Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds

as the anchoring point for the spine.
    “Is this a show-stopper?” Parry asked.
    “Bob Ungless says we can reinforce the existing driver attachments without too much trouble. We’ll have to run at reduced thrust until it’s done, but it shouldn’t kill us.”
    “I take it Svieta isn’t up and about yet?”
    “I’ve just spoken to Ryan. She’s going to be pretty bruised and battered for a few days.”
    “Is she awake?”
    “Oh yes. Just try tearing that flexy out of her hands.”
    “I might need to speak to her.”
    “You’ve found something outside?”
    Parry made an equivocal sound. “Probably nothing, but I don’t think anyone’s taken a good look between the tanks yet.” He brought the pack to a halt, disengaged from it and used geckoflex to station himself on the inner wall of the tank.
    “We’re not expecting damage there,” Bella said.
    Parry started descending. “All the same, we’ve got a dead cam down there. It happens to be the one that looks up from the shield between the tanks. I’m wondering if something clobbered it.”
    There was a crackle of static. “Okay. Advise you send in a small robot.”
    “There aren’t any. I’m making my way down on foot.”
    “Say again?”
    “We lost all the small robots, Bella.” Parry caught his breath, out of practice with flexwalking. “They were all in the machine shop, so the drivers took them out.”
    “It never rains, does it?”
    “This is beginning to feel uncomfortably like an incident pit,” Parry muttered.
    “Incident pit? Now there’s a phrase I haven’t heard in a long time.” As Bella well knew, incident pits were underwater situations that turned bad in little increments. Each small step — almost inconsequential in themselves — took one ever deeper into a pit with ever-steepening sides. Near the top, there was still time to reverse the situation and get out. Deeper in, options thinned out fast.
    “You know what they say about shit coming in threes, too,” Parry said.
    “Something else the guys used to say,” Bella answered, “anything even smelled like this, we’d call it a serious Charlie Foxtrot.”
    “Charlie Foxtrot?”
    “Clusterfuck, dear boy: CF stands for clusterfuck.”
    “I see,” Parry said. He laughed, grimly. “I suppose you could arrange a clusterfuck in an incident pit, too, if you tried hard enough.”
    “I suppose so,” Bella said. She shuddered involuntarily.
    “That’s something you’d want to keep the hell away from.”
    His torch beam glanced against faint, vague shapes some twenty metres below. Parry called up his helmet overlay, superimposing the wire-frame blueprint over his view. The thin red vector lines matched perfectly against the real-time view, highlighting the tanks and the spinal truss. The shield contained a scrawl of complex arterial machinery, delineated in green and blue, difficult to relate to the shapes picked out by the torch.
    He pushed himself closer, grunting with each metre of hard-won progress. The tank side was smooth above the scratch in the cladding where the debris had hit: he decided he’d risk drifting his way back to the top, rather than repeating the crawl. Then he would make a point of putting in more time in the gym, rehearsing for exactly this kind of job.
    “How’s the viz?” Bella asked.
    “Not great — it’s a Braille dive down here.” Parry tried various combinations of torch, helmet beam and visor filter until he found an uneasy optimum. “There is something down here, though. Actually, lots of somethings.”
    “Talk to me, buddy.”
    Parry crawled lower, then panned the beam around, whistling at what he found. “No wonder the cam was dead: there must be about ten tonnes of crap gathered down here, trapped between the tanks.”
    “What kind of crap?”
    “Highly compacted crap.” Closer now, he was able to identify some of the rubble. Bent, jagged-edged corrugated plates had come from the outer skin of the machine shop. Chunks of red