‘Maybe a few ended up on porous rock,’ Tarquinia conceded. ‘And of those that fell loose, maybe one or two failed to reattach. But that’s why we made spares.’
‘Would we be part of Giacomo’s plan at all, if we weren’t going to have at least twelve survivors to offer him?’ It wasn’t a rhetorical question; Ramiro was never confident about the possibilities until he’d talked them over with someone else.
‘He wouldn’t hear the bad news unless he stayed in touch,’ Tarquinia reasoned. ‘So even if the occulters have all disappeared into the void, he couldn’t simply shun us before we’d worked that out together. But I can’t see why he’d claim that all his hopes were resting on us if it wasn’t true. I think the plan must keep holding together – at least for as long as ordinary people can keep sending back news.’
They had both heard from friends that, three days before the disruption, official communications would start taking up so much bandwidth that no private messages would be able to get through. If the occulters did fail, the failure lay somewhere beyond that horizon.
Ramiro was heading home from the food hall when a man bumped into him in the corridor, breaking his hold on the guide rope. As etiquette demanded they both reached out to steady each other, trying to kill the motion that the collision had imparted before they sent each other crashing into opposite walls. The manoeuvre succeeded, and they both muttered embarrassed apologies, but as they separated the man passed a slip of paper into Ramiro’s hand.
Ramiro waited until he was back in his apartment before inspecting the message. The paper was covered in numbers, far too many to be an address. He stared at it for a while, then went to his console and confirmed his hunch. It had been encrypted with his public key, and the plain text did look like an address.
There was no time specified, but he was loath to delay the meeting or attract attention by trying to get hold of Tarquinia. He tore up the message and erased the plain text from his screen, then set out on his own.
When he knocked on the door, it opened immediately.
‘Are you Giacomo?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’ The man invited him in.
‘Do you think I’m being watched?’ Ramiro had counted at least five cameras along the way.
‘Of course you are,’ Giacomo replied cheerfully, ‘but right now, someone resembling you is being watched in your place.’
‘You sent a decoy into this corridor . . . to be spotted at the next intersection, as if I just carried on walking?’ Ramiro was astonished, though matching the timing to his actual movements would not have been a problem at all.
‘Let’s not talk about the details,’ Giacomo suggested. He’d had three years to think through the strategy; why would he be interested in debating it with someone who’d had three pauses?
‘All right.’ Ramiro clung to the guide rope in what he guessed was someone else’s living room. If the group had gone to so much trouble to bring him here, what did that imply about the end point of their discussions? But he had to stop thinking that way, or his decisions would all be shaped by the presumption that it was impossible for anyone armed with foresight to waste their time.
‘The occulters weren’t designed to carry anything,’ he began.
Giacomo tipped his head, acknowledging the fact without making an unseemly boast that he’d been aware of this before the occulters had even existed. ‘We put suitable hooks on the caches,’ he explained. ‘Spring-loaded to secure them. All your machines will need to do is visit the right locations along the way to the base, and the cargo will more or less attach itself. Our devices have been stuck in place with resin, but a lateral tug will loosen the bond with far less force than it would take to break it vertically.’
‘So you’ve managed to build a dozen of these things and smuggle them outside?’
‘A dozen and a half,’ Giacomo corrected him. ‘Including spares. In the end it was just a matter of stealth and patience. Everything was based on pre-existing designs; it’s only the delivery mechanism that would have been beyond us.’
Ramiro said, ‘Tell me about the bombs.’
‘They’ll do the job,’ Giacomo promised him.
‘I don’t doubt that. But what’s the size of each charge? The blast radius?’
‘In vacuum, they’ll fracture clearstone within six strides of the detonation point.’
‘That’s all?’
‘That’s enough,’ Giacomo insisted. ‘Once the light collector’s damaged, the channel will be dead.’
‘And do you know how well protected the internal light path is?’
Giacomo said, ‘There are three clearstone seals below the collector: at four strides deep, eight strides, and one stretch. Once you go past those three seals, the main tube itself is continuous – they don’t put anything between the mirrors, because that would cut into the light with every bounce. But there’s no chance of us breaching the tubes: the first seal alone will take most of the energy out of the blast.’
‘You’re certain of that?’ Ramiro wished Agata hadn’t given up on the plan before she’d heard these details.
‘That’s what the explosives experts tell me,’ Giacomo replied carefully. ‘Running a test on a mock-up would have been the best way to answer that, but there’s a limit to what we can slip past surveillance.’
Three seals, with the last at double the blast radius. The saboteurs had no need to damage anything so deep. And even if something went awry in the delivery, that would lead to less harm to these structures, not more.
‘What about the defences?’ Ramiro asked. ‘They won’t have left the collectors sitting there unguarded.’
‘All the original defences at the base were designed to protect the engines from micrometeors – arriving from out of the void at high speed without changing course.’ Giacomo spread his arms. ‘We believe they’ve tried to improve the system since they learnt about the disruption, but anything coming in low above the rocks and moving unpredictably will be a completely different kind of target.’
‘So we have a chance.’ Ramiro was beginning to feel optimistic.
‘I believe so.’ Giacomo had had three years to mull over the same facts; if there was no thrill of delight in his verdict, at least he’d earned the right to issue it.
‘This next request is a little delicate,’ Ramiro admitted. ‘Though I don’t suppose it will shock you.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘I’ll need to talk everything over with Tarquinia,’ he said, ‘but even if she agrees, we’ll have one more proviso: we’ll want to hold onto the codes for the occulters ourselves. You provide the coordinates, we operate the devices.’
‘I understand.’ Giacomo was completely unperturbed.
Ramiro understood that his collaborator could hardly need more time to weigh up the proposal, but he was still taken aback by this placid response. ‘Agata is hoping to find a safer way to cause the disruption,’ he said. It felt incumbent on him to provide a full justification for Giacomo’s ease; he couldn’t drop the discussion just because they’d agreed. ‘I don’t know what her chances are, but this way it will be clear that we can still change the plan at the last moment if she comes up with something better.’
Giacomo said, ‘We’ve always known that that was part of the deal, and we have no problem with it at all.’ He reached across from his rope and clasped Ramiro’s shoulder. ‘To the end of the system, brother.’
‘To the end of the system,’ Ramiro echoed. This strangely dispassionate rebel could not have achieved much without his own knowledge of the future. But then nothing could have been more apt than their enemies’ machine enabling its own destruction.