The Arrows of Time: Orthogonal Book Three (5 page)

Ramiro said, ‘We’ll need to calibrate the alignment.’

‘Of course. Put it together, then I’ll get the optics workbench.’

‘You have an
optics workbench
?’

‘A small one.’

The bench was half the size of Ramiro’s torso, but it let them measure the angle between the scope’s axis and the coherer’s beam. By the time he had the crude weapon aligned,
he looked out through the dome to see that the gnat had rotated again without him even noticing. The engines were dragging them backwards now, giving them a trajectory much like the parabola of a
ball thrown under gravity – albeit in some very strange game where the skill lay more in controlling the direction of the ongoing force than in the initial toss.

‘Do you have children?’ he asked Tarquinia.

‘No.’

‘So what did your brother say, when you told him about this?’

‘He wished me a safe journey,’ Tarquinia replied.

Ramiro said, ‘If I’d told my uncle, I probably wouldn’t be here at all.’

‘Hmm.’ Tarquinia sounded sympathetic, but reluctant to take sides. ‘So let’s neither of us do anything reckless,’ she said. ‘If we play this right, your
family need never even know that you were out here.’

The gnat reached the top of its parabola and started falling back towards the Station. Ramiro glanced up from the navigation console, unable to dismiss a stubborn intuition that the event ought
to be visible somehow, but nothing in the view through the dome had changed.

The
Peerless
was still tracking the rogue and sending updates; the thing was five dozen severances away, off to Ramiro’s left and ‘below’ him – in the sense of
‘down’ rammed into his body by the engines, the opposite of that in his tossed-ball analogy. He slid his head past the edge of the couch and examined the sky with his rear gaze, knowing
full well that there was nothing he could hope to see. Even if he’d slipped on the ultraviolet goggles that Tarquinia had given him from her trove of gadgets, the rogue’s engines were
pointed away from him. A similarly equipped passenger on the rogue might have seen the UV flare from the gnat ahead of them, but Ramiro was hoping that the saboteurs had had no chance to augment
the vehicle with extra hardware.

‘We need to eat now,’ Tarquinia declared, tugging at the lid on the store beside her couch.

‘I don’t have much appetite,’ Ramiro protested.

‘That’s not the point,’ Tarquinia said flatly. ‘You’ve only had half a night’s sleep, and you’re going to need to be alert for this. It’ll take a
bell for the loaves to be digested, so this is mealtime.’

Ramiro buzzed at her presumptuousness. ‘Yes, Uncle.’

‘I’m your pilot, that’s worse. Can your uncle toss you out into the void?’

He took the loaf that she handed him and bit into it dutifully. It was a struggle to force the chewed food down his oesophagus; half the flesh that usually helped him to swallow had been
ossified.

When he’d finished, Ramiro brushed the crumbs from his gloves. ‘What happens if we get this wrong?’ he asked. ‘If we scare the rogue into some kind of evasive manoeuvre
that changes its trajectory, but it’s still not enough to stop it hitting the Station . . . could that skew things so that the plume ends up aimed at the
Peerless
?’

Tarquinia had already thought it through. ‘Any collision at this speed is going to give the Station so much energy that it will be oblivious to the Object’s gravity: it will be
travelling on a virtually straight line, not whipping around in an eccentric orbit. So even if the impact’s skewed, either the Station will crash on the side where it was meant to crash, or
it will miss the Object completely and fly off into the void.’

‘So the worst that can happen is that the saboteurs get what they want: a delay in the turnaround.’ Worse was possible for the two of them, but Ramiro was trying to calm himself for
the task ahead, not give himself a reason to back out completely.

Tarquinia said, ‘As far as I can see. But the problem then is how people will respond.’

‘You mean . . . retribution?’ Ramiro hadn’t been thinking that far ahead. ‘The migrationists will be in trouble just for trying this stunt, whether or not we manage to
stop it.’

‘I think a lot of travellers will be a great deal more displeased if the turnaround is actually postponed for a generation than they would have been by the mere effrontery of the
attempt.’ Tarquinia sounded bemused: hadn’t Ramiro invested a third of his life preparing for the event?

‘I’d be disappointed,’ he confessed. ‘But it’s not as if everything I’ve done will have been wasted. Even if the delay is so long that they decide to replace
the whole system with something more modern, they’ll still end up using a lot of my ideas.’

