Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  The message had been transmitted in real-time: even allowing for translating software delays, Wang Zhanmin should already have received her first communication. There would be no time for him to consult with Beijing for clarification on the best course of action. But Bella doubted that Wang would need such assistance. The appended video file, showing the deployment of the mass driver, should have been all the encouragement he needed. Everyone in space knew what a mass driver could do if you pointed it the wrong way.

  But five minutes went by and there was no detectable change in the thrust signature or transponder Doppler of the Chinese ship. Bella gave Wang Zhanmin two extra minutes of grace, then ordered the driver to deliver its payload.

  Telephoto cameras tracked the foreshortened gun-barrel shape of the driver. The iron cage that would normally have accelerated a lump of cometary material flicked to one end of the driver’s long launch track in less than two-tenths of a second, faster than the eye could follow. Recoil shoved the driver in the opposite direction. By the time the payload emerged, it had gained fourteen kilometres per second of motion away from Rockhopper.

  Nadis confirmed that the robot and its nuclear cargo had survived the launch: they were hardened like artillery shells. It would take five hours to cross space to the Shenzhou Five, but the robot’s own thrusters would be able to make small course adjustments if the Chinese ship deviated from its predicted flight path.

  Bella didn’t expect much of that. What she knew of the Chinese indicated that if Wang Zhanmin had not backed down by now, he never would.

  She called Nadis. “Status on the driver, Denise.”

  “Bruised and battered, but she can probably take another pulse.”

  “Good. Load another robot into the can. I think Wang’s going to need more than one bloodied nose before he sees sense.”

  Bella took no satisfaction in being right: she would have liked nothing better than for the Shenzhou Five to turn away with its tail between its legs, but for the next six hours the ship remained perfectly on course, its fusion burn clean and even.

  During the final phase of the intercept, the free-flier steered itself to within a hundred kilometres of the Chinese ship, close enough to make a point but not, Bella devoutly hoped, to do more than bruise it.

  Slamming past, the FAD opened like a flower. The prick of hot blue light was visible across three hundred thousand kilometres: an evil little guest star that had no business in the sky. Then the nuclear flash died away, and the transponder signal from the Shenzhou Five was still there, ticking like a pulsar.

  “The bastard didn’t even blink,” Schrope said. They sat in her office and digested the news.

  “He’s brave, Craig. Anyone who comes this far out has my respect, no matter what flag they hang on their wall.”

  “All the same, you made him a promise. I’ve reprogrammed the second free-flier for a closer intercept. One hundred klicks doesn’t seem to have done the trick. How does fifty sound?”

  “Be careful,” she said. “We want to scare them off, that’s all.”

  “Fifty is still plenty of room. Wang the Man is probably bored out of his mind. Let’s give him something to write home about.”

  Bella waited another five minutes to see if the detonation had resulted in any belated change in the Shenzhou Five’s trajectory, but there was no alteration: it was as if their warning shot hadn’t even registered. Part of her wanted to send another warning message — she couldn’t help but see the amiable face of the young Chinese commander whenever she closed her eyes — but she had warned him that there would be no second chance.

  She told Nadis to fire another shot.

  “Kill margin set to fifty,” Nadis told her as the robot sped away.

  “It isn’t supposed to kill,” Bella said fiercely, “it’s just persuasion. Don’t anyone forget that.”

  * * *

  Bella was off-duty. She knew she ought to be using the hours to catch up on sleep, but the idea seemed ludicrous. She worked on her static bicycle until she hit exhaustion like an iron wall, and then she worked through the exhaustion into the clean, clear limbo beyond it.

  She was trying not to think about Svetlana, because that only made things worse, but even with the Chinese matter demanding her full attention, her thoughts kept wandering back to what she had done to Svieta. Her best friend.

  With Ryan Axford’s agreement, Bella had arranged for her to be detained in a separate annexe of the medical centre, in the room that was normally reserved for contagious cases. Axford had told his staff that Svetlana needed to be readmitted following complications — unspecified complications — after the mass-driver accident. Just a small white lie — and maybe not a lie at all, Bella thought; she was half-convinced that the incident had sent her friend over the edge. It was a way of saving both their faces. There was to be no mention of differences of opinion between Bella and her senior systems engineer; no one would have to know that Svetlana had been relieved of duty until Rockhopper was back home, at which point the matter could be handled with suitable discretion.

  Bella could see how Svetlana — how both of them — felt wounded and wronged, but acknowledging that fact put neither of them closer to reconciliation. Right now she didn’t want it either. Svetlana had put her in an intolerably difficult position, and Bella had tried to handle the issue with tact, despite the appalling pressure she had been under. But Svetlana hadn’t been able to see that. All she had seen was her own damaged pride: how dare Bella not take her warnings seriously? She should have known that some part of Bella desperately wanted to listen to her friend.

  If Svetlana had left it at that — if she’d been content to let Bella know how let down and undervalued she felt — then there might still have been some prospect for mending the damage. But Svetlana hadn’t been able to stop there. The moment she mentioned Cagan, Bella knew that Svieta truly hated her. It was astonishing how quickly friendship could turn to enmity, she thought, like a compass needle swinging from one pole to the other.

