The Arrows of Time

Agata rechecked the numbers, but they did not improve. She sat at her desk with her tattered books around her, bewildered but refusing to be cowed. The ancestors had spoken to her; she was joined to them across the disruption, across the generations yet to be born. The cosmos had no choice but to find a sequence of events that filled the gap and completed that connection, and it could not come out of nowhere. The right plan had to lie within her, just waiting to unfurl.

29

Ramiro was beginning to wish that they’d put cameras on the occulters. The extra transmissions needed to send back the images might have increased the chance of detection, but it would have been worth it just to have an objective version of the rendezvous with the cache in front of him, to take the place of the pictures in his head.

First, the occulter had to release itself from the rock, unwinding the drills and letting itself fall into the void. Then the air jets had to catch it and send it swooping back towards the slopes, approaching the cache with just the right speed at just the right angle. Two hooks on strings hung down from the cache, each one an open half-circle crossed by a vertical trigger about a third of the way in; the arms of the occulter needed to enter those half-circles and strike the triggers to send the second, spring-loaded halves sliding around to enclose them. Then the occulter had to move away, dragging the cache almost horizontally across the rock, unrolling the adhesive resin that was holding it in place against the vertical tug of its centrifugal weight.

Tarquinia interrupted his brooding. ‘Relax,’ she said. ‘Or add up the navigational tolerances again, if you want reassurance. We can hit the hooks, I’m sure of it.’

Ramiro checked the clock on his console. ‘Maybe we can, if the occulter turns up. It’s already three lapses late.’

‘Three days crossing the slopes, and you want it to be punctual to the flicker?’

‘These things move like clockwork, literally. If not to the flicker, they ought to be punctual to the lapse.’

Tarquinia said, ‘If this turns out badly, I’ll drop my anti-messaging principles and let you know…’ She glanced at the clock. ‘One lapse from now.’

Ramiro buzzed dismissively. ‘How would that help?’

‘It wouldn’t,’ she admitted. ‘But if you can convince yourself that I’m telling the truth, you can relax and assume that silence means success.’

A row of numbers appeared on the console – a transmission from the occulter, not from Tarquinia’s future self. Ramiro waited, refusing to interpret the numbers in isolation. Then the second brief report followed.

The occulter was stable, well clear now of the cache site… and measurably more massive than before, as revealed by its response to the thrust of the air jets. It had picked up its cargo and held on to it, and as the bomb swung down from above the arms, the occulter had successfully compensated for the spin that would otherwise have been imparted.

A moment later a third report announced that the occulter had managed to drill itself into the rock again.

‘One more,’ Ramiro pleaded. To catch the hooks and stay balanced was miracle enough, but the occulter needed to be able to keep moving down the slopes towards the base. If the strings had become tangled around the arms, they’d either end up breaking and freeing the cargo, or the whole mechanism would grind to a halt.

‘And there it is.’ Tarquinia read all the numbers aloud, and worked through the meaning of the torques. The occulter was moving in the normal way, and it was still carrying the bomb. Nothing had jammed, nothing had broken.

‘There it is.’ Ramiro bent forward, willing the tension out of his shoulders, but only a fraction of the pain departed. A dozen and two equally finicky and precarious encounters remained.

Tarquinia said, ‘The mass is less than I was expecting.’

‘The mass of the cargo? You think we lost something? Dropped some component—?’

‘No!’ Tarquinia hesitated. ‘I suppose I’m just admitting that Giacomo seems to have been honest with us. I was afraid he might have downplayed the size of the bombs.’

‘But he didn’t.’ Ramiro was pleased. ‘We’ll need to get every one of them exactly on target, though. A few strides away and we might not even shatter the collector.’

Tarquinia was amused. ‘We just threaded a needle on the slopes, and you’re talking about missing by strides?’

‘We had no time window with the cache,’ Ramiro pointed out. ‘There’s no comparison with the base. In fact, if I was working for the Council I would have told them to build decoys: dozens of structures mimicking the light collectors, with exactly the same optics protruding from the surface. Who’s to know which ones really feed into the tubes?’

Tarquinia said, ‘Giacomo’s group has had three years to think about all that. If they’d had any doubts about the coordinates they could have gone for a different strategy. If we start trying to second-guess them now, we’ll go out of our minds.’