Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  He looked back, having plotted a path to the exit. “I think it’s safe if you follow me. Peaks at around two for a metre or so back there, but if you push through it fast…”

  They followed him into the next room. By the time Bella crossed the threshold, she felt as if she’d walked up and down a mountain. Every muscle screamed with the effort of holding her upright against nearly twice her normal weight.

  Takahashi made a slow orbit of the room. “Feels okay,” he said. “One point six, on average.”

  Bella recognised the wide table and picture windows of the conference room where she had pleaded with Svetlana not to talk to the Musk Dogs. Some of the fittings had been ripped from the walls: the depressurisation must have been most violent here, Bella judged. One person lay on the floor at the far end of the room, crushed by a closing emergency airlock door. The door had jammed hard against the body and failed to seal, leaving a fifteen-centimetre gap between the door and the frame.

  “Richard Fleig,” Parry said. “Carsten’s son. Jesus, he didn’t need this, not after losing Chieko.”

  It was difficult to tell whether he’d just fallen and been pinned in place by the closing door, or whether the gravity squall had held him down first as it moved through the conference room. He’d prevented one door from closing, but the doors were always set in pairs for dual redundancy and the second one had closed fully just beyond the heels of his shoes.

  “Let’s see if we can get it open,” Parry said.

  The floor shook under Bella’s feet as she walked towards the jammed airlock door, the tremors now strong enough to overcome the damping field installed under the dome. Somewhere in the room they’d just left, she heard the crash of something collapsing.

  “We’re running out of time,” she said urgently.

  “I’m in touch with Nick,” Takahashi said. “He says we can expect Star Crusader in ten minutes. They’re using Avenger to evac the other outlying communities.”

  The floor shook again. Suddenly, ten minutes sounded like eternity. Bella worked the manual control, but the door didn’t move. “Stuck tight,” she said, with what she hoped was the right note of regretful finality.

  Parry eased her aside gently and took hold of the door with one hand, bracing himself against the frame with the other. He applied the maximum amplified force of the Chakri five.

  “Nothing,” he said, panting at the effort.

  “It moved a little,” Svetlana said. “Let me try as well. Maybe with the two of us…”

  Bella stepped aside to let the two of them tackle the door. It looked futile, but just as they were about to give up, the door suddenly sprang open, doubling the width of the gap. Svetlana immediately tried to squeeze through, but even the sleek design of her suit was too bulky.

  “Almost. If we try again, squeeze another few inches out of the bastard…”

  They tried, but this time there was no hint of further movement. The door had locked solid, jammed tight against some broken or burnt-out internal mechanism or the stress-buckled frame.

  “It’s no good,” Parry said, his chest heaving with the effort. “That’s as far as she’s going to go.”

  “Then we have to double back,” Svetlana said, “leave by the lock we came in by, walk around to the rear of the public annexe and come in via the freight lock.”

  “Two-fifty, three hundred metres, babe, assuming we don’t have to detour around eddy points. By the time we’ve cycled through locks, you’re looking at ten, fifteen minutes before we’re even inside. Then we’ll probably need to clear the internal lock into dome two —”

  “We still do it.”

  The floor shuddered again. Parry steadied himself against the door frame. “It’s not going to happen, babe. We came to look for survivors, but we always knew there might not be any.”

  “Don’t talk as if she’s already dead.”

  “I’m not…” Parry faltered. Bella heard the strain in his voice, the effort it was taking to keep it together. “I’m just saying… things are worse than we expected.”

  “Traffic,” Takahashi said, cutting across Parry. He held a hand to his helmet, a pointless but automatic gesture of concentration. “I’m hearing com traffic. Weak as hell —”

  “You’re hearing spillage from Crabtree,” Bella said, resignedly.

  “Then why didn’t I hear it until we came inside?”

  “Someone’s still alive. I knew it,” Svetlana said.

  “Maybe,” Bella allowed.

