Pushing Ice (75 page)

“I’m going to try cycling through. Coms might get patchy when the other door closes on me.”

“We’ll be waiting for you.”

“Good, but don’t wait too long. We may be wrong about the location of these people — they could be somewhere else in Eddytown, somewhere we can’t reach, or it might just be coms spillage from Crabtree after all.”

“They heard you, Bella.”

“They heard something. In any case, I don’t want that lander hanging around a minute longer than necessary.”

Bella started the door sequence. When the outer door had sealed itself, air gushed in through floor vents. She tried raising Takahashi, but all she got was the hiss of static. He might have heard her, but she wasn’t picking up his reply. Not that it mattered much now, she told herself. Bella rested her weight against the airlock wall until the pressure climbed up to normal. Normally the inner door would have opened automatically once equalisation had been achieved, but the lock was running on a power-conserving mode. The lights had not come on, and she had to use manual controls to open the inner seal. She worked through the thick levers, the muscles in her arms aching from the effort of carrying extra weight.

The door began to open, then jammed halfway.

Lights stabbed into her eyes. People were crowded into a dimly lit room, some of them holding flashlights. She raised one hand, then tried to speak, hoping that they’d hear her through the helmet. “Who’s there?”

“Who the hell are you?” someone said, on a falling note.

“The person who’s come to rescue you. You could at least
try
sounding jubilant.”

A face loomed from the darkness as one of them lowered a light from her face. She recognised something in the face, if not the face itself.

“Oh, hell. I’m sorry. I’m Andrew Dussen.”

“Hank Dussen’s son,” Bella said.

“We’re completely frazzled here. When we heard knocking…
shit
, it’s you, isn’t it?” Dussen turned to the other people huddled into the room. “It’s Bella! Bella Lind!”

“What the hell is Bella Lind doing here?” someone else asked. “Not that we aren’t grateful to be rescued —”

“But you were expecting someone taller?” Bella looked from face to face, recognising some but not others. None of them were wearing suits, and most of them looked cold and scared. “We know something bad happened here — we probably have more information than you do. I need to ask something: did Emily Barseghian make it out?”

“I’m Emily,” said a voice from the back.

“Your mother and father are here. They’re going to be pleased to hear you made it.”

“They’re
here
?”

“Just outside,” Bella said. “And we’re going to get all of you outside as soon as we can. There’s a complication, though. None of you have suits, and we can’t get a lander close enough to rig up a temporary docking tube.”

“We’re all going to die,” someone said, voice thready with panic.

“No, you’re not,” Bella said quickly. “We’re fetching you suits, same as the one I’m wearing. They’ll be good enough to get you to the ship. I have to go back into the lock to collect them.”

“How many suits?” Emily asked.

Bella looked into the face of Svetlana’s daughter, seeing a world of similarity and a world of difference. Svetlana’s red hair, but Parry’s eyes and nose, and something in the set of her mouth, the curve of her chin, that belonged to no one but Emily herself.

“How many of you are there?”

“Twenty-seven,” Emily said. They would already have counted heads to work out how much air and power they had to ration.

“Is there anyone anywhere else?”

“Just us. We all made our way here from different parts of Eddytown. None of us saw any other survivors on the way over.”

Bella nodded sadly. “Then the suits won’t be a problem.”

She resealed the inner door, cycled through the airlock and crossed quickly to the other dual lock, where Svetlana was waiting on the other side of the jammed door with the first batch of flat orange rectangles. She had eight of them, stacked in her hands like a pile of library books. “Parry’s on his way with eight more,” she said, handing them over carefully.

Bella could only manage four of the suits at a time — they were dense with Thai nanotech, heavy as paving slabs in the local field. She put the others down at her feet, to collect on the next trip.

“Tell Parry we’re already more than halfway there — there are only twenty-seven survivors.”

“You reached them?”

“All of them — including Emily. She’s going to be okay, Svieta.”

Svetlana studied Bella for a long moment and then let out a gasp of pleasure and relief as the weight of all that worry was removed from her. Bella remembered how she had felt when she learned about the lock of hair in Garrison’s hand. For the first time in more years than she cared to think about, she felt an empathic connection with Svetlana.

