Pushing Ice (16 page)

Bella stopped the recording. “It’s the same as the last time — not exactly the same wording, but the sentiments haven’t changed.”

“I like the way he emphasises the ‘commercial’ bit,” Craig Schrope said. “As if he didn’t know this was a UEE mission with full diplomatic sanction.”

“The kid’s just following a script, saying what Beijing told him to say,” Bella said. “Look at it from their angle — why should they recognise our official status if we don’t recognise theirs?”

“Because China is a rogue state, and we’re a full member of the council. That’s good enough for me.”

Bella wondered how much the strain was showing. She had still not spoken to Schrope about the second piece of evidence Svetlana had brought to her attention, and that omission was eating away at her. She worried about what would happen when she received a follow-up reply from home, as she had requested. She had hoped, guiltily, that the Chinese matter would resolve itself and leave her with only that one major problem to deal with.

Unfortunately, Beijing’s beautiful creation, with its staggered, subtly pagoda-like lines, continued to function flawlessly. The fusion engine had been notched up to a fearful two gees, which would permit an even longer study window. Had the race been equal, with
Rockhopper
and the
Shenzhou Five
starting the run to Janus from the same position, there was no doubt that the Chinese would have been the clear victors. Already the
Shenzhou Five
had come within five light-minutes of
Rockhopper
. No distance at all out in the long, empty light-hours beyond the Kuiper Cliff. They would have to come closer, too, as both ships converged on the same target.

“You may as well hear the rest of it,” Bella said.

“I’ll pass. Do we ever get to see anyone else, or is it always this one kid?”

“Just Wang,” Bella said. “Maybe he’s the only one Beijing trusts to talk to us. We still don’t know exactly how many people they’ve got aboard that thing — the Chinese are talking as if there’re dozens, but that might be an exaggeration.”

“Doesn’t matter, anyway. We only need one of them to understand our response.”

“No one’s discussed a response,” Bella said. “It isn’t for us to decide who gets to crawl over Janus.”

“That’s the point — we don’t
have
to decide. The UEE has decided for us. They’ve given us the mandate.”

“C’mon, Craig.” Bella looked at him reasonably, trying to crack the poker face of the man who had broken the Shalbatana bore. “You know what that really means.”

“It means Wang the Man can take his ball home.”

“No, it means Powell pulled strings in Niagara Falls. He said as much himself. You know how tight he is with Inga de Jong.”

“DeepShaft has a seat on the Security Council,” Schrope said, with pedantic slowness. “It’s not exactly breaking news that Powell has some leverage in UEE affairs.”

“I think it goes a bit deeper than that,” Bella said. “I think Powell knew how hot a commercial opportunity Janus was going to be. Maybe we’re flying under a flag of convenience now, but do you think anyone’s really going to care about that when we head back home with our cargo bay full of world-changing technologies?”

“So we get a bite at the big cherry.” Schrope shrugged in his best no-big-deal way. “In case you’ve forgotten, it’s a cherry that could very well kill us. We’re taking a risk here. I suggest you point the greed finger somewhere else.”

“I’m not pointing the…” Bella trailed off, wary of losing it with Schrope. He was her subordinate, so she was entitled to cuff him down, but something always held her back. Schrope had strong political connections within the company that ran all the way to Powell Cagan. After his good work in Shalbatana, in spite of all the enemies he had made, Schrope was the new golden boy.

Bella had links to Cagan, too, but hers were of a different kind; perhaps they even worked against her. Before
Rockhopper
, even before Garrison, she had been Cagan’s favourite. She had pushed hard on doors, but Cagan had made them open for her. He had helped her rise fast in the organisation, faster than could be accounted for by any measure of skill or ambition — neither of which Bella lacked — and she had believed that this was all there was to it, and that there would not be a price to be paid.

She knew now that there was always a price. Nothing that looked good was ever free, especially where men like Powell Cagan were involved.

He had wanted more than just a talented protégée. He had sucked Bella into a sexual relationship that she had been naive enough, even at the age of thirty, to believe was the real thing. Cagan was twenty-two years older than her, and an exceptionally wealthy man. For a year she had shared the luminous glamour of his world, with its private jets and private islands. Then Cagan’s wandering eye had strayed to someone younger and Bella had found herself promoted off-Earth with no warning: one day the private jet took her to a launch complex instead of an island and that had been that.

