Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Copy,” Svetlana said. “It looks to me as if you’re tilting backwards: I can see more of your helmet crown than I ought to be able to.”

  “I don’t feel it.”

  “You wouldn’t. We already know the Spicans have complete control of gravity on local scales. Be odd if they didn’t make the ramp easy to climb.”

  “I’m continuing.”

  She watched him complete his ascent to the top of the ramp, until his suit was just a smudge of orange against the smoked-glass intricacy of the ship’s central core. He was leaning at about twenty degrees to Svetlana’s local vertical. She saw the tiny movement of his arm as he unclipped the cam again and panned it around, taking in the ship and the wider view. A window on her HUD showed the same feed. Transmission was good most of the time, but now and then packet loss would shatter the image into blocks of static hexels. “Show us the door,” Parry said.

  Schrope angled the cam around to take in the large aperture where the ramp terminated. “I’m not sure how much sense you’re making of the pictures,” he said, “so I’ll try to talk you through it. The ramp levels out here and feeds into the ship for about ten metres, passing through a corridor — at least, that’s what I’m going to call it. There’s a floor, two walls and a ceiling. Everything’s slightly curved. No single source of illumination, although the whole thing seems to be glowing gently. Can’t see much detail in the walls. Again, they’re translucent, and there’s a hint of more stuff behind them, but even with my naked eye, that’s the best I can do.”

  “What’s at the end of the ramp?” Parry asked.

  “I can’t tell. It bends down into the ship at a pretty steep angle. I guess I’ll have to go inside to take a look.”

  “Take it nice and slowly to the end of the flat section,” Parry said. “Keep filming all the time.”

  Svetlana’s HUD view lurched forward with Schrope’s every pace. The glass threw back dull, blurred reflections, as if from a scuffed mirror. Schrope reached up and turned down his helmet light, relying on the ambient illumination.

  “You still reading me?”

  “We’re getting it all,” she said. “Packets are a bit erratic, but we should be good for a little while. Could be the ship’s blocking some of the signal.”

  “I’ve reached the end of the flat section. Looking down now and… okay.” The picture dropped away, then reassembled hexel by hexel. Schrope had the cam pointed down into the next sloping section of the corridor. Without him in the view, there was no obvious way to tell up from down. It looked as if the corridor curved down and then swung left around a sharp hairpin.

  “We’re still reading you,” Parry said.

  “I’m stepping onto the sloping section. One foot at a time… testing for traction.” He paused, his breath grating in Svetlana’s ears. “Feels secure. About to place second foot.” Another pause. “I’m transitioning to a new local vertical. Standing up again.” He gave a small chuckle. “Christ, this feels weird.”

  “You’re doing a fantastic job,” Svetlana said, trying to sound reassuring. “We’re right behind you, Craig.”

  “I’m going further inside. Pretty straightforward so far.”

  “Coming up on ten minutes on the clock,” Svetlana said. “You’ve got twenty left.”

  “Copy. Sounds like more than enough.”

  “Keep up the voiceover,” Parry said. “We’re still getting pictures, but the quality’s beginning to deteriorate significantly. We should be good on voice for a while yet.”

  “I’ve descended — guessing here — five or six metres from the flat section. Floor’s curving back to the horizontal again. Looking at a left-hand bend ahead of me.”

  “Any change in texture, illumination?” Svetlana asked.

  “Nothing obvious. Maybe a little bit more glow… could be my imagination, though.”

  Another voice cut in on the com. “Craig, this is Ash Murray.”

  “Go ahead, Ash.”

  “I’m seeing some drift in your trimix.”

  “Anything to worry about?”

  “No, just the usual regulator problem with the softs. Up 02 by two per cent, please.”

  Through the HUD window, Svetlana saw Craig’s thick-fingered hand tap the revised air mix into his suit sleeve. It was years since he had worn a suit, but he did it with a creditable lack of fuss.

  “Copy. Feels better already, Ash.”

  “Okay, but keep an eye on those trimix levels and self-regulate accordingly. You should see a small histogram in your lower-right faceplate HUD. Don’t let the red line drop under the white marker.”

