Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

Genres: Space Opera

Synopsis

2057. Humanity has raised exploiting the solar system to an art form. Bella Lind and the crew of her nuclear-powered ship, the Rockhopper, push ice. They mine comets. And they're good at it.



The Rockhopper is nearing the end of its current mission cycle, and everyone is desperate for some much-needed R & R, when startling news arrives from Saturn: Janus, one of Saturn's ice moons, has inexplicably left its natural orbit and is now heading out of the solar system at high speed.



As layers of camouflage fall away, it becomes clear that Janus was never a moon in the first place. It's some kind of machine-and it is now headed toward a fuzzily glimpsed artifact 260 light-years away. The Rockhopper is the only ship anywhere near Janus, and Bella Lind is ordered to shadow it for the few vital days before it falls forever out of reach.



In accepting this mission, she sets her ship and her crew on a collision course with destiny-for Janus has more surprises in store, and not all of them are welcome.

Release date: April 21, 2020

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 528

Sample

Her name was Chromis Pasqueflower Bowerbird and she had travelled a long way to make her case. The faint possibility of failure had always been at the back of her mind, but now that her ship had actually delivered her to the Congressional capital world, now that she had actually frameshifted to New Far Florence across all those dizzying light-years, the faint possibility had sharpened into a stomach-churning conviction that she was about to suffer imminent and chastening defeat. There had always been people eager to tell her that her proposal was doomed, but for the first time it occurred to her that they could be right. What she had in mind was, even by her own admission, a deeply unorthodox suggestion.

“Well, it’s certainly a nice day for it,” said Rudd Indigo Mammatus, joining her on the balcony, high above the cloud-girdled tiers and gardens of the Congress building’s footslopes.

“Abject humiliation, you mean?”

Rudd shook his head good-naturedly. “It’s the last perfect day of summer. I’ve checked: tomorrow will be cooler, stormier. Doesn’t that strike you as suitably auspicious?”

“I’m worried. I think I’m going to make an idiot of myself in there.”

“We’ve all made idiots of ourselves at some point. In this line of work it’s almost obligatory.”

Chromis and Rudd were politicians, political friends from different constituencies of the Congress of the Lindblad Ring. Chromis spoke for a relatively small grouping of settled worlds: a mere one hundred and thirty planet-class entities, packed into a volume of space only twenty light-years across. Rudd’s constituency, located on the edge of the Ring—where it brushed against the fractious outer worlds of the Loop II Imperium—enveloped a much larger volume of space but only a third as many planet-class entities. Politically, they had very little in common, but by the same token they had very little worth squabbling over. Once every five hundred years, when the representatives were summoned to New Far Florence, Chromis and Rudd would meet to swap world-weary tales of scandal and chicanery from their respective constituencies.

Chromis fingered the ring on her right index finger, tracing the interlocking, hypnotically complex design embossed into its surface. “Do you think they’ll go for it? It’s been eighteen thousand years, after all. It’s asking a lot of people to think back that far.”

“The whole point of this little exercise is to dream up something to commemorate ten thousand years of our glorious Congress,” Rudd said, with only the slightest trace of irony. “If the other representatives can’t get off their fat backsides and think back another eight thousand years before that, they deserve to have the reeves set on them.”

“Don’t joke,” Chromis said darkly. “I heard they had to send in the reeves on Hemlock only four hundred years ago.”

“Messy business, too: by all accounts there were at least a dozen non-recoverable dead. But I wasn’t joking, Chromis: if they don’t bite, I’ll personally recommend a police action.”

“If only everyone else felt the same way.”

“Then damn well go in there and see to it that they do.” Rudd offered his hand. “It’s time, anyway. The last thing you want to do is keep any of them waiting.”

She took his hand chastely. Rudd was an attractive man, and Chromis had it on good authority that she had many admirers in the Congress, but their friendship was strictly platonic: they both had partners back on their homeworlds, held in stasis cauls until they returned from New Far Florence. Chromis loved her husband, although many days might pass between thoughts of him. Without his help convincing one hundred and thirty worlds that this was something they had to support, the memorial plan would have stalled long ago.

“I’m really worried, Rudd. Worried I’m about to screw up nearly a thousand years of preparation.”

“Keep your nerve and stick to the script,” Rudd said sternly. “No last-minute clever ideas, all right?”

“Same goes for you. Remember: ‘intended recipient.’”

