Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  “I think it goes a bit deeper than that,” Bella said. “I think Powell knew how hot a commercial opportunity Janus was going to be. Maybe we’re flying under a flag of convenience now, but do you think anyone’s really going to care about that when we head back home with our cargo bay full of world-changing technologies?”

  “So we get a bite at the big cherry.” Schrope shrugged in his best no-big-deal way. “In case you’ve forgotten, it’s a cherry that could very well kill us. We’re taking a risk here. I suggest you point the greed finger somewhere else.”

  “I’m not pointing the…” Bella trailed off, wary of losing it with Schrope. He was her subordinate, so she was entitled to cuff him down, but something always held her back. Schrope had strong political connections within the company that ran all the way to Powell Cagan. After his good work in Shalbatana, in spite of all the enemies he had made, Schrope was the new golden boy.

  Bella had links to Cagan, too, but hers were of a different kind; perhaps they even worked against her. Before Rockhopper, even before Garrison, she had been Cagan’s favourite. She had pushed hard on doors, but Cagan had made them open for her. He had helped her rise fast in the organisation, faster than could be accounted for by any measure of skill or ambition — neither of which Bella lacked — and she had believed that this was all there was to it, and that there would not be a price to be paid.

  She knew now that there was always a price. Nothing that looked good was ever free, especially where men like Powell Cagan were involved.

  He had wanted more than just a talented protégée. He had sucked Bella into a sexual relationship that she had been naive enough, even at the age of thirty, to believe was the real thing. Cagan was twenty-two years older than her, and an exceptionally wealthy man. For a year she had shared the luminous glamour of his world, with its private jets and private islands. Then Cagan’s wandering eye had strayed to someone younger and Bella had found herself promoted off-Earth with no warning: one day the private jet took her to a launch complex instead of an island and that had been that.

  Bella was in orbit before she realised what had happened. The promotion was a masterstroke: it was everything she had worked for up till then — and it was Cagan’s way of getting her out of his life without having to feel a moment’s guilt.

  At the time she had been too numb to feel hatred or sorrow; instead she was ashamed and embarrassed that she had misread the rules of the game that were so childishly clear to everyone else. She never quite understood how she could have been the only one who hadn’t known from the beginning that this was how it would — it must — end.

  Other men might have had problems with the idea of a spurned lover remaining in the same company, but Cagan’s capacity for remorse didn’t stretch that far. When they spoke, he appeared completely untroubled by their past; he would even occasionally allude to their time together with a nostalgic twinkle in his eye, assuming perhaps that Bella looked back on their liaison with the same rosy glow of retrospection — as if their separation had been a matter of dignified mutual consent.

  Losing Powell Cagan hadn’t been the end of her life; Bella met Garrison not long after and their few years together had been good times — right up until that sour end. Garrison she kept in her heart; beyond a thin contempt, she felt nothing for Cagan. She had long ago vowed that her feelings would not impinge on their professional relationship: the CEO was an abstract figure who had nothing in common with the man who had so coldly disposed of her. For a long time that had worked: running Rockhopper gave her a certain independence from company control, but Janus was changing all that. The UEE business was already more than she needed.

  Schrope had rotated aboard long before Janus hit the headlines, but Bella had had doubts about the real reason for his transfer from the start. Even if Cagan didn’t particularly care about Bella one way or the other, he might want better things for his new protégée, and a captaincy wasn’t out of the question. With his connections, Schrope could make life difficult for Bella if he chose. When she went out of her way to defend him, as she had done with Svetlana, it was as much to convince herself as anyone else.

  With Schrope, she always felt as if he was trying to make her say something she would later regret — something that would count against her in the minutes of a professional-conduct tribunal. That was why she always bit her tongue when talking to him.

  So many things had been better before Jim Chisholm had fallen ill. Now, whenever she was about to fly off the handle with Schrope, she tried to imagine Jim sitting with her in the room, a warning look on his face.

