Pushing Ice (45 page)

Suddenly deflated, unable to stand up even in the weak gravity of Underhole, Svetlana sank into the seat opposite Axford. “He was trying to get a cam onto it.”

“Hallucination doesn’t preclude a rational response to that same hallucination.”

Parry eased into the seat next to Svetlana and held her hand, massaging her fingers. They were always stiff after an EVA. “Ryan’s got a point,” he said softly. “We both heard that little sermon Craig made before he went up the ramp. He was already on the edge before things turned bad.”

“He saw something,” she said, but now it sounded mechanical, her own defiance thin and unconvincing. Denise Nadis pushed a drink and a foil-wrapped lunch in front of her, but Svetlana shook her head. There was an acrid taste in her mouth and she had no appetite, no thirst.

“We need to consider our next response,” Parry said, when the silence between them had grown uncomfortable. “If we took a hardsuit, beefed up the coms —”

“Gravity would still get you,” Murray said, examining Svetlana’s helmet with a jeweller’s squinting attentiveness.

“Not if we pumped out the air and replaced it with an oxygenated solution —”

Svetlana banged her unopened drinking bulb against the table. “Stop treating this like a fucking engineering problem, all right? A man just died in there. No one else is going back inside.”

“We can’t just leave him there,” Parry said, incredulous.

“That’s exactly what we’re going to do. I don’t give a fuck about any macho code of conduct horseshit.” She closed her eyes, lowered her voice to something like a normal speaking tone. “I’m not adding to the death toll just to retrieve a corpse.”

“We need his suit, Svieta,” Parry said gently. “His cam was logging to memory the whole while. If he did see anything — and you seem to think he did — it’ll be stored in the suit. Get that back and we’ll have our slideshow.”

“We have no reason to believe his suit is still where he died. That ship’s much bigger than the tiny part Craig saw. They could have taken him anywhere inside it by now.”

Now it was Nadis’s turn to speak. “But to do nothing… they
killed
one of us, Svieta.”

“We screwed up,” she said. “Maybe they screwed up as well. Maybe they didn’t realise we were so fucking
easy
to kill.”

“That still doesn’t mean we have to let them get away with it.”

“So what are you proposing? That we smack them with an FAD, just to make a point?”

“We have to do something. We can’t just sit here in a state of stalemate, like it never happened.”

“It took us thirteen years to reach this point,” Svetlana said, fighting to hold down her fury. “Do you honestly think a few days are going to make any difference?”

“They’re getting restless in Crabtree. They want a response.”

“I’ll give them a fucking response. How does martial law sound?” She grimaced, livid with herself. But it was out there now. She had said it.

“You sound like Bella sometimes,” Nadis said, turning away.

* * *

On her way back down to the surface of Janus, Svetlana had glued a webcam to the edge of the hole with a dab of geckoflex, using her HUD window to point the cam at the alien ship. They had been concerned before not to invade the aliens’ space with anything that might have been construed as intrusive or threatening technology. Now, given what had happened to Schrope, such considerations seemed less important.

For several hours nothing had happened. Then the software detected changes above its noise threshold and sent a flag to Svetlana’s flexy. She enlarged the cam window so that they could all crowd around and examine it. The symbols on the ship, fixed until now, were undergoing rapid cycles of change.

“It wasn’t doing this before,” Svetlana said. The Ofria-Gombergs still had not come up with any correlations against their database of Janus symbol patterns, but the one thing they had confirmed was that the ship’s symbols had been static ever since its arrival.

Not now.

“It’s as if it’s agitated,” Denise Nadis said, “as if it’s upset about what just happened. As if the Spicans know they did something wrong, and they want us to know how sorry they are.”

“Or they’re angry,” Parry said. “Pissed off at us for sending Craig inside in the first place.”

“Either way, it’s a reaction,” Svetlana said. “That’s more than we’ve had so far.”

“You can’t consider this progress,” Parry said.

“I’m clutching at any straws I can find. At least now we know they noticed what just happened. At least we know it’s provoked some kind of reaction.”

“I was hoping we’d get through this without using the word ‘provoked’,” Parry said.

