Free Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds Page A

said.
    Bella pulled a thick stack of printouts from her desk. “This is a bit different, I’m afraid. It’s delicate — very, very delicate. It can only be entrusted to a safe pair of hands.”
    “Suddenly this is beginning to feel like a major dump.”
    “They don’t get much more major.” Bella passed the stack to Svetlana. “What you’ve got there are copies of one hundred paintings, selected from over fifty-six thousand individual entries submitted by American school kids between first and third grades. Artistic media range from finger smears to… well, something approximating brushwork.”
    Svetlana slipped off the rubber band and leafed through the first few sheets. “Aliens,” she said, in a numbed tone of voice. “They’ve got the kids painting aliens.”
    “It’s educational,” Bella said.
    “It’s scary.” Svetlana held up one of the pictures: something that resembled the business end of a blue toilet brush, smeared with enthusiastic daubs of green. “Aren’t we supposed to be stopping the kids getting nightmares, not encouraging them?”
    “That’s for the education system to decide, not us. Our job is to grade the efforts, that’s all.”
    “Oh, right. So: five minutes’ work, right? We just pull a few out at random —”
    Bella grimaced. “There’s a bit more to it than that, I’m afraid. They’d like us to comment on the pictures — say something nice and constructive about them. All of them — even the more — ahem ! — artistically challenged ones.”
    “ All of them?”
    Bella nodded sternly. “All of them. In enough detail that no one’s going to get offended… no one’s going to think we’re not approaching this with due diligence.”
    “Holy shit, Bella.”
    “And we’ll be steering clear of expletives, obviously.”
    “We.”
    “Oh, I’ve got my own stack of homework to grade, don’t you worry. You drew the long straw on this one. I’m the one who’ll be up all night reading creative assignments about me and my ship meeting aliens.”
    Svetlana slipped the rubber band back around the printouts. “This can’t get any worse, can it? I mean, as if we didn’t have enough to be doing as it is.”
    “This is nothing. Yesterday I had the Cosmic Avenger fan club on my back. They wanted me to comment on which of my crew members best approximated the various fictional characters… and how I’d have dealt with scenarios from the show, if they happened to me.”
    “I hope you told them where they could shove it.”
    Bella feigned horror. “Oh, no. I just put Saul Regis on the case. Man for the job.”
    “Man for the job,” Svetlana agreed, nodding. “Well, I guess that made him happy.”
    “As a pig in shit.”
    “Talking of which, I do hope you’ve lined up something nice and juicy for Craig Schrope. There’s a man with way too much time on his hands.”
    Bella leaned back in her seat, sensing an opportunity to get something out in the open that had been troubling her lately. “You and Craig… it’s not exactly an eye-to-eye thing, is it?”
    “We’ve been over this.”
    “I know, I know — he’s a suit, you’re a hands-on type. But we need suits as well as tool-pushers. Craig’s a damn good asset to this company. As bitter a pill as this might be to swallow, he’s actually quite good at his job.”
    “We’re off the record now, aren’t we?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “He rubs me up the wrong way. He’s always giving me shitty looks, especially if I venture even so much as an opinion in his presence — as if I wasn’t head of flight systems, but some lower-echelon grunt with only a few hours of wet time under my belt.”
    “Craig gives everyone shitty looks. I think it’s genetic.” Bella paused, wondering how much it was wise to disclose. “Look, I’ll let you in on a secret. He’s not had an easy ride out here. DeepShaft tried to keep a lid on it for obvious reasons, but his last assignment on Mars —”
    Svetlana looked mildly