‘The Council wants it intercepted, undamaged,’ Greta insisted. ‘We need to inspect the navigation system and find out exactly what the plan was.’

‘Then send your best pilot to bring it back, and I’ll happily dissect the whole system in the comfort of a suitably equipped workshop.’

‘That would be ideal,’ Greta conceded. ‘But it might not be possible.’

Ramiro hummed derisively. ‘This is just a gnat with a modified navigation system. There’s no one inside to defend it. Once your pilot gets on board and cuts a few photonic cables, it will be no different from any other kind of cargo. They can attach a rope to it and tow it back.’

Greta said, ‘When the Station was vacated there were dozens of samples from the Object left in its workshops. If someone gained access to the gnat at a time when they could move around the Station with next to no scrutiny, who knows what else they might have done besides reprogramming the navigation system?’

Ramiro stared at her for a moment, then he understood that there really was no squirming out of this. The one thing he couldn’t ask any pilot to bring back to the Peerless was a machine potentially booby-trapped with fragments of antimatter.

‘Strap yourself in,’ Tarquinia suggested. ‘It’s going to be a bumpy ride.’

Ramiro took her advice, fumbling at the harness with hands fitting loosely in the gloves of his cooling bag. While their gnat hung suspended from the outside of the Peerless the long flat couch against his back was vertical, like some kind of recuperative splint to help him stand upright.

He’d flown in a gnat before, but this was a different design, with space for just the pilot and one passenger and a storage hold between the couches and the cooling system. The clearstone dome that stretched over their heads was close enough to touch. ‘Did they let you talk to your family?’ he asked Tarquinia. Though he didn’t doubt her skills as a pilot, he suspected that one reason she’d been chosen for the job had been to limit the number of people who knew about the situation.

‘Greta made the case for secrecy,’ she said. ‘But I told my brother anyway.’

‘Good for you.’ Ramiro had resented the pressure to keep quiet, but then welcomed the excuse to say nothing. He wouldn’t have known how to explain the task he was facing without alarming his family, and the last thing he needed right now was a lecture from his uncle about his duty to the children his sister was yet to shed. If everything went well he’d be back long before he was missed.

He pointed to the navigation console. ‘Have you updated the local maps?’ No one had been expecting to go flying once the spin-down had begun, and apart from the altered velocity of the slopes there was the small matter of steering clear of the beams from the counter-rotation engines.

‘No, I just thought I’d leave everything unchanged and see what happened,’ Tarquinia replied sarcastically.