Greta said, ‘When the Station was vacated there were dozens of samples from the Object left in its workshops. If someone gained access to the gnat at a time when they could move around the Station with next to no scrutiny, who knows what else they might have done besides reprogramming the navigation system?’
Ramiro stared at her for a moment, then he understood that there really was no squirming out of this. The one thing he couldn’t ask any pilot to bring back to the Peerless was a machine potentially booby-trapped with fragments of antimatter.
‘Strap yourself in,’ Tarquinia suggested. ‘It’s going to be a bumpy ride.’
Ramiro took her advice, fumbling at the harness with hands fitting loosely in the gloves of his cooling bag. While their gnat hung suspended from the outside of the Peerless the long flat couch against his back was vertical, like some kind of recuperative splint to help him stand upright.
He’d flown in a gnat before, but this was a different design, with space for just the pilot and one passenger and a storage hold between the couches and the cooling system. The clearstone dome that stretched over their heads was close enough to touch. ‘Did they let you talk to your family?’ he asked Tarquinia. Though he didn’t doubt her skills as a pilot, he suspected that one reason she’d been chosen for the job had been to limit the number of people who knew about the situation.
‘Greta made the case for secrecy,’ she said. ‘But I told my brother anyway.’
‘Good for you.’ Ramiro had resented the pressure to keep quiet, but then welcomed the excuse to say nothing. He wouldn’t have known how to explain the task he was facing without alarming his family, and the last thing he needed right now was a lecture from his uncle about his duty to the children his sister was yet to shed. If everything went well he’d be back long before he was missed.
He pointed to the navigation console. ‘Have you updated the local maps?’ No one had been expecting to go flying once the spin-down had begun, and apart from the altered velocity of the slopes there was the small matter of steering clear of the beams from the counter-rotation engines.
‘No, I just thought I’d leave everything unchanged and see what happened,’ Tarquinia replied sarcastically.
Ramiro was unrepentant. ‘If you’re going to take offence every time I nag you about something that could get us killed—’
‘All right!’ Tarquinia’s expression softened. ‘I’m all in favour of some mutual irritation anyway. Better than falling asleep on the job.’
‘Don’t tempt me with that.’
‘Ready,’ she said. It wasn’t a question. She threw a switch on her panel and the gnat fell away from the mountain.
Ramiro’s queasiness at the sudden loss of weight soon changed to elation. He’d forgotten how beautiful the outside could be; after six years of moss-light and display screens, the muted shades of starlit rock spreading out above him felt like liberation. As the mountain retreated, he looked down to the bright line of jumbled colours that divided the sky. To his right, the long trails of the home cluster’s stars reached their greatest luminance along this border, then vanished completely. To see any further would have meant seeing these stars’ futures – and they weren’t sending light backwards in time against their own thermodynamic arrows. To his left, the orthogonal cluster had the sky to itself, sprinkling its domain with small, neat colour trails.
‘Firing engines,’ Tarquinia warned.
Ramiro was thrust abruptly back against the couch, ridding him of any notion that he was standing. He’d been expecting the change of vertical, but the pressure on his body was distinctly more uncomfortable than he remembered. After a few pauses wondering whether he was going to be able to hold down his last few meals, he managed to ossify parts of his torso, giving it better support against the unaccustomed weight so that it no longer threatened to squeeze out the contents of his digestive tract.
As the gnat sped away from the mountain, the sky’s stark asymmetry made it easy to maintain a sense of direction, but Ramiro still needed to check the navigation console to gauge their progress. When he finally looked back towards the Peerless again it was a pale grey triangle, a dwindling near-silhouette against the star trails. The engines labouring to end its spin produced no visible trace at all; even if the sparse dust rising out from the slopes was scattering the beams a little, they were far into the ultraviolet.
‘It should take about three and a half bells to reach the Station,’ Tarquinia predicted.
Ramiro said, ‘Isn’t it usually six?’ No wonder he felt so much heavier than on his last flight.
‘This gnat was designed for towing cargo,’ Tarquinia explained. ‘I flew it myself, the last time they upgraded the Station. I was carrying a whole prefabricated living unit, but coming back, with no external load—’ She brought six gloved fingertips together, then flung her hand forward as she spread them.
Ramiro didn’t want to risk insulting her again, so he fought back the urge to ask her exactly how much cooling air they’d brought. Carla’s glorious optical rebounders required no fuel, with the gnat’s gain in kinetic energy coming solely from the creation of light, but the frequency-shifting mirrors that enabled that trick still generated waste heat. The more powerful the engines, the more air it took to carry heat away into the void.
Tarquinia panned across the console’s map to show a featureless marker far from the Station itself. The rogue gnat had travelled a long way from its starting point – away from the Object too, with no apparent destination in sight – though in the latest observations it had been decelerating. With its engines now aimed in the opposite direction to their initial orientation there was no spillage from them reaching the Peerless; if the astronomers hadn’t known the gnat’s earlier trajectory they would never have been able to locate it. Ramiro would have enjoyed the challenge of instructing a second unoccupied gnat to seek out the first for a mutually destructive collision at the greatest possible velocity, but the gentler approach was going to be much trickier to achieve, and from his present perspective a great deal less enjoyable.
‘What were they thinking?’ he asked wearily.
‘Who?’
‘Pio’s group. We get all those earnest speeches about their fears for our descendants, and then suddenly they’re trying . . . what? Some kind of feint involving the Object?’
‘Feint?’ Tarquinia pondered the idea. ‘Whatever they’ve programmed the gnat to do, I don’t see how they could call it off now, even if they wanted to.’
Ramiro took her point: the kind of communications system that could connect to such a distant target wasn’t something a disgruntled minority could have set up in secret out on the slopes. ‘They might still have a shutdown code that they could offer us,’ he said. ‘Something we’d have to transmit on their behalf.’
‘That’s possible,’ Tarquinia agreed. ‘Or they might just offer us the flight plan itself. It was pure luck that we spotted the thing at all; they might have thought they’d still have that to bargain with.’
Ramiro buzzed disdainfully. ‘Some people are very bad losers.’
Tarquinia said, ‘I don’t think it’s that. It’s not just pride; I think they’re genuinely afraid. I don’t know what I’d do, myself, if I honestly believed that everyone around me had just voted for a literally suicidal folly.’
‘If you honestly believed it, you’d have a good reason,’ Ramiro countered. ‘You’d try to talk the rest of us around, while staying open to the chance that you might be mistaken. There’d be no need for extortion.’