  “All I’m saying,” she said, as nicely as she could manage, “is why don’t the Chinese deserve their own bite at the cherry?”

  “It’s our call,” Schrope said.

  “But why does the UEE get to decide on Janus? Last time I checked, Janus was an alien artefact. Maybe I skipped a line of small print, but I don’t think there’s anything in the charter that says Inga and her pals automatically get first dibs.”

  “If that was a problem for the Chinese, they shouldn’t have got themselves kicked out of the club for messing around with stuff they didn’t know how to handle.” He sounded stern. The Chinese had kept on experimenting with nanotech despite pressure from the other member economic entities, and eventually it had blown up in their faces. When twinkling grey mould ate half of Nanjing, China had been expelled from the UEE.

  Even now there were lingering rumours of sabotage: that agents of those industrial concerns with a vested interest in preserving a world without nanotech had infiltrated the Nanjing facility and made the replicators go haywire. No one took that very seriously, but Bella could still not shake the feeling that the Chinese had been victimised in some subtle way. Although she did not necessarily approve of everything that they had done (and everything that they continued to do, outside UEE control) she could not bring herself to loathe them for wanting to take a look at Janus as well.

  It seemed perfectly human to her.

  “Look,” she said, “if nothing goes wrong with their ship, they’re going to get there whether we like it or not. Since that’s going to happen anyway, maybe we should at least consider the possibility of cooperation.”

  “They can cooperate by keeping the hell away from us,” Schrope said, “or do I need to remind you about the exclusion zone?”

  “It’s one light-second wide,” Bella said, exasperated. “It’s a legalistic abstraction that no one actually takes seriously.”

  “It’s still a line in the sand. The moment they cross that —”

  “What?” She had a sudden sinking feeling.

  “We’re entitled to a robust response. You know perfectly well that we’re capable of giving one.”

  * * *

  On the fourteenth day, one week away from the Janus encounter, Powell Cagan’s face reappeared on Bella’s flexy. Wherever the CEO was calling from now was white with intense, heart-wrenching light, bleeding the colour from the day. He sat outside at a white table on a white-walled veranda. The tops of blue-grey trees poked above the wall and in the distance there were sun-parched treeless mountains, blank, like bleached paper cut-outs.

  “Bella,” Cagan said, assuming an actorly calm, “forgive the intrusion, but I thought this too important to leave to plaintext. If you are not alone, might I suggest that you excuse yourself: you should ensure that you and you alone are seeing this message.” He spread his hands then brought them back together, as if giving her time to pause the recording, but she was already in her quarters, secure and alone. “I’ll continue when you give voice authorisation.”

  “Go on, Powell,” she whispered.

  “What I have to impart is not entirely good news,” Cagan said. In the unflattering noonday light his skin had the same leathery quality as the surface of the flexy. Burnt a raw red, it was the only real colour in the image. “But I’ll start with the good news. One hundred and twenty hours at Janus is still practical, provided you ditch the rem
aining mass drivers on the return leg. You’ll be moving a little too fast to make orbit around Earth or Mars, but that won’t be a problem. We can get your crew off Rockhopper with shuttles, and then use tugs to refuel her tanks for a slow-down. Frankly, though, we’ll happily scupper Rockhopper: the old boat will have more than earned her keep by the time she brings you home.”

  A thought formed in her head: Why are you telling me this, Powell? I already know this.

  “So you don’t need to worry about any of that,” he said, with a flicker of a smile. Then his tone turned grave. “But you do need to worry about Svetlana Barseghian.”

  Bella narrowed her eyes as she mouthed the woman’s name.

  “I don’t know how delicately I can put this,” Powell said, “but this whole business with the pressure measurements has opened a rather distressing can of worms. Now, I know Barseghian has a good track record, but something disturbing is still happening here. We think she may be undergoing some kind of —” And here Cagan hesitated, as if searching for the right words, but Bella knew him better than that. There was nothing spontaneous or unscripted about Powell Cagan.

