s thoughts a treacherous clarity, like thin ice. “How did you get hold of the real data, in that case?”

  “There’s a copy. Normally I’d have been able to retrieve it over ShipNet, but the damage to the spinal truss meant I had to dig it out of the sweatbox using a local hook-up.”

  “Even I’d have had a hard time believing her if I hadn’t seen those numbers with my own eyes,” Parry said.

  “And now you believe her? You believe we’re the victims of a corporate conspiracy?”

  “I believe someone’s altered those numbers. Svieta’s explanation sounds as plausible as anything else.”

  “You honestly think they’d do this to us?” Bella asked.

  “Stakes don’t get much higher than Janus.”

  Bella picked up a pen and tapped it against her desk, hoping she looked and sounded like someone going along with a theory for the sake of argument and nothing more. “Assuming there is a conspiracy, just how long do you think it could be kept hidden? If we truly are running low on fuel, what happens when we can’t get back?”

  “Maybe nothing will happen. They’ll say it was all an innocent mistake.”

  “The truth would get out eventually,” Bella said.

  “Yes — if you wait long enough, to the point where no one alive cares what happened all that time ago. And even if heads do roll, they wouldn’t necessarily be the right ones.”

  “This is a lot to swallow,” Bella said.

  “I wouldn’t have come to you if I didn’t think the evidence was watertight.”

  “These numbers, you mean?”

  “They’re pretty incriminating. Enough to act on, at the very least.”

  “By which you mean I should ask for clarification on the fuel situation?”

  “No,” Svetlana said, with sudden urgency. “We don’t have time to sit and wait for them to come up with another pack of lies. We have to stop now, turn around and start our return journey.”

  “And abandon Janus?”

  “If I told you the ship was in imminent danger of break-up, you’d abort the mission immediately, wouldn’t you?”

  “You know the answer to that already.”

  “Then accept that these numbers are just as damning. This is a one-way ticket to Janus, nothing more.”

  “You’ve verified that we don’t have enough fuel for a return trip?”

  “I know that we have less fuel than they’re telling us,” Svetlana said, confidence slipping from her face. “I haven’t had time to run a full flight-dynamics sim to see just how bad things are. But if the numbers were marginal to begin with —”

  “Look,” Bella said, trying to be accommodating, “I see that you have a concern here, but there has to be an honest explanation.”

  Svetlana stood up angrily. “What more do you want?”

  Parry restrained her, standing up and putting a wide hand on her shoulder. “Easy,” Bella heard him say under his breath.

  “I can’t act on this,” Bella said. “I can’t suddenly turn around and accuse the entire company of premeditated murder on the basis of a few discrepancies between two data files.”

  “We’re talking about more than a few discrepancies,” Svetlana said defensively.

  “Hear me out,” Bella said, fighting her own instinct to shout down the other woman. “I accept that there is something puzzling going on here. You’ve convinced me of that much. But I’ll need to see more before I abort the mission.”

  “You mean this isn’t enough?”

  “Not from where I’m sitting. I want a full flight-dynamics assessment, taking into account the mass we lost when the drivers detached. I want to see something in the telemetry logs that backs up your story.”

  “I can’t give you what isn’t there.”

  “Measure the remaining mass in the fuel tanks. Use our acceleration, Newton’s first law. You can do that, can’t you?”

  “Not in any way that would convince you. This is the best you’re going to get.”

  “I refuse to believe they’d do this to us,” Bella said.

  “Start getting used to it,” Parry said.

  * * *

  In all her years on the ship, there was one room Bella had never had cause to visit. She was in it now, with Ryan Axford. The two of them sat on fold-down seats. She’d had to put on a fleece jacket against the chill: even now her fingertips were turning numb.

  “I keep wondering, Ryan: why four? Why not two, why not six?”

  “Same thing occurred to me,” Axford, who seemed oblivious to the cold, said. He puffed lightly on the cigarette she had offered him. He smoked, he said, because he had seen too many non-smoking physicians explore other avenues of addiction. Besides, he argued, the health risks were down in the noise: months off a life, rather than entire decades. “Some cost-benefit analyst must have decided four was the optimum number given our typical mission profile and the average time between shuttle visits. We’re doing pretty well, aren’t we?”

  “One down, three to go,” Bella said.

  The ends of four sliding mortuary trays occupied one wall of the narrow steel-grey room. There were even metal label holders on the ends of the trays. Three of them were empty, but now Axford had slid a medical card into the fourth, filled out in his customarily neat handwriting. Most of the people on the ship had laboured, childlike handwriting when they were forced to write; Axford, by contrast, had the most elegant and legible handwriting of any man Bella had ever met. It was calligraphic, rather beautiful.

