Pushing Ice (41 page)

Something was happening.

She sent out another party of tractors, six this time, but again they found nothing. Finally she sent out
Star Crusader
, hoping that the lander — with its engine glow, floods and elevated trajectory — might see something that the tractors and the earlier free-flier had missed.

It did.

The ice crater was wide but shallow, easy to miss amidst the ridged and wrinkled landscape. A trail showed where a tractor had passed within metres of its edge. At the base of the crater was a black disc, like a fat coin lying flat on one side. Its edge flung back reflected light, as if it had been polished to a high sheen.

Crusader
landed. Parry and Naohiro Uguru went out in Orlan nineteen hard-suits. They picked their way over the crater wall, then down to the coin-shaped object. The closer they got to it, the more massive and foreboding it became. It had looked quite small from the lander, but distance and scale were always difficult to judge on Janus. Up close, it seemed impossibly huge. It was ten metres thick, perhaps sixty metres across. As they approached, warped versions of Parry and Naohiro loomed in the reflective edge, wide as monsters.

“This must be what made all that noise,” Parry said.

Uguru touched the mirrored edge with a gloved knuckle, the way firefighters were taught to test wires that might be carrying electricity. “It’s cold,” he said, as the glove’s thermal read-out updated on his HUD, “cold and slippery as ice. What do you think cut this edge so cleanly?”

“Good question, buddy.”

But Parry was already looking up, craning back as far as he could go. He crunched elementary trigonometry. If the disc was sixty metres wide and the Iron Sky twenty kilometres above his head, then he was looking for a hole about a third of the apparent diameter of the full moon seen from Earth… if he could remember what a full moon looked like.

But the Iron Sky was black, and there might well be total darkness on the other side of the hole. If the hot blue radiation of the Spica binary was shining through the hole, they would have detected it already: it would have lit up Janus like a welding torch in a dark room.

But unless the sky had healed itself, the hole had to be up there. It was just a question of finding it. They would worry about who had cut it later.

“This is good, isn’t it?” Uguru said. “It means someone’s opened the tin. It means someone knows we’re here.”

Parry looked at him, recalling a similar conversation with Mike Takahashi, thirteen years and two hundred and sixty light-years ago.

“Could go either way,” he said.

* * *

It was many years since events had moved so quickly on Janus. There was inertia at first, as if a once-great machine was now so encrusted with oil and filth that it could barely turn a cog. But once the movement began, it had no choice but to continue. Resources were reallocated and committed. Teams were broken up and reassembled in new formations. Crabtree hummed with expectation and rumour. Everywhere Svetlana went, everywhere her spies went, she heard the same thing: something
is
happening. Men, women and children alike were saying it, placing the emphasis on the second word, as if the events themselves needed encouragement, reassurance, to keep happening. The Iron Sky began to feel like a lifting depression. No one wanted the hole in the sky to close up again. It was like the first light of dawn after an appallingly long night.

Svetlana sent tractors out to drag the piece of sky back to Crabtree. She wanted to analyse it, cut it up, recycle it. There was more metal there (if indeed it was metal) than had ever been pilfered from the lava lines. Recovering it, however, turned out to be a more difficult task than she had anticipated: the harness kept slipping off the near-frictionless edges; the tractors couldn’t get enough grip to dislodge the disc from the depression it had stamped in the ice when it fell; none of their tools were sharp or strong enough to cut it into more manageable chunks. Svetlana permitted one abortive attempt to haul the disc out of the crater using the lander, then conceded defeat. It would have to stay where it was, for now.

By then, they had established a small hamlet of domes and equipment shacks around the crater. Someone started calling it Underhole, and the name stuck. A superconducting line was reeled out from Crabtree and a smoothly graded tractor route carved into the ice.

Twenty kilometres above Underhole, there was also activity. The hole in the sky had been located: scans had revealed a spot where the near-total absorption efficiency of the sky became perfect, as radiation escaped to the outside world. But it was not completely dark outside. In the optical and near-infrared, the hole glowed slightly more brightly than the surrounding regions. With dark-adapted eyes, and knowing exactly where to look, it could be seen from Underhole as a tiny circle of not-quite-absolute darkness. Its dimensions had been measured and found to match the piece that had dropped to the ground. The sky did not appear to be healing itself.

