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.