Bella paused to draw breath, as if even she were having difficulty believing her own words. “Ladies and gentleman,” she continued, “Janus is accelerating. It’s managing around one quarter of a gee. There was no sign of any encounter with another massive body, nor of any natural outgassing mechanism that could even begin to explain such behaviour. The simple fact is that it very much looks as if Janus was never a moon in the first place.”
“A ship,” Svetlana said under her breath, along with about half the room.
Parry’s hand tightened around hers. Whatever had happened to sour things between them in the last day was over now, erased into insignificance by this astonishing news.
Bella responded to their murmured speculation. “Yes,” she said, “that does appear to be what we’re dealing with. It even looks as if the icy surface is starting to peel off in wisps, like camouflage. If that continues we might begin to see what’s really underneath.” She smiled at them all. “There’s a problem, though: Janus is getting further and further away, so the view isn’t getting any better.”
“Oh, no,” Svetlana said.
“There’s only one ship in the system in anything like the right position to intercept and shadow Janus on its way out. No prizes for guessing which ship I’m talking about. The plan is we put the pedal to the metal for three weeks. At half a gee, we can meet Janus and still have enough fuel left to shadow it for five days. Then we turn tail and head back home.”
Bella said nothing for another slow rotation of her body, allowing the commons to erupt into noisy questions before speaking again.
“It’s up to us,” she said, raising her voice until the clamour died down. “No other ship in the system, manned or otherwise, can do this.”
Parry raised his voice. People respected Parry Boyce; they fell silent to let him speak.
“This isn’t in our contracts, Bella.”
“Actually, there is a clause that covers ‘additional non-specified activities’,” Bella said, “but that doesn’t mean there won’t be compensations. Triple our usual danger bonus, from the moment we commit to chasing Janus until the moment we dock back around Mars, with discretionary rewards on top of that, depending on the conditions near Janus.” She waited a beat, before adding, “That’s a shitload of money, people.”
“Triple our usual danger bonus?” Parry repeated.
“That’s the deal.”
“I’ll buy a nice headstone.”
Bella let them have their laughter. “Parry’s right to mention the danger,” she said, when the room had simmered down. “That’s why this isn’t something I’m going to enforce without a clear mandate. I’m giving you all one hour to think this over. In one hour, report individually to your section chiefs. In ninety minutes the section chiefs will report to me. Based on their findings, I’ll make my decision.” Bella spread her hands. “I wish I could give you more information. I can’t: there isn’t any. I wish I could give you more time, but there isn’t any of that, either. The fuel situation is tight.” Bella acknowledged Svetlana again: she had timed the remark with her usual care. “One hour,” she said. “I’m sorry there’s no other way of doing this.”
Bella grabbed a nylon line stretching across the room and began to haul herself towards the wall of the commons. Then she paused and looked back at the gathering. “Oh, before I forget, since I know some of you are dying to find out. It went to Dynamo Kiev, on penalties.”
* * *
Some impulse made Ryan Axford pause on his way to the patient’s bedside. He picked up his flexy from his desk and called up the most recent tomograph of Jim Chisholm’s skull. He stroked his finger against the false-colour image, rotating it so that the intricate three-dimensional structures became clear. The inside of his patient’s skull was now as familiar to Axford as the architecture of his own house, far away on Albemarle Sound. He knew its passages and alcoves, its attic and cellar, its concealed chambers, its cavities, cracks and flaws. He knew its secret monsters.
He had already looked at the scans with a clear, clinical eye, and he knew that he had missed nothing. The disease was already progressing along textbook lines: diffuse infiltration of contiguous and regional structures of the central nervous system; compression, invasion and destruction of neighbouring brain parenchyma. It was irrational to expect the images to have changed, yet he could not resist examining them one more time, hoping that he had indeed neglected some detail, a hint of shrinkage.
Axford dimmed the flexy and placed it gently back on his desk. Nothing had changed; nothing could have changed.
He caught Gayle Simmons, the duty nurse, leaving Chisholm’s curtained-off bedside. She held a blood-filled syringe tipped with a plastic safety cap, a saline bag clutched in her other hand.
“How’s our guest?” he asked.
“Comfortable,” she said, her Southern drawl, with its questioning upwards lilt, elongating the word. Simmons was young and keen, transferred into DeepShaft from Northside Hospital, Atlanta. She wore her black hair long and was popular with the other men.
Axford touched her sleeve and lowered his voice. “Any thoughts about what Bella just told us, Gayle?”
“Whatever’s best for the patient, I’m cool with that.”
Axford nodded and peered into her eyes, searching for a clue to her real feelings. She blinked and looked away.
“That’s what I was thinking too,” he said.
Chisholm was listening to Charles Mingus playing “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”. Axford lowered the music to a murmur as he entered the screened-off area. Chisholm’s expression was neutral, neither welcoming nor shunning his visitor — he knew that Axford could be the bearer of the worst kind of news, as well as the best.