  They’d been excellent friends. They’d make excellent enemies as well.

  When she finished cycling, the sweat was stinging her eyes and her legs felt as if the bone, marrow and muscle had been flensed out and replaced by fine, sharp slivers of shattered glass. She drank a litre of water, fed the fish and checked the acidity in the tank. Attracted by her presence, a group of bloodfins nosed through the upper layers.

  The translucence of the bloodfins always startled her. She could see their spines: brush-thin, as if drawn in with lines of pale Indian ink. One was always bolder than the rest. Time after time it astounded her that something so simple, so toy-like, could be alive, and have the faintest glimmering of personality.

  She considered fixing herself a meal. It was at least a day since she had eaten anything, but even if the exercise hadn’t killed her appetite (which it nearly always did), she didn’t think she would be able to keep anything down. Instead, she flicked through the uplinked newsfeeds, dismayed at how little airtime Rockhopper — and Janus, for that matter — now merited. The heavyweight channels carried some discussion about the prickly stand-off between the Chinese and the UEE, but it was buried a long way below the main items.

  A plane carrying a young athletic troupe had crashed near the summit of Tirich Mir in the Hindu Kush. Planes didn’t crash very often, and when they did they tended to make the news. The weather had cleared sufficiently for orbital and dirigible cams to obtain close-up imagery of the survivors: infrared blobs huddled around the broken crucifix of the wreck. Biometric recognition software dropped names onto the anonymous group, with tickertaping text along the bottom of the feed giving biographical data. Helicopters couldn’t get to them, and although teleoperated robots of the Pakistani emergency services were trying to get through to them, it was a race against hypothermia, fluid loss and hypoxia.

  Bella stared at the satellite imagery of the crash survivors with a vague resentment. Three of them had died since the last update: a te
acher and two children. She watched the rest of them stomp around in the snow, trying to keep warm.

  Her flexy chimed, filling with Craig Schrope’s face.

  “Bella,” she said, redundantly.

  “I have some news,” Schrope said. He glanced away from the camera, as if concerned that she might see something in his face. “It’s the kind you might want to be sitting down for. We put another one across their bows.”

  “That was the idea,” she said. “Did it have any effect?”

  “It did.”

  There was a certain tone to his voice. “Craig, what are you telling me?”

  “We got too close,” Schrope said.

  “Too close?”

  “We took them out.”

  He told her that the Shenzhou Five had fallen silent. There was neither transponder signal nor thrust signature. Confirmation that the ship had been destroyed would have to wait, but Bella knew that was merely a formality.

  “We were supposed to be practising deterrence,” she said, forcing an icy calm into her voice. “Please tell me what went wrong.”

  “The kill margin was still dialled down to fifty,” Schrope said placidly. “It shouldn’t have hurt them.”

  “Newsflash, Craig: we blew them out of the goddamn sky! I think that probably counts as ‘hurting them’.”

  “I’m aware of that,” he said.

  “You want to take a stab at explaining how that came to happen?”

  “They must have changed course. We were using a predictive model most of the way. If they deviated from that —” Schrope shrugged, as if nothing else needed to be said. “That was their problem. Law was on our side.”

  “Is that going to help you sleep tonight, knowing that some legal specialist in Niagara Falls says you were in the right?”

  “Frankly, yes.”

  All the rage bottled up since her encounter with Svetlana spilled over like a flood tide. “You’re a reptile, Craig. I’ve even bred cichlids with more humanity.” She slammed the flexy shut before she said worse.

  * * *

  Bella stepped into the green calm of the medical complex, grateful to find Jim awake, propped up in bed with a flexy spread across his lap. He peered at her over his half-moon reading glasses. “If this is an attempt to cheer me up, I think you need to go out and come in again,” he said.

  He obviously detected something in her expression, Bella thought. “Sorry,” she said.

  “Pull up a seat. You look like the world and his wife just paid you a visit, bringing all their troubles.” He looked at her shrewdly, eyes narrowed. “Is it really that bad?”

  “Oh, yes.” She folded down a seat and sat next to the bed, head lowered in contrition. “It’s bad. It’s worse than bad. I’ve got Svetlana pinned down in isolation because she started undermining my authority.”

  He blinked in surprise. “What happened?”

  “She’s got it into her head that we’re being conned, that we don’t have enough fuel to make it home after the rendezvous.”

  “Jesus. You didn’t think to tell me about this?”

  “Didn’t want you to burden you, Jim.”

  “But you’re burdening me now.”

  “Things got worse.”

  “Oh, great. How could they get worse than imprisoning one of your senior crew?”

  “Something really bad just happened — and to cap it all I just did something really, really stupid. You’re up to speed on the Shenzhou Five?”

  “Of course.” He dimmed the flexy and put it aside. “The Chinese ship, the one that’s been inviting us to join them in glorious mutual exploration of Janus.”

  “We just destroyed it.”

  He took off the half-moon glasses, folded them and placed them delicately on his bedside table. “Tell me what happened.”