“Thank you,” Svetlana said eventually.

“I’m glad she made it. Glad all of them did, but especially Emily. She’s a good kid.”

“She’s older than I was when we were aboard
Rockhopper
, Bella.”

“We were all still kids back then. Even me.”

The ground shook with a force that nearly upended her. “Mike says the lander’s here,” Svetlana said. “I guess we’d better speed this up.”

“Send the word to Nick that we’ve found survivors and we’re bringing them out in suits.”

“I will.”

“Then tell him to send word to Wang that we’re on our way back to Crabtree. If he doesn’t have the passkey ready, we’ll evacuate him anyway, along with the last few stragglers.”

“And if he does have it?”

“I hope Jim’s going to be able to show us how it works.”

Bella turned to go. Through the gap, Svetlana reached out and touched the arm of her suit. “Bella —”

“I should be going.”

“Everything that’s happened between us —”

“Now isn’t the best time, Svieta.”

“I need to say it. I just need to say that… it isn’t as if I think things could ever have been any different.”

Bella thought about that, then nodded solemnly. “Given everything I know about me, and everything I know about you… I think you’re right.”

“But that doesn’t mean I have to like what happened. I liked having you as my friend a lot more than having you as my enemy.”

Bella stepped away from the lock, watching her footing. “I know how you feel,” she said.

Svetlana started to say something else. “Do you think —”

“Fetch the other suits, Svieta. We’ve got lives to save.”

Svetlana nodded and backed away to meet Parry, who had arrived with the next batch of suits. Bella steadied herself, the load weighing heavy on her arms, and set off back to the survivors.

When she reached the lock, she carried the suits inside and waited for the pressurisation cycle to run again. Emily Barseghian reached in and took the first four suits as soon as the door opened.

“Okay, listen carefully,” Bella said. “There are another twenty-three suits on their way. They’re all identical, all good enough to keep you alive until you reach the lander. Here’s how you activate them.” She pulled the tab on one suit, engaging the Thai nanotech, letting it unpack from the dense orange rectangle into a suit like the one she was wearing. She showed them how to put it on, how to control its rudimentary systems. “You’ve got more than enough air and power in one of these things, so don’t worry about that. Just watch out for obstructions on the way out. We experienced pretty sharp gravity eddies getting here, so watch your step.”

“Guess we’d better start deciding who goes first,” Emily said.

“No,” Bella said firmly. “That’s not how it’s going to happen. Get four people prepped, by all means, but if we cycle you through the lock in ones and twos, it’s going to take way too much time. It makes more sense to wait until I’ve shipped over all twenty-seven suits, get everyone inside a suit, then blow the pressure here. You can all leave in one go.”

“What about the other locks?” Emily asked.

“There aren’t any. You’ve got a clear run through vacuum all the way to the ship.” She paused. “It is a bit of a squeeze at one point, but you should all cope fine.”

“Thanks, Bella,” Emily said. She didn’t sound keen, but at least she understood why they had to wait.

“Start getting suited,” Bella said. “I’ll be back with the next batch as quickly as I can. I won’t be hanging around once I’ve left the last batch in the lock, so don’t expect to see me again after that until we’re all aboard the ship ”

“Where are you taking us?” Emily asked.

“Crabtree,” Bella said. “But we won’t be getting out to stretch our legs.”

THIRTY-NINE

Svetlana hugged her daughter as soon as she was clear of the airlock in
Star Crusader
. They were still on the ground, but the pilot kept the thrusters running all the while, ready to shift them fast if the local field showed any signs of climbing higher. If it exceeded three gees, the ship would be pinned down, unable to pull away from the side of Junction Box.

