Pushing Ice

  Manageable.

  But they would still be horribly far from home. And that was assuming the ship survived the burn in the first place. She had read Svetlana’s expression: there was nothing there that resembled optimism. It was a savage risk, and all it would achieve at best would be to strand them unspeakably far from home, with no fuel left to keep the ship running. They would be dead before any rescue or resupply effort ever reached them.

  But what was the alternative?

  Well, there was one.

  She picked up her flexy and placed a call to her former second-in-command. Jim Chisholm was conscious, if not exactly alert: if he had been sleeping, the violent jolting of the slew would have been sure to wake him up, even in the green calm of the infirmary.

  “Hello, Bella,” he said, favouring her with a weary smile. “So what’s up?”

  “We’re in a spot of bother.”

  “That much I’d gathered.”

  “I think I may have to make a very tough decision.” She tried to look him in the eye, as directly as the flexy’s imaging system allowed. The blue-green cast of the dying iridophores made Chisholm’s hold on life appear even more tenuous.

  “The kind that affects me?” Chisholm asked, an amused wrinkle etching the corner of his right eye.

  “The kind that affects us all,” Bella said, grimacing, “but yes, you more than anyone.”

  “Is it a matter of the crew’s welfare?”

  “As always.”

  “Tell me what you think you have to do.”

  She filled him in on everything they had learned in the last hour. Chisholm, as always, listened without interrupting; only the tiniest elevation of his eyebrows hinted at his instinctive scepticism. “It’s all true,” she whispered. “We’re caught in something and if we don’t get out of it, it’s going to carry us all the way to Spica.”

  “But even if we do get out of it, that may not help us much,” Chisholm said.

  “I could take the risk that we have enough fuel to make it home. I could take another risk that the engine will hold at two gees. But if I’m wrong about either of those two things, we’ll find ourselves either stranded without power, or dead.”

  “Either way, my chances of making it home in the next three weeks don’t look brilliant, do they?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He shook his head, as if it was nothing she should trouble herself about. “It was a calculated risk. I knew perfectly well that nothing was guaranteed.”

  He sounded brave and accepting. It was a good act, Bella thought, but Jim had been given a shot at staying alive and he was now being denied that hope. She had just told him bluntly that he was going to die.

  “You want my advice on which option to take?” he asked, with no detectable malice in his question.

  “No,” she said, “I know what I have to do. I still have a duty to my crew, Jim. I used to think it was my job to get them home in one piece —” She paused.

  “And now?”

  “Now I know it’s my job to keep them alive. Getting home’s a luxury, one I’ll deliver if I can — but before I can deal with that I have to deal with the first problem.”

  “You have something in mind?”

  “Janus,” Bella said. She waited for Chisholm to say something, something incredulous or disdainful, but the slack mask of his face gave nothing away. Perhaps he had misheard her, or maybe he thought she’d finally gone mad. “It’s power we need,” she said, stumbling over her words in her eagerness to please him. “Power matters more than fuel. Rockhopper is a closed-cycle system. With power we can last a long time.”

  “But not for ever,” Chisholm cautioned.

  “No, not for ever, I know that — but if we end up stranded on the edge of the system with empty tanks, we’ll be lucky to last a month. Whereas if we stay where we are… well, we still have plenty of fuel in the tanks. It’ll last a long time if all we need it for is to power the ship.”

  “It’ll still run out one day.”

  “I know,” Bella said, “but the fuel isn’t all we have. We have Janus itself. We have machines and people. We have our wits. If we can’t figure out a way to bleed some power from that thing — just enough to keep us alive — then do we really deserve to survive anyway?”

  “Are you serious? Do you honestly think we’d have a better chance of surviving here than by running for home?”

  “It would buy us an indefinite amount of time.”

  “While we’re being pulled further and further into interstellar space.”