‘Hmm.’ Tarquinia was surprised, but she wasn’t going to try to argue him out of his position. ‘Most people have been looking forward to this for a long time, though
– and for someone who hasn’t directly contributed to it, it’s living through the turnaround that would make all the difference. You get to take some pleasure in having made it
possible, whenever it happens. The rest of us will just be robbed of the biggest thing we hoped to see in our lives.’

‘Three years of arduous gravity, and some changes in the appearance of the stars?’

‘It’s not the novelty, or the spectacle,’ Tarquinia replied. ‘It’s the proof that what we’ve been through might be worth it. It’s seeing the mountain
heading back towards the home world – seeing the plan finally enacted, not just promised. We can’t take part in the reunion, but a whole generation’s been clinging to the hope
that at least we’d be here for the turnaround.’

‘That’s all a bit teleological for me.’ Ramiro had no wish to offend her, but the idea of anyone’s sense of worth being reduced to their role as witness to the Great
Project just dismayed him. ‘I hope our descendants can help the ancestors. But why should everything we do derive its meaning from that?’

Tarquinia buzzed incredulously. ‘So you don’t care
why
we’re turning around?’

‘I never said that,’ Ramiro protested. ‘I think the turnaround will be a good thing for everyone. If I felt otherwise, I would have joined the migrationists. But day to day? I
just like solving problems and doing my job well. That’s enough. There’s no need for all this grandiose posturing.’

Tarquinia fell silent. Ramiro felt a twinge of guilt: ‘grandiose posturing’ might have been a bit too strong.

‘Anyway, forget it,’ he said. ‘We’re not going to mess this up, so any consequences are hypothetical.’

‘One kind are hypothetical,’ Tarquinia allowed. ‘But don’t forget the rest.’

‘The rest?’

‘Most travellers will be happy if we succeed,’ she said, ‘and I hope they’ll forgive the migrationists, out of sheer relief at their ineffectuality.’

‘But?’ Ramiro shifted uneasily in his cooling bag, hoping his meal was going to stay down.

Tarquinia said, ‘Whoever did this, they’re not going to give up. If they’re certain that the
Peerless
is heading for oblivion, what else can they do but keep on trying
to save us?’

Half a chime before the expected encounter, Ramiro slipped on the ultraviolet goggles. It was impossible for the astronomers on the
Peerless
to measure the
rogue’s position down to the last saunter, so Tarquinia had decided that the only reliable way to synchronise the next stage of the process was to allow the rogue to overtake them. The
goggles didn’t leave Ramiro blind – the photonics aimed to overlay an image of any incident UV on an ordinary view – but the result was an imperfect compromise and he could
understand why Tarquinia didn’t want to try to read the navigation console while wearing the things herself.

‘After this, every new gnat will have UV cameras built in,’ he predicted.

‘Then we’re lucky no one thought it was worth it before.’ Tarquinia gave a curt hum of displeasure. ‘What next? Weapons built in? Everything we make from now on designed
with the worst in mind?’

Ramiro adjusted the straps on his goggles. He wasn’t going to fret about some hypothetical escalation of the conflict. There was a problem right in front of them; they had to focus on it
completely now.

‘Three lapses to go,’ Tarquinia announced.

Ramiro tensed, willing himself to vigilance. He turned slightly to the left. If the rogue arrived later than they’d anticipated, sticking rigidly to the flight plan would leave them
perpetually ahead of it. Only by cutting their engines completely could they guarantee that the rogue would pass them, revealing itself through its flare.

‘Two lapses.’

Ramiro fixed the pattern of the stars in his mind, noting each trail’s extension in artificial white beyond the usual violet. The rogue might pass them in the distance, and he did not want
to be confused about the significance of some pale white streak.

‘One lapse.’ Tarquinia waited, then counted down the last pauses. ‘Five. Four. Three. Two. One.’

Ramiro said, ‘Nothing.’ He was weightless now; the engines had cut off automatically. He strained his eyes, wondering if the trajectories could have been so misaligned that the rogue
had already passed them by, completely out of sight.

Something moved in the corner of his vision; before he could turn towards it there was a light in front of him, vanishing into the distance. ‘Now!’ he shouted. Tarquinia restarted
the engines, at a lower thrust intended to match the rogue’s acceleration.

Magically, the white speck stopped fading.

