When the cable was down to its last layer and the core of the reel was revealed, Agata advised Azelio and began counting down the remaining turns. Half a turn short of full extension, he brought the pod to a halt. Centrifugal force could complete the process; a tiny amount of slack like this wouldn’t be enough to give the pod a dangerous jolt.

Agata looked up and waited for her eyes to adjust back to the starlight. The cable stretched out into the void for four or five times the diameter of the hull. With the pod’s stone block hanging on the end of it, her eyes wanted to declare this direction vertical, but when she insisted on her original hull-based definition the sight became even stranger, like a conjurer’s rope trick.

‘When you and Ramiro do the spin-up, I want to come out and watch,’ she pleaded.

‘If it’s up to me, absolutely,’ Azelio replied. ‘And since you’ve got Tarquinia twisted around your finger—’

‘Ha! That’d be something.’ Agata suspected that Tarquinia was listening in on their conversation; for safety’s sake the helmets’ transceivers didn’t use any kind of encryption.

‘I’m coming back now.’

‘Have you untied the towing rope?’ she asked.

Azelio was silent for a moment. ‘Good idea.’

When he’d rejoined her, Agata said, ‘I owe you for this. I was going insane in there.’

‘You don’t owe me anything,’ Azelio declared. ‘You sat with me after the link cut off; I haven’t forgotten that.’

‘I don’t know if I helped much.’ The children were Azelio’s life; the most she’d been able to do was distract him a little, while the prospect of waiting more than ten years to hear from them again sank in.

‘What will we do if Esilio isn’t habitable?’ he asked. They’d switched off their coherers while they talked so as not to dazzle each other, but Agata could make out Azelio’s face in the starlight. She’d come out into the void to escape her dark thoughts, but the cosmic perspective seemed to have had the opposite effect on him. ‘If we go back to them with nothing, it would be like the Peerless returning to the home world with no idea how to escape the Hurtlers.’

Agata hummed angrily. ‘I don’t believe that. War’s not as inevitable as a Hurtler strike. Anyway . . . when we get to Esilio, we’ll find what we find. No one expects you to work miracles.’

‘No.’

Agata said, ‘We’d better start on the second pod, before Ramiro wakes up and finds out that I’ve stolen half his entertainment.’