The Arrows of Time

He braced himself for the second, greater threat: a cratered landscape of antimatter rushing past near enough to touch – or rising up to meet him in extinction. The vision of it hung in his mind’s eye, stark and terrible. But the thing itself failed to appear.

Ramiro lacked the strength to right his body but he raised his head sufficiently to stare up at the zenith. There was nothing ahead of the gnats now but the long, gaudy star trails of the home cluster. The shadow he’d mistaken for the Station passing by had been the Object; the first missed target had come and gone too rapidly to be perceived at all.

He was still chirping with elation at the near miss when he noticed the yellow sparks falling around him. His whole lower leg was radiant now, filled to bursting with light.

‘Pull away!’ he begged Tarquinia.

He saw her helmet poke out of the hatch.

‘Wait,’ she said. She was gone for a moment but then she reappeared with the safety harness.

‘There isn’t time!’ Ramiro protested. But he understood why she was taking the risk: if he ended up falling alongside his amputated leg, it could still kill him.

Tarquinia dropped the harness. Ramiro reached out to accept it, but the rope wasn’t long enough; the harness hung suspended beside his bad knee. He tried to raise his torso, but the effort merely set him swaying.

‘Grab it with your other foot,’ Tarquinia urged him.

Ramiro tried, but some earlier knock against the hardstone must have damaged his foot, robbing it of its power to grip. He poked it between two of the harness’s straps, pushed his leg through and bent his knee.

‘Now!’ he pleaded redundantly: the gnats were already separating. He could see starlight between the hulls.

As Tarquinia retreated into the cabin, Ramiro felt the rope tightening, until he lost all sensation in the constricted flesh. Viscid yellow fire sprayed from the stump of his foot. The glow became too painful to watch; he threw his arms up in front of his helmet.

Suddenly all his weight shifted to his good knee, almost pulling him free from the harness. The light from above was gone; Ramiro lowered his rear gaze and saw his severed leg tumbling through the void, part of the snapped boarding rope beside it. As he watched, the flesh liquefied completely then swelled into a ball of flame, lifting the rogue’s form out of the darkness. A moment later he felt a faint gust of warmth penetrate his cooling bag, then a single sharp sting to his shoulder. He groped at the wound with a gloved hand; it was painful to touch, but any break in the skin was too small to discern. Maybe he’d been hit by a fragment of bone.

When the fireball had faded, Tarquinia shut off her engines. The rogue shot forward, passing the gnat, making no attempt to recover from its failure. But even if this was a ruse – and even if the rogue didn’t overheat and shatter from a lack of cooling air – it would need eleven bells just to slow and come back, and twice that to make a fresh stab at the original plan. That left time for half a dozen more gnats to come from the Peerless and start towing the Station away.

Weightless, Ramiro reached up and took the safety harness in his hands. He clung to it for a while, too weak to go any further, then Tarquinia began drawing the rope back into the cabin.

4

‘Happy Ancestors’ Day!’ Agata greeted her mother. ‘Are you coming to the celebration?’

Cira regarded her with undisguised pity. ‘I came here to ask if you’d visit your brother with me.’

Agata dropped clear of the doorway to allow Cira to clamber down the entrance ladder. ‘Mind the bookcase.’ A year and a half into the deceleration, Agata had kept the changes to her apartment messy and proudly provisional. ‘Why would I want to see Pio?’

‘Common decency.’

Agata felt a twinge of guilt, but she remained unpersuaded. ‘All we ever did when he was free was argue, so I doubt he spends his time now yearning for my company.’

‘You need to mend things with your brother,’ Cira insisted. ‘If you think Medoro’s going to do Pio’s job for you, his sister might have another opinion.’

Agata grimaced. ‘Medoro’s a friend! Is there anything going on in your head that isn’t about reproductive strategies?’

‘Someone has to think about these things.’ Cira peered suspiciously at Agata’s console, as if the images of phase-space flows on display might reveal the true source of her daughter’s intransigence. ‘If you value your work, you should value your brother.’

‘Really?’

‘Why do you think I had a son at all? It was for your benefit, not mine.’

Agata was chilled. ‘Whatever my differences with Pio, at least I don’t think of him as some kind of useful machine.’