Pushing Ice (21 page)

“She had a choice.”

“She didn’t, not really. I know this is cutting Bella up really badly. She’s not enjoying one second of it. She thinks she’s destroyed a friendship, a really good one.”

“She’s the one ignoring the evidence.”

“No,” Parry said, gently but firmly, “she didn’t ignore it at all. She looked at it, weighed it, took it seriously, but it just didn’t convince her.” He sighed, kneading his red cap between his fingers in a strangely beseeching gesture, as if he had come to her in penitence. “Look, it isn’t all as bad as you think, anyway.”

“Looks pretty bad from where I’m sitting.”

“Bella hasn’t shut you out of everything — at least, no more than she has the rest of us. That’s what I meant when I said she wasn’t keeping you in the dark as much as you think.”

“I can’t see anything,” she said, “not even the news from home. Is that what you mean by not keeping me in the dark?”

“That,” Parry said, “is nothing to do with Bella at all, It’s the uplink antenna — they’re having problems picking up the signal.”

“What kinds of problem?”

“They don’t know what’s going on. It’s just that there’s nothing coming in on the uplink. Like the rest of the system’s gone off the air.”

“But they must have a team looking into it,” Svetlana said. “Haven’t they figured it out yet?”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“If Bella would only let me back into ShipNet,” she said, “then I might be able to look into it.”

“You’d do that?”

“I never asked to be removed from duty,” she said. “I just said I’d do everything in my power to turn us around.”

“And now?”

“That’s still true. But if Bella wants my input, she can have it.”

“I don’t know,” Parry said. “I’ll mention it to her, but I think she’ll probably wait and see what your team has to say first.”

“It can’t be anything complicated. How long have they been working on it?”

“About twelve hours,” Parry said.

NINE

Day twenty turned into day twenty-one. News filtered through to Svetlana via Parry: Janus had continued its obliging deceleration; in response, Bella had throttled the engine back to one-tenth of a gee.
Rockhopper
was now making its final approach to their initial study position, ten thousand kilometres astern of Janus.

If the former moon’s decelerating trend continued, it would soon be moving at constant velocity. The plan was to hold station at ten thousand kilometres for a day, then move in closer, to within a thousand kilometres of the surface. If Janus tolerated that, they would move closer still. By the third day of the five-day encounter, robots and unmanned autonomous vehicles would land on the artefact. If the robots and UAVs were permitted access, then people would follow. On day four they would limit themselves to passive surface investigations. If that went well, then on day five they would attempt to secure a physical sample of the machinery. They’d begin with microscopic scrapings and return each sample to
Rockhopper
, which by then would be standing off at a safe distance. If those small sample collections were successful, they would increase to larger specimens. On day six,
Rockhopper
would depart and Janus would fall away into the night, on its long ride to Spica.

There was still no news from home.

The technical team had been working on the problem for nineteen hours, but — so Svetlana’s informant told her — nothing they had done had shed any light on the problem.

Parry passed her a flexy. “Bella’s beginning to stew. If she wasn’t, she’d never have agreed to this.”

“She wants me to take a look at it?”

“She says that if you can find something, that would be good.”

As Svetlana’s hands moved over the hide-like skin of the display, she tumbled through ShipNet layers without obstruction.

“How long is she giving me?”

“As long as it takes,” Parry said. “There’s a technical note in your inbox — everything they’ve tried so far. It may give you a head start. There’s no point trying to slow or stop the ship, Bella says — as soon as you go anywhere near critical systems, they’ll lock you out.”

“Who led this repair team?”

“Belinda Pagis and Mengcheng Yang. They’ve been working around the clock.”

She nodded, for those were the names she would have pencilled in for the repair duty. “Did anyone EVA?”

“No — too dangerous under thrust, given the location of the antenna. I wouldn’t sign off one of
my
people to go outside, put it like that.”

She had expected as much. “Robots?”

“We’ve already had Jens Fletterick look at it with one of the free-flier remotes — there’s a video clip in the tech note. Doesn’t seem to be any external damage to the antenna, no blown servos, but maybe you’ll see something everyone’s missed.”

