Yalda looked back at the mountain. She could see three other worksites now, the bright mouths of tunnels further down the slope. But her trajectory was carrying her off to the side, and an expanse of dark rock was now spread out below her. There was an entire second line of worksites a half-turn around the mountain; the full set of engines would consist of a dozen diametrically opposite pairs. But if any of those sites came into view she’d know that something was wrong—that she’d been misdirecting her throws and inadvertently bending her trajectory.
She took another handful of rubble from the sack, waited for the target, then threw it. Her spin provided a rhythm for the process, giving her a chance to rest her arm without delaying the next throw too long. After a dozen cycles, she switched arms. She couldn’t extrude any new limbs without damaging her cooling bag, but although she felt some jarring at the end of each throw it didn’t build up to enough pain or damage to slow her down.
What she could have done with, though, was a good slingshot.
Yalda could see ten of the worksites now, with the remaining two from her side of the mountain probably just hidden behind small outcrops. All these engines would be completed, with or without her. The Peerless would get its spin, the crops would thrive once more. The real purpose of their journey would soon come to the fore again. Sabino had opened up a path that the brightest young students—Fatima, Ausilia and Prospera—would follow. Her death would not mean the end of anything.
And Nino? She cut off the morbid train of thought. The rubble sack was still more than half-full, her situation had not yet been proved unsalvageable.
As she threw another handful of rubble, she saw a flash of light in her rear gaze. She tried to place it exactly, to backtrack from the afterimage, but her spin confused her. Had she glimpsed one of the other worksites, the lights from its tunnel peeking briefly over the edge of the mountain? It had been too bright for that, hadn’t it? The tunnel mouths all faced the same way around the mountain—so those at the other worksites would be pointing away from her. The most she could have seen was the spill of light from the ground near the pit, and the scatter in the dust haze. How could that have outshone the sites where she was facing straight into the tunnels?
A few turns later, she was facing the mountain when she saw a second flash: far from any of the worksites, surrounded by blackness. She wondered if someone might have lit a sunstone lamp inside one of the observation chambers—but why would they do such a thing, let alone light it only for an instant?
The third flash was at a different location, still nowhere near any worksite—and too brief and too bright, Yalda concluded, to be an artificial source at all. Something must have collided with the Peerless—something small that nevertheless carried enough energy to turn the rock white-hot.
The telescopes had shown a corridor devoid of matter, but there’d been a limit to the sensitivity of those observations. Any speck of dust here, drifting along at a leisurely rate relative to the ordinary stars, would now be like a Hurtler to the Peerless. That was the price of taming the Hurtlers by matching their pace: ordinary dust could now do as much damage to the mountain as a Hurtler could do to an ordinary world.
So much for the city of carefree scholars, working in safety and tranquility until the secrets of the cosmos were laid bare to them. Just like the people they’d left behind, they would be living with the constant threat of conflagration. And not for four years: for generations.
Worst of all, Yalda realized, she was probably the sole witness to these events. The dust could have been striking the mountain for days, but most of the surface was invisible from the worksites and observation chambers. She had to get back and organize a fire watch for the Peerless; they had to prepare themselves to reach and douse a wildfire anywhere on the slopes, or risk going the way of Gemma.
Yalda cast another few stones—imagining them heavier in the hope of tricking her body into dispensing a little more force. The sack was a quarter full. She believed she was still heading away from the mountain, but judging tiny changes in the view at this distance was almost impossible.
How could they keep a lookout for fires? From a cage tethered on a rope, high above the surface, stabilized… somehow. Once the mountain was spinning, though, the problem wouldn’t be stability, but the strength of the rope.
And once the mountain was spinning, it would be far harder to move around on the surface. Weightlessness had made it difficult enough, but every part of the slope would be transformed into a ceiling. How did you douse a raging fire on a ceiling?
The sack was empty. Yalda clutched it to her chest, unwilling to presume that she’d have no further use for it. Was she moving toward the mountain, or away from it? For some time now, she hadn’t discerned any change in the angle it occupied in the sky, but she’d been too distracted to give the task much thought. She needed to pick a few distinctive stars close to the edge of the mountain, then wait to see if they crept away from it, or whether its silhouette slowly grew and hid them.
Yet another flash of light came from the mountain, this one very close to one of the worksites. Perhaps someone there, outside the tunnel on catapult duty, would have seen it? Yalda counted the pit-lights down from the summit, and realized that the site was her own.
The light winked again, from exactly the same direction. Not an impact, then. By now, she realized, her team would be out scouring the area for her, their sunstone lamps occasionally turning up into the sky. Yalda pictured them inspecting the catapult, feeling how loose it was, wondering if anyone could possibly have been careless enough—
The same light appeared, brighter than before, crossing her line of sight so slowly that it dazzled her. When she completed a half-turn it struck her rear gaze and stayed—wandering a little, but never fading out completely.
The lamp wasn’t on the surface of the mountain; it was moving straight toward her through the void. And it couldn’t be aiming itself, searching her out itself.
Yalda spread the empty sack out in front of her, hoping to make a larger, more reflective target. The approaching light began wavering oddly, as if seen through a heat haze. Through a burst of air, spreading out through the void. Some beautiful idiot had come after her—launched along the same trajectory by the catapult—and now they were using compressed air to brake. Not from a tiny canister like her own, but from one of the giant cylinders that powered the jackhammers.
The dazzling light overshot her, passing to one side. It rebounded, then overshot in the other direction. It was excruciating, but Yalda could do nothing to meet her rescuer halfway. By trial and error, by eye and airburst alone, the distance and difference in speed that separated them was whittled down to the point where the lamp became superfluous and its owner shut it down. No longer blinded by its glare, by starlight alone Yalda could see the figure before her, clutching an air tank and a coil of rope, wrapped in a familiar cooling bag.
Fatima took hold of a portion of the coiled rope and tossed it toward Yalda. This sent her gliding backward, but she didn’t bother trying to compensate, she just let the rope uncoil. Yalda reached out and grabbed the end, then brought it around her waist twice and held on tight.
There was a jolt as the rope went taut, then they were bound together, moving in a broad circle around a common point. Yalda dragged herself along the rope a short way, then gestured to Fatima to use an airburst to get rid of some of their angular momentum. By the time they were within arms’ reach of each other, their spin was almost gone.