‘Why do I feel that I have no choice in this?’ Tarquinia complained.
‘Because everything feels that way,’ Ramiro replied. ‘Just ignore it and do what you want.’
She slid away from him beneath the tarpaulin of his sand bed, a silhouette against the red moss-light coming through the fabric from the wall behind her. ‘The codes remain in our hands to the end,’ she said. ‘What is there I could possibly object to?’ She made this sound like a bad thing.
‘It’s strange being trusted by strangers,’ Ramiro conceded. ‘But they know we won’t betray them for at least the next four stints, and we know we won’t have any reason to regret the deal ourselves or we would have sent back a warning. This is what life is like without surprises. I wouldn’t want it to last for ever, but at a time like this I can’t honestly claim a need for even more uncertainty.’
Tarquinia said, ‘What I’m afraid of is being certain, without being right.’
‘About what, exactly?’ he pressed her.
‘If I knew that there wouldn’t be a problem.’
Ramiro drew the tarpaulin away from his face and looked out across the room. ‘What’s the worst that can happen – short of a meteor strike? Vincenzo’s right and it’s all a set-up. Giacomo is secretly working for the Council. We’ll end up in prison, but with a clear conscience: nothing we were planning would have harmed anyone, while the Councillors lied to the whole mountain for years. Come the next election we’ll probably be pardoned, and the system will never be turned on again. Does any of that sound so bad to you?’
‘No.’ Tarquinia shifted uneasily.
‘So . . . ?’
‘We’ll go ahead,’ she said. ‘Nothing else makes sense. Maybe I’m just not accustomed to things slotting into place so perfectly. It used to be that anyone who knew from the start what to say to win you over was setting an ambush. These days, maybe all it proves is that they bother to read their messages.’
Giacomo handed over the data link, a shiny black slab of photonics about five scants across.
Ramiro inspected it. ‘That’s perfect,’ he said. He’d had no hope of getting hold of anything like this himself. ‘How do you get past the inventory checks?’
‘You can swap an inert mock-up for the real thing,’ Giacomo explained. ‘If you do it the right way no one will notice for years.’
Ramiro formed a pocket and hid the link. ‘Do you have the coordinates for me?’
‘Yes, but we should get the other business out of the way first.’ Giacomo paused expectantly.
‘Of course.’ Ramiro had sat down with Tarquinia for a bell the night before, refining the sketches from memory. They’d kept no records of the occulters’ design on paper or in photonics, and not merely to avoid discovery; they hadn’t actually anticipated any need for it.
He summoned the final drawing onto the skin of his chest, with all the details and dimensions that Giacomo had requested. The explosives caches would need to have been carefully designed if they were to grab the occulters and ride them – without jamming the mechanism or fatally unbalancing their hosts. Still, Ramiro’s first impulse when asked for the plans had been to challenge his accomplice, jokingly, to display them first. But the information would still need to pass between them in the conventional direction at some point, and Ramiro hadn’t really wished to be confronted with an unarguable proof that he would agree to the transaction eventually.
Giacomo dragged himself closer along the guide rope. ‘Do you mind if we do this by touch? My visual memory isn’t so strong, and cameras are a security risk.’
‘All right.’ Ramiro hadn’t been expecting this, but he had no reason to object. He moved forward and let Giacomo embrace him, and as their skin made contact the gentle pressure rendered the ridges of the drawing palpable to both of them.
‘When will you send it?’ Ramiro asked.
‘Tonight.’ Giacomo separated from him. ‘In three pieces, hidden in pictures of my children.’
‘Why not just encrypt it?’ Ramiro hoped nothing had shown on his face as he heard the phrase my children. He would never have picked the man for a Starver, but then, once their children were born they had no reason to starve.
Giacomo said, ‘The authorities can tell from the size of the message that it’s unlikely to be text, and encrypting an image attracts more suspicion.’
‘Right.’
‘I’ll give you the coordinates now.’
Ramiro waited for him to hand over the paper, but then he understood that this exchange was to be conducted the same way.
As they embraced again, Ramiro concentrated on the numbers, committing the pattern of ridges to memory. As a child, he’d passed messages to male friends this way, making a joke out of the harmless intimacy’s mimicry of the forbidden act. But the skin that was pressed against his own now hadn’t mimicked it, it had triggered the real thing.
‘Do you have them all clearly?’ Giacomo asked.
‘I think so.’ Ramiro pulled away, averting his gaze, unsure what he was feeling. Envy? If Tarquinia had ever really died in his arms, it would have been unbearable. Why should he envy a man who’d lost his co?
Giacomo said, ‘The angle of approach and the orientation are crucial. We’ve made sure that the hooks are compatible with the dimensions of the arms, but if your machine comes in too steeply or the arms are turned the wrong way, it won’t engage the hooks at all.’
‘I understand.’
‘And the retreat’s just as important,’ Giacomo stressed. ‘If you pull away vertically, the resin won’t give. The rope will snap, or something else will break.’
‘We’ll follow the whole flight plan as closely as we can.’ Ramiro reviewed the list, bringing the figures back onto his skin as he checked them. ‘What are those last sets of numbers?’
‘The coordinates of the light collectors.’
Ramiro hadn’t expected to be given the targets themselves until he’d reported back on the first stage of the process. ‘So that’s it? We just fly the occulters there . . . and then what?’
‘The bombs are all controlled by timers,’ Giacomo explained. ‘All you need to do is get them to the right place.’
‘What do we do if something goes wrong? How can we contact you?’ Ramiro was prepared to accept responsibility for the occulters, but if anything else malfunctioned he’d have no idea what the options might be.
‘Nothing goes wrong,’ Giacomo assured him.
‘You can’t know that,’ Ramiro protested. ‘Not after the private messages are squeezed out—’
‘That late?’ Giacomo paused, struggling to frame an answer, as if he’d lost the habit of imagining anything beyond the reach of his foresight. ‘The disruption is ours,’ he said finally. ‘We’ve been planning it for longer than the system’s been in existence. We know that it happens – and we know that we’re trying harder to make it happen than anyone else. So how can we possibly fail?’
Ramiro moved away from the console and let Tarquinia check the alignment of the link against her own calculations. They’d set the beam to be as narrow as they dared, to minimise the chance of anyone detecting it on its way out to the slopes. But if they failed to aim it at the precise location where they’d left the first occulter clinging to the rock they’d be risking discovery for nothing.
‘This looks right to me,’ Tarquinia said.
‘Are you sure?’
‘In the end it’s just arithmetic and geometry,’ she replied. ‘If I do it a dozen more times I’ll still get the same answer.’