Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Parry can show me the ropes on the train. Don’t argue, Bella. This is a miner thing.”

  She glared at him for a moment, then sighed. “All right,” she said, knowing this was one battle she could never win.

  Protsenko and Nadis started removing their suits, ready to hand them over to the two miners.

  “I’m in as well,” Svetlana said. “My daughter’s there. I’m not letting anyone else go after her in my place.”

  Bella stared hard into her eyes. “You know I’m still going to have to arrest you when we get back from Eddytown. You disobeyed a direct ruling not to talk to the Musk Dogs. In addition, you owned and operated an illegal forge vat and ran an unauthorised construction file. Your actions may cost us Janus. You’ve already cost us Eddytown. I’m hoping there are survivors, Svieta, but I’m damned sure there are going to be casualties.”

  “Done with the lecture?”

  “Pretty much. For now.”

  Svetlana’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What you just said — about ‘us’ getting back from Eddytown — that was a slip, right?”

  “No — I’m still coming with you.”

  “But you think Janus is going to blow.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re still willing to go back there, even though you could go with everyone else to the embassy?”

  “Yes.”

  Something behind Svetlana’s eyes gave in. “You don’t have to do this,” she said softly.

  “Oh, I think I do. Like Mike said: it’s a miner thing. Once upon a time we were all miners, all in it together. Pushing ice.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “Still appears to be about the only thing we’re good at, if this mess is anything to go by.”

  Takahashi and Boyce were already inside the Chakri fives Nadis and Protsenko had vacated, the conformal suits adjusting their dimensions to match the differing builds of the two men, elongating here, tightening there. “You’ll need a suit, too,” Takahashi told Bella. “Have one of the bailiffs bring you down a five, then we can move out.”

  “I haven’t trained in them,” Bella said. “As a matter of fact, it’s about thirty years since I last wore any kind of suit, even an Orlan.”

  “You need something, Bella,” Takahashi insisted.

  “There’ll be emergency suits on the train. As long as it holds air, I’m not fussy.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The train came to a vicious stop on the vertical face of Junction Box, the line ahead of it buckled and broken. They had just crossed the boundary where the lines of perpetual-motion wheels were still turning, gyring like crazed windmills. They were spinning faster than Bella remembered from her last visit, as if the brakes had failed.

  She dimmed the cabin illumination and stared through the windows at the place where there had recently been a community of more than a hundred people. It would have been easier if there had been no trace of it: then at least she could have closed her mind to the remote possibility of any survivors. But something of Eddytown was still there, picked out in the harsh clarity of the train’s forward headlights: a fringe of structures bordering a bowl-shaped absence. Many of the structures had been torn in half, or pancaked down as if they’d been stepped on with bullying force. Only those furthest away from the depression were in anything approaching one piece, but there was no sign of power or lighting in any of them.

  “I’m sorry,” Bella said, aware that Svetlana was looking over her shoulder at the same grisly scene. “It doesn’t look very good. That depression must be where the femtotech accident happened —”

  “The vat was in the middle,” Svetlana said numbly.

  Bella imagined the boiling black explosion Chromis had described, its epicentre the illegal machine in which Svetlana had tried to brew the passkey. There was no sign of any part of the memorial cube machinery now, save a fine black dust that layered every visible surface. Bella tried to extract some thin measure of comfort from the fact that Chromis had succeeded.

  But Janus was still going to die.

  Before they left the train, Bella called Wang. He answered immediately, pushing white, sweat-matted hair out of his eyes. “Yes, Bella?”

  “Any progress?”

  “We’re still here. Something’s taking shape in the vat, but don’t ask me how it works or what kind of range it needs. It’ll be completely useless if we can’t work out how to turn it on.”

  “That’s where I’m praying Jim will be able to help us,” Bella said, hoping Wang didn’t pick up on the strain in her voice. “He told me he’d return to Janus as soon as it looked as if things were going according to plan at their end.”

  “Return to Janus?”

  “Just long enough for us to rendezvous with him and get as far away from here as possible. If we can have the passkey installed in a lander, ready to be carried through the skyhole, we’ll at least have a shot at closing the endcap door.”

  “Once we’re all safely on the other side of it, I hope.”

  “We may not have that luxury. The door takes a long time to close: if we wait until we’ve made it into the next chamber before activating it, it may not close in time to protect us when Janus goes up.”

  “So we’ll have to start closing it before we arrive. For some reason that doesn’t fill me with overwhelming enthusiasm.” He smiled tightly.

  “If we time it right, we’ll be able to slip through the gap before the door closes completely.”

  “And if Janus goes up before then?”

  “No one will ever be able to accuse us of not trying.”

  “I suppose that will be some consolation,” Wang said, philosophically. He glanced distractedly aside. “I’d best get back to the vat: it’s shaking around like an old washing machine.”

  “Be ready for us,” Bella said.

  She left Wang to his work and put another call through to Nick Thale while Svetlana and the others were cycling through the maglev’s single-person airlock. It took a moment for the call to find its way to him. When it did, she recognised the plaza at Underhole, where at least a hundred people were being marshalled into a Skyside-bound elevator.

