Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds

Author:Alastair Reynolds [Reynolds, Alastair]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Tags: Science Fiction - Space Opera
ISBN: 9780441015023
Publisher: Ace
Published: 2008-12-05T22:00:00+00:00

* * *

It was many years since events had moved so quickly on Janus. There was inertia at first, as if a once-great machine was now so encrusted with oil and filth that it could barely turn a cog. But once the movement began, it had no choice but to continue. Resources were reallocated and committed. Teams were broken up and reassembled in new formations. Crabtree hummed with expectation and rumour. Everywhere Svetlana went, everywhere her spies went, she heard the same thing: something is happening. Men, women and children alike were saying it, placing the emphasis on the second word, as if the events themselves needed encouragement, reassurance, to keep happening. The Iron Sky began to feel like a lifting depression. No one wanted the hole in the sky to close up again. It was like the first light of dawn after an appallingly long night.

Svetlana sent tractors out to drag the piece of sky back to Crabtree. She wanted to analyse it, cut it up, recycle it. There was more metal there (if indeed it was metal) than had ever been pilfered from the lava lines. Recovering it, however, turned out to be a more difficult task than she had anticipated: the harness kept slipping off the near-frictionless edges; the tractors couldn’t get enough grip to dislodge the disc from the depression it had stamped in the ice when it fell; none of their tools were sharp or strong enough to cut it into more manageable chunks. Svetlana permitted one abortive attempt to haul the disc out of the crater using the lander, then conceded defeat. It would have to stay where it was, for now.

By then, they had established a small hamlet of domes and equipment shacks around the crater. Someone started calling it Underhole, and the name stuck. A superconducting line was reeled out from Crabtree and a smoothly graded tractor route carved into the ice.

Twenty kilometres above Underhole, there was also activity. The hole in the sky had been located: scans had revealed a spot where the near-total absorption efficiency of the sky became perfect, as radiation escaped to the outside world. But it was not completely dark outside. In the optical and near-infrared, the hole glowed slightly more brightly than the surrounding regions. With dark-adapted eyes, and knowing exactly where to look, it could be seen from Underhole as a tiny circle of not-quite-absolute darkness. Its dimensions had been measured and found to match the piece that had dropped to the ground. The sky did not appear to be healing itself.

Reports of alien sightings gradually died down. Nothing had been seen coming or going through the hole since its discovery. Perhaps the alien machines had already seen all that they needed to. After much consideration, Svetlana decided that it was safe to take a look at what was on the other side. Belinda Pagis stripped a spare free-flier to the chassis, then welded on as much high-res survey gear as the power and telemetry bus could run.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.