The Arrows of Time: Orthogonal Book Three (3 page)

‘Ramiro?’

He looked up; Tarquinia had reappeared on the navigation screen.

‘What’s happening?’ he asked, surprised that she’d have anything more to report so soon.

‘Don’t panic,’ she said. ‘The spin-down’s going perfectly.’

‘But?’

‘I just saw the latest snapshot of the halo.’

Ramiro’s anxiety deepened. The navigators used ultraviolet images of the region around the Object as a way of measuring the density of interstellar gas, traces of which could be seen being
annihilated as it struck the orthogonal asteroid’s dust halo.

Tarquinia read the look on his face and buzzed softly. ‘The gas is as rarefied as ever; the corridor should still be safe to traverse. But there was something unexpected on the image. I
think it was a gnat moving away from the Station.’

Ramiro struggled to make sense of this claim. ‘I heard there was a gnat left behind; the last shift didn’t have enough pilots to fly them all back. It should have been tied up, but I
suppose it could have sprouted some kind of air leak that pushed it away—’

‘I don’t mean
drifting
,’ Tarquinia interjected. ‘It was firing its engines. Some of the flare came our way – that’s the only reason it showed up on
the snapshot.’

‘But the Station’s empty. Everyone’s been evacuated.’

Tarquinia knew what she’d seen. ‘Do you think someone could have automated the gnat?’ she asked. ‘To start flying on its own, after they’d left the
Station?’

‘It’s possible,’ Ramiro conceded. ‘But why would they?’

‘I have no idea. But it’s either that, or someone’s managed to stay behind.’

‘What are you suggesting? Some disappointed voters from Pio’s faction have decided that they’re going to get their way after all . . .
at the Station
?’ Ramiro
didn’t know whether he should be amused or horrified. The ambition was comical, but if there really were holdouts who’d concluded that the safest life they could make for their children
lay in an abandoned research habitat, there’d be nothing funny when they starved to death.

‘This image shows a gnat using its engines,’ Tarquinia replied. ‘I’m not going to try to guess if there are people inside, let alone what their motives could
be.’

‘Do you want me to chase down the Councillors?’ Ramiro didn’t know whose job it had been to ensure that every last traveller was inside the
Peerless
before the
spin-down commenced, but he was glad it fell entirely outside his own domain.

Tarquinia said, ‘You’d better do that.’

Ramiro loosened his harness. ‘If we had cameras in all the corridors,’ he mused, ‘and programs for recognising invariant anatomy . . .’

‘We could have done an automated census before starting up the engines?’ Tarquinia suggested.

‘Ah, good idea.’ Ramiro hadn’t been thinking on quite that scale. ‘I was just picturing a way of getting messages to people when they were wandering around the
mountain.’ But Greta and her guests would not have gone far. ‘Are you certain this isn’t a false alarm?’

‘No,’ Tarquinia admitted. ‘But if we fire the main engines and there are people left behind, do you want to be the one who takes responsibility?’

Ramiro said, ‘I’ll find the Councillors.’

Ramiro was roused by a discordant clanging of his own design, impossible to mistake for anything else. It was not a pleasant way to wake, but experience had shown him that no
gentler sound could penetrate his sleep. He dragged himself out from beneath the tarpaulin of his sand bed and over to the communications link. The walls’ red moss-light had been gentle on
his eyes, but when he switched on the display the sudden brightness was painful.

‘I’m going to need you to go outside,’ Greta said.

‘Why?’ Ramiro asked, baffled. ‘Is someone waiting in the corridor?’

‘I’m not talking about your apartment.’

Ramiro massaged his skull, hoping to conjure up a third interpretation.

‘The census results are in,’ Greta said. ‘There’s no one missing from the
Peerless
.’

‘Good! We can fire the main engines with a clear conscience.’

Greta hummed impatiently. ‘The observatories are tracking the gnat, but we still have no idea what it’s doing.’

‘Why should we care?’ Ramiro was mildly curious, but chasing a moving target across the void when no one’s life was at stake, and the environs in which the whole strange prank
was playing out would soon be left far behind, struck him as a little disproportionate.

Greta said, ‘Who understands automation better than you do?’

