Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  As the car took her back to the hab, her flexy chimed unexpectedly. With her head swimming with engineering issues, she had asked not to be called unnecessarily.

  She pulled the flexy from her jacket, shook it alive and found herself looking at Denise Nadis.

  “You need to see this, I think,” Nadis said.

  “What?” Svetlana asked.

  “We were looking at Janus, at the icecap, mapping it with the high-res cameras, looking for alternative dig sites.”

  “I thought we’d agreed on the site. Haven’t we already got machines down there?”

  Nadis blinked and swallowed. “I just wanted to be sure we’d picked the best spot. Once we’re down —”

  “I know. No second chances. What is it, Denise?”

  “We found… this.” An image box swelled to cover most of Nadis’s face. At first, Svetlana could make nothing of the mesh of false-colour hexels overlaid with numeric codes. “You’re going to have to help me, Denise.”

  “I’m sorry — zoom’s too far out. This is a section of the icecap, about fifty klicks south of where we’re planning to dig. That’s the limit of our search area — it was just luck that we happened to find it at all.”

  “Find what?”

  Nadis whispered a command to her own flexy. The image swelled and zoomed until Svetlana was clearly looking down at something blunt and metallic, mashed into the ice as if it had hit at high speed.

  “It’s a ship,” Nadis said. “Part of one, anyway.”

  A scale overlay dropped over the image. The crashed ship was only twenty metres across its longest axis.

  “That’s not right,” Svetlana said flatly. “We already mapped the ice at enough res not to have missed —”

  “We didn’t miss shit.” Nadis interrupted her. She was on firm ground now. “It wasn’t there before. It must have come in since we completed the maps, slipped right past us somehow.”

  “While we were otherwise engaged,” Svetlana said, understanding. The ship’s form was familiar to her, albeit as part of a larger whole. She had seen the television pictures from Earth orbit. It was part of the Shenzhou Five.

  “This isn’t possible. We destroyed it. We shot it out of the fucking sky.”

  “We’re only looking at part of it,” Svetlana said. “Like the smallest part of a multi-staged rocket. They must have planned on using one large fusion engine and fuel tank to get them out here, and then returning home using a smaller stage, with its own engine and fuel.”

  “It’s tiny.”

  “I know. Maybe they weren’t carrying as many people as they wanted us to believe.” Nadis still sounded spooked, as if the reappearance of the Chinese ship violated some fundamental principle of her personal universe. “What the hell happened, though? Bella still shot it. Nothing changes that.”

  “Maybe Bella just damaged it,” Svetlana said. “Cooked their main stage with the FAD. Forced them to bail out into the second stage and make a run for it.”

  “Run here?”

  “Maybe they didn’t have a hell of a lot of choice.”

  “If that thing was built to take them home, why didn’t they use it?”

  “I’m guessing maybe because they had too much velocity in the wrong direction,” Svetlana said. “They must have intended to use the main stage to slow down before they started their return journey.”

  “Only Bella cancelled that option.”

  “Looks like it. Wang must have known he had one shot at being rescued, and that was us.”

  “Oh, Jesus. You mean he was trying to catch up with Rockhopper?”

  “I think so.”

  “After we shot the poor kid out of the sky.”

  “Beggars can’t be choosers, Denise. Trouble is, he didn’t know about the slipstream either.”

  “He must have used up all his fuel,” Nadis said. “Never had enough to slow down.”

  But even as Nadis voiced the thought, Svetlana knew she was wrong. If the Shenzhou Five had come in at uncontrolled speed, there would only be a crater where the ship now lay. For the ship to have survived at all, for the ship not to have smeared itself across the whole face of Janus… the crash must have been very close to a landing.

  It must have been very close to survivable.

  “There could be someone alive in that thing,” she said.

  “There isn’t,” Nadis said. “No transponder, no SOS beacon. We’ve tried hailing on the Chinese frequency. Nothing.”

  “Wang can’t have died. You don’t come all this way, make it this far, and just die.”

  “They’re dead, Svieta. I just thought you needed to know. Maybe there’s some tech we can use —”

  “Get me infrared,” she said.

  “We’ve tried it — she’s still hot — but if she’d come in from space in the last week or so, we’d expect her to be.”

  “I still want infrared,” Svetlana said. “And I don’t want to have to ask a third time.”

  Nadis made a huffing sound that she probably hoped Svetlana didn’t catch. It was going to be tough for Nadis from now on, taking orders from someone who had been her equal in the old regime. But she was good. She would learn.

  So they turned the cams on the Shenzhou Five, as they had turned cannons on it before, and this time they took a series of mid-infrared snapshots. When they scrolled onto Svetlana’s flexy, they had the hyperreal clarity of images taken across a perfect and still vacuum. The ship was still hot, just as Nadis had told her it would be. Engine parts glowed in cherry-red false colour as they ticked and cooled down to Janus ambient. But there was a pattern to the radiating heat that made Svetlana’s heart jump in her chest. The radiators sketched a neon grid across the exposed surface of the hull, but only there. The visible side panels were dark. So, judging by the lack of boil-off, were the underpanels.