  “The day we get back,” Svetlana said caustically, “I’m putting in a letter of complaint to the dickhead who designed these suits.”

  “The dickhead who designed these suits died about two hundred years ago,” Ash Murray said, “but I take your point.”

  “I’m approaching the corner,” Schrope said. “Angling the cam around the bend… let’s see.”

  “Craig?”

  “Still here.” But his voice had a fractured quality to it. The visual feed had become a series of static images, updating every two or three seconds. “I’m moving along another straight section of corridor. Traction still good. Hard to tell, but —”

  “Keep talking,” Svetlana said.

  “Things widen up ahead. There’s some kind of spherical opening. I’m going to call it a room.”

  The visual link improved momentarily, permitting Svetlana a glimpse of the end of the corridor, feeding into a wider space bathed in the same sourceless spectral light. Then the image crashed back to static frames.

  “Keep an eye on those trimix levels,” Ash Murray said.

  “Roger that. Everything feels okay in here. Wish I’d taken a leak before we left Underhole.”

  “Ash didn’t plumb you in?” Svetlana asked.

  “Told him not to. I’m not planning on spending the rest of my week in this thing.”

  “Visuals are getting scrappy down here,” Parry said. “Keep up that commentary, buddy.”

  “I’ve reached the opening into the room. The corridor comes out into the side of the spherical chamber. There’s no level floor, just one continuous curved surface.” He jogged the cam around. “No sign of any other way out, either — although it’s tricky to tell with all this glass-on-glass.”

  “You mean it’s a dead end?” Parry asked.

  “Looks that way. I’m going to take a closer look inside, provided I can still grip.” He grunted as he lowered himself over the edge, legs dangling into the spherical space. “Glove traction feels okay. Should be able to climb out if I have to.”

  “Keep the cam steady for several seconds at a time,” Parry said quietly. “We’re down to still frames here.”

  “I’m lowering myself. Hold on a sec.” There was a grunt and a wheeze as he completed the movement. “Okay. I’m down and standing. The floor material is the same stuff we’ve seen all the way in. No problem with grip. I’m going to give you a panoramic view of the chamber now.” Making an obvious effort to hold the cam as steadily as he could, Schrope pointed it in six different directions before holding it at arm’s length, aimed at his own faceplate. He managed a nervous grin. “Hope this one makes the cover of Newsweek,” he said.

  “Craig,” Parry said, “do me a favour and pan back to the entrance hole.”

  “Like this?” The HUD box greyed into motion blur, then stabilised. “Oh, wait.”

  Svetlana saw it, too. Unless there was some strange trick of the light caused by the chamber’s optics, the hole in the wall had narrowed — it was, in fact, narrowing even further as they watched.

  “Okay, we have a situation here,” Parry said, with a calmness that was just a bit too insistent to be convincing. “Craig, I want you to keep cool and get out of there. You still have time.”

  Schrope said nothing. He clipped the cam back onto his suit and headed quickly back the way he had come in. The cam picked up his hands reaching ah
ead, palming down against the wall for geckoflex traction.

  “No good,” Svetlana said, under her breath. “Hole’s already too small for him to squeeze through.”

  Schrope had seen it as well. He pushed back, his hands shaking. “Too narrow,” he said. The cam lingered on the closing entrance as the glass sphinctered down to a gap smaller than fifty centimetres across and kept on closing. “There’s no way I can get through.”

  “Stay where you are,” Svetlana said, not caring how much it sounded like an order. “This is… not necessarily a problem.”

  “It’s a problem to me.”

  Now the refresh rate was even slower, with more and more of the image being filled in by software guesswork based on the previous frames.

  “You must be in an airlock,” she said. “We should’ve expected something like this. It’s good — it means they want to meet us.”

  “There’s no way out now,” Schrope said. His voice had gone metallic, stripped of harmonics. The imagery had stalled on the last full frame, refusing to update. The bit rate was barely enough to carry audio now.

