‘Not good,’ Tarquinia admitted. ‘We’re still aimed at the Station.’
Ramiro tried to accept the news calmly. ‘What more can you do? Give me a couple of lapses with a knife, then we can fly away.’ He could still survive this: he just had to cut through the rope on the rogue’s side before starting work on his leg.
Tarquinia said, ‘I’m going to unbalance the main engines.’
Ramiro’s shivering grew worse. ‘Manually?’
‘Yes,’ she confirmed.
The manoeuvring engines delivered a modest push that any trained pilot could use manually, for docking. Severing the main engines from the feedback loop of accelerometers and gyroscopes that aimed to keep their thrust perfectly symmetrical, and then imposing a deliberate asymmetry to try to push their neighbour off course, would escalate the speed and violence of the interaction between the gnats by an order of magnitude. Tarquinia had the stronger engines – but the gnats could easily smash each other into rubble without anyone winning.
Ramiro said, ‘Automate it.’
‘We have eight lapses to impact, Ramiro. We don’t have time to rewrite the navigation system.’
‘What I’m thinking of would take a very small change.’
‘We don’t have time!’ Tarquinia repeated.
Ramiro struggled to find the words to sway her. ‘Do you trust what I did for the Peerless? Most of the tricks I used there were things I learnt from the woman who programmed the gnats. I know their navigation software backwards – and I’ve been revisiting it in my head from the moment Greta sent me out here.’
‘You don’t think I can do this myself?’
‘I’d trust my life to you as a pilot,’ Ramiro promised her, ‘but no one has the reaction time they’d need to make this work. All we have to do is poke a skewed target value into one register, and instead of disabling all the guidance sensors we’ll have enlisted them: we’ll force them to deliver a measured push, whatever the rogue does, no more and no less. Everything you usually rely on to keep you flying straight will be working towards this new goal. Can you really do better than that by gut alone?’
In the silence, Ramiro glanced up at the Object. It still looked absurdly small, but in another few lapses he’d see how big a target it made. Tarquinia seemed paralysed with indecision; if he let himself drop now he could take his chances with his air tank, while hoping that she came to her senses and simply flew away from the rogue in time.
Tarquinia said, ‘How do we do this?’
Ramiro was confused. ‘Do what?’ Settle the argument before they were dead?
‘How do we automate the push?’ she asked impatiently. She’d accepted his plan.
Ramiro described the commands for the navigation system, raising the glyphs on his own skin as he spoke, picturing them repeated on Tarquinia’s body under her own corset’s empowering gaze.
As Tarquinia echoed the last command back to him, the opposing hulls began to screech and shudder. The shaking cost Ramiro’s good foot its grip on the rope; the other one fell back against the hull. He barely felt the knock, but when he looked down there was a swarm of brilliant yellow specks dropping away into the void, endlessly replenished from his disintegrating flesh. The balance of energies that tamed his body’s chemistry was coming to an end; the damaged tissue was making ever more light, wrecking all the finely honed systems that had held the process in check. His only chance to survive would be to part from it, but in this juddering chaos he doubted he could take a knife from Tarquinia’s hand, let alone use it.
The rogue shifted suddenly, its hull scraping backwards like a boulder sliding down an incline. Ramiro watched the slack part of the rope stretching out below him and readied himself for the void – but then the motion stopped abruptly.
He understood what was happening: as the rogue fought to stay true – with no extra power to spend on the task – it could only shift its balance by throttling some of its rebounders, decreasing its forward thrust. Tarquinia was doing her best to fall back alongside their neighbour – and at least his clumsy fix had spared her from having to micromanage the sideways shove at the same time – but the whole encounter was too complicated to be rendered truly stable, and their luck couldn’t last much longer.
Ramiro placed his injured leg against the rope and managed to work a full turn around it. But the loop was too low, barely above his ankle. He brought his hands down a span to lower his body while kicking out with his leg, until the rope rode up to encircle his knee. He made a second loop, then a third.
He looked up to see the Object looming ahead, its red and grey rock mottled with craters and crevices limned with shadows in the starlight. Then in the foreground, far smaller for an instant but growing in no time to obscure the whole asteroid, he saw the Station: a cluster of stone boxes, rooms and workshops pieced together in weightless anarchy, rushing forward greedily towards the duelling gnats.
Instinctively, Ramiro released his hold on the rope, convinced for a moment that this would save him. He fell upside down, hanging by his knee, his face to the sky as a featureless shadow flickered across the stars and was gone.
He braced himself for the second, greater threat: a cratered landscape of antimatter rushing past near enough to touch – or rising up to meet him in extinction. The vision of it hung in his mind’s eye, stark and terrible. But the thing itself failed to appear.
Ramiro lacked the strength to right his body but he raised his head sufficiently to stare up at the zenith. There was nothing ahead of the gnats now but the long, gaudy star trails of the home cluster. The shadow he’d mistaken for the Station passing by had been the Object; the first missed target had come and gone too rapidly to be perceived at all.
He was still chirping with elation at the near miss when he noticed the yellow sparks falling around him. His whole lower leg was radiant now, filled to bursting with light.
‘Pull away!’ he begged Tarquinia.
He saw her helmet poke out of the hatch.
‘Wait,’ she said. She was gone for a moment but then she reappeared with the safety harness.
‘There isn’t time!’ Ramiro protested. But he understood why she was taking the risk: if he ended up falling alongside his amputated leg, it could still kill him.
Tarquinia dropped the harness. Ramiro reached out to accept it, but the rope wasn’t long enough; the harness hung suspended beside his bad knee. He tried to raise his torso, but the effort merely set him swaying.
‘Grab it with your other foot,’ Tarquinia urged him.
Ramiro tried, but some earlier knock against the hardstone must have damaged his foot, robbing it of its power to grip. He poked it between two of the harness’s straps, pushed his leg through and bent his knee.
‘Now!’ he pleaded redundantly: the gnats were already separating. He could see starlight between the hulls.
As Tarquinia retreated into the cabin, Ramiro felt the rope tightening, until he lost all sensation in the constricted flesh. Viscid yellow fire sprayed from the stump of his foot. The glow became too painful to watch; he threw his arms up in front of his helmet.
Suddenly all his weight shifted to his good knee, almost pulling him free from the harness. The light from above was gone; Ramiro lowered his rear gaze and saw his severed leg tumbling through the void, part of the snapped boarding rope beside it. As he watched, the flesh liquefied completely then swelled into a ball of flame, lifting the rogue’s form out of the darkness. A moment later he felt a faint gust of warmth penetrate his cooling bag, then a single sharp sting to his shoulder. He groped at the wound with a gloved hand; it was painful to touch, but any break in the skin was too small to discern. Maybe he’d been hit by a fragment of bone.