Pushing Ice (42 page)

“It does.” He looked down at the picture again, stretching it between his hands like a scroll. “It’s lovely. Lovely and a little sad, but in a good way. Do you like your rocking horse?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“I’ll make you another one when you’re bigger, but this fellow should do you for now.”

“It’s very kind of you, Uncle Wang,” Svetlana said.

“I’m glad I can make something,” he said, shrugging.

She smiled quickly and looked away, not wanting to acknowledge the unspoken truth that hung between them. Stools and rocking horses were all very well, but no amount of colourful wangwood knickknacks was ever going to make up for the failing flexies.

Svetlana ate a meal with Emily, and then they spoke to Parry on the link to Underhole. Parry asked Emily what she had been doing in school today, and promised he would see her soon. He put on a brave face, but Svetlana could see something there that he did not want his daughter to pick up on.

When Emily was asleep, Svetlana dosed herself up with black-market coffee, signed out an Orlan and drove back to Underhole, gunning the tractor at fifty kilometres per hour. Everyone was still awake when she cycled through the lock. They had been waiting for her.

“I think we know where we are,” Parry said, an edge of unease clouding his voice.

Pagis had finished stitching together the raster data. She had also begun to get a handle on the data from the deep-penetration radar.

“So tell me,” Svetlana said, as she struggled out of the bulky suit.

“We’re inside a tube-shaped structure,” Pagis said, directing Svetlana’s attention to the mosaic image spread across the flexy array. “The walls are dark, but there are filaments in them — wavy glowing tracks, a bit like the lava lines. They’re peaking at about five thousand five hundred angstroms, which is why everything looks yellow-orange out there. We haven’t seen any transits moving on them, but it does look like a similar technology.”

“If the Spicans have brought us here, then maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised by that,” Svetlana said.

“That’s what we figured.”

The raster image looked like the view down a drainpipe, with perspective traced by the converging density of the wavy, intertangled lava lines.

“The first echo I got was off the nearside wall,” Pagis said. ‘The tube’s about one hundred and sixty thousand klicks across, so we’re floating pretty near the middle. We’re getting optical data about two hundred thousand klicks down the shaft — we’d see further if we had a better cam.“

“And the radar?”

“The radar bounces are coming back from much further down. We’re reaching two and half light-seconds into the tube before the echo peters out. It isn’t a smooth spectrum of return times — there must be irregularities in the cladding acting as discrete reflecting surfaces.”

“And beyond the last echo?”

“Anyone’s guess. One thing we can be pretty sure of, though: the tube reaches further than we can see.”

“And in the other direction?”

“Our view’s not as good since Janus is in the way, but there’s nothing to suggest we wouldn’t see a similar picture.”

Svetlana looked at Parry. “You said you knew where we are. Are you going to let me in on the secret?”

“It’s not a secret. We’re exactly where we expected to be after two hundred and sixty light-years. We’ve achieved slowdown. We’re at Spica.”

“And the Spican structure?”

He smiled gently. “We’re in it, babe.”

“I don’t —”

“Remember the scale of that thing? We always did have a hard time getting our heads around it. It looked skeletal, but remember what Bella said?”

She bridled at the name. “What?”

“Just one of those longitudinal spars would have the internal surface area of fifty thousand Earths. A million Earths’ worth in the entire structure. Well, I think we’re in one of those spars now. Or maybe one of the cross-connectors. The numbers fit. If it’s a longitudinal spar, the tube could be three light-minutes long. If we’re seeing two and half light-seconds into it, there’s still a hell of a lot more tube down here.”

“We have to know for sure,” she said. “We’ve been inside one cage for four hundred days. I don’t like the idea of punching through and finding another set of walls out there.”

“I agree absolutely,” Parry said vehemently.

“And what kind of fucking welcome committee is this anyway?” Irrational, directionless anger rose in her like bile. “We’ve come all this way — been
dragged
all this way — and all that happens is they drill a hole in the sky and then
fuck off
.”