‘Appeals to my vanity will get you nowhere.’

‘That wasn’t a rhetorical question,’ she retorted. ‘The gnats aren’t meant to be able to do this. But it looks as if someone else knows your field well enough to
make it happen.’

‘It’s a trivial modification,’ Ramiro stated flatly. ‘If you want to get me interested you’re going to have to do better than that.’

Greta fell silent.

‘What?’ he pressed her. ‘You can trust me to automate the turnaround, but you can’t tell me the Council’s paranoid theory about a self-driving gnat?’

‘We think the intention might be to exploit the Object as some kind of weapon,’ she confessed.

Ramiro’s skin tingled strangely. He had never even been close to the Object, but since childhood he’d heard stories of Carla and Ivo’s near-fatal first approach, when even the
faint wind leaking from their cooling bags had set the rock below them on fire.

‘We could always start the main engines ahead of schedule,’ he suggested. ‘Before this gnat can finish doing whatever it’s trying to do.’

‘And what about the farms?’

‘Some soil spills down the walls, to the place we were moving it anyway.’

Greta said, ‘It’s only the wheat fields that have been left fallow for the changeover. There are timber plantations, medicinal gardens and a dozen different crops we use for fibres
and resins that all need careful transplantation.’

Ramiro doubted that anyone would have cared about a few upended trees if it had been clear that the whole mountain was at stake. But if the cost to agriculture seemed too great in the face of an
undetermined threat, there were other routes to certainty.

‘Why not just destroy the gnat?’ he suggested. ‘How hard could that be?’

‘The Council wants it intercepted, undamaged,’ Greta insisted. ‘We need to inspect the navigation system and find out exactly what the plan was.’

‘Then send your best pilot to bring it back, and I’ll happily dissect the whole system in the comfort of a suitably equipped workshop.’

‘That would be ideal,’ Greta conceded. ‘But it might not be possible.’

Ramiro hummed derisively. ‘This is just a gnat with a modified navigation system. There’s no one inside to defend it. Once your pilot gets on board and cuts a few photonic cables, it
will be no different from any other kind of cargo. They can attach a rope to it and tow it back.’

Greta said, ‘When the Station was vacated there were dozens of samples from the Object left in its workshops. If someone gained access to the gnat at a time when they could move around the
Station with next to no scrutiny, who knows what else they might have done besides reprogramming the navigation system?’

Ramiro stared at her for a moment, then he understood that there really was no squirming out of this. The one thing he couldn’t ask any pilot to bring back to the
Peerless
was a
machine potentially booby-trapped with fragments of antimatter.

‘Strap yourself in,’ Tarquinia suggested. ‘It’s going to be a bumpy ride.’

Ramiro took her advice, fumbling at the harness with hands fitting loosely in the gloves of his cooling bag. While their gnat hung suspended from the outside of the
Peerless
the long
flat couch against his back was vertical, like some kind of recuperative splint to help him stand upright.

He’d flown in a gnat before, but this was a different design, with space for just the pilot and one passenger and a storage hold between the couches and the cooling system. The clearstone
dome that stretched over their heads was close enough to touch. ‘Did they let you talk to your family?’ he asked Tarquinia. Though he didn’t doubt her skills as a pilot, he
suspected that one reason she’d been chosen for the job had been to limit the number of people who knew about the situation.

‘Greta made the case for secrecy,’ she said. ‘But I told my brother anyway.’

‘Good for you.’ Ramiro had resented the pressure to keep quiet, but then welcomed the excuse to say nothing. He wouldn’t have known how to explain the task he was facing
without alarming his family, and the last thing he needed right now was a lecture from his uncle about his duty to the children his sister was yet to shed. If everything went well he’d be
back long before he was missed.

He pointed to the navigation console. ‘Have you updated the local maps?’ No one had been expecting to go flying once the spin-down had begun, and apart from the altered velocity of
the slopes there was the small matter of steering clear of the beams from the counter-rotation engines.

‘No, I just thought I’d leave everything unchanged and see what happened,’ Tarquinia replied sarcastically.