  “Craig,” Svetlana said, “if you can hear this — stay calm.”

  “Losing suit packets,” Ash Murray said. “No visuals at our end,” Parry reported. “Craig,” Svetlana said, “talk to me. Tell me what’s happening.”

  His voice came through in short, breathless shards. “I think the chamber’s pressurising. Pressure’s counteracting my suit inflation. Gas is… colourless. Maybe it’s my imagination, but —”

  “Talk to me.”

  “Getting heavier in here. Suit’s weighing me down. Can’t stand up much longer.” She heard another grunt and wheeze of effort. “Kneeling down. Still getting heavier.” He broke off and sucked in a deep, laboured breath. “Breathing’s getting tricky.” Parry cut in. “Craig, it looks like you’re in a lock for gravity as well as atmosphere.”

  “I figured.”

  “You need to lie as flat as possible, to ease the blood supply to your head.”

  “I’m trying. Can’t get flat… fucking backpack’s in the way.”

  “Oh, no,” Svetlana said, remembering all the arguments they had gone over as to whether he should use a soft- or hard-suit. The softsuit had been considered less threatening, more obviously anthropomorphic, but the hardsuit would have allowed him to lean back much more easily, and it would have maintained normal suit pressure no matter what the external conditions.

  Bad call. Bad, bad call. “Still getting heavier. Pressure’s pushed my suit all the way in. Seeing a lot of red lights on the chin board.”

  “Just… hold on in there,” Parry said. “Sooner or later —” But Svetlana heard the hopelessness in his voice. It was already too heavy in there for someone burdened with a suit. If the gravity and pressure increased much more, Schrope would soon slip into unconsciousness as the blood left his brain. Shortly afterwards his heart would stop.

  “Wait —” she heard, suddenly. “Something happening. Glass is clearing… I can see through. I can see the other side.” He made a wretched gurgling sound, every breath a universe of pain. “It’s them. They’re here. Oh, God. They’re here. They’re outside. They’re coming nearer.” A fevered urgency entered his voice. “I gotta get the cam. Gotta get the cam.”

  “Craig, never mind the damned cam,” Svetlana snapped.

  “You need to see this. You need to see this. You need to see this.”

  “He’s losing it,” Ash Murray whispered.

  “Keep that shit together, Craig,” Parry said.

  “I can see them,” he said. “They’re... funny. Big. Bigger than I expected. They’re like —” Audio broke up into static, reassembled in some scratchy, parodic approximation of human speech. “Mountains.” Then there was silence.

  * * *

  “We screwed up with the suit,” Svetlana said, over and over again. “We screwed up with the suit.”

  Murray helped her out of her own gear. “Don’t cut yourself up about it. For all we know it hit a hundred atmospheres in there.”

  “Speculation, Ash.”

  “It was getting worse all the way until the end. Irrelevant, anyway: the grav would have got him no matter what kind of suit he was wearing.”

  “We shouldn’t have let him into that chamber without securing the entrance point.”

  Parry grabbed her roughly by the elbow. “Secure it with what, Svieta?” he said angrily, frustrated by his inability to comfort her. “Do you honestly think anything we could have put there would have made a damned bit of difference once that door decided to close?”

  “Maybe it wouldn’t have closed on him. Maybe it would have detected the obstruction and —”

  “Too many maybes.” He took her chin and gently steered her face to look at him, eye to eye. “Craig knew this was going to be a tough one. He went in there knowing the risks, knowing this was his one shot at redeeming himself. Well, he got what he wanted. And he got what we needed: hard data on the inside of that thing we’d never have had otherwise. We owe him thanks. He came back and did something for us.”

  “He saw them,” she said.

  Ryan Axford, who was sitting down at the Underhole meeting table with a bulb of water before him, shook his head with tight-lipped regret. “I don’t think he saw all that much, Svieta.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “We already know he was having problems with trimix control. Coupled with the respiratory and circulatory stresses he’d have been experiencing…” He rotated the bulb between his birdlike surgeon’s fingers. “Hallucinatory imagery wouldn’t have been unexpected.”

