The Arrows of Time

‘So why this?’ Ramiro bent the knife-wielder’s hand – then crossed ropes to let a woman move past, positioning his body to hide the blade from her.

‘It ends well because you take this as a warning and stop bringing attention to yourself,’ the man replied.

Ramiro said, ‘I think you might be confusing foresight and wishful thinking. I say it ends well because I have a meeting with Giacomo, immediately.’

The accomplice’s expression of certainty was wavering. He must have grown so accustomed to his plans unfolding perfectly that he’d lost the ability to rethink them on the fly.

Ramiro said, ‘I know it’s hard for people to organise their calendar these days, but the only way I’ll stop being a problem for your boss is by talking to him face to face.’

Giacomo sat on the floor of the food hall, chatting amiably with a dozen companions, but the gathering was large enough that he didn’t need to be contributing constantly to appear to be engaged. Ramiro sat two strides away with his back to the group, straining to hear the whispers directed his way, while trying to look like a lone diner brooding sadly on the fate of his friend.

‘We’ll take care of the machine,’ Giacomo said. ‘There’s nothing for you to worry about.’ His rear eyes moved aimlessly, his gaze passing over Ramiro without registering his presence.

Save Giacomo’s friends, there was no one else close enough to have any chance of hearing them, and Ramiro could only assume that his allies knew the location of every listening device in the room. But it was still a struggle to speak as if they had real privacy.

‘If you can fix this,’ he said, ‘you should have told us earlier, and then my friend wouldn’t be in trouble.’

‘That won’t last long,’ Giacomo promised. ‘Even if they’ve taken her, in a matter of days every prisoner will be free.’

Ramiro had no idea how he thought he could guarantee that; the whole government was hardly going to resign in shame. ‘And what about the occulter? You can perform the repairs yourself?’

‘Absolutely,’ Giacomo assured him.

Ramiro gave him the communications codes that would be needed to instruct the navigation system and get the machine back on course.

‘You should lie low now,’ Giacomo said. ‘I’m sorry about the incident before, but that wasn’t my decision. Someone saw you as a risk and took things into their own hands.’

Ramiro chewed his loaf slowly. His trust in this man was disintegrating, but if the conspiracy was a sham and Giacomo had been working for the Council all along, why would anyone go through the motions of trying to warn him off?

‘You don’t need to make repairs,’ Ramiro realised. ‘You’ve got replacements. You’ve built your own.’ They’d had the plans for three years. Why limit themselves to making accessories when they could copy the whole design?

Giacomo took his time replying, inserting a raucous joke into his friends’ End of the Mountain celebration.

‘We’ve built our own,’ he agreed reluctantly. ‘That was only prudent – and it’s turned out to be essential.’

‘You couldn’t tell us?’

‘The less you knew, the better,’ Giacomo replied.

Ramiro suspected that it was Agata’s position that would have been the sticking point; this made a mockery of the idea that the Surveyor’s crew had held a veto over the final deployment. ‘How many spares did you make?’

‘Enough.’ There was a note of irritation creeping into Giacomo’s voice.

‘A dozen? A gross?’

Giacomo said, ‘You don’t need those details. We’ve been planning this for years, we know exactly what we’re doing. Just go back to your apartment and wait.’

Ramiro stared down at the plate in front of him. These people knew him far better than he knew them – at the very least through Pio, and Ramiro had told Pio that he’d oppose him if he ever tried to use violence. Giacomo would have been forewarned not to expect Ramiro to cooperate with anything of the kind.

That was why they’d been so coy about the scale of their own resources: they were going to try to breach the tubes. They had as many occulters as they’d need, carrying whatever quantity of explosives it would take. The occulters from the Surveyor were just decoys; it had never mattered whether or not they reached their targets.

Ramiro said, ‘I need some proof from you that the attack won’t be excessive – that it will shatter the light collectors, nothing more.’

Giacomo’s rear gaze turned on him briefly, before sliding away. ‘How could I prove that? Do you want to come and observe all our communications? What would that tell you? If we showed you the data from the one machine that’s replaced your runaway, you could always convince yourself that there were more.’

Ramiro was silent; he had nothing to bargain with. If he went to the Council and helped them mount a defence against the occulters, he’d only be risking a far greater loss of life from a meteor strike.