“There’s no sign of alien presence out there,” Pagis said timidly. “We did get a weird transient echo off something for a while, but it didn’t show up again.”

Svetlana rubbed tired eyes. She was close to tears, close to some kind of breaking point she did not want any of them to see. “What kind of echo?”

“Something small, something local.”

“Maybe one of their probes, leaving?” Parry said.

“Don’t think so,” Pagis said. “If the probes showed up on radar, we’d have already seen them. This was a big fat bounce, with a hint of rotation. Then it was gone.”

Parry looked keen. “So maybe there is something out there.”

“Or was,” Svetlana said.

The opening of the sky had offered them hope. That was why they had all been so keen for it to stay open, for that glint of dawn to hold steady and true. But beyond the Iron Sky was just another kind of Iron Sky: more distant, more enormous, more inhuman, more oppressive.

Svetlana felt crushed. She knew that everyone else was feeling it as well but was desperately trying not to show it, as if by an act of collective denial they could pretend that this was somehow good news.

“Wait,” Svetlana said, pressing fingers to her eyelids. “I know what it was you saw. It must have been a piece of our junk: the free-fliers that were still in the slipstream when the sky sealed up. They must have been out there all this time.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Pagis said glumly. “I was hoping it might be something more… exciting.”

“Maybe this is as good as it’s going to get.”

“It’s still early days,” Parry said, forcing strained optimism into his voice. “Someone drilled through the sky, and they must have done it for a reason. Just because we don’t see them immediately, it doesn’t mean they won’t be back.”

“We can go out and look for them,” Pagis said suddenly. “Fuel up
Crusader
or
Avenger
, see what’s really out there. At the very least we need to see deeper into the tube.”

“At least that way we’d be doing something,” Parry agreed, “instead of just sitting down here, waiting for them to make the next move.”

“What if there is no next move?” Svetlana asked. “What if they’ve let us out of one cage into another, and that’s
it
— end of story?”

“I can’t believe that,” Parry said. “We were brought here for a reason, not just to be locked away in a pipe for the rest of eternity.”

She looked at him sullenly. “Maybe that
was
the reason.”

“Even godlike aliens have to act rationally — don’t they?”

“I wouldn’t know,” she said. “I can’t recall ever meeting any.”

They sat in a brooding silence for half a minute. Svetlana looked at the flexy array again, with its intimations of further mysteries. Parry and Pagis were right, of course: they had waited thirteen years for something to study beyond Janus itself — some key to the deeper purpose behind the deceitful moon. It had brought them here, and it had kept them alive during the flight. Maybe all that had been accidental, and they’d simply hitched a ride in the slipstream of something that neither knew of nor cared about their existence.

But maybe it hadn’t.

“All right,” she said, trying to shrug aside her own sense of fatalistic hopelessness. “We take a look down the tube. We’ll send a free-flier first and see what we turn up.”

* * *

It wasn’t good news.

The probe encountered the end of the tube two light-minutes downstream from Janus. First its radar began to detect bounces from a solid structure blocking the tube; closer, lidar and the optical cam recorded a circular plate one hundred and sixty thousand kilometres across, snugly filling the tube.

By then, the free-flier had consumed most of its fuel and was speeding towards the end wall at its terminal velocity. The final images, transmitted back to Crabtree just before impact, revealed the presence of radial spokes running from the rim to a smaller wheel-shaped structure at the plate’s centre, a mere thousand kilometres across. The grainy pictures suggested that the wheel-shaped structure was etched with inwardly curving lines, like the diaphragm in an old camera.

“It’s a door,” Svetlana said.

No one saw any reason to argue with her.

But the door was closed. It looked immeasurably ancient and heavy, like something that hadn’t moved in a million years. The free-flier dashed itself against the structure like a gnat against a dam. If it left a smear, there was no trace of it when a second free-flier sent back another set of images.

A third free-flier had also been dispatched in the opposite direction. One light-minute up the tube, it encountered a blank endcap with no trace of any doorlike mechanisms.

It died as well.