  The card said that the tray contained the frozen body of Mike Takahashi, wh
o had died during an EVA accident. There was some allusion to the cryopreservation procedure, some mention of the chemicals utilised, but nothing overt. Axford did not need to state that he froze a man so that he might live again. When Rockhopper made it home, the right people would learn what had happened. To say anything more would be a mark of hopeless wishful thinking.

  “You didn’t come down here to chill out with the Frost Angel,” Axford said delicately. “Something’s bothering you.”

  Bella had always been able to talk to Ryan Axford; she treated him as a kind of honorary second-in-command, her deputy in all but name, especially since Chisholm’s health had deteriorated so badly. She supposed ship’s surgeons had always enjoyed that unspoken privilege.

  “Something’s come up,” she said.

  “The Chinese mess?”

  “No — not that that isn’t enough of a headache in its own right. But this is about us, about Rockhopper.” She waited for him to say something, but Axford just looked at her with the cigarette poised near his lips. A good listener, she thought. “It’s about Svetlana Barseghian. I guess you know her pretty well.”

  “She’s been in and out of medical a couple of times in the last month. First there was a muscle she pulled on her exercise bike, two, three weeks back. Then I had her in for treatment and observation after the mass-driver accident.”

  “How’d she seem?”

  “Patient confidentiality, Captain Lind.”

  “Sorry.”

  Axford smiled forgivingly. “She seemed the way she always does: in good shape, mentally and physically, focused on her job. Not one of the problem cases, like… well, I’m sure you can fill in the blanks. But Svieta isn’t one of my headaches. The crew like her. I like her. She’s attractive, bright, a good team player.”

  “Attractive, Ryan? I didn’t think you’d notice.”

  “Because I’m a gay man?” He gave Bella a stern look. “I expected better of you, frankly.”

  “I’m sorry. That was unspeakably crass.”

  “I’ll forgive you in return for another cigarette. That’s absolutely my last for the day, though, so you’re not allowed any more slip-ups.”

  She let him take another cigarette, which he dropped into his shirt pocket for later. “So what’s the deal with Svieta? Why do you want to know what I think of her?”

  “She’s come to me with something, a technical matter that might impact on our chances of mission completion. On the face of it, it’s pretty disturbing stuff.”

  “You have faith in her abilities, don’t you?”

  Bella nodded firmly. “Absolutely. She’s never put a foot wrong.”

  “So what’s the problem? If she’s flagged an issue, shouldn’t you listen to her?”

  “It’s a bit more complicated than that. She’s basically asking me to abort the mission. Turn Rockhopper around, forget about Janus.”

  Axford blew out softly. “Whew.”

  “Under ordinary circumstances, I don’t think I’d have hesitated for a second. But these aren’t ordinary circumstances. Part of me’s screaming to do what she says. I trust her abilities, I trust her as a friend, and I have no reason to think she might be exaggerating the dangers for her own reasons. But there’s another part of me — call it my cold-hearted-bitch mode — that says ignore her.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “Svetlana raised a technical query — there was something in the numbers she didn’t like. I thought she had a point, actually. I called headquarters and asked them to look into it. They came back with a technical explanation that ought to have resolved her concerns.”

  “Except they didn’t go away.”

  “Svetlana thought it was a whitewash, so she went digging for more evidence and came up with something that looked even more compelling.”

  “I can see how this would put you in something of a quandary.” Axford ran a hand over his salt-and-pepper crew-cut. “Have you spoken to Craig Schrope about any of this?”

  “Yes, of course. It would have been remiss of me not to mention her concerns to him when she first brought them to me.”

  “So what was Craig’s angle?”

  “Like me, he thought she had a point. Like me, he thought DeepShaft had covered all the bases.”

  “And the second thing — the other evidence she came up with?”

  “I haven’t mentioned it to Craig.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. It’s become delicate now. Svetlana could be digging a deep hole for herself. If she’s right, then we’re in trouble, but if she’s wrong, it’ll be the end of her career. They’ll bury her alive. I don’t want that to happen to my friend.”

  “Which is why you’ve held back from telling Craig about the latest instalment.”

  “You heard how he turned Shalbatana around. This is a man who doesn’t give a shit about making enemies. It’s what gets him through the day.”

  Axford narrowed his eyes. “What’s your reading on Craig?”

  “The crew don’t like him. But they’re not paid to like him. He’s the right man in the right seat.”