“Bella talked to me,” Axford said. “She wanted to make sure you had all the facts.”
“She didn’t talk to me,” Chisholm said.
Axford sat down next to the bed. “Bella was concerned that you’d feel persuaded against your own judgement if she spoke to you in person.”
Jim Chisholm blinked and squinted upwards, as if taking an interest in something on the ceiling. The light in the room was low, green-tinged and calculatedly soothing. Around the bed, machines ticked and hummed and bleeped in an endless, numbing chorus.
Chisholm reached for a glass of water. “Did Bella ask you anything?”
“Yes,” Axford said, “she did. She wanted all the facts at her disposal.”
“What did you tell her?”
“The truth, or at least my understanding of it.”
“Which was?”
Axford chose his words with care. “You have a progressive condition that, untreated, stands a good chance of killing you within three months.”
“I know this.”
“I still think it’s worth spelling things out. I can’t cure you, and I can’t stop the disease from advancing. I can relieve the intracranial pressure; I can administer anticonvulsants; I can try to stabilise your neurotransmitter and cytokine levels. But the best I can do is slow things down. Short of —” Axford caught himself before he went on, “Realistically, your only hope of survival is to return to Earth within three months. Sooner would be better, obviously.”
“I know this,” Chisholm said again.
“But I need to know that you know it.” Axford leaned closer to him, lowering his voice. “Here’s the deal. When you signed up for this mission, you accepted certain medical risks. We all did. We have to accept that it simply isn’t practical to carry a hospital’s worth of state-of-the-art surgical equipment, let alone the expertise to use it, on board a ship. That’s why we go through such intensive medical screening before they let us aboard. But there is always a statistical risk of something getting past those tests.”
“Where’s this heading?”
“If I could have arranged a shuttle to take you home, I would have. Failing that, I have to look at the quickest way to get you back given the options currently on the table.”
“Go on
,” Chisholm said.
“Bella’s polling the crew. If the answer that comes back is ‘no’, we’ll simply resume normal operations. We’re due another crew-rotation shuttle in five months. I’m pushing them to send that ship out earlier, but I doubt that they’ll be able to shave more than four or six weeks off the schedule.”
Chisholm looked at him, his eyes narrowed. “Back there you almost said something. ‘Short of, you began… and then you stopped. Short of what, exactly?”
“I shouldn’t have said anything. I don’t agree with it.”
“Don’t agree with what?”
“The company has a contingency plan,” Axford said, reluctantly, “for cases like yours where the prognosis is poor, and where there is no prospect of an early return to Earth. It’s called Frost Angel.”
“Frost Angel? No one’s ever mentioned anything called Frost Angel to me.”
“It isn’t widely discussed outside the medical section. It’s something we hoped never to have to put into practice.”
“You have no idea how encouraging that sounds.”
“The contingency is…” Axford hesitated, momentarily unable to continue. He had never expected to find himself talking to Jim Chisholm like this. Chisholm was still his effective superior, Bella Lind’s second-in-command. What business did the company have in not telling Chisholm about something like this through formal channels?
“Ryan,” Chisholm prompted.
Axford steeled himself and said, “The idea is that we kill you now. It’d be a controlled, painless transition into unconsciousness. Once you’re unconscious, there are a couple of options open to me to complete the euthanisation. After inducing cardiac arrest, I’d proceed with a rapid exsanguination, flushing out your blood and replacing it with a cold saline solution. The object is to get as much oxygen out of your body as possible. Oxygen is the engine that causes ischemic damage if your heart stops pumping, so the less of it we leave in you the better. That’s one option.”
“I’m just dying to hear the other one,” Chisholm said.
“Instead of the saline flush, we keep the heart running and expose you to an atmosphere containing a high concentration of hydrogen sulphide — around eighty parts per million. After a few minutes, respiration will slow and your core body temperature will plummet. The hydrogen sulphide molecules will start binding to the same cell sites that oxygen normally uses, so — in effect — we lock oxygen out of the loop. It achieves more or less the same result as the saline flush.”
Axford waited for that to sink in. He looked at Chisholm’s smooth, untroubled face and read nothing.
“Maybe I’m missing something,” Chisholm said, “but in either scenario, wouldn’t I still be dead at the end of it?”
“Dead, yes, but protected from ischemic damage. That’s the point of Frost Angel. The damage doesn’t get any worse.”
“And then — when we make it home — they’ll bring me back?”
“They’ll try their best.”
“How many people have been through this?”
“As part of the official Frost Angel programme? Not as many as I’d like.”
“Meaning none, right, Ryan?”
“I’m not sugaring any pills here. The way things are going, in ten years, fifteen years, they might be able to bring you back. Then again, they might not.”
“I don’t get this. You’re saying you can shut me down, but you can’t operate on my brain?”
‘The process isn’t complicated. It’s — how shall I put this? — within the scope of the services we’re set up to provide.“
“You mean you’d be running that saline flush through me no matter what happens?”