Rudd smiled reassuringly and led her into the stratospheric vastness of the meeting room. The chamber had been constructed in the early centuries of the Congress, when it had aspirations to expand into territory now occupied by neighbouring polities. Space not being at a premium on New Far Florence, the hundred-odd representatives were scattered across nearly a square kilometre of gently sloping floor space, and the ceiling was ten kilometres above their heads. Slowly rotating in the middle of the room, lacking any material suspension, was the display cube in which their enlarged images would appear when they had the floor. While it waited for the session to begin, the cube projected the ancient emblem of the Congress: a three-dimensional rendering of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of a naked man encompassed within a square and circle, his limbs drawn twice so that he stood upon, and touched, both shapes.

Chromis and Rudd took their positions on either side of the floor. The last few delegates were arriving by transit caul: black humanoid shells popped into existence in the chamber before dissipating to reveal the occupants within. The femtomachinery of the cauls merged seamlessly with the local machinery of the Congress building. Every artificial object in the Congress of the Lindblad Ring—from the largest frameshift liner to the smallest medical robot—comprised countless copies of the same universal femtomachine element.

Routine business consumed the first hour of the meeting. Chromis sat patiently, shuffling mental permutations, wondering whether she should consider a change of approach. It was difficult to judge the mood of the gathering. But Rudd’s advice had been sound. She held her nerve, and when she had the floor she spoke the words she had already committed to memory before leaving home.

“Honoured delegates,” she began, as her magnified image appeared in the display cube, “we are nearing the ten thousandth year since the founding of our first colony—the beginning of what we now recognise as the Congress of the Lindblad Ring. I believe we are all of a mind in one respect: something must be done to acknowledge this coming milestone, something that will reflect well upon our administration, especially in light of the similar anniversaries that have recently been celebrated in two of our neighbouring polities. There have been many suggestions as to how we might mark this occasion. A civic project, perhaps, such as a well-deserved terraforming or a timely stellar rejuvenation. A Dyson englobement—purely for the hell of it—or the frame-shifting of an entire world from one system to another. Even something as modest as the erection of a ceremonial dome or an ornamental fountain.” Chromis paused and looked pointedly at the delegates who had proposed these latter projects, hoping that they felt suitably abashed at their dismal lack of vision.

“There have been many excellent proposals, and doubtless there will be many more, but I wish to suggest something of an entirely different magnitude. Rather than creating something for ourselves, a monument in our own galactic backyard, I humbly suggest that we consider something altogether more altruistic. I propose an audacious act of cosmic gratitude: the sending of a message, a gift, across space and time. The intended recipient of this gift will be the person—or the descendants of the person—without whom the very fabric of our society would look unrecognisably different.”

Chromis paused again, still unable to judge the mood of the delegates, the blank faces of those close enough to see conveying neither approval nor disapproval. She took a deep breath and pressed on. “Doubtless we would have achieved some of the same advances eventually—but who is to say that it wouldn’t have taken tens of thousands of years rather than the mere handful of millennia it actually took? Instead of a mosaic of polities spread across nearly twelve thousand light-years of the galactic disc, we might very well be confined to a handful of systems, with all the risks that such close confinement would inevitably entail. And let us not forget that the insights that have allowed us to leapfrog centuries of slow development were given to us freely, with no expectation of reward. Our Benefactor sent that data back to Earth because it was the right thing to do.” Here Chromis swallowed, uncomfortably aware that some might be thinking—not without cause—that the very same data had almost wiped out humanity as it struggled to assimilate dangerous new knowledge. But at a remove of eighteen thousand years, such thoughts were surely churlish. Fire had singed more than a few fingers before people learned how to use it.

She heard a few unconvinced grumbles, but no one chose to interrupt her. Chromis steeled herself and continued, “I know that some of us have forgotten the precise nature of that act of charity. In a moment, I hope to jog our collective memory. But first let me outline exactly what I have in mind.”

She craned her neck to look at the display cube. On cue, her image was replaced by a simulation of the galaxy, as if viewed from far outside: ancient and huge, littered with the humbling relics of the Spicans but empty of life—so far as anyone knew—save for the smudge of human presence spreading out from one spiral arm, like an inkblot.