Reports of alien sightings gradually died down. Nothing had been seen coming or going through the hole since its discovery. Perhaps the alien machines had already seen all that they needed to. After much consideration, Svetlana decided that it was safe to take a look at what was on the other side. Belinda Pagis stripped a spare free-flier to the chassis, then welded on as much high-res survey gear as the power and telemetry bus could run. She utilised the equipment
Rockhopper
would once have trained on comets for the benefit of Nick Thale and the other analysts — deep-penetration radar, terrain-mapping lidar, supercooled photon-counting cams with intrinsic energy-resolution — tools to unravel every secret light or matter could hold. She bolted on massive floodlights and then even more massive fuel tanks and reaction thrusters to handle the swollen payload.

“Okay,” she said, when her new creation was ready, parked like a bright-yellow wasp on a cradle thirty metres from Underhole. “Let’s kick the tyres and light the fires.”

Pagis programmed a vector into the free-flier, fired up the thrusters to haul it off the ground and then watched as it made its way up to the hole. Twenty klicks over Underhole, she took the joystick and slowed the free-flier to a hover. It nosed around the rim of the hole, recording the bright counterpart to the mirrored edge on the piece of sky lying below. Measurement of the diameter established that the hole had been cut through with something astonishingly fine, for there was no measurable difference in size between the hole and the piece that had dropped out of it. Perhaps the cutting tool had simply persuaded the inter-atomic bonds to unzip along a precise line.

Pagis tipped the free-flier on end so that its forward cam pointed out through the hole. Svetlana and Parry crowded around the meagre little array of flexies that was the best they could assemble. Scratches and hexel dropouts blotted the image as the ailing gelware struggled to process the incoming telemetry. There wasn’t much to see: just a blank absence stained orange by the false-colour display, like the sodium-light sky over a big city. Graphics boxes framed the image portion, updating with line plots and columns of numbers. Once, they would have meant something to Svetlana, but now all she felt was a faint prickle of recollection. Fluency with mathematics — in the context of any kind of engineering discipline or physical science — was a use-it-or-lose-it skill.

In thirteen years, she had lost it badly. Now all she could do was brazen her way through and hope the likes of Pagis wouldn’t spot the mile-wide dropouts in her understanding.

“Radar?” Svetlana asked. “Seeing anything?”

“Not sure,” Pagis said, chewing on the tip of some strands of hair she had tugged into her mouth. “Something’s bouncing back at me, but I’m not sure if I believe what I’m seeing.”

“Could be backscatter off the edge of the hole,” Parry commented. “Used to get a lot of —”

“Ain’t backscatter,” Pagis said. “Too far out for that. Too damn faint, as well. Could be a logic ghost, something bouncing around in the overflow buffer… don’t think so, though.”

“How far out?” Svetlana asked.

“Eighty thousand kilometres — just over a quarter of a light-second.”

Once Svetlana would have laughed at such a small distance. It was nothing compared to the operational sphere of
Rockhopper
, carved up into entire light-hours. But for thirteen years her world had been two hundred kilometres across, and her mind had become accustomed to handling things on that scale. Now it struggled to make the mental adjustment back to the larger universe beyond the Iron Sky.

“We need to see what it is,” Svetlana said. “Take us through. Maybe we’ll have a better view on the other side.”

Pagis looked over her shoulder. “You sure about this?”

“Take us through.”

Pagis nudged the joystick and powered the free-flier up through the hole. The silver edge reflected back the free-flier’s lights, and then suddenly it was out, rising from the hole.

“Hold at one hundred metres,” Svetlana said.

Pagis nodded and brought the machine to a halt again, suspended on a breath of thrust.

“Pan around. Let’s take a look at the hole from the outside.”