“I’ll look at it,” she said dubiously. “Is Jens still on shift?”

Parry glanced at his big multi-dialled diver’s watch. “I don’t think so. Should be catching up on some sleep now. Why?”

“I’d like to talk to Jens, or anyone in Saul’s robotics team.”

“That’ll have to go through Bella, I’m afraid. What are you thinking?”

“Something we should try,” she said.

* * *

Janus loomed as large in
Rockhopper’s
sky as a full moon seen from the Earth: a bright clenched fist peppered with tiny islands of ice amidst seas of dark, glinting mechanism.

Rockhopper
was unspeakably close to it now: a mere twenty thousand kilometres from the object’s machine-clotted surface. Soon they would halve that distance and come to a watchful halt relative to the moon. There had been no hint of a reaction from the alien thing; no warning to keep their distance. Equally, beyond the fact of the moon’s slowing, there had been no invitation to come closer either.

Bella finished a cigarette as the nurse arrived with Svetlana. There was no physical contact between Svetlana and the nurse, but Judy Sugimoto never strayed more than a metre from her charge. Discreetly, but not so discreetly that Svetlana wouldn’t have been aware of it, Sugimoto carried a sedative syringe, ready to be jabbed into the other woman’s arm if she turned difficult.

“You didn’t have to go to all this trouble,” Svetlana said. “We could have met at my place.”

“If I could have kept this to just the two us, perhaps that might have worked,” Bella said. “Obviously, that wasn’t an option.”

Craig Schrope clicked his pen. He sat behind Bella’s desk, leaning back in the seat. “Parry said you might have an angle on the uplink issue.”

“I asked to see Saul Regis.”

“Saul’s on his way. In the meantime, we’d like to know why you think he can help. We’ve already had a robot look the thing over, and there’s no sign of damage. Diagnostic software hasn’t flagged any mechanical issues.” He fingered his clean-shaven jaw. “So what’s the deal, Barseghian? Can a robot help us, or have you just cooked up some new scheme to sabotage the mission?”

He had said her surname with exaggerated care, as if everyone else in the world mispronounced it. Svetlana took an angry step closer to Schrope. “I’m trying to help here, you sanctimonious prick.”

“Easy,” Schrope said, snapping his fingers at Judy Sugimoto. The nurse took gentle hold of Svetlana and pulled her back, bewildered but obedient.

“I appreciate that you offered to look into this,” Bella said, choosing her words diplomatically. “I removed you from duty and placed you under arrest. At that point your obligations to me ended.”

“Where is this going?” Svetlana asked.

“I’m just saying: you’ve never disappointed me. No matter what happens to us, I’m still proud that we were friends. I’d like to think that one day we might be able to put —”

“Did you look at the video feed?” Schrope asked Svetlana, cutting across Bella.

“Yes.”

“Did you see anything wrong with the uplink system?”

“Nothing,” Svetlana said, speaking to Bella rather than Schrope. “The system looks okay, inside and out. That’s why I wanted to bring in Saul. I had another idea, something we should at least rule out.”

“Go on,” Craig Schrope said.

But Bella spoke before Svetlana had a chance. “According to Parry, you wanted to talk to Saul about the feasibility of dropping a free-flier behind the ship, possibly to a distance where we’d run a risk of losing the flier. Is that the case?”

“It wouldn’t have to be a robot, if we could instrument a package and send it back instead. But a robot would be quicker.”

“What are you worried about?”

“I’ll tell you,” Svetlana said, “but I want to negotiate first.”

Schrope nodded curtly at Sugimoto. “Take her away. I’ve had enough.”

Sugimoto was moving apologetically towards Svetlana when Bella raised a hand. “I can’t let you go free. You know that much.”

“I know you won’t turn this ship around, either: not until you’ve had a closer look at Janus. So I’ll work with what’s on the table. I’ll help you with the uplink if you agree to something else.”

Bella waited. She made a little inviting gesture with her hand. “I’m listening.”

“You cut down the time at Janus, from five days to one. We spend only twenty-four hours at the initial study point.”

“Completely unacceptable,” Schrope said.

