The Arrows of Time: Orthogonal Book Three (23 page)

Agata hadn’t brought a picture of Lila, but she could effortlessly summon the sound of her mentor’s gentle nagging. She knew exactly what Lila’s advice would have been at this
juncture: Romolo and Assunto’s tricks weren’t suited to her purpose, and there was no point pretending that some minor variation in their methods would suffice. If she wanted to make
progress, she needed to dig far deeper into the mysteries of the vacuum and come up with some new tools of her own.

Ramiro passed the first bell of his watch correcting the errors in a small program that he’d written the night before. It computed the shapes of two four-dimensional
polyhedra, set them rotating – with different speeds and directions – then displayed a projection of the portion of the first that lay inside the second.

It was a frivolous exercise, but the endlessly mutating image was strangely soothing, and this playful tinkering did have the advantage that it kept his skills sharp. As much as he’d
luxuriated in the process of ridding the
Surveyor
of its intrusive surveillance software, he’d only been able to prolong that task for about a year, and though he doubted that all
the genuinely useful automation that remained would turn out to be ideal for its purpose once they reached Esilio he was still in no better position to know the true requirements than the original
designers.

There was a sudden high-pitched noise from behind him, like something large and brittle being snapped. Not the ominous groan of a machine part under pressure gradually yielding – just
instant surrender to an overwhelming force. It was over in a flicker or two, and though the screech itself was unforgettable the lingering impression offered no clues as to its source. Ramiro
dimmed the cabin and switched on the exterior lights. Through the window he could see a trail of debris drifting off to his right, small grey rocks spinning in a haze of dust. They could only be
fragments of the hull’s hardstone, torn free by a collision of some kind.

An alarm sounded. The pressure in the
Surveyor
was dropping.

He grabbed his helmet and dragged himself back towards the crew’s sleeping quarters. Agata emerged from her room, strapping on her jetpack, helmet in hand. Ramiro could see her tympanum
moving but he couldn’t hear a sound; the pressure was already too low. He put on his helmet and she did the same.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘Something’s hit us,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what. Is your cabin holed?’

‘No.’

Ramiro clambered past her and opened the nearest door. There was a jagged slot half a stride across missing from the far wall; the rock along the edges was shattered unevenly, but the course of
the damage was unswerving. Sheets of paper were fluttering through the gash, out into the void. Azelio was motionless, tangled in his bed’s twisted tarpaulin. Ramiro approached, switching on
his helmet’s coherer to supplement the safety lights, and saw three holes in the tarpaulin, each the width of his thumb.

Agata’s voice came through the link. ‘Tarquinia’s gone!’

‘What?’

‘I’m in her cabin – she must have been blown right out.’

Ramiro stared at Azelio, imagining Tarquinia tumbling through the void in the same condition – carrying no air, insensate, her flesh pierced by splinters of rock.

‘I can see sunstone spilling out,’ Agata said. ‘From the cooling system.’

Ramiro was paralysed. What did he do first? If they couldn’t run the cooling system, they were dead.

Agata shouted, ‘I can see Tarquinia! I’m going after her!’

‘
No!
I’ll get her!’

Agata hesitated. ‘You can see her too?’

‘No, but—’

‘Ramiro, I can do this,’ Agata insisted. She sounded impossibly calm. ‘She’s not that far away, and I can still see her clearly. I’ve got her cooling bag here, air
tank and all. I’ll get it to her. She’ll be all right.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Do it.’

Agata said nothing more, but then he caught the flash of her coherer as she jetted across the trench of stars behind Azelio’s wall.

Ramiro shook himself out of his stupor. Azelio’s cooling bag was missing from the clamp beside the bed, but the spare was in the cupboard. He took it over to Azelio and worked it up over
his limp form, then he opened the valve on the air tank and held his hand against the fabric to check that there was a flow across the skin. There were five deep wounds in Azelio’s thigh and
torso, but his skull seemed to be untouched. The injuries might be survivable – so long as his flesh didn’t denature and ignite.

Ramiro dragged Azelio into his own cabin; abutting the opposite side of the hull, it appeared to be completely undamaged. He got Azelio under the sand bed’s tarpaulin, and brought two
straps across to be sure he wouldn’t drift away.