Svetlana had deemed that a trio of free-fliers could be sacrificed in the interests of speedy data acquisition, but that was as many machines as Crabtree could afford to lose. Further investigations would need to be made using recoverable craft, slowly, with the minimal expenditure of fuel and logistics. At least now they knew that the tube was finite, and that there was nothing immediately threatening inside it. That, she supposed, could be construed as a kind of good news. But it was also bad, since there was still no sign of an alien welcoming committee. And the door and endcap both had the brutal look of something impenetrably thick, so thick that even their demolition nukes would be lucky to leave a scratch on them. They had established the parameters of their new prison and the situation was not encouraging.

That left the other piece of news.

They had found something tumbling end-over-end in orbit around Janus. It was the object Pagis had already picked up on the free-flier radar, but Svetlana’s original guess had been wrong. It was not one of the old free-fliers that had been monitoring the slipstream when the Iron Sky had appeared. Of those, there was no longer any trace. This was something else, and it was not remotely what anyone had been expecting.

In a way it was good news, because it was a concrete sign that their arrival had been noticed and — unlike the opening of the sky — it appeared to be a message addressed specifically to them.

The bad news was that it was odd, unsettling and devoid of useful content, and ever so slightly threatening.

It was a solid cube
exactly
two metres along each side, and very black, although not so black that it hadn’t thrown back a radar bounce. A manipulator-equipped free-flier was able to approach the object, touch it and stabilise its tumble. It massed
precisely
two hundred metric tonnes, but appeared otherwise quite inert and unresponsive. Svetlana weighed the risks and decided to permit the object to be brought back to Underhole for further study. A dome was thrown around the cube, initially unpressurized. Once a battery of tests had established that the cube probably wouldn’t be harmed by the presence of air — it appeared to be chemically inert — the dome was flooded with a normal atmospheric trimix. Denise Nadis, Josef Protsenko and Christine Ofria-Gomberg were running tests on the cube when Svetlana came to visit them a day after the dome had been pressurised.

In the harsh floods rigged around it, the cube was dismayingly black. Its surface albedo was exactly 0.999999, to the limits of measurement. As it rotated on the electric turntable installed under it, the cube became a chunk of abstract form, almost appearing to ooze from one shape to another as it turned from face to face. It was surrounded by monitoring devices mounted on spindly tripods, trailing tangles of optical data cables and thick, frayed, heavy-duty power lines.

The cube was smooth on all but one of its six faces. X-ray and acoustic probing revealed no hints of interior structure. Surface analysis, using atomic-force microscopes, drew blank on the matter of the object’s composition. For an artefact that had presumably spent some time in space, even in the hermetic environment inside the tube, it was astonishingly free of imperfections. The cube’s edges were still absurdly sharp.

Must be self-renewing, the science team informed Svetlana: stuffed full of sleek alien nanotech, correcting any fault or imperfection before it had a chance to register. No chemical analysis was possible because the surface was itself in a state of constant overhaul and flux. If they had better tools, they said ruefully, they might have been able to glimpse these processes in action.

Except — as they all knew — the nanotech might not be alien at all. The cube’s dimensions and mass suggested prior knowledge of human measurement systems.

But that was not all.

The sixth face contained an engraving.

It was turning towards her now. By some trick of surface effects, the finger-thick lines of the engraving had a higher albedo than the surrounding face. It was da Vinci’s drawing of a man standing in a box, one of the most familiar and iconic diagrams imaginable. It had been stylised, reduced to the essentials, but it was still recognisable. It seemed unlikely that any alien mind had created this cube.

The technical team wore masks, gloves and surgical scrubs, but that was just a token precaution: nothing they’d measured had suggested that the cube was in any way harmful. It just sat there, revolving slowly on the turntable, presenting five blank faces and then the da Vinci design.

“You can touch it if you like,” Denise Nadis said, handing her a pair of recyclable surgical gloves inlaid with a matrix of haptic sensors. “We’ve all done it. It’s almost like a ritual. You don’t really believe it’s
there
until you’ve pressed a hand against it.”