‘We’ll take care of the machine,’ Giacomo said. ‘There’s nothing for you to worry about.’ His rear eyes moved aimlessly, his gaze passing over Ramiro without registering his presence.
Save Giacomo’s friends, there was no one else close enough to have any chance of hearing them, and Ramiro could only assume that his allies knew the location of every listening device in the room. But it was still a struggle to speak as if they had real privacy.
‘If you can fix this,’ he said, ‘you should have told us earlier, and then my friend wouldn’t be in trouble.’
‘That won’t last long,’ Giacomo promised. ‘Even if they’ve taken her, in a matter of days every prisoner will be free.’
Ramiro had no idea how he thought he could guarantee that; the whole government was hardly going to resign in shame. ‘And what about the occulter? You can perform the repairs yourself?’
‘Absolutely,’ Giacomo assured him.
Ramiro gave him the communications codes that would be needed to instruct the navigation system and get the machine back on course.
‘You should lie low now,’ Giacomo said. ‘I’m sorry about the incident before, but that wasn’t my decision. Someone saw you as a risk and took things into their own hands.’
Ramiro chewed his loaf slowly. His trust in this man was disintegrating, but if the conspiracy was a sham and Giacomo had been working for the Council all along, why would anyone go through the motions of trying to warn him off?
‘You don’t need to make repairs,’ Ramiro realised. ‘You’ve got replacements. You’ve built your own.’ They’d had the plans for three years. Why limit themselves to making accessories when they could copy the whole design?
Giacomo took his time replying, inserting a raucous joke into his friends’ End of the Mountain celebration.
‘We’ve built our own,’ he agreed reluctantly. ‘That was only prudent – and it’s turned out to be essential.’
‘You couldn’t tell us?’
‘The less you knew, the better,’ Giacomo replied.
Ramiro suspected that it was Agata’s position that would have been the sticking point; this made a mockery of the idea that the Surveyor’s crew had held a veto over the final deployment. ‘How many spares did you make?’
‘Enough.’ There was a note of irritation creeping into Giacomo’s voice.
‘A dozen? A gross?’
Giacomo said, ‘You don’t need those details. We’ve been planning this for years, we know exactly what we’re doing. Just go back to your apartment and wait.’
Ramiro stared down at the plate in front of him. These people knew him far better than he knew them – at the very least through Pio, and Ramiro had told Pio that he’d oppose him if he ever tried to use violence. Giacomo would have been forewarned not to expect Ramiro to cooperate with anything of the kind.
That was why they’d been so coy about the scale of their own resources: they were going to try to breach the tubes. They had as many occulters as they’d need, carrying whatever quantity of explosives it would take. The occulters from the Surveyor were just decoys; it had never mattered whether or not they reached their targets.
Ramiro said, ‘I need some proof from you that the attack won’t be excessive – that it will shatter the light collectors, nothing more.’
Giacomo’s rear gaze turned on him briefly, before sliding away. ‘How could I prove that? Do you want to come and observe all our communications? What would that tell you? If we showed you the data from the one machine that’s replaced your runaway, you could always convince yourself that there were more.’
Ramiro was silent; he had nothing to bargain with. If he went to the Council and helped them mount a defence against the occulters, he’d only be risking a far greater loss of life from a meteor strike.
‘Why?’ he asked, dropping any pretence that there was still some doubt about Giacomo’s plans. ‘The disruption is enough. The Council will be humiliated, they’ll fall at the next election. The system will never be restarted. What more could you want?’
Giacomo embarked on a long, loud story about someone’s feud with someone else in their student days. Ramiro began to think that the meeting was over; he finished his meal and began picking up crumbs from the plate.
But then the story ended and Giacomo spoke.
‘This is the fulcrum,’ he whispered. ‘This is our one chance. Or how many generations will be forced to bear the same ruthless people holding power? Prisoners locked up without trial? Men treated as lesser beings, made for one purpose alone? The disruption is not enough; there needs to be damage and chaos. The Council needs to fail the people so badly that they don’t dare set foot on the mountain again. Let them run away to Esilio or die in their private fortresses. In two days everything will change for ever. There’s nothing to lament in that. But if we want our time to come, there has to be a price.’
Ramiro lay sleepless in his sand bed, staring out into the moss-lit room. If the messaging system’s tubes were breached, their walls might still hold against the pressure. The Council would have known all along that this kind of damage was possible; they must have taken steps to minimise the consequences.
But all the earlier construction along the axis had been carried out with no conception that it would ever be exposed to the void. Walls could be strengthened after the fact, seals could be laid down. But nothing would ever render the resulting patchwork the same as the solid rock of the hull that had been kept intact for that purpose from the start.
If the tubes gave way, whole precincts would crumble. People would be battered by the winds and debris, even if they didn’t end up out in the void. Before the breach could be repaired there would be all the damage and chaos that Giacomo could desire.
But what other possibilities remained? Ramiro could still summon up a slender hope that if he went to the Council promising to reveal the details of the attack, they would agree to a voluntary shutdown. Maybe all the stubbornness Greta had displayed in public had only been for show.
Was that what he wanted, though: the Council triumphant? Could he really have half of Vincenzo’s version – the disruption as a bluff to expose the saboteurs – without the messaging system starting up again and the same dismal paralysis descending across the mountain for six more generations? With his rash confession to Agata he’d destroyed any chance of Tarquinia’s hoax convincing anyone that the system was redundant. And if he was sentencing people to the dust and darkness of Esilio, how many more would die there than would fall victim to Giacomo’s plan?
He wanted change. He wanted the Council crushed. He wanted the men who came after him to be more than timid appeasers like his uncle, who’d clutched at their prescribed role with pathetic gratitude then done their best to instil the same subservient mentality in the next generation.
Whatever choice he made, whatever side he took, some lives would be endangered and some people would die. All he could do was look beyond that to the fate of the survivors. One path would lead, at best, to a miserable exile for the dissenters and generations of tyranny for everyone who remained on the mountain. The other would bring turmoil and grief for a while, but it would also bring a chance of enduring freedom.
32
Agata flipped over a dozen pages before realising that her concentration had deserted her and she had no idea what she’d been looking at.