  She told him about the UEE exclusion zone, the mass drivers and the payloads they had been firing back at the Chinese ship. She told him about her confrontation with Schrope.

  “It was supposed to be a warning action,” she said. “The idea was to scare them off, not to wipe them off the face of the galaxy.”

  “Did you see any reaction from her captain after you put the first nuke across his bows?”

  “None at all.”

  “Meaning he was probably under orders not to back down.” Chisholm bit hard on his lip and shook his head. “This was always going to be a tough call, but I don’t think anyone did anything wrong here. The Chinese were yanking our chain. We had to take a stand. That’s all we did.”

  “I only wanted them to turn around —”

  “We drew the line in the sand. No one made them cross it.”

  “Commander Wang would have been under orders.”

  “Don’t feel too sorry for the guy, Bella. By tomorrow he’ll be a national hero. They’ll have named a square after him within the week and moved his widow into a nice mansion in Shanghai.”

  “We killed him, him and all of his crew.”

  “Beijing killed them.”

  “They didn’t even have time to send back for orders.”

  “It was still Beijing, even if those orders were given weeks ago. Look, I’m sorry about what happened, but this is space exploration.”

  “There’s something else. I did — said — something inexcusable.”

  “To Svetlana?”

  “No, worse. Schrope.”

  “So you finally lost it with the Shalbatana Terrier.”

  “I came pretty close to accusing him of shooting them down deliberately.”

  Chisholm mulled over the idea, as if he didn’t find it totally preposterous. “Could he have done that?”

  “All he’d have to do is switch a few lines of code. It wouldn’t have stretched his competence envelope.”

  “I don’t think he did it. He’s a solid company stiff, but he isn’t psychotic.” He sipped some water from the bedside dispenser. “How did Terrier-boy take it, anyway?”

  “Not great.”

  Chisholm looked amused. “Tell me.”

  “By then I’d already accused him of being a reptile.”

  “A reptile,” Chisholm said thoughtfully. “But what type?”

  “We didn’t get into specifics.”

  “Well, that’s good. At least you left it open.”

  “Trust you to find something positive to say.”

  “Positivity is something I’m working on. Did Terrier-boy just lap this up?”

  “He’s asked for a written apology.”

  Chisholm winced. “He’s got you there. It’s not that you’ve offended him — this guy’s skin is thicker than the Europan ice-crust. He wasn’t upset that you called him a reptile. But you sure as hell gave him a pretext for pretending to be.”

  “I know. That’s what makes me so mad at myself: I just fell right into it.”

  “You can bet the bastard had a flexy stuffed under his jacket, too, set to voice-record. If he doesn’t see you eating some serious crow, he’ll mail the whole thing home and let the psychs loose on it.”

  “I know,” she said again.

  “They’ll raise questions about your command fitness, say the Janus thing is getting to you; that you’ve started to lash out at your senior staff. The Svetlana thing might not help.”

  “Craig was the one pushing for her removal, Jim.”

  “But you made the decision, right?”

  “Yes,” she said, resignedly.

  “That’s the way he’d have known it would go down. He’s angling for your suspension, Bella. He’s itching to park his behind in your command chair.”

  “So why wait for my apology?”

  “Kid’s building up ammunition. Even if he lets you ride this one out, he’ll have a thick dossier to hand when we get back home. If it doesn’t buy him Rockhopper, it’ll still get him some kind of promotion.”

  “The devious little shit.”

  “Agreed. I think you ought to write that apology.”

  “I thought that was what you
’d say. Matter of fact, I’ve already written it.”

  “Good for you. Bet it felt like pulling teeth.”

  “If it keeps the ship together, I’ll gladly pull my real ones.”

  “Send Craig the grovel note, then send him to me. I’ll have a word, see if I can smooth things out. I’ll tell him you’ve been under a lot of pressure. And if he turns against you when we get home, you know he’ll have me to deal with as well.”

  “Thanks,” she said, doubtfully.

  “I could talk to Svetlana, too. Ryan’s got her in isolation?”

  “It’s just to keep her away from the rest of the crew. There’s really nothing wrong with her. I feel lousy about it, Jim, but I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “She’s pretty good, isn’t she?”

  “None better.”

  “Then these doubts she has — you’ve looked into them?”

  “I gave her the benefit. Evidence looked pretty compelling, too. But then I consulted with home — turns out her numbers didn’t stack up.”

  “Her maths was out?”

  “Worse than that. Turns out the numbers she was showing me were faked, to bolster her case.”

  “Woo.” He closed his eyes, as if the news caused him actual pain. “That’s pretty heavy stuff.”

  “They say she’s having some kind of episode. I wouldn’t believe it, Jim — this is Svetlana Barseghian, not some green-behind-the-ears newbie on first rotation. She’s been through every crisis scenario imaginable and I’ve never even seen her break sweat. But that’s the way it was with me, too.”

  “You think if it happened to you, it can happen to her.”

  “You put anything through enough fatigue cycles, sooner or later it fails.”

  “Including people.”