  “He’s still alive,” she said excitedly. “He’s turned off the radiators in contact with the ice. If he didn’t, he’d melt his way right down to the machinery. Machines wouldn’t have done that. It must have taken human intervention, after the ship came to rest.”

  “Why didn’t he send us a message?” Nadis asked.

  “He did,” Svetlana said. “That was it.”

  * * *

  They went down in Cosmic Avenger and hovered near the smashed wreck of the Shenzhou Five, sending out robots to scout it from different angles. It looked bad at first, but that was only because every fragile part of the ship had been bent or broken off by the glancing impact. The airtight hull had weathered the crash with only a slight amount of buckling. Even in the optical, its heat radiators were visible as brick-red squiggles along its dorsal surface. There were no windows in the pale-green metal; no way to tell if the crew was alive or dead.

  Avenger touched down nearby. Robots scouted again, poking and prodding the snowbound hull for a way in.

  The Chinese used a simplified variant of the same rocket-age airlock door design as everyone else, but from the outside there was no way to tell whether a particular door really was an airlock, and not just a door leading straight into a pressurised cabin. They had to bring in an emergency outer airlock sheath from Avenger and glue it into place with dabs of fast-setting vacuum epoxy. They sealed it with a caulk of sprayrock, then pumped it full of trimix adjusted to their best guess for the Chinese taste in pressure and gas fraction.

  Even the best airlock made settling sounds as pressure equalised on either side of it. With his helmet resting against the door, Parry heard these sounds like distant hammer taps. It told him there was probably air on the other side.

  He knocked on the door. He waited and knocked again, knowing that a survivor might need time to complete final suiting-up procedures before working the lock. Even in a hurry, that might take five or six minutes. He knocked again, and waited: five minutes, then ten. He gave it fifteen to be on the safe side — there was no rush, given how long the Chinese had been down there already.

  But still no one was coming.

&n
bsp; Parry swung the door open using the manual release. They’d been right about the trimix, and although they’d also been right to be careful, there was an airlock chamber on the other side. Good omens. Maybe his knocks hadn’t been audible through all those layers of metal and insulation.

  He opened the inner door and stepped inside. It was crypt-dark: another Braille dive. But when he cuffed on his helmet light, he saw all that he needed to.

  The ship was a wreck: a dislodged pile of equipment and furniture had been compacted into the nose under the force of the impact. Hull spars were sheared off like broken ribs. The Chinese were good at materials science, everyone knew that, but this ship had taken more of a kicking than even they built for.

  Parry poked the torch into the rubble, wincing against what he expected to find: a brave crewman, pinned into his seat, mangled into something that would give him nightmares for the rest of his life.

  But there was no one there.

  He directed the light towards the back of the ship and saw a bulkhead door, framed on either side by Chinese symbols. He picked his way through the wreckage and knocked on the door. He waited, but again there was no answer. No telling if there was air on the other side, or just a vacuum pocket. If it was vacuum, the door would swing away from him as soon as he unlocked the catches. He braced himself against the possible outrush of air and worked the release. The door opened easily, without snatching away from his fingers.

  He shone the light inside and the beam picked out a Chinese man wearing lightweight clothes. He lay on his back on a heavily padded couch, facing the rear of the ship. He was strapped in like a psychiatric patient, tied down with enormous cushioned restraints. One of his arms was bent at an odd, anatomically problematic angle. His eyes were closed, the lids blackened. He looked dead.

  Parry moved towards the man and leaned in close, until his faceplate glass was only a finger’s width from the man’s mouth. A faint smear of exhaled breath misted the glass.

  “Ryan,” Parry said, “you’d better get over here. There’s a survivor. He looks pretty beaten up.”

  “What about the others?” Axford asked.

  “There are no others. Just this one man. Just this one… this one kid.”

  The man’s eyes opened. They were red through the black slits of his lids. G-force haemorrhaging: the eyes bleeding from inside as they were squeezed out of shape. He must have heard Parry speaking through his helmet. The man started to move a limb, then aborted the motion. Pain creased his face.

  “Easy, easy,” Parry said. He reached up and undid his helmet seal, unconcerned that he might be placing himself at risk. He lifted off the helmet and let it drift down to the floor. “It’s Wang, right?”

  The man’s lips moved. They were dry and very chapped. In a ghost of a voice he said, “Commander Wang Zhanmin.”

  “Parry Boyce,” he said. “From the Rockhopper. Welcome to Janus.”

  “I think I may have broken something in the crash,” Wang said weakly.

  “There’s a doctor coming over. We’ll take care of you. You’re going to be fine.”

  “Where will you take me?”

  “Back to Rockhopper” Parry said.

  “There’s something you need to do first, before you leave the Shenzhou Five where it is, before she melts into the ice.” Wang lifted a finger, pointing to the back of the ship. “In the rear compartment… I brought something for you.”

  “You brought us something?”

  Wang managed a nod. “I thought it might come in useful. There was just time to transfer it before I had to undock. Consider it a gift from China.”