  He found the words he had appeared to be searching for and continued, “It’s some kind of stress-related episode; a crisis brought on by the pressure of the Janus mission. This all started after the death of Mike Takahashi, didn’t it? The death of a colleague —” He corrected himself. “The unpleasant death of a colleague, a death that was unavoidably linked to the mission itself. We all handle that sort of thing in different ways, Bella. Most of us pick up the pieces and get on with our jobs, and we go on doing that day in, day out, year after year, through death after death. But for some of us there comes a day when it happens and suddenly we don’t pick up the pieces. We become them. I’m afraid that’s what appears to have happened to Svetlana Barseghian.”

  “No,” Bella said, as if that negation might in some way influence the message Cagan had recorded many hours earlier.

  “She’s clearly been badly affected by that death,” he said. “Her nerve has snapped, and she can’t face going through with the rest of the mission. She can’t back out either. Nor, for that matter, can she admit the true nature of her problem. But the mind is a resourceful thing. When a psychological need exists, it finds ways and means.”

  Cagan leaned back from whatever flexy or cam was capturing his speech. For a moment Bella saw a stricken expression cloud his face, his features caught in a moment of disfiguring psychic stress.

  “This isn’t easy,” he said. “I’m not for one minute suggesting that any of this was premeditated or consciously engineered, but the evidence at our end is beyond dispute. Barseghian’s version of events is not the truth. The data she claimed was from the buffer memory was data that she had falsified.”

  “No,” Bella said again.

  “It was vital to her that she find a way to undermine your confidence in the mission,” Powell went on inexorably, “but there was no way to do that without creating a lie. As I say, I doubt that she was even aware of that motivation. She’s probably quite sincere in her delusion. But the simple fact remains that she can no longer be trusted to execute her duties. In seven days you will be at Janus, Bella. You will be operating not just under the aegis of DeepShaft, but also as an envoy of the United Economic Entities. You will be acting for all humankind. There can be no room for mistakes, no room for misjudgements. It is imperative that you reach your target with a crew in whom you can have absolute confidence. That means you have to act immediately. You can’t wait until Barseghian makes another error. You have to remove her now, before things become worse. You must do so quickly and cleanly, so that you have time to restore operational structure — and morale, of course — before your arrival.”

  Cagan shook his head regretfully. “If there were some way that I could have avoided sending this message, I would have. For what it’s worth, I’ve also spoken to Craig Schrope. He’s fully in the loop. But I know it will be different for you. I know you are friendly with Barseghian, that you like and trust her. I can only hope this necessary action does not damage that friendship.”

  Cagan’s message ended, and for a moment the flexy was silent. Then the incoming-call icon popped up and Craig Schrope’s face filled the display surface.

  “Bella,” he said. “I take it you’ve you heard from Powell?”

  “Yes,” she said, still numbed.

  “Then we need to talk.”

  * * *

  He came to her office. They sat looking at each other, waiting for the other to speak. The fish formed an anxious audience, crowding each other, darting around the tank with hyperactive attentiveness. Normally they would have been fed by now, but the strain of recent days had thrown Bella off her routine. She was neglecting the fish, neglecting herself. She felt a vortex of tension building and reaching out from her like a magnetic storm.

  “I’m not going to do this,” Bella said flatly. “I’m not going to screw Svetlana just because she’s raised concerns that Powell doesn’t happen to like.”

  “No one’s screwing anyone. We’re just talking about the acquisition of facts. Facts first, then judgements. It’s how I handled Shalbatana.”

  “This isn’t Shalbatana, Craig. This is my best friend we’re talking about here.”

  “Best friends run off the rails too.”

  “Not Svieta. I’ve never known anyone less likely to lose it.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ve seen enough psych evaluations to know that these things hit you out of the blue. In high-pressure careers, people sometimes crash and burn.” He looked at her carefully. “Happens to the best of us.”