“The Benefactor and her people are still out there somewhere,” Chromis said, “almost certainly beyond the Hard Data Frontier—perhaps even outside the galaxy itself. But unless the universe has more tricks up its sleeve than we suspect, they can’t be more than eighteen thousand light-years away, even if they’re still moving away from us. And perhaps they’ve already arrived wherever they were headed. Either way, I think it behoves us to try to send them a message. Not a transmission, easy and cheap though that would be, but rather a physical artefact, something that we can stuff with data until we’re knocking on Heisenberg’s own back door. Of course, there’s an obvious problem with sending a physical artefact as opposed to an omnidirectional signal: we have no idea where to send it. But that’s easily remedied: we’ll just send out a lot of artefacts, as many as we can manufacture. We’ll make them by the billions and cast them to the four winds. And hope that one of them, one day, finds its intended recipient.”

That was Rudd’s cue to interject. “That’s all very well on paper, Member Chromis, and I don’t doubt that we have the industrial capacity to make such a thing happen. But I wonder if you’ve considered the risks of such an object falling into the wrong hands. Not all of our neighbours are quite as enlightened as we might hope: we already have enough trouble policing the harmful-technologies moratorium as it stands. Stuffing all our worldly wisdom into a bottle and tossing it into the great blue yonder doesn’t strike me as the wisest course of action, no matter how well intentioned the gesture.”

“We’ve thought of that,” Chromis said.

“Oh? Do tell.” Rudd sounded innocently intrigued.

“The artefacts will have the ability to protect their contents from unintended recipients. They won’t unlock themselves unless they detect the presence of the Benefactor’s mitochondrial DNA. There’ll be a margin of error, of course—we won’t want to exclude the Benefactor’s children, or grandchildren, or even more distant descendants—but nobody else will be able to get at the treasure.”

Again, Rudd played his part expertly. “Nice idea, Chromis, but I’m still not convinced that you’ve done the detailed work here. There is no Benefactor DNA on file in any Congress archive. All biological records were lost within a century of her departure.”

“We’ve got her DNA,” Chromis said.

“Now, that is news. Where from, might I ask?”

“We had to go a long way to get it—back to Mars, as it happens—but we’re confident that we’ve retrieved enough of a sample to lock out any unintended recipients.”

“I thought they’d already drawn a blank on Mars.”

“They did. We dug deeper.”

Rudd sat down heavily, as if the wind had been snatched from his sails. “In which case… I must congratulate you on your forward thinking.”

“Thank you,” Chromis said sweetly. “Any further questions, Member Rudd?”

“None whatsoever.”

There were disgruntled murmurs from some of the delegates, but few of them could begrudge Chromis and Rudd this little piece of theatre. Most of them had participated in similar charades at one time or another.

“Member Rudd is right to draw attention to the technical difficulties associated with this proposal,” Chromis said, “but let’s not allow ourselves to be daunted. If the project were easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing. We’ve had ten thousand years to do the easy stuff. Now let’s bite off something big, and show history what we’re made of. Let’s reach across space and time and give something back to the Benefactor, in return for what she gave us.”

Chromis allowed herself a pause, judging that no one would interrupt her at this crucial moment. When she continued speaking, her tone was measured, conciliatory. “I don’t doubt that some of you will question the wisdom of this proposal, even though it has already been subjected to every conceivable scrutiny by the combined intelligence of one hundred and thirty worlds. The problem is that, for most of us, the Benefactor is no more than a distant historical figure—someone with whom we have no emotional connection. But there is every chance that she is still out there somewhere, still living and breathing. She’s not a God, not a mythic figure, but a human being, as real as any of us. There was a time when I had trouble thinking of her that way, but not any more. Not since we recovered this, and heard her speak.” Chromis nodded gravely in response to her audience’s speculative murmurs. “That’s right: we’ve recovered an intact copy of the transmission that started all of this: the Benefactor’s original statement of intent; her promise to give us all that she could. Recovering this transmission was, in its way, as difficult as finding a sample of her DNA. The difference was that the recording was always part of our data heritage: just misplaced, buried, corrupted beyond recognition. It took centuries of forensic skill to piece it together, frame by frame, but it was, I believe, worth the effort.”

Chromis looked to the display cube and sent a subliminal command, causing it to begin replaying the clip. Music welled up and an ancient symbol—a globe and three letters in an alphabet no one had used for nearly fourteen thousand years—spun before them. “Please adjust your language filters,” Chromis said, “for English, mid twenty-first century. You are about to hear the voice of the Benefactor.”

