The Arrows of Time: Orthogonal Book Three (6 page)

Ramiro gathered up the rope and tried again. On his fourth attempt, the hook passed through the ring beside the rogue’s hatch. The boarding rope hung down into the void; he didn’t
want to tighten it so much that any jitter in the engines would snap it, but as it was the catenary looked dauntingly steep. He wound some rope back onto the reel, until the dip at the centre was
no more than a couple of strides.

‘How long have we got?’ he asked Tarquinia.

‘A bit more than three chimes.’

Ramiro removed his safety harness. The rope that tied it to the cabin’s interior was too short for the crossing, but if he’d substituted a longer rope that would have put him in
danger of swinging down into the gnat’s ultraviolet exhaust. Having had no training in using a jetpack, he’d decided that the bulky device would just be a dangerous encumbrance. If he
lost his grip, or if the boarding rope snapped or came loose, the safest outcome would be for him to plummet straight down away from both vehicles and await rescue.

Tarquinia said, ‘Be careful.’

‘I intend to.’ Ramiro clambered out of the hatch and took hold of the boarding rope, swinging his legs up to share the load. He was more used to dealing with ropes in low gravity
– as antidotes to drift rather than weight-bearing structures – but with four limbs in play he had no trouble supporting himself. With his rear eyes he gazed down at the stars beneath
him; if he was going to react badly to the infinite drop it would be better to do it now than when he was halfway across. But though the sight was discomfiting, he didn’t panic or seize up. A
long fall could only harm him if there was something below on which to dash open his skull. Nothing made for a softer landing than the absence of any land at all.

As he dragged himself out along the rope, Ramiro’s confidence increased. He wasn’t going to lose his grip for no reason, and the two gnats remained in perfect lockstep, their engines
running as smoothly as he could have wished. His thoughts turned from the mechanics of the approach to the task ahead. With only three chimes remaining, it had passed the point where all he’d
have to do to spare the Station was shut off the rogue’s engines. Its sheer momentum now would be enough to carry it to the impact point with only a few pauses’ delay – not long
enough for the Station’s orbit to move it out of harm’s way. But the saboteurs might have made it difficult to change the flight plan quickly, so his best bet would be to plug his
corset directly into the engine controller. That was not a smart way to try to fly a gnat to a specific destination, but all he had to do was swerve sharply enough to avoid both the Station and the
Object. Once he was clear of both, he could kill the engines and Tarquinia would come and find him.

Ramiro felt the rope tilting disconcertingly as he approached the rogue feet first. He’d been looking up into the star trails, but now he raised his head; the hatch was just a few strides
away. Clambering upside down into the cabin was going to be awkward, but he didn’t think it was worth trying to turn his body around. When the hatch came within reach, he took his right foot
from the rope and stretched it towards the handle.

His leg jerked back before he was aware of the reason, then the pain arrived, driving everything else from his mind. He was seared flesh and a bellowing tympanum, skewered to an endless,
unbearable present, begging for relief that never came.

‘Ramiro?’ Tarquinia repeated his name half a dozen times before he could form a reply.

‘I’m burnt,’ he said.

Tarquinia was silent for a moment. ‘They must have sabotaged the cooling system,’ she concluded. ‘Do you want me to come and get you?’

Ramiro had closed his eyes; he opened them now, and realised that he’d managed to hang onto the rope despite the shock. ‘No.’ His damaged foot was useless, but he still had
three good limbs. ‘Can we pump some of our own air through?’

‘There isn’t time,’ Tarquinia said flatly.

‘No.’ It would take at least a chime just to set up the hoses, let alone for the air to have any effect.

‘I’m going to try pushing the rogue, hull to hull,’ Tarquinia announced. ‘How quickly can you get back here?’

‘I don’t know. Let me try.’

Ramiro braced himself and began. Even with his injured foot touching nothing, his body complained about the effort and the motion; it wanted to curl up where it was. He tried bribing it with
images of the safety of the cabin: the rogue was fatal, and the rope was precarious, but once he was in the cabin he could rest.

Halfway back, Ramiro felt his foot growing mercifully numb. He looked down to see a swarm of tiny yellow globules spilling from the ruined flesh, glowing like the sparks from an old-fashioned
lamp as they fell into the void.