  * * *

  Parry landed Avenger on minimum thrust, kicking up only a tiny backwash of boiled ice. He emerged from the ship wearing a hardshell Orlan. Elias Feldman, Hank Dussen and Gillian Shimozu followed him, escorting two bound prisoners who were wearing softer spacesuits of older design. They progressed across the ice in gentle parabolas until they were about a hundred metres from the lander. They had arrived at a spot of ground roughly ten metres across, illuminated with a disc of projected laser-light from the distant form of Rockhopper. The circle was as sharply edged as if it had been marked with chalk. Their shadows were black and judicial, as dark as the interstellar night itself.

  Parry brought the little party to a halt in the middle of the circle. The bound prisoners were made to kneel on the ice, shoulder to shoulder, while Feldman, Dussen and Shimozu stood behind. Parry stood before them, his legs slightly apart for balance. He peeled a flexy from the chest of his suit, where it had been drinking power. With a flick of his wrist the flexy stiffened itself until it had the rigidity of slate. He held the flexy to the level of his helmet, tilting it this way and that until he found the right angle. The words he had prepared were marked in bold black type.

  His voice came from every wall and flexy on Rockhopper. At first his words were hesitant, but as he continued to speak he seemed to find some wellspring of authority within himself.

  “John Chanticler and Connor Herrick, you have been brought here to face punishment for the death of Thomas Crabtree eight days ago. You were found guilty of this crime by a jury of your fellow crewmen.” Parry waited for the flexy to scroll to the next block of text: the hesitation seemed to lend the proceedings even more solemnity. “The Judicial Apparatus of the Interim Authority has determined that murder must be punished by death. There were one hundred and forty-four of us before you killed Thom Crabtree. Now there will be one hundred and forty-one. Let your deaths mark an end to this. Let your deaths not go wasted. After this day, there will be no more killing.” He stopped again and looked up from the brightly lit tableau to the hovering ship most of them would see again. “We will heal our differences or die together.”

  Parry lowered the fiexy. “Let the sentence be enacted.”

  Hank Dussen and Elias Feldman stationed themselves on either side of John Chanticler. Gillian Shimozu removed a cumbersome piece of mining equipment from her belt: a recoilless hammer-drill. A ribbed power line ran from the drill to her backpack. She held the drill two-handed and pressed its sharpened, glinting tip against the back of Chanticler’s helmet.

  With the thumb of her right hand she armed the drill’s magnetic induction coils. Pink status lights flickered along the drill’s barrel. The drill had been buffed to a high sheen.

  Parry knelt down so that his helmet was level with the faceplate of John Chanticler. No one else knew it, but the trimix of the condemned men had been adjusted before they stepped from the descent craft. They were drunk on oxygen: stoned and slightly euphoric. “This will be quick and painless,” Parry said, while doubting that either of them heard him.

  Then he looked over the crest of Chanticler’s helmet and nodded to Gillian Shimozu.

  She fired the hammer-drill. It flinched in her grip, but the counteracting weights held it steady even as the mass of the sharpened cutting tip rammed its way through the back of Chanticler’s helmet on a ripple of magnetic induction. The helmet’s self-sealing layer ensured that there was only a cough of air-loss before the helmet regained integrity. By then the drill had done its work. Something vile coated the inner surface of Chanticler’s faceplate.

  Shimozu jerked the drill free. The tip was stained red. She knelt down and drove it into the ice until the friction worked it clean. Chanticler stayed in the kneeling position, held there by Hank Dussen. Feldman moved to Herrick and placed a hand on his right shoulder.

  They repeated the process.

  When Shimozu had removed the drill for the second time and cleaned the blade, she took a respectful step back from the two men she had just executed. Parry nodded and the men released their holds on Chanticler and Herrick.

  With a horrid, almost comic synchrony, the two kneeling figures pitched forward in slow motion and buried their faceplates in the ice.

  PART TWO - 2059+

  THIRTEEN

  Svetlana ignored the apprehensive knot in her stomach as best she could, her right hand
clamped tightly around Parry’s arm, fingers digging into the fabric of his sleeve. Typically, Parry had fallen asleep as soon as Cosmic Avenger was airborne.

  They were still traversing ice — it was too dark to see much except in the weak backlight from the lander’s engines — but the in-flight map told her they were over the very edge of the sternward cap, where it thinned out into a lacy and unstable shelf poised above dizzying spires and canyons of Spican machinery. The gravitational eddies from the machinery became more severe here, which was partly why the ice had failed in the first place. The lander pitched and rolled like an airliner in bad turbulence — the kind where they stop serving drinks.

  It was possible that a smoother trajectory existed, but that it had been deemed too costly in terms of fuel expenditure. Fuel was still a problem, even now, and every gram that was burnt had to be accounted for with mandarin scrupulousness. Pilots were reprimanded if their journeys used even a fraction more fuel than the software had predicted.

  Another lurch and they were no longer over ice. Svetlana looked back just in time to see the ragged, serrated blue-grey cliff receding behind the lander. Boulders as large as icebergs cluttered the base of the cliff, jostling amongst huge rectilinear formations. The lander now overflew a vista of dreamlike machines, vast as mountains, and the impression of speed diminished as the ground plummeted away into distant, indistinct complexity. For a moment it was almost as if they were hovering, unmoving. It took Svetlana’s breath away. It always did.