  “But we’d be alive. We can do it, Jim: I know we can. There’s more than just power out here. Look at all the water ice still left on the rearward face. We can mine that to top up our reserves. We can sift it for organics… we can find ways to make this work.”

  “You’ve given this some thought, haven’t you?”

  “About ten minutes’ worth. But if you gave me a lifetime to think about this, I don’t think it would make much difference.”

  “No,” he said reflectively. “You’re probably right. That’s always how it is with the tough ones.”

  “It’s my call, isn’t it?”

  “I think my situation disqualifies me from having an opinion,” he said, pausing to lick dry lips. “But whatever you decide, you’ll have my absolute support. You’re right: bringing them home isn’t your first duty.”

  “Then you agree with me,” she said.

  “I didn’t quite say that.” His expression was reproving, but not without sympathy. “I don’t disagree with you, either. But like you said: it has to be your call.”

  “I’m not sure how it will go down with the others.”

  Chisholm was in the process of answering her when the siren drowned out his words. “That’s the end of the slew,” Bella said. “We’re facing the right way now. They’ll be expecting me to authorise engine start-up.”

  “You could still give them what they want,” Chisholm said.

  “I could, but I think our chances of making it back home would be about one in four. I’m afraid those odds aren’t good enough for me.”

  The ship held together as the rockets fired to arrest the slew. More water spilled from her tank, but not as much as last time.

  “Bella, would you do me a favour?” Chisholm asked, as if an idea had just occurred to him.

  “Yes, of course,” she said, without thinking.

  “Call Ryan. Ask him to disconnect me from this thing. I think my presence might help when you have to explain this to the crew.”

  “No,” she said emphatically. “You’re staying in that bed.”

  “I’m already dead,” Chisholm said. “The least I can do is make myself useful.”

  ELEVEN

  Bella floated in the gymnasium, weightless now that the ship was at rest. The assembled throng represented almost the entire crew. She could feel the unspoken force of their demand for action. There was only one thing that they wanted of her, and that was not in her power to give.

  “We’ve turned the ship,” she said, making dutiful eye contact with her senior staff. “I have it on good authority that the engine is ready to push us away from Janus.” She waited a beat. “But we won’t be moving.”

  It took a while for the impact of her words to sink in; she watched as an almost palpable wave of affront passed through her crew — even those who would normally have supported any decision she took.

  “The risk is too great,” Bella said, before anyone had a chance to shout her down. “Our fuel situation is too precarious, even if we can trust the readings. If we can’t — and I have good reason to doubt them — then the situation is beyond hopeless. With empty tanks we’ll freeze to death within three or four weeks, long before any rescue mission could reach us. The best-case scenario allows us to limp home and just make it — but I can’t allow myself to be tempted by false hopes. Your lives are too precious for that.”

  Svetlana was the first to speak. “Bella, we have to move
now.”

  Bella nodded understandingly. “But you said it yourself, Svieta — there’s no guarantee that the engine will get us out of here. What was the expression you used? You said it was a combustion regime you’ve never explored before? Sorry, but I’m just not prepared to put lives on the line like that.”

  “You only listen to me when it suits you,” Svetlana said, hostile now.

  “No,” Bella said, “I’ve listened to every word you’ve ever said, every time, and I’m listening now. The risk of what you’re suggesting is just too great.”

  “Then we’ll die out here.”

  “No, we won’t. At least, not for a long, long time. And that’s my point, Svieta.”

  There were more than a hundred and thirty people in the room, but those who disagreed with Bella appeared to be willing to let Svetlana speak for them. Bella had no idea whether they amounted to a majority, but their silence cut through her like an invisible wind.

  “We can’t survive,” Svetlana said.

  “We’ll survive longer here than we would waiting for rescue on the edge of the system. Here we have fusion power. When that runs out, we have Janus, There’s an entire world only a few thousand kilometres away.”