  “We have to get through that door,” Svetlana insisted.

  “It’s as wide as it’s going to go,” Parry said. “We can’t squeeze through, babe, no matter how much we want to.”

  “Then we take the long way round. At least now we know there’s a reason to do it.”

  Takahashi still had his hand pressed against his helmet. “They can’t hear me,” he said, “but I think I heard someone mention Batista. Sounds as if there’s more than one survivor.”

  “Batista’s here, not at Crabtree,” Svetlana said. She sounded too drained for elation, but Bella could imagine her hoping and praying that Emily would be amongst the survivors.

  Bella looked at Takahashi. “How do they sound, Mike?”

  “Not great. Kind of panicked, if the voices are anything to go by. But they’re alive. Dead people can’t panic.”

  “Chances are they’re in the holding bay by the freight lock,” Svetlana said. “There were good links to the other domes from that bay — they’d have been able to get there fast.”

  “That puts them one chamber away, on the other side of the next admin section,” Parry said.

  “Then we’d better find a way through this thing,” Svetlana said. “Maybe we can use something from the other room as a lever, some furniture, maybe —”

  “There’s no need,” Bella said. “You can’t get through in a Chakri five, but I’m not wearing one. I should be able to squeeze through the gap pretty easily now.”

  Parry touched her shoulder. “It’s good of you to suggest it, Bella, but that emergency suit’s like a soap bubble. You so much as scrape it against something sharp and you’re going to be sucking vacuum when that second door opens onto the freight lock.”

  “Then I’d better make sure I don’t, hadn’t I?”

  The floor jogged violently. Bella felt the force of gravity notch higher, and then steady at that heightened level.

  “Even if you find survivors, we still have a problem,” Parry said. “If they’d been able to get into suits, they’d be outside by now.”

  “Then we’d better make sure they have suits, hadn’t we?” Bella glared at him. “Give me a break, Boyce. Do you honestly imagine I’d let a little detail like that slip my mind?”

  “So what’s your plan?” Svetlana asked.

  “My plan is for you to form a supply chain. One of you — make it Mike — goes back to the train and starts unloading emergency suits from under the seats. There must be thirty or forty of them, at least. They’re small, so you can easily carry several at a time. Just make damned sure you don’t pull the activation tabs.”

  “We’ll need to bring them through the other airlock — that’s going to take a lot of time if we have to cycle through it more than once,” Mike said.

  “We know there’s no one alive in this room, and there’s definitely vacuum in the next room along,” Bella said. “That means no one’s getting out of here without a suit on. I’m going to have to open this door anyway, so we’ll lose nothing by opening the other lock.”

  “Makes sense,” Takahashi said. Like all EVA people, he had a deep-rooted aversion to any kind of depressurisation procedure, treating vacuum as a necessary evil that had to be endured but definitely not encouraged.

  “You’d better find something to hang onto,” Bella said. “It’s going to get a little draughty in here.”

  Bella squeezed gingerly through the gap and appraised her options for a safe bracing position. In the tight confines of the interior c
ell, she judged that she would be able to hold herself steady against the outrushing air until it vented into the adjoining admin section and either settled down or continued on into empty space. It would all depend on the nature of the blow-out, which in turn would depend on the age and design of the dome.

  “I’ll wait on this side of the door,” Svetlana said. “Parry can relay the suits to me from the lock, if Mike relays them from the train.”

  “Copy. Watch those gradients, people. Mike: you’re going to be making repeated movements between the annexe and the train, so keep at least one eye on your Sheng box.”

  “Oh, Jesus. You don’t seriously think I need to worry about that as well, do you?”

  “I doubt it, but let’s not take chances, okay?”

  “I’ll do the Sheng shuffle one more time, then.”

