‘I was joking!’ Agata insisted. She wasn’t sure that she had been, but she certainly didn’t feel that way now.

Tarquinia said, ‘You can go out with Azelio and set up the tether, but that’s all: install it, but leave it motionless. Ramiro will go out for the spin-up. Half the task for each of you. What could be fairer?’

Sanctified by the ancestors’ gaze or not, the sky unsettled Agata. When she’d trained with Tarquinia around the Peerless, the contrasting hemispheres had made it easy to stay oriented. There were bright stars now that caught her eye, and constellations that she could commit to memory, but it took much more effort to seek out these relatively subtle cues than it had to distinguish between an empty black bowl and a riot of colour.

Azelio seemed to be focused on the Surveyor itself, so Agata followed his lead and tried to think of the disc of the hull as her horizon. Still clinging to the hand rings outside the airlock she turned her body until it was perpendicular to the disc, then she released her grip and drew a short arrow on her chest that pointed towards her head. The jetpack obliged with a gentle push in that direction; when she’d ascended half a stride above the hull she drew a stop-line that killed her velocity. The jetpack was keeping track of all the acceleration it delivered – along with any bumps and pushes she inflicted on herself – and it knew how to return her to her initial state of motion.

She followed Azelio to the rear of the hull, opposite the main cabin and its window, and halted beside him. The two agronomy pods mounted here were roughly cubical, each about as broad as Agata was tall. Azelio grasped a ring to brace himself, lit the scene with the coherer mounted on his helmet, then began turning the first of the eight wide, hollow bolts that held the first pod in place. Agata had arrived upside down for the task; she secured herself with her foot through a ring, then squatted down so she could grip another with a hand and right herself. She switched on her own coherer and squinted at the disc of brightness she’d imposed on the starlit hull; it was strange to see the sharp details summoned out of the grey shadows, as if the Surveyor of the void had become the Surveyor of the workshop again. Then she reached into the bolt closest to her and took hold of the crossbar within. The crossbar needed a twist around its own axis to disengage the spring-loaded pins that locked it in place, then it served as a handle to turn the bolt.

‘My arm’s tired already,’ Azelio confessed. ‘Why couldn’t they make this a job for power tools?’