The Arrows of Time

Agata deleted the sketches from her console. She peeled off her corset and lay down on her sand bed. The whole approach was a dead end: she might as well have set out to reverse the motion of every particle of air in the Surveyor in the hope of creating a breeze that would carry all the dust away.

Anything that sought to inscribe a new arrow into the soil at a microscopic level was doomed; the numbers would always be against her. What she needed was something infinitely less subtle.

Agata waited until she had a chance to speak to Tarquinia alone. ‘Do you remember telling me once that you believed Greta had put a bomb on the Surveyor?’

Tarquinia replied warily, ‘No, but I’ll take your word for it.’

‘My word that there’s a bomb?’

‘No, your word that I told you.’

‘So it’s true?’

Tarquinia struggled to reconstruct some half-forgotten chain of inferences. ‘Verano dropped some hints. He was very apologetic.’

‘Is there any way to be sure?’ Agata pleaded. ‘Greta might have put him up to the apology, as a kind of misinformation.’ Even before the launch, the whole crazed-anti-messager-rams-the-Peerless scenario had never struck her as very plausible, and after spending six years with Ramiro – irritating as he could be – Agata had to strive mightily to put herself inside the head of anyone who’d imagined him commandeering the Surveyor and turning it into a weapon.

Tarquinia was bemused. ‘This is a strange time to start worrying about it,’ she said. ‘If an unexpected bump could set it off, we’d have been dead long ago.’

‘If the Council really didn’t trust Ramiro not to turn saboteur,’ Agata reasoned, ‘then they wouldn’t have been content with a bluff, would they? They would have insisted on some genuine means to destroy the Surveyor if it turned rogue.’

‘I suppose that’s true,’ Tarquinia agreed. ‘Though over the last six years I’ve become pleasantly accustomed to not having to think about politicians at all, so I don’t know what my judgement is worth now.’

‘If there’s a bomb, we need to find it,’ Agata declared. ‘We need to cut it open and extract the explosive.’

Tarquinia swivelled on her couch, assessing this suggestion. ‘We need to locate the hidden, possibly tamper-proof bomb that’s been obliging enough not to kill us so far, and start prodding and poking at it now… because?’

‘Because the test plots are failing,’ Agata explained. ‘So we need to take the explosive up into the hills, turn some rock into soil for ourselves – against the Esilian arrow – and see if that imbues the soil with the properties that it needs to support plant growth.’

‘If wheat hadn’t failed to grow properly in weightlessness,’ Tarquinia mused, ‘then Yalda never would have ordered the spin-up. And if Yalda hadn’t ordered the spin-up, the Peerless might well have been incinerated by antimatter. So really, I ought to be encouraged by history: anything that starts with crop failure ends well.’ There was a sound of hardstone scraping against hardstone, then slipping.

‘Can you see what you’re doing?’ Agata aimed her own coherer down into the maintenance shaft.

‘Yes, I can see,’ Tarquinia replied. ‘It’s just that none of these bolts have been turned since the engines were assembled.’

‘The bomb’s not going to explode just because you open that panel, is it?’ Agata asked anxiously.

Tarquinia looked up at her, affronted. ‘However much pressure he was under, Verano would never have done anything so perverse. We’re entitled to inspect our own engines; that hardly amounts to an act of sedition.’

There was a long silence, followed by a rhythmic squeaking noise that was almost certainly one of the bolts being turned. Agata restrained herself from cheering; Ramiro was asleep.

It took Tarquinia more than a chime to loosen all six bolts and remove the access panel. Agata peered over her shoulder into the exposed cavity, where cooling pipes ran along the back of the rebounders. If one of the banks of rebounders had failed, someone could have squeezed in here to fit a replacement.

‘Anything?’ Agata asked hopefully.

‘Nothing obvious,’ Tarquinia admitted. ‘I thought this was the last place we hadn’t poked around in, but maybe I should sit down with the maintenance logs to confirm that.’

‘Right.’

Tarquinia lingered, lowering her head partway through the hatch and turning her face sideways. ‘There’s a big stone beam that goes right across the top of the engines, from rim to rim.’

‘Could something be attached to it?’ Agata suggested. ‘Out of sight from where you are?’

‘I’m just wondering why it’s there at all,’ Tarquinia replied. ‘The floors of the cabins should provide enough bracing for the engines. And why a beam that runs across one particular diameter of the disc, and not another one at right angles to it? Nothing about the stress from the engines picks out one axis like that.’

‘No.’

Tarquinia said, ‘If I don’t come out in six lapses, send in Azelio with a rope.’

‘Azelio?’