Inside, the ship reeked of fear and exhaustion. Nick Thale was counting heads, making sure all twenty-seven of the Eddytown survivors were through the lock and secured for takeoff. The ancient lander had never been designed to take more than a dozen bulkily-suited people, but in the years since her last cometfall, Star Crusader had been stripped and refurbished as a passenger-carrying transport. That had been when there was still hope that the Fountainheads would permit — or at least not actively discourage — human exploration beyond the confines of the present shaft. Where once a large fraction of her internal volume had been occupied by DeepShaft equipment: drills, stowed robots, suit ballast, sprayrock applicators, decompressed and folded tents, and the occasional handy ex-MIRV nuclear device, the lander was now outfitted with additional seats, berths and extra life-support systems. Not that it wouldn’t be a squeeze by the time they’d picked up Wang and the other survivors — but Svetlana wasn’t hearing any complaints.

“I thought you were dead,” she said to Emily. “When it happened, we didn’t think anyone could have survived. I know I should feel sorry for the people who didn’t make it, but right now the fact that you got out is all that matters to me.”

“We didn’t know about what was happening to the rest of Janus,” Emily said, tearing her way out of the emergency suit. “We knew there was something going on under Eddytown, but we assumed it was because of the accident.”

“Some of it probably was. Not all of it, though.” Svetlana felt a bracing sense of freedom as she spoke the truth. “I made a mistake when I talked to the Musk Dogs. They lied to me, Emily. They’ve put something inside Janus: not to tap energy like the Fountainheads, but to make it blow up.”

Emily appeared to accept this unquestioningly. “Why would they do that?”

“They’re trying to blow a hole in the Structure. Janus is their one best shot at escape, until the next moon rolls in. Which might be a long, long time from now.”

“And they didn’t think to mention this to us?”

“I guess they knew what we’d say.”

“It’s still going to happen, right?”

“Looks like it. Bella’s been advised to evacuate everyone. Everything we’ve made, everything we’ve built, every place that we’ve tried to make feel like home — it’s ending today.”

“I can’t deal with this. It’s too sudden.”

Svetlana kissed the side of Emily’s forehead and ran a hand through her tousled hair, straightening it. “We’re all going to have to deal with it sooner or later.”

“Where will we live? How will we find enough energy and power to stay alive?”

“We’ll just have to figure something out, the way the Fountainheads did.”

“We’ll be poorer, though, by losing the one thing we have that makes us worth talking to.”

“In which case we’re about to find out who our friends really are, I suppose.”

“How long before we’re all off Janus?”

“Bella was talking in terms of hours. The sooner the better, I think.”

“And you still came back for us?”

“I was hardly going to abandon you, was I?”

“Not you,” Emily said. “But Bella — why did she come back, when she could have left with the others?”

“Ask her yourself,” Svetlana said, looking over the heads of the evacuees, trying to locate the small woman she knew had to be somewhere inside. She drew a blank, then looked harder.

Bella wasn’t on the ship.

“Where is she?” Svetlana asked. “She should have been with you, after she handed over the last set of suits.”

“She said she wouldn’t be sticking around while we got into the suits,” Emily said. “I assumed she’d have come aboard ship before any of us arrived.”

“But she didn’t. Didn’t you notice?”

Emily pulled away from her mother. “She could have been anywhere aboard.”

“She isn’t on the flight deck. Where else could she be?”

Emily looked affronted. “Don’t give me a hard time — I had twenty-six other people to think about.”

“But Bella somehow escaped your attention.”

Parry pushed through to them, steadying himself via an overhead handrail. “We’re about ready to dust off, unless there’s a problem I don’t know about.”

“Bella isn’t aboard,” Svetlana said.

He looked around, his expression hardening. “You double-checked?”

“She isn’t here. She told Emily she’d be back on the ship before any of the evacuees.”

“Who was the first through?”

“Elias Feldman’s son. Bella definitely wasn’t with him.”

“Fuck.” He looked stunned, as if the universe could not possibly be doing this to them, after everything they had already been through on this day. “Something must have happened to her between the two airlocks.”

“It was dark,” Emily said. “If she’d fallen, stumbled away from the track we were following… we were moving quickly, not paying much attention to what was on either side of us. Jesus, don’t look at me like that! No one told us she was going to fall!”

“Easy,” Parry said. “No one’s blaming you.”

“
She
damned well is,” Emily said, looking pointedly at Svetlana.