Nobody said anything after that. They just looked at the cam window, hypnotised by the storm of alien language, daring to dream that it indicated remorse rather than rage.

* * *

Parry leaned against the doorframe. “How’re you feeling, babe?”

“Not quite as bad as I look. Have you spoken to Emily?” Svetlana had been too tired, too frayed at the edges, to call their daughter before her excursion to the alien ship. She had been afraid Emily would pick up on some of that. “She’s fine,” Parry said. “No one’s told her about what’s going on here, I hope.”

“I think some of it filtered through, but not enough to worry her. It’s all just big adult stuff going on over her head. Great being a kid, isn’t it? Here we are screwing up first contact and she’s worried about the doll Wang promised her.”

“We were all like that once. I wonder what happened to us?”

“You should get some more sleep.” Parry’s own face was puffy with strain and fatigue. “There’s nothing happening here we can’t deal with without you.”

“That does great things for my pride.” Wide awake now, she picked at a loose eyelash gummed to her eye. “Sorry. I know you’re trying to help. Did anything happen while I was out?”

“Nothing worth mentioning. No sign of any activity from the ship. Shall I fix you some breakfast, or are you going to try to catch a few more winks?”

“So what happened that isn’t worth mentioning?” After so many years together, Svetlana was familiar with all Parry’s various distraction techniques.

“You won’t like it,” Parry said warily.

“I never like it. What happened?”

“We heard from Bella. Word got out to her somehow.”

Svetlana growled her annoyance. “She wasn’t supposed to know about any of this.”

“Crabtree already has the full story. It was only a matter of time before Bella got wind of it.”

“What did she want, anyway? To rub our noses in the mess we just created?”

“That’s not the impression I got.”

“There you go, always ready to jump in and defend her,” Svetlana said with a spitefulness she knew Parry did not deserve.

“I take it that’s a ‘no’ on the breakfast front?”

Svetlana pulled herself out of bed. She was still wearing the clothes she had gone to sleep in, now as wrinkled and musty as week-old laundry.

“Give me a break, Parry. I’m doing my best here. And you do have a habit of defending her.”

“Maybe because she’s not always wrong.” It was said too placidly to have been intended as a goad. Svetlana gave him a poisonous look as she pushed her hair into shape, making the best of the sleep-matted mess. “Bella heard about Craig,” Parry went on, immune to the look. “She wanted to talk to you about your next move.”

“Like I need her advice now.”

“She says it’s very important that you talk to her.”

She pulled a fresh T-shirt from her overnight bag, one of her old ones, not one of the new garments from the forge vats. It was red with a masked mermaid and the words “
Dive Chick”
in faded silver glitter. Animated fish that had once swum around the mermaid no longer did anything.

“She would say that.”

“She also said it concerns Jim Chisholm.”

Svetlana paused with the T-shirt half-on. “Say again?”

TWENTY

Parry crossed the open ground from the lander and waited politely for Bella to let him inside. In the hardsuit, it would have been impossible for her to tell whether it was Parry or Svetlana waiting in her airlock, but when the inner door opened he saw no surprise on her face.

“Sit down,” she said, taking the helmet from his hands and racking it.

“I know you were hoping to speak to Svetlana.”

“Hoping. Not expecting. There’s a world of difference.” She had brewed him tea from her rations. He sipped at it from a vat-forged china cup with a hinged lid designed to keep the tea from wandering. Wang had printed it with the willow pattern, drawn from memory but with great accuracy and delicacy of line. The tea was weak, the colour of muddy rainwater, just the way he liked it. He wondered if Bella had remembered that from his last visit. “You’re looking well,” he ventured.

“For a sixty-eight-year-old woman, you mean.”

“Not every compliment has to be swatted down.” He peered at her over the rim of his cup. “Not that Svieta’s any better at accepting them.”

“Would it have killed her to come in person?”

Perhaps she caught his glance towards the window. Svetlana had forbidden him to mention that she was aboard
Crusader
. “It’s not been easy for her lately,” he said. “Since Bob Ungless died… since the Iron Sky went up… since
this
. How much did you hear about what happened to Craig?”

“Enough.”

“She blames herself for ever letting him inside that thing.”

“Did she point a gun at his head and frogmarch him to the door?”