Ramiro was unrepentant. ‘If you’re going to take offence every time I nag you about something that could get us killed—’

‘All right!’ Tarquinia’s expression softened. ‘I’m all in favour of some mutual irritation anyway. Better than falling asleep on the job.’

‘Don’t tempt me with that.’

‘Ready,’ she said. It wasn’t a question. She threw a switch on her panel and the gnat fell away from the mountain.

Ramiro’s queasiness at the sudden loss of weight soon changed to elation. He’d forgotten how beautiful the outside could be; after six years of moss-light and display screens, the
muted shades of starlit rock spreading out above him felt like liberation. As the mountain retreated, he looked down to the bright line of jumbled colours that divided the sky. To his right, the
long trails of the home cluster’s stars reached their greatest luminance along this border, then vanished completely. To see any further would have meant seeing these stars’ futures
– and they weren’t sending light backwards in time against their own thermodynamic arrows. To his left, the orthogonal cluster had the sky to itself, sprinkling its domain with small,
neat colour trails.

‘Firing engines,’ Tarquinia warned.

Ramiro was thrust abruptly back against the couch, ridding him of any notion that he was standing. He’d been expecting the change of vertical, but the pressure on his body was distinctly
more uncomfortable than he remembered. After a few pauses wondering whether he was going to be able to hold down his last few meals, he managed to ossify parts of his torso, giving it better
support against the unaccustomed weight so that it no longer threatened to squeeze out the contents of his digestive tract.

As the gnat sped away from the mountain, the sky’s stark asymmetry made it easy to maintain a sense of direction, but Ramiro still needed to check the navigation console to gauge their
progress. When he finally looked back towards the
Peerless
again it was a pale grey triangle, a dwindling near-silhouette against the star trails. The engines labouring to end its spin
produced no visible trace at all; even if the sparse dust rising out from the slopes was scattering the beams a little, they were far into the ultraviolet.

‘It should take about three and a half bells to reach the Station,’ Tarquinia predicted.

Ramiro said, ‘Isn’t it usually six?’ No wonder he felt so much heavier than on his last flight.

‘This gnat was designed for towing cargo,’ Tarquinia explained. ‘I flew it myself, the last time they upgraded the Station. I was carrying a whole prefabricated living unit,
but coming back, with no external load—’ She brought six gloved fingertips together, then flung her hand forward as she spread them.

Ramiro didn’t want to risk insulting her again, so he fought back the urge to ask her exactly how much cooling air they’d brought. Carla’s glorious optical rebounders required
no fuel, with the gnat’s gain in kinetic energy coming solely from the creation of light, but the frequency-shifting mirrors that enabled that trick still generated waste heat. The more
powerful the engines, the more air it took to carry heat away into the void.

Tarquinia panned across the console’s map to show a featureless marker far from the Station itself. The rogue gnat had travelled a long way from its starting point – away from the
Object too, with no apparent destination in sight – though in the latest observations it had been decelerating. With its engines now aimed in the opposite direction to their initial
orientation there was no spillage from them reaching the
Peerless
; if the astronomers hadn’t known the gnat’s earlier trajectory they would never have been able to locate it.
Ramiro would have enjoyed the challenge of instructing a second unoccupied gnat to seek out the first for a mutually destructive collision at the greatest possible velocity, but the gentler
approach was going to be much trickier to achieve, and from his present perspective a great deal less enjoyable.

‘What were they thinking?’ he asked wearily.

‘Who?’

‘Pio’s group. We get all those earnest speeches about their fears for our descendants, and then suddenly they’re trying . . . what? Some kind of feint involving the
Object?’

‘Feint?’ Tarquinia pondered the idea. ‘Whatever they’ve programmed the gnat to do, I don’t see how they could call it off now, even if they wanted to.’

Ramiro took her point: the kind of communications system that could connect to such a distant target wasn’t something a disgruntled minority could have set up in secret out on the slopes.
‘They might still have a shutdown code that they could offer us,’ he said. ‘Something we’d have to transmit on their behalf.’

‘That’s possible,’ Tarquinia agreed. ‘Or they might just offer us the flight plan itself. It was pure luck that we spotted the thing at all; they might have thought
they’d still have that to bargain with.’

Ramiro buzzed disdainfully. ‘Some people are very bad losers.’