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.