  “It’s carrying us into interstellar space.” Svetlana sounded plaintive; there was an edge of hysteria in her voice. “Bella, listen to me. Every second we’re not running —”

  “We’re not running,” said someone else. “We don’t ever run.”

  Collectively, the room tracked the voice: Jim Chisholm had dressed, but his painful thinness was emphasised by every hollow crease and sharp curve of his clothes. Bella wondered how he had made it down to the weightless volume of the gymnasium. She assumed that Ryan, or perhaps Jagdeep Singh, had carried him.

  Chisholm coughed, and found some strength: his voice had a conviction Bella had not heard in months.

  “Bella’s right: running would kill us. I know this is hard, I know this is tough medicine… but what she’s saying is true. Our only hope is with Janus. We should stay here and find a way to keep alive.”

  Someone else started to speak now — not Svetlana — but Chisholm raised his voice again. “Listen to me. I want to go home. I want to go home so badly it makes me weep. Most of you know that there’s something in my head that’s killing me, something that even Ryan can’t cure, although he’s done his damnedest; he’s tried everything in his power.” He looked at Axford, stationed by the doorway, and Bella saw the doctor acknowledge this public thanks with a small, grave nod, as if, like an executioner, he took no pleasure in having done his best.

  Chisholm turned back to his audience. “When we were offered a shot at Janus, I took it gladly: it was my best hope of getting home before there was nothing of me left to cure. Things didn’t work out the way I hoped… but if I were offered that chance again, I’d still take it, if only to see the things we’ve seen — the things we will see, in the weeks ahead, if we do the brave thing. Better to be here, now, than anywhere else in the universe. No one has ever been more privileged than us.”

  He paused for a moment, and looked astonished. “And some of you think we should run! With no guarantee of even making it back to the local stellar rest frame?” Chisholm shook his head wonderingly. “It can’t be true. Not aboard Rockhopper. We’re miners. We push ice. They sent us out here to do a job, to mine Janus, only this time for knowledge. It’s still mining. It’s still what we do. I say we stay. I say we stay here and finish the job.”

  It was a good speech, and it came from a member of the crew who was universally liked and respected. Bella dared to hope it might be enough to win the day. For some, perhaps, it was.

  But not for everyone.

  “I didn’t come here to die,” said Christine Ofria, looking around for support. “I came here to do a difficult job, yes. I wanted to look at Janus. But I have a life back home. I want to see it again.”

  A chorus of voices added weight to her statement. Bella tried to judge numbers: who was with her, who was against. It was going to be a close call.

  “No one’s saying you won’t see home again,” Bella said, raising her voice above the tide of dissent. “What I’m saying is that if that’s what you want, to get home, then Janus is your best — your only — hope.”

  “She’s right,” said Jim Chisholm again, his voice carving its own silence into the room. “Janus is taking us away from home. Bella and I know that. But it’s also a means to stay alive. If we can keep ourselves alive, anything is possible.”

  “We may never find a way to slow Janus,” Bella said, “but I’m damned if we won’t try. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll still have options. If all we can do is stop Janus accelerating, that will still give us a chance of being rescued. Now that we’ve sent images home, the UEE will have a huge incentive to come and take a longer, more detailed look. They’ll want to send out another ship — something fast enough to catch up with us.”

  She swallowed a frog in her throat. “Even if we can’t make Janus slow down, we don’t know that it will keep accelerating. There’s still hope. And at the end of it all we’ll still be alive.”

  “Some of you probably want to take your chances on the return voyage,” Chisholm said. “I understand, really I do. But it won’t work. Luck would have to be on our side all the way home.” He looked confidingly at his audience. “Take it from me: luck isn’t on our side. And if we start counting on luck, we’re finished. We’re professionals, Luck doesn’t come into the equation. Hard planning, guts and resourcefulness do.”

  “We don’t have to make it all the way home,” said Malcolm Fox, one of the mass-driver specialists, “we just have to slow down. We can last in empty space, at least long enough until we’re rescued.”

