‘Is there any way to be sure?’ Agata pleaded. ‘Greta might have put him up to the apology, as a kind of misinformation.’ Even before the launch, the whole crazed-anti-messager-rams-the-Peerless scenario had never struck her as very plausible, and after spending six years with Ramiro – irritating as he could be – Agata had to strive mightily to put herself inside the head of anyone who’d imagined him commandeering the Surveyor and turning it into a weapon.
Tarquinia was bemused. ‘This is a strange time to start worrying about it,’ she said. ‘If an unexpected bump could set it off, we’d have been dead long ago.’
‘If the Council really didn’t trust Ramiro not to turn saboteur,’ Agata reasoned, ‘then they wouldn’t have been content with a bluff, would they? They would have insisted on some genuine means to destroy the Surveyor if it turned rogue.’
‘I suppose that’s true,’ Tarquinia agreed. ‘Though over the last six years I’ve become pleasantly accustomed to not having to think about politicians at all, so I don’t know what my judgement is worth now.’
‘If there’s a bomb, we need to find it,’ Agata declared. ‘We need to cut it open and extract the explosive.’
Tarquinia swivelled on her couch, assessing this suggestion. ‘We need to locate the hidden, possibly tamper-proof bomb that’s been obliging enough not to kill us so far, and start prodding and poking at it now . . . because?’
‘Because the test plots are failing,’ Agata explained. ‘So we need to take the explosive up into the hills, turn some rock into soil for ourselves – against the Esilian arrow – and see if that imbues the soil with the properties that it needs to support plant growth.’
‘If wheat hadn’t failed to grow properly in weightlessness,’ Tarquinia mused, ‘then Yalda never would have ordered the spin-up. And if Yalda hadn’t ordered the spin-up, the Peerless might well have been incinerated by antimatter. So really, I ought to be encouraged by history: anything that starts with crop failure ends well.’ There was a sound of hardstone scraping against hardstone, then slipping.
‘Can you see what you’re doing?’ Agata aimed her own coherer down into the maintenance shaft.
‘Yes, I can see,’ Tarquinia replied. ‘It’s just that none of these bolts have been turned since the engines were assembled.’
‘The bomb’s not going to explode just because you open that panel, is it?’ Agata asked anxiously.
Tarquinia looked up at her, affronted. ‘However much pressure he was under, Verano would never have done anything so perverse. We’re entitled to inspect our own engines; that hardly amounts to an act of sedition.’
There was a long silence, followed by a rhythmic squeaking noise that was almost certainly one of the bolts being turned. Agata restrained herself from cheering; Ramiro was asleep.
It took Tarquinia more than a chime to loosen all six bolts and remove the access panel. Agata peered over her shoulder into the exposed cavity, where cooling pipes ran along the back of the rebounders. If one of the banks of rebounders had failed, someone could have squeezed in here to fit a replacement.
‘Anything?’ Agata asked hopefully.
‘Nothing obvious,’ Tarquinia admitted. ‘I thought this was the last place we hadn’t poked around in, but maybe I should sit down with the maintenance logs to confirm that.’
‘Right.’
Tarquinia lingered, lowering her head partway through the hatch and turning her face sideways. ‘There’s a big stone beam that goes right across the top of the engines, from rim to rim.’
‘Could something be attached to it?’ Agata suggested. ‘Out of sight from where you are?’
‘I’m just wondering why it’s there at all,’ Tarquinia replied. ‘The floors of the cabins should provide enough bracing for the engines. And why a beam that runs across one particular diameter of the disc, and not another one at right angles to it? Nothing about the stress from the engines picks out one axis like that.’
‘No.’
Tarquinia said, ‘If I don’t come out in six lapses, send in Azelio with a rope.’
‘Azelio?’
‘No offence to you or Ramiro, but he’s the skinniest. There’s not much point in two people getting stuck.’ Tarquinia climbed head first through the access hatch, slithering deeper and humming softly as the cooling pipes banged against her, until even her feet had disappeared from view.
Agata waited, listening intently for any cries of discovery or distress. She was starting to wonder if she should have kept her inspiration to herself. Tarquinia trapped in the guts of the Surveyor would not be a happy outcome – and if she actually located the mythical device there could be worse to follow.
Worrying silences were punctuated with thuds, pings and echoing curses. Finally, Agata heard Tarquinia returning, her steady advance eliciting a resonant hum from the maze of pipes.
‘That was exhausting,’ she said. ‘Can you give me a hand up?’
Agata jumped down into the shaft and helped her out through the hatch. The flesh of Tarquinia’s torso had become corrugated as she’d forced it between the pipes, giving her the appearance of a decoratively shaped novelty loaf on legs.
‘Any luck?’
Tarquinia said, ‘There’s nothing hidden beside the beam.’
‘Oh.’
‘But the beam itself is hollow.’
‘Really? How can you tell?’
‘You can hear it when you tap,’ Tarquinia explained.
‘Couldn’t that just be to save mass?’
‘In principle it could be. But when I got to the far end I found something peculiar: it looks as if the cooling air is actually routed through the beam. Why do that, except to make life harder on anyone tampering with it?’
‘So if there’s a bomb,’ Agata said, ‘it might be anywhere inside a hardstone beam that spans the diameter of the Surveyor. And the only way we’ll ever know for sure is if we cut the whole thing open – in a place where there’s barely room to move, let alone the space to wield tools safely.’
Tarquinia inclined her head admiringly. ‘Trust Verano to find a civilised solution.’
Agata hummed with distaste. ‘Is there such a thing as a civilised bomb?’
‘Well, no,’ Tarquinia conceded. ‘But the Council would have asked him to fit a booby trap, and at least he made that idea redundant. There’s no way that Ramiro alone – or even the four of us – could have taken that hiding place apart and left the Surveyor functioning. A booby-trapped bomb would probably have been triggered by accident, long ago. We can thank Verano for finding a way to make the thing as good as tamper-proof, without turning it into a death sentence.’
Agata said, ‘I’ll send him flowers when I get back. But if we can’t get the bomb out and leave the Surveyor functioning—’
‘We couldn’t have done it in the void,’ Tarquinia interjected. ‘But with an external atmosphere, there’s no comparison. I think even the most paranoid Councillor would have reasoned that if Ramiro had proposed the mission merely as a cover for an attack on the Peerless, he would hardly have been willing to spend twelve years actually detouring all the way to Esilio just to remove this thing.’
‘You really think you can go back down there and slice the beam open?’ Agata gestured at the curves still imprinted into Tarquinia’s body.
Tarquinia said, ‘Not just like that. First we take out most of the cooling pipes. Then we drill inspection holes in the beam, to see what we can see. The whole exercise could take a while, but it’s not impossible.’