She closed her eyes, waited, then opened them. She hadn’t lost the rhythm. Every muscle in her body knew what to do, and when.
The piston plunged, the pressure rose. Agata waited. The piston ascended.
As the piston rose above the mouth of the tunnel, she threw the canister. It entered the shaft and disappeared. She heard no sound from the impact, but she hadn’t expected one; the bottom of the chamber would be far below, and the canister might yet be spinning in mid-air, still caught in the updraught.
The piston crashed down again, closing the mouth of the tunnel. Agata closed her eyes, overcome with relief. She had four more days; she could prepare and deliver at least four more doses. All her numbers were approximations and guesswork, but unless she had wildly miscalculated, that total would at least give her a chance.
The air burst out from the chamber once more; Agata opened her eyes to welcome it. A trace of fine grit stung her eyes, then something clattered loudly across the tunnel floor.
The canister came to a halt beside her. She stared down at the rejected gift. If it had travelled all the way into the expanse of the chamber, it was very unlikely to have entered the shaft again.
There had to be a grille or baffle of some kind at the bottom of the shaft – below the piston’s lowest point, or the canister would have been crushed into powder. Some of the disruptor would surely have ended up inside the chamber, but the grit blown back at her must have been the rest.
Agata touched the clock on her belt; she needed to start moving immediately, or she’d be so late for her end of shift that Celia would send in a search party. She gathered up her tools and the lidless canister and forced them back into their hiding place.
She had four days left, and a barrier at the bottom of a giant, pounding piston that would reject most of what she threw into the shaft.
But as she retreated along the tunnel, she finally understood where the plan was leading her. She could dive under the piston, survive the landing on the barrier, and – if the low point of the piston’s motion was high enough – remain there unharmed long enough to deliver the disruptor into the chamber by hand. That much was possible.
But once she was down there, there would be no way out.
31
‘Have you checked the horizon lately?’ Tarquinia asked Ramiro, following him into the apartment.
‘I think it’s still about a bell away,’ he said. There was no official cut-off point, but there was a public site where people had posted the times of origin of all the messages they’d received from the last few days before the disruption. Ramiro harnessed himself to the desk beside his console and brought up the file.
‘No change,’ he reported. ‘Do you want to try out the system while you still have a chance?’
Tarquinia hummed with mock regret. ‘Too late. Let the messagers who want the bandwidth have it; I’m not going to steal it from them for a cheap thrill.’
‘Then why do you care about the timing?’
‘This is the start of freedom,’ she said. ‘The Councillors might know everything they’re going to do for the next three days, but most people will have nothing proscribing their actions.’
Ramiro wasn’t expecting an uprising. ‘It’s going to take more than three days for the effects of the last three years to fade. And if there was going to be public unrest, I think the Council’s own bulletins would have mentioned it.’ Censoring bad news wouldn’t change anything, and once the omission came to light it would only undermine the government’s credibility.
He took the link from its hiding place under the desk and plugged it into the console.
The occulters were approaching the bottom of the mountain. Having them crawl over the sharp edge that divided the slopes from the base would have been insanely ambitious, so the machines had been instructed to fly from one surface to the other, keeping as low as possible but sparing themselves the most difficult terrain.
Centrifugal gravity turned the base of the mountain into a sheer vertical wall. The cargo hooked to the occulters’ arms would hang down over them, applying a torque that would try to peel them off the rock, and increasing the risk of the connecting strings becoming tangled in the clockwork. Ramiro had programmed adjustments to the depth and angle of the drills that he hoped would minimise the problems, but it was all untested; there’d been no reason back on the Surveyor to rehearse for this strange asymmetric loading. He found it hard not to resent Giacomo’s group for failing to devise a better solution when they’d had three years’ warning, but then the innovation block wasn’t an imaginary disease that people invoked just to excuse their laziness. Agata’s long silence since she’d set out to overcome it proved just how pernicious it must be.
A short burst of data appeared on the console. Tarquinia chirped. ‘Number one’s made the jump!’
Ramiro waited for the next report, then scrutinised the figures. ‘It’s clinging on, and it hasn’t jammed.’ He wasn’t satisfied yet; it was still possible that the strings would become progressively twisted. The occulter rotated its body in opposite directions with each step, so all things being equal it ought to unwind as much it entwined, but he could imagine some configurations of the strings interfering with the process and favouring one direction.
But in the third report the torques were unchanged, and the fourth confirmed that nothing was escalating. The occulter was cycling its way up the rock face towards its target, tenaciously regaining the same equilibrium with every step.
Ramiro sagged across the desk. ‘I think I just aged another six years.’
Tarquinia said, ‘Better here than back on the Surveyor.’
‘That’s true.’ Ramiro had never thanked her for the lengths to which she’d gone to spare him that fate. He sat and watched her for a moment, wondering what she’d say if he raised it after all this time. But he suspected that it would only annoy and embarrass her if he told her that he knew what she’d done for him.
The second occulter flew over the edge, and recovered as well as the first. Ramiro was wary of becoming complacent — but it made no sense to reason about the machines’ fate without taking account of everything he knew of both the past and the future. The disruption would happen, that was close to a certainty, and the occulters’ behaviour had to be consistent with that. The cosmos was indifferent as to whether the solution of its governing equations described the Peerless obliterated by a meteor, or just a few conspirators managing to shatter a few mirrors. But even the most dispassionate mathematician who’d been told that twelve clockwork insects carrying explosives were crawling across the mountain towards the light collectors would have to accept that the second solution now appeared at least as viable as the first.
The third occulter reported success. The fourth, the fifth. Ramiro said, ‘When this stage is over, we should go and tell Agata and Azelio. They deserve to have their minds put at ease.’
Tarquinia was sympathetic, but not so sure that it would help. ‘Do you think Azelio would get any comfort from this?’
‘Once he’s confronted with the sheer improbability of a meteor arriving at exactly the same time as the occulters, it might change his perspective.’
The sixth occulter landed safely and commenced its upwards crawl. Tarquinia said, ‘After Agata and Azelio, we should break the news to the Councillors.’
‘Really?’
‘Just to taunt them,’ she stressed. ‘No details.’
Ramiro said, ‘Where’s the fun in that? They’ve known for three years that they were going to be defeated.’