  Bella blushed. She’d had no idea that Schrope knew anything about her own burn-out episode. She imagined Jim Chisholm sitting across from her, willing her not to say something rash.

  “I had problems, but no one accused me of faking data.”

  “I know, I know. I’m just saying — nobody’s immune.” He clicked the end of his pen, then tapped it against the table. “Okay, got a plan. We need to look at those numbers ourselves, independently of Svetlana. That’ll mean getting someone from her team to cooperate with us.”

  “What?”

  “Someone competent, but who doesn’t have strong ties to Svetlana. I’m thinking someone who came on team during the last rotation.”

  “Why? What are you planning?”

  “I’m thinking Meredith Bagley. Young kid, right? She’s a company player. She knows ShipNet. She can get us those numbers. Then we’ll have the facts.”

  Bella flustered. “I want to talk to Svieta first.”

  He looked at her sadly. “Talking to Svieta now would be a serious mistake. She’s too clever, too resourceful. Talk to her if you absolutely must… but I’d advise strongly against it.”

  “I’m not sure why I need to remind you of this, Craig, but I’m the one running this ship.”

  “Absolutely.” He suddenly looked abashed. “Look, I’m sorry — sometimes I catch myself sounding as if I’m trying to take over the show. It’s insolent and inexcusable. It’s just that on Mars I was given pretty much free rein to do what I wanted. The only person I answered to was Powell Cagan. It’s a hard habit to break.”

  “I understand,” Bella said, “but I urge you to put some effort in that direction.”

  “I will — and I’m genuinely sorry. I only want to do the best by DeepShaft.”

  Bella managed a smile. “Everyone knows you did a good job on Mars. That’s why I was happy to have you as my second. But this is a woman I’ve known and trusted for years. I won’t treat her like a common criminal, and I won’t see her humiliated in public.”

  “I’ll make absolutely sure this entire matter is handled with maximum discretion.” He looked at her encouragingly. “Do you mind if I use your flexy?”

  Bella hesitated for a second, then slid the flexy across her desk. Schrope checked the duty roster, establishing that Meredith Bagley was awake. He placed the call, drummin
g his fingers against the desk while he waited for her to answer.

  “Meredith,” she said brightly, as if she had been expecting someone else. “What can I — ?”

  Bella leaned into the visual field of the flexy. “Meredith, can you come to my office immediately?”

  “And make sure you don’t speak to anyone on the way,” Schrope added.

  She arrived within two minutes, her demeanour visibly fearful, as if expecting a reprimand. Bagley was a young addition to Svetlana’s flight-operations team: keen but nervous, still not fully meshed into the social matrix of the ship. She fiddled with her thick black hair, her eyes darting from Bella to Schrope and back again.

  “It’s all right,” Bella said, “there’s nothing to worry about, and you’re not in any trouble. As a matter of fact I’m more than happy with your performance.”

  “We need you to do a job for us,” Schrope said. “It’s simple, and it won’t take long. The car-line’s running today, isn’t it?”

  “We’re still making some adjustments —” Bagley began.

  “That’s okay — we won’t complain if the ride is a little rough.” Schrope leaned over and consulted the duty roster again. He glanced at Bella. “She should be sleeping now. This is as good a time as we’re going to get.”

  Bagley looked at the two of them. She didn’t ask who “she” was, but she must have had some inkling.

  They left Bella’s office and worked their way to the nearest car-line access point. A car was already there, but Schrope took a moment to call up a schematic showing the positions of the other vehicles on the line.

  “Someone’s in the sweatbox,” he said. “I was hoping we’d have the place to ourselves.” Using his flexy, he tried to get a picture from one of the sweatbox webcams, but the links were down.

  “I’ll call ahead and ask them to leave,” Bella said.

  “Actually,” Schrope said, “it might be better if we just showed up.” He paused and added, “Just a suggestion.”