‘Tarquinia?’

‘Do you need help?’

He could ask her to bring out a knife and amputate his foot, but that would take too long. ‘The wound isn’t stable,’ he said. ‘I’d better not come back into the
cabin.’

‘What do you mean, it isn’t stable?’

‘The burn’s denatured the tissue to the point where it might be explosive. You’d better start the manoeuvre, and I’ll drop out here.’

‘You can’t drop, Ramiro.’ Tarquinia presented the verdict as if she’d brook no contradiction.

‘I trust you,’ he said. ‘If I survive this, I know you’ll come and get me.’

‘If we were clear of obstacles, you can be sure I would,’ Tarquinia replied. ‘But if you let go of that rope now, I won’t have time to deal with the rogue and pick you up
before you come to grief.’

Ramiro felt himself scowling in disbelief; his pain-addled brain was proffering an image of him tumbling away into the safety of the void. With no rock beneath him, what was there to fear? But
if he insisted on taking the gnats’ frame of reference and its fictitious gravity seriously, to complete the description he’d need to include the two things above him: the Station and
the Object, falling straight down. Letting himself fall, too, wouldn’t protect him: those giant battering rams had already gained too much velocity. Turning his air tank into an improvised
jet to push himself sideways might just get him clear of the Station in time, but the Object was too large, his aim too unreliable.

He stared down at the sparks escaping from his foot. ‘Maybe this won’t go off – but if it does I don’t want us both dying.’

‘Then stay where you are!’ Tarquinia insisted. ‘It’s the shock wave in air that kills bystanders; if anything happens, the dome and the void will protect me. Look, we
don’t have time for a debate! I’m going to start the manoeuvre now. If you get into trouble, shout.’

Ramiro said, ‘All right.’

He adjusted his grip on the rope, taking the opportunity to rest one arm for a lapse. He didn’t think it would be wise to try to mess with the cooling bag to let him extrude a fresh pair
of limbs, but if fatigue really did start to threaten his hold he could try tying his corset’s photonic cable in a loop around the rope.

As the gnats drew closer together, the centre of the rope dropped lower, nearer to the engines. Ramiro began climbing towards Tarquinia’s side, alarmed at how much harder it was to make
progress with the rope at a steeper angle. Tarquinia poked her head out through the hatch, then reached down and began winding the rope in; Ramiro could see her straining to shift his weight, but
she was doing much more than sparing him the effort of the climb. With the rope shortened the angle improved, and Tarquinia kept winding until it was nearly horizontal again.

Then she disappeared back into the cabin, and the gnats moved closer still.

Ramiro clung on, trying to ignore the revived throbbing of his foot. Everyone had imagined the rogue defending itself with antimatter, or elaborate software to deal with would-be intruders. But
the measure that had actually defeated him might not even have been a deliberate strategy: in those last days at the Station, whoever had reprogrammed the navigation system might simply never have
had an opportunity to restock the decommissioned gnat with cooling air. At this very moment, they might be fretting over the possibility that their weapon had overheated to the point where every
photonic lattice had cracked and the rebounders’ mirrors had split into shards.

Tarquinia turned the gnat so that its flat belly faced the rogue’s. Ramiro scrambled to keep himself away from both the engines below and the approaching slab of hot rock. As Tarquinia
eased the gnats’ bases together he found himself suspended half a dozen strides below the hatch through which he’d left the cabin. With the side of his body resting against the polished
grey stone of the hull, he could feel the surface growing warmer as heat spread into it from the rogue. But before he could panic, he registered a quickening flow of air from the cooling channels.
Tarquinia’s gnat was built to run at three times its current power; the extra burden would not overwhelm it.

‘How long to the impact?’ Ramiro asked.

‘A chime and a half,’ Tarquinia replied evenly. ‘I’m going to start applying force now; this might get rough, but don’t let it shake you.’

‘I’ll do my best.’

Ramiro hugged the rope. The immediate effect of Tarquinia’s shoving was imperceptible, but it wouldn’t take long before the rogue sensed itself drifting off course – and no
tampering by the saboteurs was needed to ensure a response. The navigation system would adjust the power in the individual rebounders, skewing the direction of the main engines’ thrust to try
to compensate for the deviation.