  Bella gave them all a minute to find handholds, then started the door-release procedure. It was designed to be quick enough to use in an emergency, but riot so simple or fast that there was any danger of anyone tripping it accidentally, or before they could be stopped. Four heavy, childproof levers had to be pulled down in sequence, with five-second intervals before the next one could be moved. Alarms blared and strobe lights flashed. A synthesized voice cautioned that the door was about to open onto vacuum.

  “Hold tight,” Bella said.

  The door slid open, smoothly this time, and the gale of out-rushing air seized Bella with shocking force. She’d trained for emergency decompression scenarios during the early days of her career, but somewhere along the line she had forgotten how bestial air could be, like an enraged animal clawing its way out of confinement.

  The pressure ramped all the way down to zero, her paper-thin suit puffing out again as the air inside it was allowed to expand. It was either vacuum outside or close enough not to matter.

  “Still with us, Bella?” Parry asked.

  “Still here, still frosty. Gravity doesn’t feel higher than in the rest of the admin core, although I’m taking things slowly.”

  “This is Mike,” Takahashi said. “Parry and I are at the main lock. We’re cycling it open now.”

  “Good. Watch out for the lander — it should be here any minute now. Make sure they know to keep away from the eddy zones. Best if they don’t come any closer than the train.”

  “Copy,” Takahashi said.

  “You still hearing voices, Mike?”

  “Fainter now, but then I’m nearly outside.”

  “I’m getting something, too,” Svetlana said. “Like Mike says — it’s weak.”

  “If they’re on reserve batteries, they’re doing well to be sending any signal at all,” Parry said.

  Bella’s suit was picking up none of the traffic Takahashi and Svetlana had tuned into, but that didn’t discourage her. The emergency suit was not designed to sense a wide spread of com frequencies.

  She peered through her faceplate, measuring the gloomy dimensions of the new room in the green light of her HUD. No bodies, at least: if anyone had been trapped in here when the blow-out started, they’d presumably been sucked out with the air. She felt sorry for them, but she’d come to find survivors, not to trip over corpses.

  At the other side of the freight lock, her HUD traced the out-line of another airlock door, sealed shut. She scanned around, but while there were a few open doors leading into darkness, this was the only visible lock. It had to lead into the holding bay Parry and Svetlana had talked about. Bella wished she had paid more attention to the layout of Eddytown, but there was no point blaming herself now.

  Taking each step as if her bones were made of glass, she made it to the second airlock. She flipped up the indicator cover, then strained to read the feeble display. The HUD overlay made it difficult without an extra source of light from one of the other suits. There was no way to tell whether the door was holding back air or more vacuum.

  “This is Bella,” she said, catching each breath as if it were her last. “At the door. It’s sealed tight, but I’m going to try to open it from outside.”

  “Better hope they have the inner door sealed,” Parry said.

  “If they haven’t, there isn’t a lot we can do for them.” Bella’s hands worked the controls, her mind blotting out any possibility save the one that allowed those people to stay alive. She pushed the four heavy levers down, each one more difficult to move than the last, each five-second delay stretching to a minor eternity. It all happened in deathly silence this time: no alarm, no synthesized voice. Then the door opened.

  At the last minute, Bella remembered to brace against out-rushing air… but there was none. The inner door was sealed, and the airlock had held only vacuum.

  “I’m halfway through,” she said. “How are you doing with those emergency suits, Mike?”

  His voice was thready. “I’m at the train, cycling aboard. Crusader’s not down yet, but Nick says they’re on final approach. The large-scale eddies around Junction Box have become treacherous in the last few minutes —”

  “What’s the story on the Uncontained?”

  “We’re still getting a nice fireworks display from the end-cap. I guess that means the good guys still have some mopping up to do.”

  Or that the good guys were getting the kicking of their lives, Bella thought. “And Wang?”

  “No news, I’m afraid. Didn’t want to push Nick — they’re not having an easy time of it, by the sound of things.”

