Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds Read Free Book Online Page A

glass of water on Bella’s desk trembled.
    She looked at Svetlana. “Are we okay?”
    “We’re okay.”
    “It’s just that I don’t remember that sort of thing happening before.”
    “It’s expected,” Svetlana said. “We’re running the engine in a different operating regime.”
    “So it isn’t anything I need to worry about?”
    “No. Just some mixing eddies in the precombustion tokamak.”
    “Fine,” Bella said, but like everyone in the room — with the exception of Svetlana — she had just been forcibly reminded that they were not sitting in some anonymous corporate office building, but were in fact riding fifty thousand tonnes of nuclear-powered spacecraft to the edge of interstellar space, with the pedal to the metal.
    They had been under way for three days now, and Rockhopper had already picked up thirteen hundred kilometres per second of speed compared to their initial vector around the comet. They were travelling at a shallow angle to the ecliptic, in an almost radial direction away from the Sun. Every second they were crossing the width of the Gulf of Mexico: putting that much extra distance between them and their places of birth. And they were still accelerating.
    By the time they reached Janus, they would be thirteen light-hours from home: far enough that a round-trip signal would take more than a day. And they would be moving at three per cent of the speed of light, a figure that was enough to put the fear of God into anyone. Three per cent of the speed of light was nine thousand kilometres per second.
    With every minute that passed, they’d be falling further from home than the distance between the Earth and its Moon.
    A minute or two had passed since the tremor; the ship’s ride was now limousine-smooth once more. Everyone was waiting for her to continue speaking, their faces expectant. It was a nice show, but she doubted that any of them were convinced. Their nerves were already stretched paper-thin. For three days the ship had been creaking and groaning like a submarine sinking to crush depth.
    “Where was I?”
    “Janus,” someone said helpfully.
    “Right… right. It’s just that until four days ago our best guess was that the two moons must once have been part of the same body.”
    Craig Schrope had done his homework as well. “A bigger moon — maybe something Charon-sized. A few billion years ago something must have hit it, smashing it into pieces. The two largest chunks drifted apart from each other on nearly identical orbits.”
    “Hence your co-orbital moons,” Bella took up the discussion again. “But the Janus event shows that it didn’t happen like that. It was setup to look that way, but the co-orbital situation was clearly staged: an engineered occurrence designed to look natural.”
    “Before any of you ask,” Schrope said, “there are teams crawling over Epimetheus even as we speak.”
    “With kid gloves, I hope,” Nick Thale said.
    “I think we can assume that they’re exercising all due caution,” Bella said. “Not that it seems to matter: nothing they’ve done or observed in any way suggests that Epimetheus is anything but what we always thought it was. Unless the interior mechanisms are spectacularly well camouflaged, it’s just a lump of ice.”
    “The best guess,” Schrope interjected, “is that Epimetheus is just an ordinary satellite. The Janus artefact must have been introduced from outside the Saturnian system, and its orbit carefully tuned to produce the co-orbital situation we thought we understood.”
    “There are other situations like that, right?” asked Parry.
    “No,” Schrope said, “at least not in our system. Janus and Epimetheus were the only two moons that acted like that.”
    “And elsewhere? In other systems?”
    “The data isn’t good enough for us to tell,” Bella said. “We have some images of the big Jovians in nearby systems, good enough to pick up major weather systems, ring complexes and Titan-sized moons, but