Bella was in orbit before she realised what had happened. The promotion was a masterstroke: it was everything she had worked for up till then — and it was Cagan’s way of getting her out of his life without having to feel a moment’s guilt.

At the time she had been too numb to feel hatred or sorrow; instead she was ashamed and embarrassed that she had misread the rules of the game that were so childishly clear to everyone else. She never quite understood how she could have been the only one who hadn’t known from the beginning that this was how it would — it
must
— end.

Other men might have had problems with the idea of a spurned lover remaining in the same company, but Cagan’s capacity for remorse didn’t stretch that far. When they spoke, he appeared completely untroubled by their past; he would even occasionally allude to their time together with a nostalgic twinkle in his eye, assuming perhaps that Bella looked back on their liaison with the same rosy glow of retrospection — as if their separation had been a matter of dignified mutual consent.

Losing Powell Cagan hadn’t been the end of her life; Bella met Garrison not long after and their few years together had been good times — right up until that sour end. Garrison she kept in her heart; beyond a thin contempt, she felt nothing for Cagan. She had long ago vowed that her feelings would not impinge on their professional relationship: the CEO was an abstract figure who had nothing in common with the man who had so coldly disposed of her. For a long time that had worked: running
Rockhopper
gave her a certain independence from company control, but Janus was changing all that. The UEE business was already more than she needed.

Schrope had rotated aboard long before Janus hit the headlines, but Bella had had doubts about the real reason for his transfer from the start. Even if Cagan didn’t particularly care about Bella one way or the other, he might want better things for his new protégée, and a captaincy wasn’t out of the question. With his connections, Schrope could make life difficult for Bella if he chose. When she went out of her way to defend him, as she had done with Svetlana, it was as much to convince herself as anyone else.

With Schrope, she always felt as if he was trying to make her say something she would later regret — something that would count against her in the minutes of a professional-conduct tribunal. That was why she always bit her tongue when talking to him.

So many things had been better before Jim Chisholm had fallen ill. Now, whenever she was about to fly off the handle with Schrope, she tried to imagine Jim sitting with her in the room, a warning look on his face.

“All I’m saying,” she said, as nicely as she could manage, “is why don’t the Chinese deserve their own bite at the cherry?”

“It’s our call,” Schrope said.

“But why does the UEE get to decide on Janus? Last time I checked, Janus was an alien artefact. Maybe I skipped a line of small print, but I don’t think there’s anything in the charter that says Inga and her pals automatically get first dibs.”

“If that was a problem for the Chinese, they shouldn’t have got themselves kicked out of the club for messing around with stuff they didn’t know how to handle.” He sounded stern. The Chinese had kept on experimenting with nanotech despite pressure from the other member economic entities, and eventually it had blown up in their faces. When twinkling grey mould ate half of Nanjing, China had been expelled from the UEE.

Even now there were lingering rumours of sabotage: that agents of those industrial concerns with a vested interest in preserving a world without nanotech had infiltrated the Nanjing facility and made the replicators go haywire. No one took
that
very seriously, but Bella could still not shake the feeling that the Chinese had been victimised in some subtle way. Although she did not necessarily approve of everything that they had done (and everything that they continued to do, outside UEE control) she could not bring herself to loathe them for wanting to take a look at Janus as well.

It seemed perfectly human to her.

“Look,” she said, “if nothing goes wrong with their ship, they’re going to get there whether we like it or not. Since that’s going to happen anyway, maybe we should at least consider the possibility of cooperation.”

“They can cooperate by keeping the hell away from us,” Schrope said, “or do I need to remind you about the exclusion zone?”

“It’s one light-second wide,” Bella said, exasperated. “It’s a legalistic abstraction that no one actually takes seriously.”

“It’s still a line in the sand. The moment they cross that —”

“What?” She had a sudden sinking feeling.

“We’re entitled to a robust response. You know perfectly well that we’re capable of giving one.”