  “Give me the good news, Nick.”

  “The good news is that we don’t have to worry about the Musk Dogs any more. Their ship left an hour ago — it’s on its way to the endcap door.”

  “Oh.”

  “It looks as though they’re in a hurry to get through.”

  A weight descended on Bella’s heart like a stone. “They know there isn’t much time, then. They’ve lit the fuse. They’ll use their own passkey to close the door, then sit tight in the adjacent chamber until we blow a hole through the wall. Then they’ll reopen the door and come back inside, along with their Uncontained friends.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  Bella looked at the airlock. It would soon be her turn to go through, onto the Spican machinery outside. “I was hoping you weren’t going to say that. I was hoping you were going to shoot my theory down in flames.”

  “It gets worse, Bella. Those indications I showed you earlier? They’re through the roof now. Janus is shaking itself to bits, and I don’t think the accident in Eddytown helped matters — it may have stressed an already overloaded system.”

  “Any idea how long we have?”

  “If I could get the data to the Fountainheads, they might be able to give us a hint, but I think it’s pretty safe to say they’re otherwise engaged.”

  “The battle’s still going on?”

  “If anything, it’s heated up in the last thirty minutes. The door’s still open, at least. We’d be in even more trouble if it was closed.”

  “Wang’s making progress with the vat,” Bella said. “I told him we’ll need to get the passkey spaceborne as soon as it’s brewed.”

  “Let’s hope it comes with a user manual,” Thale said.

  Bella signed off and cycled through the airlock. The others were waiting for her further up the line,
near the point where it met the edge of the depression. Normally, the scene would have been bathed in the pastel light of the Spican symbols on the surrounding machinery, in addition to the lights of Eddytown itself. Many of the Spican structures were completely black now, except for the occasional flickering symbol. The hard floor that was the sheer face of Junction Box trembled under Bella’s feet, like metal decking over an engine room. The visible lava lines flashed with hectic activity as materials were shuttled at emergency speed from one part of Janus to another. The moon was performing emergency surgery on itself.

  It wasn’t going to work.

  There was no further need for Nick Thale’s parameter readings. The fact that the moon was convulsing itself to death was obvious in every footstep, every glance.

  Bella caught up with the others, finding the going harder than she had expected. “This feels like more than one gee,” she said, catching her breath.

  Svetlana turned the sleek form of her Chakri five to face Bella. Her voice rasped over the common channel. “It’s heavier than when we left. My HUD says one point five and rising. Something’s wrong with the eddy effect — that’s why the wheels are turning so damned fast.”

  They had built Eddytown here to exploit this focus of enhanced gravitational field, but now that focus was intensifying, dragging matter against the side of Junction Box. Bella suspected it wouldn’t be the last good idea they’d have cause to regret by the end of the day.

  “I just talked to Nick — he says things are getting worse all over Janus. I don’t think we have much time, Svieta.” Bella looked at the huddle of ruined and deformed structures on the fringe of the crater, their outlines furred with the black ash from the dead femtomachines. The heightened gravity had pulled it down like a blanket. “We’ll scout the nearest buildings,” she said, trying to sound more optimistic than she felt. “That should give us a clearer idea of survivors. Once we know what kind of numbers we’re looking at —”

  “You don’t think we’ll find anyone,” Svetlana said bluntly.

  “If anyone survived, we’ll find them. Including Emily.”

  “She could have been at the epicentre.”

  “Or she might have made it out. We know it didn’t happen instantly, Svieta. Chromis held it back for a while before it swallowed the whole town. There’s still hope.”

  But a small, private voice said: there’s hope, and there’s desperation.

  They walked to the very edge of the depression and looked down. It was a polished black bowl, with no trace of former human habitation. Even the maglev line ended sharply at the rim.

  Bella knelt down and scooped up a handful of the black dust in her gloved palm. It seeped between her fingers like water. She had just held part of what had once been Chromis. She wondered, with a little pang of unease, if some ghostly echo of Chromis was still running in the ashes covering Eddytown.

  “Grav’s higher again here,” Svetlana said. “One point six, nudging seven. Our suits have power-assist, so we can manage. You’re going to find it tougher, Bella.”

  Bella felt the extra weight in her hip joints: a discomfort that would very soon turn into pain. For now she blotted it out. “Good job I kept up with Axford’s exercise programme, then.”

  “There’s nothing on this side of the bowl,” Parry said, as they edged past some ruins that were only just recognisable as having once been domes and connecting tubes. “We’ll skirt the crater and check out the admin core and the public annexe. That whole complex still looks pretty stable.”

  But dead, Bella thought. Dead and cold and airless, as if it had been abandoned for a hundred years.

  Beneath them, the ground tremored with a renewed fury. Frantic patterns of Spican symbology flashed across distant regions of the surrounding machinery, changing colour and shape so quickly that they looked like neon advertisements in speeded-up movie footage of some long-vanished, long-forgotten city.

  They worked around the edge of the depression until they were close to the buildings Parry had identified. Bella found the going even harder, feeling with each step as if her bones were going to shatter under the load.

  “How heavy now?” she gasped.

  “One point eight,” Svetlana said.