Right on cue, she spoke, identical copies of her face projected on each facet of the cube. A delicate-boned woman: looking less like the kind of person who made history than the kind who became a victim of it. She sounded diffident, uncertain of herself, forced into saying something that did not come naturally to her.

“I’m Bella Lind,” she said, “and you’re watching CNN.”

Parry Boyce looked up from the rippled red surface of the comet. He cuffed down his helmet binocs, keyed in mid-zoom and waited for the image to stabilise.

Only a breath of thrust held fifty thousand tonnes of ship over his head. The precious mass driver was fully extended now, but still braced alongside Rockhopper. A spray of flickering blue lights near the head of the driver showed activity still taking place around the jammed deployment gear. Chrome-yellow robots worked the repair duty, with one tiny, suited figure hovering to the side. He knew it was Svetlana even before his helmet dropped an icon onto her figure.

They hadn’t parted well. He’d been on her case about the repairs, but only because Bella was on his case. It was getting to them all, sitting out here, doing nothing.

Parry stood on the floodlit edge of the abyss that he had cut into the skin of the comet. The cylindrical shaft was geometrically perfect, an intrusion of order into the otherwise chaotic landscape of the crust. It was a hundred metres deep and fifty metres wide, the curving side already lined with a neat, laser-smooth plaque of hardened blue-grey sprayrock.

He voiced on some music from the Orlan nineteen’s files and lost himself in the soaring qawwali of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. After what could have been minutes or hours, the floods picked out the moving shadow of another suit lumbering towards him. Whoever it was had just emerged from one of the dome-shaped surface tents set back twenty metres from the rim of the shaft. Beyond the tents sat the angular, splayed-leg form of Cosmic Avenger, the heavy lander that had carried them from Rockhopper.

Parry tried to read the walker’s gait before his head-up ID’d the approaching figure. Feldman and Shimozu moved with the cautious economy of underwater workers—they’d been transferred from DeepShaft’s marine division on Earth—but Mike Takahashi was a spacewalker to the marrow. Even wearing a thirty-year-old Russian surplus Orlan nineteen, ballasted with nearly a tonne of depleted uranium, he moved with a loping grace, unafraid to lose contact with the surface for long moments.

The HUD bracketed Takahashi’s nineteen and appended his name in pulsing blue letters, accompanied by a Manga-style face icon.

“Nice hole, Chief.”

“Thanks,” Parry said.

“Thing is, it isn’t going to get any nicer just because you keep staring at it.”

“I’m thinking it might need another layer,” he said, hands on his hips. “Maybe just a dab down there?”

Takahashi stood next to him, their bulky shadows spilling into the abyss. The other man favoured glacial Estonian choral music: Parry heard it seeping over the voicelink.

“We need you inside,” Takahashi said.

Parry wondered what was up. Takahashi could have called him inside easily enough without making the trek in person.

“What’s the story?” he asked, as they walked back to the tent.

“Don’t know. Something’s going down, that’s all. You checked out the ship lately?”

“A while back.”

“Maybe you should take another look.”

Parry cuffed down the binocs again. Rockhopper leapt into view as the Nikons found their focus. Everything looked the same, except that the flicker of repair torches around the head of the driver was absent—nor was there any sign of Svetlana’s hovering figure.

“Interesting,” he said.

“Good or bad?”

Parry stowed his binocs. “Could go either way.” He reached for the tent flap and pulled it wide enough to admit the two men.

The tent was unpressurised: a stiffened dome-shaped shelter, fabric wired with superconducting mesh to afford the bare minimum of protection against charged particles. Gillian Shimozu and Elias Feldman sat either side of a plastic packing crate, playing cards spread across the lid. The cards, some faded and crudely redrawn in magic marker, were printed on thick, texturised plastic, better for handling with spacesuit gloves.

The four suits exchanged protocols with a warble.

“Still time to deal you in,” Shimozu said, looking up as Parry sealed the flap behind them.

“I’ll pass.” Behind Shimozu, balanced on a bright-red oxygen pump, a flexy showed a picture of Saturn, with the blue logo of China Daily in the top-left corner.

“Spoilsport,” Shimozu said, taking a card from the table.

“Any word from Batista or Fletterick? There are signs we might be in business,” Parry said.

