The Arrows of Time

The next find was so clear that Agata cursed her stupidity as she formed the triangle; the phantoms on which she’d wasted so much air seemed inexcusable now. As the rock halted, the occulter appeared almost directly below her, but she was surprised to see how different the package looked from the last one.

She moved closer. There were no strings; the bomb was secured to two posts that rose from the occulter’s arms, lifting the rigid assembly clear of the dodecahedral core that held the air jets. But how had these posts been attached, out on the slopes? Was this the occulter that Tarquinia had repaired – and she’d had to perform some strange modifications in the void?

Agata was baffled, but she didn’t have time to make sense of it. She took a wrench from her tool belt and set to work; the jetpack braced her with yet more expenditure of air. She tried to turn the post itself, but it was too smooth and she could get no purchase on it. She groped around the attachment point on the arms, but there was no bolt head. The posts seemed to be glued in place.

She closed one hand around the occulter’s arm then shut off her jetpack’s airflow completely, letting herself hang down across the vertical rock face. She took a flat bar and inserted it between the machine’s arm and the rock, then began trying to prise the splayed drill bits out of the holes they’d made. But however hard she strained there was no perceivable effect; the drills were mounted too securely and the rock itself wasn’t going to crack.

If she’d had more air she could have tried taking the drill assembly apart; she’d put half of them together herself, so she should have been able to reach in and unscrew all the same bolts by touch alone. But not while she was clinging to this sheer drop. She took a high-powered coherer in her free hand and began carving through the posts that held the bomb in place.

Every few lapses she had to stop and wait for the occulter to cool down; it wasn’t smart enough to use its own air to deal with this unexpected contingency, and the heat was slow to dissipate into the rock. At least her own need to be able to hold onto the frame gave her a clear signal to act; it was unlikely that any temperature she could tolerate on her skin would be high enough to trigger the explosive. When the second post was all but severed, she started up her jetpack to support her and then snapped the post by hand.

Agata moved quickly into a disposal trajectory, cancelling her motion around the axis as she ascended – rising a little faster than before, now that her cargo would have less time to reach a safe distance. She released the bomb and resumed the search. She was exhausted, but she still had enough air to go farther.

More experienced now, she dared to let the rock below her blur a little, trading off perfect clarity for less costly centripetal force. Agata didn’t want to grow complacent, but the numbers were already better than she’d dared hope. While the majority of the team had barely been into the void before, five people had done maintenance work out on the hull. If those five alone had dealt with two bombs each, as she had, the job would already be completed.

The amorphous blur below her was broken by a sharp edge spinning by. Agata went in pursuit, astonished by her luck. She was beginning to pity all the searchers who must have come just as far with no result; everyone would understand that that might happen to them, but three times now she’d seen the signs that their collective effort was heading for victory, while others would still be wondering if the whole endeavour had been misconceived.

The third occulter came into view. The cargo was attached in exactly the same manner as it had been on the last one. Agata didn’t delay her assault; she grabbed one of the posts, shut off the jetpack and began applying her coherer. But as she worked, she sifted through the possibilities.

Tarquinia had not repaired the lost occulter with stone and glue. This one and the last had not picked up their cargo in any manoeuvre out on the slopes; the bombs had been glued into place in a workshop somewhere. But how and why would Giacomo’s people have retrieved occulters from the slopes in order to do that? The answer was that they hadn’t. They’d built occulters for themselves, and affixed the bombs before sending them out.

Agata moved her grip and began cutting through the second post. Three bombs diverted out of a dozen had seemed glorious. Three out of an unknown swarm could mean anything.

Before she severed the second post completely, she stopped to think through her choices. If she spent air carrying the bomb onto the same kind of path as the others, that would be the end of her contribution; she’d have too little air left to intervene in any other way. But if there were already enough bombs waiting above the light collectors to cause the disruption, there was no need for this one to be carefully positioned. She could simply let it fall away into the void.