‘You’ll be fine,’ he muttered. ‘You’ll be fine.’

He dragged himself back into the passage and headed for the cooling system.

Whatever had grazed the side of the
Surveyor
had left a single long gash in the hull running all the way from Azelio’s cabin via Tarquinia’s to the gasification chamber.
Looking out through the opening where the gash had breached a narrow maintenance shaft, Ramiro could now see what Agata had reported: pieces of sunstone tumbling into the void like gravel spilling
from a torn sack. The feed supplying the decomposing agent should have shut off when the pressure plummeted – and if it hadn’t, the result would have been spectacularly worse. But the
sunstone would continue to react with the agent already present in the chamber. There was no way to render the swarm of jostling rocks perfectly motionless, so nothing would keep them in the
chamber while there was a wide-open path into the void.

‘Can you still see Tarquinia?’ he asked Agata.

‘I’ve nearly reached her!’ Agata declared. ‘How are things there? Is Azelio all right?’ Once she’d moved away from the
Surveyor
she would have looked
back and taken in all the damage at a glance.

‘He’s safe,’ Ramiro assured her. ‘He’s got some small wounds, but I’ve put him in my room to recover. Please, just concentrate on Tarquinia.’

‘All right.’

Ramiro leant against the side of the shaft. How was he going to seal the chamber? They had stone plugs prepared for holes up to the size of his hand, but no one had envisaged anything like
this.

The repair didn’t have to be airtight immediately; he just had to stop the sunstone being lost. He dragged himself to Agata’s cabin and snatched the tarpaulin from her bed, then
detoured to the tool cupboard and grabbed a jar of sealing resin.

If he entered the gasification chamber through the hatch he’d just drive more sunstone out as he pushed his way through it. Back in the maintenance shaft, he warily tested the rim of the
gash with one fingertip. The damaged stone was still warm from the collision – with a microscopic Hurtler, most likely – but the escaping air had carried away enough heat to render it
traversable. He clambered out into the void and made his way along the torn edge of the hull, hand over hand; the distance was so short that this was faster than messing around with his
jetpack.

‘I’m with her!’ Agata announced excitedly. ‘She’s conscious, Ramiro. She’s putting on her cooling bag now.’

Ramiro started humming with relief; embarrassed, he muted the outwards channel on the link until he’d regained his composure. ‘Be careful coming back,’ he managed.

Agata replied, ‘Don’t worry, we will.’

As Ramiro climbed into the chamber small pellets of sunstone bounced off his jetpack and faceplate; he had to force himself not to raise his arm instinctively to swat them away like insects, as
that would only have added energy to the swarm. He took the jar from his tool pouch and daubed resin over the nearest part of the inner wall, then tugged the tarpaulin out of the gap under his belt
and fixed one edge in place. There were no ropes or handholds in the chamber that he could use to brace himself, but he could apply pressure by closing his hand over the whole exposed thickness of
the wall, clamping the fabric of the tarpaulin against the resin until it adhered.

He pushed himself off from the wall to reach the far side of the chamber; he hit it with a jolt but managed to grab the rim of the gash to keep himself from bouncing. The tarpaulin was wider
than the gap he was trying to cover, and once he had it secured at both ends the pellets of sunstone were too large to work their way around the sides.

Ramiro paused to take stock. There was more sunstone in the store behind the chamber; they’d probably only lost about a twelfth of their total. If Tarquinia was safe, the next most urgent
matter was checking on Azelio. Getting the gash repaired and the entire
Surveyor
airtight again would take a long time, but as an interim measure they could seal the doors to the damaged
cabins and concentrate on the cooling chamber while they still had enough air in tanks to keep them from hyperthermia.

He managed to get out of the chamber through the hatch with only a handful of sunstone escaping into the passage. Back in his cabin, he surveyed Azelio’s wounds, cutting holes in the
cooling bag so he wouldn’t have to pull the whole thing off. At each site there was a faint yellow glow suffusing the punctured flesh, but it looked like the body’s ordinary signalling
rather than a runaway reaction, and the surrounding skin wasn’t hot to the touch. The fragments of stone had passed right through Azelio’s body, but as far as Ramiro could see his
digestive tract hadn’t been breached. If his skull and gut were undamaged, his chances were good.

