Free Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds

blank flexy in a stunned funk. She had not asked for her ship to be reclassified as an instrument of the UEE, nor had she asked for permission to shoot another ship out of the sky if it violated her company’s interests.
    Rockhopper had been under way for a week now. Around the system, a massive coordinated observation programme saw every large civilian telescope trained on the fleeing moon. Even military spysats had been pressed into service, diverted away from the monitoring of hair-trigger frontiers and treaty-violation hotspots to peer into deep space, in the direction of Virgo. Commercial communications networks had been reassigned to cope with the mammoth effort of merging the data from this awesome concentration of surveillance. From near-Earth out to the cold, dark territory of the outer system, space hummed with intense, fevered scrutiny. Every day took Janus further away; but every day also saw more aperture and processing power coming on line, and for a little while the human effort outweighed the moon’s increasing distance.
    The images had sharpened, revealing the urban intricacy of the Spican machinery under the now broken and incomplete icy mantle. What they were looking at was definitely alien, but at least it stayed still and allowed them to feel as if it obeyed something like logic. The newest images uploaded to Rockhopper came with nomenclature: features in the machinery that had been given tentative, resolutely unofficial names. Junction Box, Radiator Ridge, Big North Spiral, Little South Spiral, Spike Island, Magic Kingdom, Crankshaft Valley . None of it meant anything, but it was comforting to put some human labels on the alien territory.
    Bella thought she could deal with the alien territory — she had signed up for that when she agreed to take Rockhopper out to Janus. But no one had warned her that she might also become embroiled in a hair-trigger standoff with Beijing.
    Not technically armed , Cagan had said, but both of them knew full well what that really meant.
    She looked at the fish tank, idly contemplating the mistake everyone made in assuming she’d used part of her mass allowance to make it happen. That wasn’t the case. As she’d explained to Svetlana, everything in the tank was already mass-budgeted into the ship, except for the fish. Even the glass was surplus window material, stored here as opposed to somewhere else aboard Rockhopper , glued into a temporary watertight box. If refurbishment ever came calling for the glass, they’d have a fight… but it was theirs, in the small print.
    No, the tank hadn’t cost her one gram of her mass budget, but she’d had to pull some serious strings to make it happen. It was a perk. So was the big room with the carpeted floor. No one else on the entire ship had a carpet. No one else had decent soundproofing. This, she supposed, was when she started paying for the perks. She had always known it would happen one day.
    That didn’t mean she had to like it.

    * * *

    “Sorry to dump on a friend,” Bella said when Svetlana arrived in her office, “especially when you’ve just got off-shift, but I need your help with something.”
    “What are friends for, if not for dumping on?” Svetlana scrunched a finger through her hair, still wet from the shower. She wore jogging pants and a dive-chick T-shirt printed with a mermaid and moving shoals of animated fish. “What is it now: someone wants another slice of you?”
    Bella shook her head grimly. She had already farmed out several interview requests to her senior officers, including Svetlana, and they’d lapped her up: the bright Armenian-American girl with the mind of a nuclear engineer and the body of a one-time champion free diver, one who just happened to be romantically entangled with a space miner with several commendations for bravery during EVA operations. Now even the diffident Parry was getting his fifteen minutes, squirming like something found under a stone.
    Too good to be true, they