Above, still, there was nothing but stars. How hard could it be to miss a target too small to discern? Ramiro flinched suddenly, his teeth aching with a hideous vibration. It was over in an
instant, but his skull kept ringing. One gnat must have suffered a brief drop in thrust, scraping hull against hull.

He steadied himself and tightened his grip. He still had no real sense of motion; if he closed his eyes, he might have been clinging to the side of a wall back in the
Peerless
,
somewhere out near the rim. But now that Tarquinia had gone beyond simply matching the rogue’s trajectory, there could be no more placid mimicry: the instruments that were detecting her
provocations were not so perfect and standardised that their response could be predicted and allowed for in advance. The rogue wasn’t even trying to shake them off – with the proximity
sensors dead, it thought it was moving untrammelled through the void, in battle with nothing but its own errors.

Ramiro cried out in shock before he knew why: the hulls were moving apart. Tarquinia said, ‘I’ve got it, I’ve got it!’ The gap began to shrink, then the surfaces made
contact again with an ugly grinding sound.

Ramiro was shivering. If the gnats separated and the rope snapped on the wrong side, he needed to be ready to release his hold to stop his body being slammed against the overheated hull. Better
to end up dashed against the walls of the Station than be flayed by heat from head to toe.

He looked down at his ruined foot. It had grown numb again, but the luminous discharge was unabated. In all the years since the launch, only three people had gone to light in the
Peerless
; Ramiro had never paid much attention to the accounts he’d read of the phenomenon, other than fixing in his mind the importance of fleeing if he ever saw a glowing liquid
seeping from someone else’s wound. All he could do was wait for the manoeuvre to be finished so Tarquinia could bring him a knife. He looked to the zenith and finally spotted a tiny pale oval
against the star trails.

‘How’s our course?’ he asked. They’d pushed gently against the rogue – not gently enough to remain unopposed, but there had to be some small chance that the net
result had ended up in their favour.

‘Not good,’ Tarquinia admitted. ‘We’re still aimed at the Station.’

Ramiro tried to accept the news calmly. ‘What more can you do? Give me a couple of lapses with a knife, then we can fly away.’ He could still survive this: he just had to cut through
the rope on the rogue’s side before starting work on his leg.

Tarquinia said, ‘I’m going to unbalance the main engines.’

Ramiro’s shivering grew worse. ‘
Manually?
’

‘Yes,’ she confirmed.

The manoeuvring engines delivered a modest push that any trained pilot could use manually, for docking. Severing the main engines from the feedback loop of accelerometers and gyroscopes that
aimed to keep their thrust perfectly symmetrical, and then imposing a deliberate asymmetry to try to push their neighbour off course, would escalate the speed and violence of the interaction
between the gnats by an order of magnitude. Tarquinia had the stronger engines – but the gnats could easily smash each other into rubble without anyone winning.

Ramiro said, ‘Automate it.’

‘We have eight lapses to impact, Ramiro. We don’t have time to rewrite the navigation system.’

‘What I’m thinking of would take a very small change.’

‘We don’t have time!’ Tarquinia repeated.

Ramiro struggled to find the words to sway her. ‘Do you trust what I did for the
Peerless
? Most of the tricks I used there were things I learnt from the woman who programmed the
gnats. I know their navigation software backwards – and I’ve been revisiting it in my head from the moment Greta sent me out here.’

‘You don’t think I can do this myself?’

‘I’d trust my life to you as a pilot,’ Ramiro promised her, ‘but no one has the reaction time they’d need to make this work. All we have to do is poke a skewed
target value into one register, and instead of disabling all the guidance sensors we’ll have enlisted them: we’ll force them to deliver a measured push, whatever the rogue does, no more
and no less. Everything you usually rely on to keep you flying straight will be working towards this new goal. Can you really do better than that by gut alone?’

In the silence, Ramiro glanced up at the Object. It still looked absurdly small, but in another few lapses he’d see how big a target it made. Tarquinia seemed paralysed with indecision; if
he let himself drop now he could take his chances with his air tank, while hoping that she came to her senses and simply flew away from the rogue in time.