“Of course not.”

“Then she doesn’t need to feel like a martyr.” Bella shrugged. “Unless she gets a kick out of it.”

“Craig died badly. We were listening in. We heard everything.”

“I heard he saw mountains.”

Parry nodded, amazed at how much information had seeped out to Bella. “He says he saw the Spicans. Axford isn’t so sure — he thinks it was just Craig’s neurochemistry shutting down.”

“I’m sure he saw something.”

“This is going to sound harsh,” Parry said, “but in a way I’m glad it happened to Craig. We’d already lost him once. Losing him again… it’s bad, but it’s bound to hurt less than losing someone else.”

“That does sound harsh,” Bella said. She poured herself a little more tea, using a strainer improvised from a suit dust filter. Under Janus gravity, the liquid did not so much flow as meander into the cup. “But I know what you mean.”

“Will you tell me about Jim Chisholm?”

“I said I’d speak to Svetlana.”

“I’ve done all I can. She’s still not ready to deal with you.”

Bella raised an eyebrow speculatively. “Why is that, do you think? Could it possibly be that she doesn’t want to acknowledge my existence? Because that would force her to confront what a mistake it was putting me here in the first place?”

“You’d have made no material difference, Bella. We’d still have been on this ride, unable to get off.”

“I heard about the trouble with the Symbolists. I’d have handled them better.”

“Easy to say from here.”

“Easy for you to dismiss. But I’d have had my ways. Svetlana’s mistake was treating the Symbolists as an aberration, something that could be diagnosed and cured like a pathology. I’d have accepted their inevitability and made them work for me. More tea?”

“No thanks.”

“She tried to keep them from the Maw because it offended her puritanical sensibilities to think that a bunch of cultists might actually be capable of running something. So she antagonised and marginalised them, sent spies and agitators in to try to break them up. Which, of course, only made things worse.”

“Whereas you would have… ?”

Her eyes widened. “I’d have embraced them, encouraged them. Zealots are exactly the sort of people you want running delicate machinery. The clockwork mechanism would have been in safe hands for evermore.”

“It wouldn’t have worked.”

“Svetlana’s methods were hardly a raging success, Parry.” Bella sniffed. “Still, if she won’t talk to me… no sense arguing with a sulking child, is there?”

“Then you’ll talk to me?” Parry asked.

“If that’s what it takes. The difference is I care about Crabtree, not my pride.”

Parry leaned forward and softened his voice, trying to connect with the woman under whom he had once served. “Then tell me what this is all about. Tell me what Jim Chisholm has to do with what just happened to Craig Schrope.”

“Everything,” Bella said. She put down her teacup and studied Parry with an intensity he found disquieting, as if his very soul were being scrutinised for flaws.

“It’s about what Jim said to you, isn’t it? The day you came back to Crabtree to visit him.”

“Of course.”

“But that was… what? Nine or ten years ago, easily. Jim knew nothing about the Spicans.”

“But he knew we’d meet them one day, and that when we did it might be —” Bella paused and hunted for the right word. “Difficult.”

“But his knowing that — it doesn’t
help
us.”

“I think it does,” Bella said. “You see, the thing is… This is difficult as well. I only have one thing still of value to me, Parry.” She looked down at age-spotted fingers laced in indecision. “It was a gift from Jim. He could have told you, could have told Svieta, or Ryan, or anyone else… but he didn’t. He told
me
, because it was the only way he could give me something useful. And I’ve kept his secret all these years, knowing it might one day help us, knowing it might one day help
me
… but at the same time hoping, praying, that the time would never come when I needed to reveal it.” She looked into his eyes with a sudden fierce gaze. “But now I think that time has come.”

“Tell me,” Parry whispered.

“I’d always hoped that I might use this to bargain with you. That’s why I wanted to talk to Svieta.”

“I’ll relay any requests to her.”

“I’m not asking for the world. Just let me come back to Crabtree. Allow me to play some kind of role in our affairs.”

“Pass me my helmet,” Parry said.

Bella obliged. He locked the helmet back into place and returned to the airlock. With the door closed behind him and the helmet tightly sealed, he was sure Bella would not be able to hear him talking to Svetlana on the
Crusader
.