“Frost Angel means doing it before the damage becomes extensive.”
Chisholm stared off into the distance for a few uncomfortable moments as Mingus played on. “You think this is a good idea?”
“I accept the medical logic, given the situation. That doesn’t mean I’m jumping for joy at the idea of going ahead with it. It would depend on the severity of the condition, and on the odds of reaching home in time.” Still torn, Axford paused. “If you wanted it, that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t oblige. I’d need your consent — otherwise it’s murder. I could get into serious trouble for that.”
“And we wouldn’t want that.”
“But maybe we don’t have to freeze you,” Axford said. “Maybe there’s still a way to get you back in time.”
Chisholm nodded shrewdly, like someone who had just got the punch line of a joke. “Janus, right?”
“My professional recommendation,” Axford said, “is that you vote for the mission. I’ve spoken to Bella; when we’ve completed the Janus rendezvous, we’ll return home on the fastest possible trajectory. We may even be able to meet the shuttle halfway. Even if we can’t, I still think we can get you home in seven or eight weeks.”
“Is that soon enough?”
“When we get back home,” Axford said, “everyone will want a piece of us. And when they find out there’s a sick man aboard, every nation on the planet will be fighting for the privilege of treating you.”
Chisholm closed his eyes and slumped back against his pillow. Barely audible above the machines, Mingus had moved on to “Open Letter to Duke.” For a moment the two of them listened to the music, as if somewhere within it there might be an answer neither of them had so far imagined, an option that involved neither freezing nor a risky encounter with something alien.
“They’ve never brought anyone back, have they?”
“They’re getting better all the time. They’re up to mammals now. They did a rabbit last year.”
* * *
As the car slid along Rockhopper’s spine, Bella unzipped her jacket and removed the flexy that had been recharging itself from her body heat. A deft flick of her wrist stiffened the sheet of leathery plastic. The ShipNet menu formed in its iridophores, tinged with a blue-green cast where some of the flexy’s living cells were beginning to die.
Bella navigated to her private area and retrieved the latest message from Powell Cagan.
He sat in a living room, its surfaces gleaming with reflected moonlight. Bella heard the faint roar of what she first took to be road traffic, but then realised must be ocean breakers. She thought she recognised the room. One of the framed prints on the wall — a reproduction of one of Cagan’s favourite Nu Metal album covers — looked familiar to her. Across twenty-five years she could almost place the villa and the island.
Cagan never changed much. His white hair was still spiked and gelled in the manner of his youth. He wore a black shirt unbuttoned at the collar, with a pale sweater draped over his shoulders, sleeves tied together across his chest. He was nearing his eightieth birthday, but he could have passed for a retired tennis pro in his late fifties, holding down a good game and a good med programme.
“Hello, Bella,” he said. “Excuse the interruption, but it appears we’ll need to move faster than we expected. The Chinese are further ahead than we thought.” He held up a hardcopy of China Daily. The paper cast a pallid glow across his desk. “They’re talking about their own unilateral expedition. They say they’ve got a crew together and that they’re ready for engine start-up. More than likely it’ll blow up in their faces, but we have to be ready in case it doesn’t. I’ve spoken to Inga and — although she clearly can’t go on the record about this — she agrees with me.”
He said “Inga” with such affected casualness that it took Bella a moment to realise that he meant Inga de Jong, the Secretary-General of the United Economic Entities.
He shifted in his chair as the roar of surf rose like static. “A lot of water has passed under our mutual bridges, but I’ve never doubted your strengths. If — when — you have that ‘yes’ vote, you can move on it immediately. There’s no need to wait for my confirmation before you begin the chase.” His excellent teeth flashed silver in the moonlit room. “Good luck, Bella. For old times’ sake, all right?”
She s
miled at that: not because it pleased her, but because she found it amusing that Cagan still expected her to look back on their affair with something like fondness. The depth of his lack of understanding was awesome, even after twenty-five years.
The image faded. Bella softened the flexy and slipped it back under her zip-up.
The car slowed as it neared the mid-spine machine shop and slid into a reception dock. Bella climbed out and hand-propelled herself through access corridors reeking of lubricant and ozone. In addition to Craig Schrope, there were seven chiefs present. Some of them floated, some had lashed themselves to floor or wall with tie-lines, Velcro or geckoflex, while others lounged on or straddled the outstretched manipulator arms of the deactivated robots.
Bella centred herself, taking time to make careful eye contact with everyone in the room. “Thank you for getting here on time,” she said.
“Has anything changed in the last ninety minutes?” asked Svetlana.
“Not to my knowledge,” Bella said, “although it’s becoming increasingly difficult to pick out signal from noise where the news is concerned.”
“Janus still doing its thing?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like numbers for its trajectory,” Svetlana said.
“Now?” said Schrope softly.
She looked at him. “It can wait until we’re under way.”
“Well, let’s not the jump the gun,” Bella said. “We may decide we’re not going anywhere. Or have you reached a collective decision while you were waiting for me?”