The Arrows of Time

‘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.