“Hear me out,” Svetlana said. “What I’m proposing will still give you solid science. Even if you don’t put people down on Janus, you can still send robots. It doesn’t matter if we abandon them there: we can keep teleoperating them until we reach an unworkable timelag, and even then we can still upload command sequences. They can carry on exploring Janus while we’re on our way home.”

“That was always the plan,” Schrope said. “You’re not giving us anything that we didn’t already have.”

“I’m giving you an uplink.”

“
If
you can fix it. From where I’m sitting, this looks like a bluff.”

“I can’t do what you’re asking,” Bella said, shaking her head. “I can’t come all this way, representing the entire human species, and then say that we decided to turn tail as soon as we arrived.”

“I’m talking about twenty-four hours, Bella — that’s still a lot of time. Throw some of that caution away and I’m sure you can still achieve most of the objectives.”

“Look at the damned thing,” Bella said, gesturing to the image of Janus. “Look at that and tell me it’s going to take anything less than a century to do it justice.”

“Then five days won’t be enough either,” Svetlana said reasonably. “Given that, the difference between one and five doesn’t seem so bad.”

Bella closed her eyes, wondering how things had ever come to this. She wanted to be able to walk out of her office, take a holiday and then return to this precise moment in the conversation, only this time sharpened like a new tool.

“I can give you something,” she said, “but not everything you want. I’ll concede to three days at Janus.”

“Still unacceptable,” Schrope said.

“For the first time in my life, I agree with Craig,” Svetlana said, with what sounded like genuine regret. “Three days is too long.”

“That’s my final offer,” Bella said.

There was a knock at the door. Saul Regis entered and studied the room’s occupants with his usual reptilian equanimity, betraying neither surprise nor particular interest.

“You had a shot at redeeming yourself,” Schrope told Svetlana. “You blew it. But it doesn’t matter. I think I know what you have in mind.”

“Svetlana,” Bella said, “please: I’m giving you one last chance. Help us. Help us and then maybe we can talk again.”

“Sorry,” she answered. “Cast-iron guarantees up front. That’s the only thing I’ll settle for.”

Schrope clapped his hands together. “Okay, looks like we’re about done here. Saul: can you spare a free-flier? I’ll bet money that Svetlana’s idea was to drop a robot behind the ship, carrying a radio transmitter configured to match the output frequency and strength of the Earth uplink signal. Am I right?” He looked at her for a moment, then turned back to Regis. “She thinks the uplink antenna might be working fine, but that there might be a problem with the signal.”

“What kind of problem?” Bella asked, instinctively directing the question to Svetlana.

Svetlana, to her surprise, answered. Perhaps she realised she had nothing to gain from silence. “The uplink system is working normally,” she said, sounding defeated. “The problem isn’t at our end.”

“Earth has a problem?”

“That’s the idea,” Schrope said, “but we won’t know for sure until we test it.”

Bella shook her head, unable to accept that this was the answer. “Earth has gone off-air before,” she said, “but only for minutes at a time, when they have a problem with the alignment. This has been going on for twenty-three hours now.”

Schrope shrugged. “So it’s more than a glitch.”

“Surely they’d have locked a back-up dish onto us by now.”

“
If
they know there’s a problem. Maybe everything looks fine at their end. We’re thirteen hours out now. We’ve been sending error signals back to Earth ever since we lost the feed, but even if they got those messages and acted on them immediately, we won’t know about it for another three hours.”

Bella absorbed the information, mentally conjuring up a picture of the system’s web of radio transmissions. Telecommunications around the Sun were pushed to the limit of data-crammed efficiency, which meant high-power signals squeezed into tight, pencil-thin beams between designated senders and receivers. Only one transmitter had been assigned to
Rockhopper
, and that beam carried every byte of information uploaded to the ship, from personal plaintext messages to the flood of data from the global news networks.
Rockhopper
was too far out to intercept any other communications unless they were deliberately aimed at the ship.

“There’s nothing else we can tap into?” Bella asked. “No omni-directional signals?”

“Too faint,” Schrope said. “All the catalogued beacons are too far away for us to pick up at this range.”

“
All
of them? What about the beacon we left behind — the one we tagged on the mass driver we were going to use on the last comet —”