  “Okay.” She realised, with chagrin, that she had overlooked how difficult it might be to land the ship. It was years since anyone had flown anything that large to Junction Box, an approach that would have been tricky even if the gravity fields were not lashing around like a nest of vipers. “Are you still hearing those voices?” he asked, hardly daring to frame the question.

  “Now and then. They’ve been a bit subdued for the last few minutes.”

  “See if this makes any difference.” She hammered on the door.

  “Nothing,” Takahashi said.

  Bella hammered again, as hard and regularly as she could manage. In vacuum, she heard nothing of her efforts. It was like hitting a mattress. “How about now?”

  “Do it again.”

  Bella hammered until she feared that the glove would rip apart from the force. “Talk to me, Mike.”

  “Someone heard you, Bella — I can hear voices again!”

  She hammered until her fist felt bloody. “Now?”

  “They’re hearing it, all right. Must mean they’re on the other side!”

  “I’m going to try cycling through. Coms might get patchy when the other door closes on me.”

  “We’ll be waiting for you.”

  “Good, but don’t wait too long. We may be wrong about the location of these people — they could be somewhere else in Eddytown, somewhere we can’t reach, or it might just be coms spillage from Crabtree after all.”

  “They heard you, Bella.”

  “They heard something. In any case, I don’t want that lander hanging around a minute longer than necessary.”

  Bella started the door sequence. When the outer door had sealed itself, air gushed in through floor vents. She tried raising Takahashi, but all she got was the hiss of static. He might have heard her, but she wasn’t picking up his reply. Not that it mattered much now, she told herself. Bella rested her weight against the airlock wall until the pressure climbed up to normal. Normally the inner door would have opened automatically once equalisation had been achieved, but the lock was running on a power-conserving mode. The lights had not come on, and she had to use manual controls to open the inner seal. She worked through the thick levers, the muscles in her arms aching from the effort of carrying extra weight.

  The door began to open, then jammed halfway.

  Lights stabbed into her eyes. People were crowded into a dimly lit room, some of them holding flashlights. She raised one hand, then tried to speak, hoping that they’d hear her through the helmet. “Who’s there?”

  “Who the hell are y
ou?” someone said, on a falling note.

  “The person who’s come to rescue you. You could at least try sounding jubilant.”

  A face loomed from the darkness as one of them lowered a light from her face. She recognised something in the face, if not the face itself.

  “Oh, hell. I’m sorry. I’m Andrew Dussen.”

  “Hank Dussen’s son,” Bella said.

  “We’re completely frazzled here. When we heard knocking… shit, it’s you, isn’t it?” Dussen turned to the other people huddled into the room. “It’s Bella! Bella Lind!”

  “What the hell is Bella Lind doing here?” someone else asked. “Not that we aren’t grateful to be rescued —”

  “But you were expecting someone taller?” Bella looked from face to face, recognising some but not others. None of them were wearing suits, and most of them looked cold and scared. “We know something bad happened here — we probably have more information than you do. I need to ask something: did Emily Barseghian make it out?”

  “I’m Emily,” said a voice from the back.

  “Your mother and father are here. They’re going to be pleased to hear you made it.”

  “They’re here?”

  “Just outside,” Bella said. “And we’re going to get all of you outside as soon as we can. There’s a complication, though. None of you have suits, and we can’t get a lander close enough to rig up a temporary docking tube.”

  “We’re all going to die,” someone said, voice thready with panic.

  “No, you’re not,” Bella said quickly. “We’re fetching you suits, same as the one I’m wearing. They’ll be good enough to get you to the ship. I have to go back into the lock to collect them.”

  “How many suits?” Emily asked.

  Bella looked into the face of Svetlana’s daughter, seeing a world of similarity and a world of difference. Svetlana’s red hair, but Parry’s eyes and nose, and something in the set of her mouth, the curve of her chin, that belonged to no one but Emily herself.

  “How many of you are there?”

  “Twenty-seven,” Emily said. They would already have counted heads to work out how much air and power they had to ration.