  “One nine,” Takahashi said, breathing heavily despite his power-assisted suit. “Nudging two.”

  “I’m reading one point six,” Parry, who was walking to the left of his wife, said. “Field’s like a patchwork quilt. I suggest you follow my line, Bella — between us we should be able to plot the optimum path.”

  “Copy.”

  “It’s shifting around us,” Parry said. “Could be the average is getting stronger.” He glanced back at the perpetual-motion array. “Wheels look to be turning even faster than when we arrived.”

  “Then we’ve even less time than we thought,” Bella said, between gasps, as she did her best to follow Parry’s path.

  They approached an armoured airlock set into the side of the nearest dome-shaped building, the door bordered with luminous wasp-coloured stripes. The frame was buckled, sagging to one side as if a fierce gravity squall had swept over it. Svetlana reached it first, quickening her pace with the servo-assist suit.

  “Looks pretty skewed,” Parry warned.

  The building and its airlock dated back to the very earliest days of the settlement, cobbled together from pieces of Rockhopper. Svetlana brushed black dust from an instrument panel and thumbed the thick, multi-coloured control buttons. After an agonising interval, amber strobe lights signalled the opening of the door. It slid into its frame with a laboured, jerky motion, encountering obvious resistance from the buckled structure.

  At least it was open. The airlock chamber was large enough to take two people in bulky suits. Bella let Parry and Svetlana through first, waiting outside with Takahashi. The outer door closed to allow air to cycle into the lock, assuming that the dome still contained any pressure. It felt like an eternity before the outer door shuffled open again. Bella wondered how many cycles the ancient mechanism would stand before it burnt out completely, freezing the door in place.

  When Bella and Takahashi reached the interior, it was as dark as she had feared it would be, but at least her suit was telling her that there was air pressure.

  “Dome held,” Parry said. “That’s good. There might be some survivors, after all.”

  Helmet flashlights activated automatically on the Chakri five suits. Bella had to make do with a ghostly green HUD overlay as her emergency suit — which had no light of its own — sensed its surroundings via radar and ambient light. Parry had described this building as the admin core, and now that Bella looked around she saw evidence of businesslike partitions and spartan office furniture. Chairs had been upended, plants and ornaments tipped over and strewn across the floor, coffee cups spilled on the dark carpeting.

  “Must have been a blow-out somewhere in the dome,” Takahashi said, “enough to whip up a gale in here before pressure normalised. The people working here must have had time to reach safety.”

  “Not all of them,” Parry said quietly.

  They followed the shaft of his helmet light until it fell on a pair of legs jutting out through the open doorframe leading into the next major room of the admin core. Maybe a survivor, Bella thought — the person could easily have been knocked unconscious by flying debris during the blow-out and abandoned here after everyone else reached safety. But when they rounded the corner and saw the rest of the body, she scrubbed any possibility of survival.

  “It’s Malcolm Fox,” Parry said, kneeling down as best as his suit allowed.

  Something invisible had crushed Fox’s upper body. He looked as if he’d fallen onto concrete from a skyscraper. Both his arms were broken and twisted, glued to the carpet in unnatural positions. His head had lolled to one side and although his face was still recognisable, the side pushed into the carpet had been squashed flat with brutal force. Blood had oozed out around the crushed skull, dark and thick as tar. “Poor Malco
lm,” Takahashi said. “Maybe we —”

  “He’s gone,” Bella said sadly. “There’s nothing we can do for him. Even the Fountainheads wouldn’t be able to bring him back now.”

  “Bella’s right,” Parry said. “We have to leave Malcolm now.” It was only then that any of them paid any real attention to the rest of the room in which Fox had died. It was another section of the admin core: an open-plan area with seats, desks and display media. Their lights probed darkness, falling on chaotic details. A gale had ripped through this room as well, but that was not the worst thing that had happened. Across from the dead body of Malcolm Fox, another worker remained in his seat. The strong alloy and composite chair had barely buckled, but the worker had been pressed into it with savage force. His head had rolled back, its weight twisting his neck unnaturally through ninety degrees. Bella stared in numb horror at the corpse, grateful that she did not recognise the dead man. Another victim, a woman this time, lay sprawled across a dividing barrier separating one part of the room from another. It had almost cut right through her.

  “The squall must have come through this room,” Parry said. “A bad one, tens of gees… maybe even hundreds. Would’ve been fast.”

  “Not fast enough,” Svetlana said, pointing to another pair of bodies sprawled in broken-doll formation across the carpet. “They were trying to get out.”

  Bella asked, “Did Emily work anywhere near this section?”

  “No, not usually, but if there’d been an emergency —”

  “Let’s not assume the worst. There’s still pressure, and we know these squalls can be very localised.”

  Takahashi moved ahead of them through the room, placing each footstep like a man navigating a minefield. Bella understood: there could easily be a sharp gravity gradient still present in the room. Step into a pillar of a hundred gees and it might as well be a landmine. Without the suit, he might have felt the currents caused by the flow of air across the pressure discontinuity. Inside the suit, all he had was the HUD warning for comfort, and the HUD would only report the gradient when he was halfway through it.