‘We’re almost back,’ Agata announced. ‘Ah, you’ve closed off the chamber already!’

‘Yes.’ Ramiro had never expected her to prove so indomitable in the face of a calamity like this. One stride deeper into the hull and the Hurtler would have ended the mission. Maybe
Agata was relishing the sense of solidarity with the ancestors, and picturing herself as a member of the most far-flung branch of Eusebio’s fire watch.

The two women returned together through the same opening they’d used to make their separate exits. Ramiro was waiting for them, and he handed Tarquinia her helmet.

‘Welcome back,’ he said. If the ordeal had shaken her, she wasn’t letting it show.

‘How’s Azelio?’ she asked.

‘He’s got five wounds, but they all seem clean to me.’

‘Let me take a look.’

In Ramiro’s cabin, Azelio was still motionless under the tarpaulin, but even from the doorway they could see the light from the wound in his thigh, shining through the fabric.

‘It wasn’t like that a few lapses ago,’ Ramiro declared. That meant it was deteriorating rapidly.

Tarquinia said, ‘Get the medical kit.’

Agata went to fetch it.

‘The hull fragments missed you?’ Ramiro asked Tarquinia.

‘I was lucky.’ Tarquinia buzzed grimly. ‘I was out in the void before I was even awake. After this, I’m going to start sleeping in my cooling bag.’

Agata returned with the box of medication and instruments. Tarquinia dragged herself over to the bed; Ramiro followed, taking off his jetpack so he could move more freely.

Agata remained by the door. ‘You survived worse than this, didn’t you, Ramiro?’

‘Absolutely. He’s going to be fine.’

Ramiro helped Tarquinia pull the tarpaulin out of the way, but they left the straps in place to keep Azelio still.

‘Is there a reason the cabin lights aren’t on?’ Tarquinia asked irritably.

‘No.’ Ramiro had been relying on his helmet and the safety lights; with the cooling system dead they shouldn’t be using any of the
Surveyor
’s photonics
gratuitously, but well-lit surgery was hardly an indulgence. When Agata switched on the main lights, Ramiro felt a sickening disjunction between the reassuring familiarity of the room –
intact and unblemished, as if nothing had happened – and the condition of his guest.

Tarquinia found a long, sharp scalpel and dusted it with astringent. ‘Can you get on the other side and hold him still?’ she asked Ramiro. ‘The straps won’t stop him
wriggling, and even if he doesn’t wake he might move instinctively.’

‘Do you want me to hold his leg?’ Agata asked.

Tarquinia said, ‘Good idea.’

Agata joined them. The three of them braced themselves awkwardly over the bed, holding different parts of the same rope for support. Ramiro glanced down at the tunnel in Azelio’s flesh; a
luminous discharge was oozing into the hole that the fragment had made.

Tarquinia said, ‘Everyone secure? I’m going to start.’

She plunged the scalpel into Azelio’s thigh, a scant back from the surface of the wound, and started carving a cylinder of her own. Azelio’s torso twitched under Ramiro’s arm,
then he opened his eyes and started bellowing. Even without air to carry the sound, the cry that passed from flesh to flesh was piteous.

Ramiro pushed harder against the rope, pinning the poor man down more firmly.
It’s almost done
, he wrote on his forearm, hoping that Azelio could read the ridges through
the fabric separating their skin.
Be strong, it won’t be much longer
. He locked his gaze on Azelio’s, trying to convey some reassuring sense that his tormentors knew
what they were doing.

Azelio kept screaming, but he managed to suppress his struggling. Tarquinia completed the incision. She used a pair of forceps to pull the tube of damaged flesh out of his thigh, swabbed the
spilt liquid with a cloth, then dragged herself quickly out of the room. Agata fumbled in the medical kit and found a syringe of analgesic; she injected the powder in three sites around the wound.
Ramiro knew from experience that it would take a few lapses to have much effect, but Azelio responded with relief just to the sight of it being administered.

Tarquinia returned. ‘Any of the other wounds need ablating?’ It was lucky that Azelio couldn’t hear her. Ramiro looked over the four remaining holes.

‘I don’t think so. But someone should stay with him to monitor them.’