  “He is good at his job,” Axford allowed. “Not everyone can be a Jim Chisholm, liked and respected at the same time.”

  “Actually,” Bella ventured, “Jim’s the other reason I wanted to talk to you. This whole business —”

  “You want to bounce it off Jim, see what he has to say.”

  “I know he’s ill, but I really need to talk to him.”

  “Not going to happen,” Axford said, shaking his head slowly. “I’m sorry, but he’s under enough emotional strain as it is. I know you have your reasons — and I sympathise — but the last thing he needs is to be dragged back into the mire of command politics.”

  “I understand,” Bella said. In truth, she had expected this. Axford had always been protective of his patients: she would have respected him less if he had given ground, even for this.

  “But I don’t mind you asking,” he went on. “I really can appreciate the stress this puts you under, but I don’t think for a moment that Jim would tell you anything you hadn’t already figured out for yourself.”

  “Which is?”

  Axford took out and lit the second cigarette. “Being captain is a bitch. But you knew that already.”

  SEVEN

  The face on Bella’s wall was that of a young man, skin pulled tight to the bones by gravity. Padded restraints locked his head into immobility. What could be seen of his surroundings was red-lit and unfocused: perforated foamsteel bulkheads, a tangle of circulation pipes, screens burbling with text and schematics. Under his cross-buckled seat restraints, the young man wore a suit jacket over a white roll-neck sweater. Coloured ribbons and metal insignia offset the jacket’s dark material. The young man had short black hair, neatly side-combed and gleaming as if he had washed and gelled it just before making this broadcast.

  “Greetings to captain and crew of commercial vehicle Rockhopper” said the face on Bella’s wall. “This is Commander Wang Zhanmin of exploratory space vessel Shenzhou Five, on behalf of the People’s Democratic Republic of Greater China. It is my great honour to extend the hand of friendship on behalf of my nation. Please, honoured crew of commercial vehicle Rockhopper, accept offer of Chinese people to join in mutual exploration of Janus anomaly.“

  Bella stopped the recording. “It’s the same as the last time — not exactly the same wording, but the sentiments haven’t changed.”

  “I like the way he emphasises the ‘commercial’ bit,” Craig Schrope said. “As if he didn’t know this was a UEE mission with full diplomatic sanction.”

  “The kid’s just following a script, saying what Beijing told him to say,” Bella said. “Look at it from their angle — why should they recognise our official status if we don’t recognise theirs?”

  “Because China is a rogue state, and we’re a full member of the council. That’s good enough for me.”

  Bella wonde
red how much the strain was showing. She had still not spoken to Schrope about the second piece of evidence Svetlana had brought to her attention, and that omission was eating away at her. She worried about what would happen when she received a follow-up reply from home, as she had requested. She had hoped, guiltily, that the Chinese matter would resolve itself and leave her with only that one major problem to deal with.

  Unfortunately, Beijing’s beautiful creation, with its staggered, subtly pagoda-like lines, continued to function flawlessly. The fusion engine had been notched up to a fearful two gees, which would permit an even longer study window. Had the race been equal, with Rockhopper and the Shenzhou Five starting the run to Janus from the same position, there was no doubt that the Chinese would have been the clear victors. Already the Shenzhou Five had come within five light-minutes of Rockhopper. No distance at all out in the long, empty light-hours beyond the Kuiper Cliff. They would have to come closer, too, as both ships converged on the same target.

  “You may as well hear the rest of it,” Bella said.

  “I’ll pass. Do we ever get to see anyone else, or is it always this one kid?”

  “Just Wang,” Bella said. “Maybe he’s the only one Beijing trusts to talk to us. We still don’t know exactly how many people they’ve got aboard that thing — the Chinese are talking as if there’re dozens, but that might be an exaggeration.”

  “Doesn’t matter, anyway. We only need one of them to understand our response.”

  “No one’s discussed a response,” Bella said. “It isn’t for us to decide who gets to crawl over Janus.”

  “That’s the point — we don’t have to decide. The UEE has decided for us. They’ve given us the mandate.”

  “C’mon, Craig.” Bella looked at him reasonably, trying to crack the poker face of the man who had broken the Shalbatana bore. “You know what that really means.”

  “It means Wang the Man can take his ball home.”

  “No, it means Powell pulled strings in Niagara Falls. He said as much himself. You know how tight he is with Inga de Jong.”

  “DeepShaft has a seat on the Security Council,” Schrope said, with pedantic slowness. “It’s not exactly breaking news that Powell has some leverage in UEE affairs.”