‘No other components on the board?’ Ramiro pressed her.
Tarquinia said, ‘Remember when we shot up into a high orbit, to maintain contact with the probe? If that didn’t set this thing off, nothing will. There’s no accelerometer here.’
‘Is the beam warm?’ Ramiro asked.
Tarquinia buzzed curtly. ‘Yes! I just drilled a hole in it.’
‘You should leave it for a chime and see if it cools down completely,’ Ramiro pleaded. Agata understood his logic: a passive system that needed an external signal to wake it would not be generating heat, but the kind of photonics required to detect an incision in the cable would have to be constantly active.
‘If it gave out a heat signature, that would defeat the whole point of trying to hide it,’ Tarquinia replied.
Ramiro said, ‘I think they would have imagined the cooling system still running while we were doing this.’
‘All right,’ Tarquinia agreed reluctantly. ‘I’ll wait.’
Agata caught Azelio’s eye and they exchanged grimaces of relief. Tarquinia’s unwavering conviction that Verano would have gone out of his way to make the bomb ‘safe’ was probably justified – but impugning the man’s honour was quite low on everyone else’s list of calamities to avoid.
Ramiro took off his helmet and rubbed his eyes. ‘I should be doing this,’ he muttered. Agata offered no opinion; in the end it had been Tarquinia’s decision.
‘Is anyone hungry?’ she asked. ‘I could go and bring some loaves.’ She hadn’t seen Ramiro eat all day.
Azelio said, ‘I’ll go with you.’
As they unzipped the entrance to the tent a gust of wind entered, sending the walls ballooning out and loosening the stake holding down one corner; it was only the collection of heavy tools arrayed across the floor that kept it from peeling up from the ground. Ramiro went and put a foot on the wayward corner, and Agata dashed out to fix the stake. With the wind pelting her with dust the food run seemed like more trouble than it was worth; she returned to the tent.
Tarquinia’s voice came over the link. ‘The beam’s down to ambient temperature,’ she announced. ‘There’s no heat coming from the bomb.’
‘How’s your visibility?’ Ramiro asked anxiously. They could hear the wind rising; the dust had to be obscuring the sunlight entering the Surveyor’s window.
‘Good enough,’ Tarquinia assured him. ‘I’m going to cut the cable.’
Ramiro said, ‘You’re tired now, and there’s not much light. Why don’t you wait for the storm to pass?’
Agata heard the drill start up again; Tarquinia would need a third hole to insert the shears.
Ramiro paced the tent. Azelio crouched in a corner, staring at the floor. The whining of the drill came to an end, replaced by a gentle scraping noise as the folded instrument was manoeuvred through the hole.
‘I’ve got the shears around the cable,’ Tarquinia announced. Agata saw Ramiro’s faced contorted with fear. There was a soft click of the blades meeting.
The wind rose up, pelting the wall of the tent with dust. But one word came clearly through the link.
‘Done.’
As Agata trudged up the rocky incline, the patch of bright ground beside the Surveyor remained visible in her rear gaze. But it looked so out of place against the dark valley floor that a part of her mind began to discount it, treating it as nothing but a flaw in her vision. The first few times she felt it vanish from her mental map of her surroundings she panicked, scanning the view for the comforting beacon until it snapped back into focus, acknowledged again as real. But after a while she stopped worrying and let it fade into the landscape. Tarquinia and Ramiro were not going to turn out the lights and hide from her. When the time came she’d have no trouble finding her way back.
Ahead, above the grey hills, the sky could not have marked the way more clearly. The direction along Esilio’s axis that they’d chosen to call ‘south’ pierced the bowl of stars about a twelfth of a revolution below its bright rim, and from this valley in the southern mid-latitudes that celestial pole remained perpetually in view, with the rim twirling around it like a burning hoop and the stars in between never setting.
Azelio walked beside her, carrying two of his potted seedlings from the final dozen he’d held in reserve. He wasn’t complaining, but she could see him struggling with the weight as the slope increased.
‘I’d be happy to take one,’ she offered.
‘Thanks, but I’d rather you had nothing to distract you from your own load,’ he replied.
Agata raised the bomb effortlessly above her head. ‘It hardly weighs anything. And even if I drop it, it’s not going to go off.’ Tarquinia had assured her that the explosive could only be triggered by a bright pulse of light at a specific wavelength, and the only means of delivering that pulse was strapped securely to her tool belt.
Azelio said, ‘I’m more worried that you might damage the detonator and we won’t be able to set it off at all.’
‘Fair enough.’
Azelio had identified a promising outcrop in the images they’d taken from orbit – a body of rock whose spectral signature suggested that it could give rise to fertile soil. No one had objected when Agata had volunteered to accompany him to the site, but she still felt slightly guilty at having wormed her way out of the tedious business of moving everything back into the Surveyor. Blowing up a hillside would be vastly more enjoyable than reassembling cooling pipes and restocking the pantry.
‘Can we rest for a bit?’ Azelio suggested.
‘Of course.’ Agata placed the bomb gently on the ground, then sat beside it, positioning her body so she’d be blocking its way if it began to slide. Azelio did the same with his plants.
‘Do you think they already know how this ends, back on the Peerless?’ he asked her.
‘I expect so.’ Unless there’d been an ongoing campaign of sabotage, it was hard to believe that the messaging system would not have been completed by now.
‘In some ways that takes the sting off the separation,’ Azelio mused. ‘If the children are already in contact with me, that’s almost like being there.’
‘This from a man who voted against the system,’ Agata teased him.
Azelio said, ‘If the vote had gone against the system then we wouldn’t have needed to be here at all.’
‘Hmm.’ Agata didn’t want to start arguing with him over the attribution of blame.
‘So long as there’s peace, I don’t care about the system,’ Azelio admitted wearily. ‘People can use it or ignore it as they wish. We managed not to go to war over shedding; we ought to be able to live with anything after that.’
‘We ought to, and we will,’ Agata declared. ‘The fanatics who can’t accept that will be free to leave.’
Azelio buzzed wryly. ‘Fanatics carrying the necessary stocks of explosive?’
‘Maybe we can send all the bombs they’ll need in a separate craft,’ Agata suggested. ‘We could bundle off a whole lot of freight to Esilio in an automated vessel at high acceleration, then let the settlers follow. It’s not an intractable problem; we’ll think of some way to do it safely.’
‘Assuming this works at all.’ Azelio nodded towards their own bomb.
‘It has to work.’ Agata searched the dark valley for the speck of light that marked the landing site. ‘If the soil is right and the arrow is right, the plants will grow. Nothing else would make sense.’
The rim of the star bowl was almost vertical as they came over the rise. Agata wished they could have chosen a landscape with more rock than dust from the start; it would have spared them the worst of the storms, and they could have passed the time just sitting outside, gazing at this glorious celestial clock.