Feldman lowered his hand, revealing a set of aces. “The driver?”

“Looks like work’s been called off. Unless Saul’s managed to swing shift changes for his robots, it’s got to mean we have a functioning deployment system.”

“Whoop-de-doo,” Shimozu said. She had her antiglare visor tipped down: its near-matte coating blocked any possible reflection from the cards in her hand.

“You could tone down the enthusiasm a smidge,” Parry said. “I’ll ask again: any word?”

Takahashi pointed at the screen. “Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with the driver at all. They were showing Saturn just now.”

“That why you pulled me in?” Parry asked.

“I thought it was weird. Why show Saturn?”

“Batista and Fletterick,” Parry said patiently. “Anyone?”

“Maybe there’s been an accident,” Takahashi said, wonderingly. The other two had dealt him into the game, but he appeared to be more interested in the screen behind Shimozu. “Anyone know how to get that feed on my helmet?”

“Use your drop-down menu,” Feldman said testily, as if he’d been over this before. “Select preferences, then HUD audiovisual display options, then—”

Parry walked past the game to the oxygen pump and picked up the flexy, squeezing it gently so as not to injure the quasi-living thing. The main image was still Saturn, but now a pundit in an overlaid box was talking. Nobody he recognised. Chinese text ticker-taped along the bottom of the screen.

Maybe Takahashi was right. Maybe something was happening around Saturn. But what could be big enough to hold the attention of China Daily this long? The major newsfeeds made Bella Lind’s fish look like masters of sustained concentration.

That was when his HUD rearranged itself spontaneously, a priority window popping open, filled with Bella’s face.

“Parry,” she said. “Thank goodness. I was beginning to think we’d need to send Crusader to pick you up. It appears that the repair squad cut through the power bus to the downlink.”

“Hope you give them hell.”

“Ordinarily I would, but… now isn’t the time.”

No one said anything. They were waiting for Parry to speak for them. The cards were on the table.

“What’s up, Bella?”

“Something big,” she said, “big enough that I’m going to need you back on the ship, and quickly. But before you leave, I want the driver shaft prepped to accept an FAD.”

“We don’t need to chip anything off this one, Bella. She’ll fall nice and stable all the way home.”

“I’m not talking about reshaping,” she said. “I’m talking about blowing it out of the sky.”

Svetlana Barseghian dabbed bright-green disinfectant onto the pressure sores around her groin, then snapped a dosimeter cuff from her wrist and checked that the mission dosage was still on the low side of four hundred millisieverts. She pulled on jogging pants and a black Lockheed-Krunichev Fusion Systems T-shirt, jammed stained grey sneakers on her feet and raked a hand through hair flat and itchy after the spacewalk. She pushed in a pair of pink ear protectors, muting the background noise. Except for the two hours a day when they turned off most of the machines, it was noisier in Rockhopper than in the Orlan eighteen.

A warren of interconnecting corridors brought her to the number-two centrifuge. When she reached Bella’s office she saw that Craig Schrope was already there. She reminded herself to be on her best behaviour.

Bella invited her in, pushed a cigarette into an ashtray and said something to Svetlana. Her lips were moving but no sound was coming out—Svetlana realised that she still had the ear protectors in. She popped them out and squeezed them back into their little plastic case, then secured it against the Velcro band of her jogging pants.

“Sorry.”

“I was suggesting you might want to take a seat,” Bella said nicely. She waited patiently until Svetlana was settled on a lightweight folding chair.

Bella’s soundproofed and carpeted office was the largest private space in the ship; it doubled as her sleeping quarters. The walls were pastel-grey, papered here and there with false-colour seismic survey maps: grainy images of shipwrecks and coral reefs grabbed during scuba expeditions. The only fixture that never changed was Bella’s fish tank, all five hundred litres of it.

Schrope hated the fish tank, Svetlana knew. It was a rule-twisting indulgence, exactly the kind of thing he’d made so many enemies stamping out on Big Red. Terrier-boy, they called him back there. Word was DeepShaft had put Schrope aboard Rockhopper to get him as far away from Mars as possible.

He sat there now, next to Bella, behind the same desk—the one Jim Chisholm should have been sitting behind—twirling a company ballpoint pen and looking pleased with himself.

“Sorry to bring you inside at short notice,” Schrope said, his voice a low, throbbing, catlike purr.

Svetlana shifted on her folding seat, but didn’t reply.

