Tarquinia had already thought it through. ‘Any collision at this speed is going to give the Station so much energy that it will be oblivious to the Object’s gravity: it will be travelling on a virtually straight line, not whipping around in an eccentric orbit. So even if the impact’s skewed, either the Station will crash on the side where it was meant to crash, or it will miss the Object completely and fly off into the void.’
‘So the worst that can happen is that the saboteurs get what they want: a delay in the turnaround.’ Worse was possible for the two of them, but Ramiro was trying to calm himself for the task ahead, not give himself a reason to back out completely.
Tarquinia said, ‘As far as I can see. But the problem then is how people will respond.’
‘You mean . . . retribution?’ Ramiro hadn’t been thinking that far ahead. ‘The migrationists will be in trouble just for trying this stunt, whether or not we manage to stop it.’
‘I think a lot of travellers will be a great deal more displeased if the turnaround is actually postponed for a generation than they would have been by the mere effrontery of the attempt.’ Tarquinia sounded bemused: hadn’t Ramiro invested a third of his life preparing for the event?
‘I’d be disappointed,’ he confessed. ‘But it’s not as if everything I’ve done will have been wasted. Even if the delay is so long that they decide to replace the whole system with something more modern, they’ll still end up using a lot of my ideas.’
‘Hmm.’ Tarquinia was surprised, but she wasn’t going to try to argue him out of his position. ‘Most people have been looking forward to this for a long time, though – and for someone who hasn’t directly contributed to it, it’s living through the turnaround that would make all the difference. You get to take some pleasure in having made it possible, whenever it happens. The rest of us will just be robbed of the biggest thing we hoped to see in our lives.’
‘Three years of arduous gravity, and some changes in the appearance of the stars?’
‘It’s not the novelty, or the spectacle,’ Tarquinia replied. ‘It’s the proof that what we’ve been through might be worth it. It’s seeing the mountain heading back towards the home world – seeing the plan finally enacted, not just promised. We can’t take part in the reunion, but a whole generation’s been clinging to the hope that at least we’d be here for the turnaround.’
‘That’s all a bit teleological for me.’ Ramiro had no wish to offend her, but the idea of anyone’s sense of worth being reduced to their role as witness to the Great Project just dismayed him. ‘I hope our descendants can help the ancestors. But why should everything we do derive its meaning from that?’
Tarquinia buzzed incredulously. ‘So you don’t care why we’re turning around?’
‘I never said that,’ Ramiro protested. ‘I think the turnaround will be a good thing for everyone. If I felt otherwise, I would have joined the migrationists. But day to day? I just like solving problems and doing my job well. That’s enough. There’s no need for all this grandiose posturing.’
Tarquinia fell silent. Ramiro felt a twinge of guilt: ‘grandiose posturing’ might have been a bit too strong.
‘Anyway, forget it,’ he said. ‘We’re not going to mess this up, so any consequences are hypothetical.’
‘One kind are hypothetical,’ Tarquinia allowed. ‘But don’t forget the rest.’
‘The rest?’
‘Most travellers will be happy if we succeed,’ she said, ‘and I hope they’ll forgive the migrationists, out of sheer relief at their ineffectuality.’
‘But?’ Ramiro shifted uneasily in his cooling bag, hoping his meal was going to stay down.
Tarquinia said, ‘Whoever did this, they’re not going to give up. If they’re certain that the Peerless is heading for oblivion, what else can they do but keep on trying to save us?’
Half a chime before the expected encounter, Ramiro slipped on the ultraviolet goggles. It was impossible for the astronomers on the Peerless to measure the rogue’s position down to the last saunter, so Tarquinia had decided that the only reliable way to synchronise the next stage of the process was to allow the rogue to overtake them. The goggles didn’t leave Ramiro blind – the photonics aimed to overlay an image of any incident UV on an ordinary view – but the result was an imperfect compromise and he could understand why Tarquinia didn’t want to try to read the navigation console while wearing the things herself.
‘After this, every new gnat will have UV cameras built in,’ he predicted.
‘Then we’re lucky no one thought it was worth it before.’ Tarquinia gave a curt hum of displeasure. ‘What next? Weapons built in? Everything we make from now on designed with the worst in mind?’
Ramiro adjusted the straps on his goggles. He wasn’t going to fret about some hypothetical escalation of the conflict. There was a problem right in front of them; they had to focus on it completely now.
‘Three lapses to go,’ Tarquinia announced.
Ramiro tensed, willing himself to vigilance. He turned slightly to the left. If the rogue arrived later than they’d anticipated, sticking rigidly to the flight plan would leave them perpetually ahead of it. Only by cutting their engines completely could they guarantee that the rogue would pass them, revealing itself through its flare.
‘Two lapses.’
Ramiro fixed the pattern of the stars in his mind, noting each trail’s extension in artificial white beyond the usual violet. The rogue might pass them in the distance, and he did not want to be confused about the significance of some pale white streak.
‘One lapse.’ Tarquinia waited, then counted down the last pauses. ‘Five. Four. Three. Two. One.’
Ramiro said, ‘Nothing.’ He was weightless now; the engines had cut off automatically. He strained his eyes, wondering if the trajectories could have been so misaligned that the rogue had already passed them by, completely out of sight.
Something moved in the corner of his vision; before he could turn towards it there was a light in front of him, vanishing into the distance. ‘Now!’ he shouted. Tarquinia restarted the engines, at a lower thrust intended to match the rogue’s acceleration.
Magically, the white speck stopped fading.
‘It’s stable,’ Ramiro marvelled. In all these cubic severances of void – and the further three dimensions of velocity in which they might have gone astray – they’d actually succeeded in crossing paths with their foe and keeping pace with it.
Tarquinia raised the acceleration slightly; the speck grew brighter and slid off-centre. ‘It’s going left,’ Ramiro warned her. Tarquinia eased the thrust down, turned the gnat fractionally for a few pauses, then turned it back again. As far as Ramiro could tell, the rogue was dead ahead now.
By trial and error they whittled away the distance between the two gnats. Tarquinia advanced cautiously; if they overshot the rogue its engines would become invisible. Instead, the light grew gratifyingly intense, to the point where Ramiro had to lower the gain on the goggles.
Tarquinia said, ‘I can see the hull now.’
Ramiro took off the goggles and waited for his eyes to adjust. Ahead of them and slightly to the left, the rogue gnat’s dome glistened in the starlight above its grey hardstone shell. In visible light, the blazing beacon he’d been following was reduced to a black patch at the rear of the hull.
Tarquinia brought them closer. ‘I’m going to depressurise,’ she said. As the air hissed out of the cabin, Ramiro opened the valve on the tank attached to his cooling bag. Tarquinia put on her helmet, but Ramiro deferred; it would be awkward trying to aim the coherer with his face covered, and with the heat being drawn off most of his body he’d be comfortable for a while yet.