Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds Read Free Book Online

crew were in favour of the mission, subject to haggling over bonus pay and working arrangements near the moon. Twenty per cent were unenthusiastic, but would go along with it. The other twenty per cent were strongly opposed, irrespective of the bonus terms.
    Bella would have preferred a stronger majority, but at least the ship wasn’t split down the middle — and she knew exactly how she felt: Janus was an unprecedented opportunity, not only for her crew, not only for her company, but for humanity as a whole. She’d believed that before she entered the room, and she believed it now.
    She held up her flexy, showing the tally of poll results to the assembled chiefs.
    “Back to your teams, people,” she said, “and tell them to start battening down the hatches.”

    * * *

    When Rockhopper pulled away from the comet four hours later, a robot had already dropped the fragmentation-assistance device into the shaft that Parry had dug to take the mass driver. The nuclear device was military surplus, recycled from the decommissioned warhead of a forty-year-old NATO surplus Bush III MIRV. It had been dialled to its maximum civilian yield of ten megatonnes.
    The comet went up nicely.
    That was one piece of ice no one else would be getting their hands on.

THREE

    “It’s the last good close-up picture we have,” Bella said, “taken about a year ago, when a cargo slug swung by on a routine slingshot.”
    The object displayed on her wall was irregular in shape: two hundred and twenty kilometres across at its widest point; one hundred and sixty at its narrowest. The surface was lightly cratered and gouged, the craters soft-edged and shallow. The ice was a tarnished grey-white, the oily colour of roadside snow. “What was a slug doing taking pictures?” Svetlana asked.
    “University of Arizona paid to piggy-back a cam: some kid finishing off a Ph.D. thesis on dynamic ice chemistry. There are better images on the feeds, and maps that cover the entire thing down to a rez of a few metres, but this is the most recent snapshot in existence.”
    “Still looks like a piece of ice to me,” Saul Regis said.
    “That must have been the point,” Bella said. “Janus is about the last place in the system we’d have thought to look for signs of alien intelligence.”
    Nick Thale stirred in his seat. “If they meant to camouflage their activities, why didn’t they pick something a bit less weird than a co-orbital moon?”
    “I don’t know. Hide in plain sight? Pick the one place we wouldn’t seriously consider looking?”
    The image revealed no hint of wrongness: no suggestion of alien mechanisms lurking just beneath that shell of icy camouflage.
    Regis tapped a stylus against the flexy he had spread across his lap. He was a burly man, bald at the crown but with his remaining long black hair worn in a ponytail. His goatee beard tapered to a long braided tail. “I’m not sure I follow,” he said. “What was so unique about Janus? Aren’t there a bunch of water-ice moons orbiting Saturn?”
    “Not exactly,” Thale said, turning to face the robotics specialist. “Janus was co-orbital with another small moon named Epimetheus. They shared almost the same orbit around Saturn, at about two and half Saturn radii. One of them was a tiny bit closer to Saturn, so it moved just a little bit faster. Once every four years the fast one lapped the slow one, overtaking it from behind. When that happened, the two satellites exchanged orbits: the slower one became the faster one, and vice versa.”
    “Freaky,” Regis observed.
    “It is freaky. Every four years the same thing happens. The moons take turns going fast, like skaters running a relay.”
    Bella had read up on it before the meeting. “It’s a pretty unusual set-up. Definitely not the sort of thing you expect to happen by chance, just because two independent moons happened to settle into that —”
    She stopped, because they had all felt something shiver through the room. The