‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ Tarquinia replied. ‘I think they convinced themselves that it would be a meteor. No defeat, no surrender, just an act of nature.’
The seventh occulter sent its report. Ramiro squinted at the numbers, confused. ‘What . . . ?’
Tarquinia leant closer to the screen. ‘It’s gone into the void. It fired the air jets to leave the slope, but then something jammed and it couldn’t get back.’
A second report arrived; the accelerometer showed the occulter in free fall.
Ramiro was numb. ‘That’s impossible. How can we lose one when we have no spares?’
Tarquinia said, ‘What if we change some of the targeting? Maybe we can take out two light collectors with one bomb – or three with two.’
Ramiro brought the target coordinates onto the screen. ‘How do we model this? Do we add the pressures from each shock wave?’
‘That will do, for an estimate.’
The estimate told them that the strategy wouldn’t work. The light collectors were spread too far apart, and the blast radius of each bomb was too small.
Ramiro was lost. ‘What is it that we don’t understand? Could one channel survive?’
Tarquinia considered this. ‘So one Councillor already knows what comes after the disruption? It’s hard to believe that they could keep that a secret from the others, and I don’t see how the politics would work: in the aftermath they’d just be despised by everyone for withholding the information.’
‘It’s not impossible, though.’
‘It’s not impossible, but I’m not going to rely on it.’
‘So what do we do?’
Tarquinia hesitated, then came to a decision. ‘I’ll go out and repair the occulter – clean the jets, change the air tank. It’s in free fall and we know the trajectory; it shouldn’t be too difficult to intercept.’
Ramiro fought down an impulse to volunteer himself; she’d have a far better chance of success than he would, if she could get out into the void at all. ‘Won’t the airlocks be guarded?’
‘I know a way out through the observatory,’ she said.
‘A way out that isn’t an airlock?’
‘It’s a chamber with two airtight doors,’ Tarquinia conceded, ‘but no one ever uses it to come and go. There are some small instruments that we operate in the void, and we slide them in and out on tracks to avoid all the rigmarole of going outside to tend to them.’
‘But a person can squeeze through?’
‘Yes. Just barely.’
Ramiro said, ‘We don’t know that it won’t be guarded, or monitored somehow.’
‘No. But we can be sure that every other airlock will be.’
‘How will you get access?’
‘I think I can talk my way into an observing session – and there are tools, cooling bags and air tanks there already, I won’t need to drag a lot of suspicious paraphernalia with me. All I need is a bell or two alone in the main dome, exploring some hunch about the disruption.’
‘A hunch that your colleagues will know must come to nothing, or the Council would have sent the results back three years.’
Tarquinia scowled. ‘No, it must come to nothing that’s recognised as vital in the next three days – but that doesn’t prove that the observations won’t be valuable later. I can invent some wild theory on my way to the summit. Believe me, I’ve seen the observing program – no one has any idea where to point the telescopes right now. The chief astronomer will be grateful for anything that looks even half plausible.’
‘So the instrument will be doing some automated sweep . . . while you’re out in the void fixing the occulter?’ Every part of this sounded desperate, but Ramiro had no better ideas. ‘Won’t you be tracked?’
‘If I go straight up from the summit and then arc around towards the plane of the base I can stay out of range of the systems tuned for accidental egress – and I certainly won’t have the signature to be mistaken for an incoming Hurtler.’ Tarquinia reached across the desk and took the link. ‘I’m going to need this to reprogram the occulter. We should have made it possible to talk to the things with a corset alone, but it’s no use complaining about a lack of foresight.’ She formed a pocket for the link then started dragging herself towards the door, then she saw the expression on Ramiro’s face.
‘We’ve both survived tougher jobs than this,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to die out there.’
‘I know, but—’
‘If I get arrested, just pretend to be shocked. Maybe there’ll still be something you can do – don’t assume that the whole plan’s dead just because they’ve grabbed me.’
‘All right.’
Tarquinia drew herself towards Ramiro and embraced him. ‘This is just a glitch,’ she said. ‘In a few bells I’ll be back here and we’ll be joking about it.’
‘Yeah.’
Ramiro watched her leave, then he sat by the console. Without the link he couldn’t even check what was happening with the other occulters. He didn’t doubt Tarquinia’s skill or resolve, but if they lost one more machine she could hardly repeat the same ruse. The whole plan was on the verge of collapsing, and he had no idea how to salvage it.
Ramiro pounded on Agata’s door until his hand ached, but there was no response. So much for her sitting in her room and thinking. Who would she visit? Lila? Azelio?
He looked up Lila’s address on a public console, but he hadn’t gone far when he ran into Agata coming the other way, carrying a box full of books.
Ramiro greeted her casually and restrained himself from blurting out anything compromising. ‘That’s a lot of reading,’ he said.
‘They’re Medoro’s books,’ Agata explained. ‘His family had no use for them, so I thought I’d take them.’
Ramiro gave a quiet chirp of approval, as if he were acknowledging a respectful gesture of remembrance. ‘It’d be good to catch up with you,’ he said. ‘If you’re not too busy.’
‘I’d like that,’ Agata replied. ‘My apartment’s a mess, though – it’s not fit for company.’ They’d never checked it for listening devices.
‘You could drop off the books and come to my place, if you like.’
‘All right. I’ll see you in a chime.’
They parted at the next intersection.
When Agata arrived, Ramiro invited her in and closed the door. ‘If you have another plan,’ he said, ‘now’s the time to tell us.’
Agata’s composure shattered as if he’d struck her. ‘I couldn’t do it,’ she confessed. She started humming and shivering. ‘I wasn’t strong enough.’
Ramiro was horrified. ‘It’s all right, calm down! I was just asking.’ In all their time together he’d never seen her so wretched. ‘No one else could break the innovation block – and so far you’ve had about three bells without it.’
‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I already had a plan three stints ago – no innovations, it was all gleaned from textbooks. But I couldn’t go through with it.’
Ramiro led her over to the couch and sat beside her. ‘What happened?’ he asked gently.
Agata explained between bouts of shivering. ‘I had everything worked out so that Celia would think I’d done a final shift and then quit. No one would have been searching the tunnels for my body. I’d even found a way to repair the grilles behind me so that the other workers wouldn’t notice the damage. I was going to schedule a message to you and Tarquinia, telling you the threshold that the refractive index of the air near the axis would need to cross for you to know that you could cancel the bombs. But after I sent a message to myself to hold fast against Giacomo, I lost all my courage.’
Ramiro squeezed her shoulder. ‘I’m glad you didn’t do it.’