‘It’s stable,’ Ramiro marvelled. In all these cubic severances of void – and the further three dimensions of velocity in which they might have gone astray –
they’d actually succeeded in crossing paths with their foe and keeping pace with it.

Tarquinia raised the acceleration slightly; the speck grew brighter and slid off-centre. ‘It’s going left,’ Ramiro warned her. Tarquinia eased the thrust down, turned the gnat
fractionally for a few pauses, then turned it back again. As far as Ramiro could tell, the rogue was dead ahead now.

By trial and error they whittled away the distance between the two gnats. Tarquinia advanced cautiously; if they overshot the rogue its engines would become invisible. Instead, the light grew
gratifyingly intense, to the point where Ramiro had to lower the gain on the goggles.

Tarquinia said, ‘I can see the hull now.’

Ramiro took off the goggles and waited for his eyes to adjust. Ahead of them and slightly to the left, the rogue gnat’s dome glistened in the starlight above its grey hardstone shell. In
visible light, the blazing beacon he’d been following was reduced to a black patch at the rear of the hull.

Tarquinia brought them closer. ‘I’m going to depressurise,’ she said. As the air hissed out of the cabin, Ramiro opened the valve on the tank attached to his cooling bag.
Tarquinia put on her helmet, but Ramiro deferred; it would be awkward trying to aim the coherer with his face covered, and with the heat being drawn off most of his body he’d be comfortable
for a while yet.

When the rogue was suspended a couple of saunters away, he unstrapped his harness, found the release handle under the dome on his left and pulled open the exit hatch. He slithered around on the
couch until he was facing out. Tarquinia handed him the coherer. He held the scope to his eye; there was nothing between him and the rogue but void now. He searched the hull for the two dark
circles of the proximity sensors; he knew more or less where they had to be, but it still took three sweeps to find them.

Ramiro reached up and set the coherer to blue – far enough from infrared that it wouldn’t trigger the sensors – and checked that the spot was falling on his first target. Then
he slid the tuner further along, to a point he’d marked earlier with a speck of adhesive resin: an ultraviolet frequency that would permanently damage the lattice structure of the
photodetector.

The dark circle showed no visible change, but he’d expected none. He’d just have to trust the physics. He shifted his attention to the second sensor.

When he was done, Ramiro righted himself on the couch. The navigation console was predicting an impact with the Station in less than four chimes.

He put on his helmet. ‘We’re too late to use the explosives, aren’t we?’

Tarquinia’s voice came through the link, but he could hear a muffled version through the couch as well. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It took me longer to catch up than I
thought it would.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’ On balance, Ramiro was relieved; the whole idea had sounded like a dangerous gamble.

The rogue was drawing closer now; Tarquinia was using the manoeuvring engines to ease the gnat sideways. Ramiro waited for the rogue to turn skittish, but their presence had no effect on it at
all. Either he really had killed the proximity sensors, or the saboteurs hadn’t even tried to make use of them.

Ramiro slid into a safety harness attached to a short rope. Tarquinia had brought the two gnats to within about three stretches of each other; Ramiro could see right through the rogue’s
dome now, into its empty cabin. If he’d been weightless he would happily have attempted to jump straight for the rogue’s hull, but under this much acceleration he doubted that he would
have made it a quarter of the way.

He poked his legs out through the hatch and reached around with his right foot for the panel that covered the boarding rope. He slid it aside and groped for the hook on the end of the rope.
He’d chosen a cooling bag that left his feet uncovered, allowing him to re-form them easily into hands. He took hold of the hook, released the brake on the reel, then unwound what he judged
to be a little more rope than he’d need.

Seated on the rim of the hatch with his legs dangling down into the void, leaning a little so he could watch himself through the dome, Ramiro tossed the hook. When it struck the other
gnat’s dome he cringed, expecting the worst; if the rogue’s software was monitoring sound in the cabin, this would be the time for it to scupper the attempted boarding.

The rogue stayed put. Ramiro was puzzled, but he was beginning to suspect that the saboteurs had baulked at the idea of trying to automate a response to every contingency. Their overriding aim
would have been to keep the rogue on course and on schedule; with the Station deserted and the
Peerless
so far away they had hardly been guaranteed visitors, and any extra layers of
complexity in the software aimed at dealing with that possibility would have carried some risk of jumping at shadows. It was just bad luck for them that their plan had been detected so early; if he
and Tarquinia had left the
Peerless
half a bell later, this whole encounter would have been impossible.