  “No,” Svetlana said sharply. “He saw something. He was clear about that. Beyond the glass, he said. Coming closer.”

  “I really wish I could believe that, Svieta,” Axford said kindly, “but all he saw was his brain being starved of blood.”

  “He saw mountains, Ryan. Since when do mountains have anything to do with seeing Jesus at the end of the tunnel?”

  Axford looked at her placidly. “Since when do mountains have anything to do with aliens?”

  “Craig saw something,” she insisted. “He saw something and sent us a message. He saw them. And he wasn’t frightened. He sounded more… mesmerised.”

  “Or intoxicated.” Axford shook his head again. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to take anything away from what he did for us — it was a brave thing to go inside. But unless we recover that suit, we’ll never know what he really saw.”

  Suddenly deflated, unable to stand up even in the weak gravity of Underhole, Svetlana sank into the seat opposite Axford. “He was trying to get a cam onto it.”

  “Hallucination doesn’t preclude a rational response to that same hallucination.”

  Parry eased into the seat next to Svetlana and held her hand, massaging her fingers. They were always stiff after an EVA. “Ryan’s got a point,” he said softly. “We both heard that little sermon Craig made before he went up the ramp. He was already on the edge before things turned bad.”

  “He saw something,” she said, but now it sounded mechanical, her own defiance thin and unconvincing. Denise Nadis pushed a drink and a foil-wrapped lunch in front of her, but Svetlana shook her head. There was an acrid taste in her mouth and she had no appetite, no thirst.

  “We need to consider our next response,” Parry said, when the silence between them had grown uncomfortable. “If we took a hardsuit, beefed up the coms —”

  “Gravity would still get you,” Murray said, examining Svetlana’s helmet with a jeweller’s squinting attentiveness.

  “Not if we pumped out the air and replaced it with an oxygenated solution —”

  Svetlana banged her unopened drinking bulb against the table. “Stop treating this like a fucking engineering problem, all right? A man just died in there. No one else is going back inside.”

  “We can’t just leave him there,” Parry said, incredulous.

  “That’s exactly what we’re going to do. I don’t
give a fuck about any macho code of conduct horseshit.” She closed her eyes, lowered her voice to something like a normal speaking tone. “I’m not adding to the death toll just to retrieve a corpse.”

  “We need his suit, Svieta,” Parry said gently. “His cam was logging to memory the whole while. If he did see anything — and you seem to think he did — it’ll be stored in the suit. Get that back and we’ll have our slideshow.”

  “We have no reason to believe his suit is still where he died. That ship’s much bigger than the tiny part Craig saw. They could have taken him anywhere inside it by now.”

  Now it was Nadis’s turn to speak. “But to do nothing… they killed one of us, Svieta.”

  “We screwed up,” she said. “Maybe they screwed up as well. Maybe they didn’t realise we were so fucking easy to kill.”

  “That still doesn’t mean we have to let them get away with it.”

  “So what are you proposing? That we smack them with an FAD, just to make a point?”

  “We have to do something. We can’t just sit here in a state of stalemate, like it never happened.”

  “It took us thirteen years to reach this point,” Svetlana said, fighting to hold down her fury. “Do you honestly think a few days are going to make any difference?”

  “They’re getting restless in Crabtree. They want a response.”

  “I’ll give them a fucking response. How does martial law sound?” She grimaced, livid with herself. But it was out there now. She had said it.

  “You sound like Bella sometimes,” Nadis said, turning away.

  * * *

  On her way back down to the surface of Janus, Svetlana had glued a webcam to the edge of the hole with a dab of geckoflex, using her HUD window to point the cam at the alien ship. They had been concerned before not to invade the aliens’ space with anything that might have been construed as intrusive or threatening technology. Now, given what had happened to Schrope, such considerations seemed less important.

  For several hours nothing had happened. Then the software detected changes above its noise threshold and sent a flag to Svetlana’s flexy. She enlarged the cam window so that they could all crowd around and examine it. The symbols on the ship, fixed until now, were undergoing rapid cycles of change.