“How’d the shift go?” Bella asked. She wore shark’s teeth around her neck and a faded red lumberjack shirt, open over a black vest embossed with a gold foil picture: the Titanic Bar and Grill.

“I’ve had better. Blacking out isn’t one of my favourite ways to spend EVA time.”

Bella raised a knowing eyebrow. “The eighteens again?”

“Same old trimix problem.”

“Don’t forget to file the LOC log. Headquarters may make us use that reconditioned shit, but we don’t have to like it.”

“Everything’s industry standard and space certified,” Schrope said, picking a speck of fluff from his crisp blue DeepShaft zip-up. “On Hammerhead they make do with a lot older than Orlan eighteens without bitching and moaning.”

“That’s Hammerhead’s problem,” Svetlana said.

“The difference is they don’t make an issue of it,” Schrope said evenly. “But since it’s clearly an issue here, I’ve okayed a consignment of new twenty-twos on the next rotation.”

Like ticking that one box on a consignment spreadsheet had been the favour of the century… “Which would be when, Craig?” Svetlana asked, sweetly. “Before or after Jim gets his ticket home?”

Schrope batted aside her question with a flick of the pen. “Bella, maybe you should fill Svetlana in on developments. Since this does, obliquely, concern Jim—”

“What developments?” Svetlana interrupted.

“We’ve had a request to disengage,” Bella said. “They want us to tag the driver and leave it out here.”

“And the comet?”

“Plenty more where that one came from.”

Svetlana shook her head in disbelief. “We can’t just abandon it, not after all the work we’ve put in. Driver pit’s dug, parasol’s already locked in and prepped for spin-up—”

“Could be we’ve bigger fish to go after. I need some tech input.”

Schrope took over. “Could we move quickly, if we had to?”

“We’re always ready to withdraw to a safe distance,” Svetlana said.

“I mean immediate full power, for an extended cruise?”

Svetlana worked her way through a mental checklist. “Yes,” she said, cautiously. “Normally we’d run a few more tests, especially after an extended shutdown like this one—”

“Understood,” Bella said, “but there’s no compelling reason why we can’t fire up?”

“No. But Parry and the others—”

“Avenger’s on its way back up. They’ll be aboard shortly. One more thing, Svieta: specs say we can push the engine to half a gee, if we talk to it nicely…” Her voice trailed off; Svetlana knew what she was asking.

“Theoretically.”

Bella narrowed her eyes. “Yes or no?”

“All right, yes, but it’s not something you’d want to do for more than a few hours. You’d be looking at accelerated wear in expensive, non-replaceable components… elevated risk of mission-critical failure modes—not to mention the increased structural load on the rest of the ship.”

Bella tapped a finger against a hardcopy of a plaintext e-mail. “Lockheed-Krunichev tell me the loads are within design lims. If you tell me the engine can hold, I’m a happy bunny.”

The document was upside down from Svetlana’s perspective, but she could still make out part of the subject line: something about Janus. Mythical and Roman, she thought. The two-faced god of… what?

And the name of one of Saturn’s moons.

“It’s doable,” she said.

“Good,” Bella said. But Svetlana noticed that she said “good” with a sigh, as if she had secretly been hoping for a different answer.

Svetlana pushed her way through the crush of people until she spotted Parry.

At the last rotation there were one hundred and forty-five souls on the ship, most of whom had gathered to hear Bella’s announcement. They were plastered around the inside wall of the cylindrical gymnasium, tethered in place with hooks and Velcro and geckoflex and the friction of body on body. The gym—which doubled as a commons and radiation storm shelter—was normally spun to provide centrifugal gravity, but that would have kept Bella from floating into the middle to address the crowd.

“I’m sorry about—” Parry began hesitantly when Svetlana reached him. “You know… that little thing earlier. I guess you didn’t need me giving you a hard time on top of everyone else.”

“No. Not today.”

“It’s just that we badly wanted to play with our comet, babe.”

“Boys will be boys, I suppose.” She gave him a quick squeeze, letting him know it was all right.

“All ancient history now, though.”

“So Bella tells me. Any idea what this is all about?”

Parry’s concerned expression softened—he knew he was off the hook, for now at least. “Didn’t get a chance to check ShipNet. Was there—?”

“Nothing. No CNN, no Space.com, no nothing. Guess Bella pulled them.”

?