* * *

On the fourteenth day, one week away from the Janus encounter, Powell Cagan’s face reappeared on Bella’s flexy. Wherever the CEO was calling from now was white with intense, heart-wrenching light, bleeding the colour from the day. He sat outside at a white table on a white-walled veranda. The tops of blue-grey trees poked above the wall and in the distance there were sun-parched treeless mountains, blank, like bleached paper cut-outs.

“Bella,” Cagan said, assuming an actorly calm, “forgive the intrusion, but I thought this too important to leave to plaintext. If you are not alone, might I suggest that you excuse yourself: you should ensure that you and you alone are seeing this message.” He spread his hands then brought them back together, as if giving her time to pause the recording, but she was already in her quarters, secure and alone. “I’ll continue when you give voice authorisation.”

“Go on, Powell,” she whispered.

“What I have to impart is not entirely good news,” Cagan said. In the unflattering noonday light his skin had the same leathery quality as the surface of the flexy. Burnt a raw red, it was the only real colour in the image. “But I’ll start with the good news. One hundred and twenty hours at Janus is still practical, provided you ditch the remaining mass drivers on the return leg. You’ll be moving a little too fast to make orbit around Earth or Mars, but that won’t be a problem. We can get your crew off
Rockhopper
with shuttles, and then use tugs to refuel her tanks for a slow-down. Frankly, though, we’ll happily scupper
Rockhopper
: the old boat will have more than earned her keep by the time she brings you home.”

A thought formed in her head:
Why are you telling me this, Powell? I already know this
.

“So you don’t need to worry about any of that,” he said, with a flicker of a smile. Then his tone turned grave. “But you do need to worry about Svetlana Barseghian.”

Bella narrowed her eyes as she mouthed the woman’s name.

“I don’t know how delicately I can put this,” Powell said, “but this whole business with the pressure measurements has opened a rather distressing can of worms. Now, I know Barseghian has a good track record, but something disturbing is still happening here. We think she may be undergoing some kind of —” And here Cagan hesitated, as if searching for the right words, but Bella knew him better than that. There was nothing spontaneous or unscripted about Powell Cagan.

He found the words he had appeared to be searching for and continued, “It’s some kind of stress-related episode; a crisis brought on by the pressure of the Janus mission. This all started after the death of Mike Takahashi, didn’t it? The death of a colleague —” He corrected himself. “The
unpleasant
death of a colleague, a death that was unavoidably linked to the mission itself. We all handle that sort of thing in different ways, Bella. Most of us pick up the pieces and get on with our jobs, and we go on doing that day in, day out, year after year, through death after death. But for some of us there comes a day when it happens and suddenly we don’t pick up the pieces. We become them. I’m afraid that’s what appears to have happened to Svetlana Barseghian.”

“No,” Bella said, as if that negation might in some way influence the message Cagan had recorded many hours earlier.

“She’s clearly been badly affected by that death,” he said. “Her nerve has snapped, and she can’t face going through with the rest of the mission. She can’t back out either. Nor, for that matter, can she admit the true nature of her problem. But the mind is a resourceful thing. When a psychological need exists, it finds ways and means.”

Cagan leaned back from whatever flexy or cam was capturing his speech. For a moment Bella saw a stricken expression cloud his face, his features caught in a moment of disfiguring psychic stress.

“This isn’t easy,” he said. “I’m not for one minute suggesting that any of this was premeditated or consciously engineered, but the evidence at our end is beyond dispute. Barseghian’s version of events is not the truth. The data she claimed was from the buffer memory was data that she had falsified.”

“No,” Bella said again.

“It was vital to her that she find a way to undermine your confidence in the mission,” Powell went on inexorably, “but there was no way to do that without creating a lie. As I say, I doubt that she was even aware of that motivation. She’s probably quite
sincere
in her delusion. But the simple fact remains that she can no longer be trusted to execute her duties. In seven days you will be at Janus, Bella. You will be operating not just under the aegis of DeepShaft, but also as an envoy of the United Economic Entities. You will be acting for all humankind. There can be no room for mistakes, no room for misjudgements. It is imperative that you reach your target with a crew in whom you can have absolute confidence. That means you have to act immediately. You can’t wait until Barseghian makes another error. You have to remove her now, before things become worse. You must do so quickly and cleanly, so that you have time to restore operational structure — and morale, of course — before your arrival.”