Other than the glimpse they’d obtained from the upper surface of the fallen disc, this was their first view of the other side of the Iron Sky. At first glance, there was nothing very surprising about it. The outer side was as smooth and dark as the inside surface, at least as far out as the free-flier’s floodlights were capable of reaching. It raced away in all directions, black and flat as an oil slick, but with its own dull lustre.

“It’s a tiny bit more reflective than the inner surface,” Pagis announced, “but that’s about the only difference. I think I can already see the curvature in the backscatter. We can map it, if you like: there’s enough fuel in the free-flier for a couple of loops.”

“We’ll lose contact with it once it drops over the horizon, won’t we?” Parry said.

“Most likely, but the autopilot should bring it back, provided the inertial compass keeps working.”

“I want to find out where the hell we are first,” Svetlana said. “Are you still seeing that eighty-thousand-klick echo?”

“Still there,” Pagis confirmed, “although that’s only part of it. Now that we’re clear of the hole I’m seeing a spread of return times. There are reflective surfaces a lot further out than eighty thousand klicks — although the bounces are weaker.”

“How far are we talking?”

“Hundreds of thousands of kilometres. Entire light-seconds.”

“Pan the cam around, see if you can pick up anything else now you have a wider field of view.”

“I’m on it,” Pagis said, with a hint of irritation, as if she didn’t need to be told these things. Svetlana buttoned her lip — she was obviously trying too hard.

“Hey,” Parry said, “that looks like… something.”

“Yup. Looks like,” Pagis agreed.

Something was creeping into view as the free-flier changed its angle of study. The featureless orange background was still there, but now there was a kind of wavy line showing up along one side, like a glowing human hair trapped in the optics.

“Can you zoom in on that?” Svetlana asked.

“Sorry, no — didn’t have time to install a zoom platform.”

Svetlana nodded — she understood the pressure Pagis had been under to put the free-flier together. It was a miracle that they had any pictures at all. “Can you pull back, broaden the field of view?”

“Also a no-no, but we can raster scan the whole area — build up a picture in stripes and then stitch them together in flexy memory. It’ll take a little while, though. And we’ll be burning fuel like a bitch.”

“Do it — even if we don’t have enough left to make an orbit. We can always do that later. Right now I’d really like to know where we are.”

* * *

Lately on Janus, things had a habit of taking longer than anyone expected, even when this trend was taken into account. The simple business of making the raster scan and gluing the elements together to produce a single mosaic ought to have been child’s play. But the remaining flexies did not have enough combined memory to handle the image manipulation without some tricky algorithmic sleight of hand, which taxed Pagis’s ingenuity to its limits.

Svetlana knew better than to pressure her, and to avoid the temptation to breathe down her neck, she took a tractor back to Crabtree on the new road, enjoying the mindless pleasure of just driving, hypnotised by the endless flow of the superconducting line. Emily was just out of school that afternoon, so she took her daughter out to visit Wang Zhanmin, who (Emily remembered from the last visit) had promised her a rocking horse. Svetlana half-expected him to have forgotten, but he had it ready when they arrived, gleaming with vivid scarlet paint. Learning to make wood — or at least a close analogue of it — had been one of Wang’s recent breakthroughs, and he was intensely pleased with himself. In recent months the forge vats had been churning out the parts for wooden furniture, ornaments and toys faster than Crabtree could use them. The lab was bursting with these new creations. “I made you this,” Emily said, offering Wang a cardboard tube.

Wang popped the end on the tube and slid out a roll of paper. Svetlana looked over his shoulder. It was a painting of fish, swimming through rocks and fronds. The picture had been rendered with a childlike delight in the application of bright, clashing colours, but also a certain adult fastidiousness in the way the colours were never allowed to merge or blot. The sea was a joyous, saturated turquoise and the striped and mottled fish seemed to float an inch or two closer to the viewer, as if they had been etched on a sheet of glass resting on the background.

“Thank you,“ Wang said, holding the picture to the light so that the paper shone like stained glass. ”Anything to brighten this place up.” He looked at Svetlana and said, under his breath, ”Thank God for the kids.“

“You hear that a lot these days,” she replied quietly.

“I thought it would make you happy,” Emily said.