  “We can last three or four weeks with no fuel in the tanks,” Bella said. “No longer, unless you think metal burns.”

  “Even if we had six weeks,” Chisholm said, “that still wouldn’t be enough time. The company wouldn’t spare a rescue mission to take me home even when we were in comfortable shuttle range. They offered to freeze me. If we turn from Janus now, then we’ll already have played our trump cards. We’ll have nothing they really need from us, except the dollar value of this ship — and that can wait until someone sends out a recovery tug.” He paused, gathering his strength. No one interrupted him. “But Janus gives us leverage. Right now, we own it, not DeepShaft, not the UEE. If they want a slice of it, they’ll have to come out and negotiate with us. When they do, we’ll be ready and waiting.”

  Gregor Mair, one of Parry’s mining team, broke the silence that followed. “I’m not going to make any friends here,” said the sandy-haired Scotsman, “but I think Bella and Jim are right: our best hope is to stay. That doesn’t mean I have to like it. I think it’s the lesser of two evils.”

  “I agree,” said Saul Regis, tapping a finger against the braided strand of his beard. “We stay, we live.”

  “I’m with Bella,” said Reda Kirschner, one of the cometary scientists under Nick Thale. “We’re not finished with Janus. We didn’t come all this way just to turn around.”

  Bella was glad of the support, but she knew that those people who had publicly thrown in their lot with her had no strong ties to Earth, or to any of the space colonies. None of them were married; they had left neither lovers nor close family behind.

  Unfortunately, that could not be said for everyone on the ship. No sooner had she framed that thought than Craig Schrope pushed himself away from his tether point at the wall and drifted into the middle of the auditorium. With expert timing, he brought himself to a halt three metres to Bella’s right: close enough to command attention, but not so close that he looked like he was standing with her.

  “This space vehicle is a DeepShaft commercial asset,” he said. “We have an obligation to bring it back home. Bella and Jim can talk about professional duty all they like. We’re miners — yes. But we’re also custodians of this ship.” He looked pityingly at Chisholm, t
he way he might have looked at roadkill. “I’m sorry, Jim, but you have no authority here any more.”

  “Craig,” Bella said warningly, “don’t try to split the ship. It doesn’t have to happen this way.”

  “I’m not splitting anything,” Schrope said. “I’m not the one talking about being abandoned by DeepShaft. I’m not the one talking as if the company has already forsaken us.”

  “And don’t try playing the company loyalty card, either,” Bella said. “This is about human lives.”

  “It is,” Schrope said, nodding emphatically. “And I don’t happen to think this is any place to spend the rest of my life.” An idea seemed to occur to him suddenly: a gloss of interested animation suffused his face. He looked at Svetlana. “I will freely admit that you and I have had our differences in the last few days.”

  “What about it, Craig?” Svetlana asked, with exaggerated civility.

  “You never wanted this,” Schrope told her. “Rightly or wrongly, you didn’t buy into this. You were always ambivalent about Janus, and after the accident you had grave reservations about continuing the mission.” He waved a hand dismissively. “It’s true that we had a difference of opinion about the validity of your fears, I admit that. But if you’d had your way, we’d have never ended up in this mess.”

  “Fuck you, Craig. You didn’t listen. That’s all that matters to me.” She was still furious with him.

  “But I’m listening now,” he said. “I’m listening, and I’m asking you to work with me: for the sake of Rockhopper, if not DeepShaft.”

  She looked appalled. “Work with you?”

  “Bella can’t operate this ship without you. You hold the reins, Svetlana; you are the one who gets to choose whether we stay here or make a run for home. It’s in your hands.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Bella said. “We’ve been over this — it’s suicide even to think of returning.”

  “It won’t be a question of taking the ship,” Schrope said, talking to everyone in the room. “Bella has already abdicated authority here by giving up on us. That leaves me. I’m still in command. All anyone here has to do is keep doing their job.”