Tarquinia panned across the console’s map to show a featureless marker far from the Station itself. The rogue gnat had travelled a long way from its starting point – away from the Object too, with no apparent destination in sight – though in the latest observations it had been decelerating. With its engines now aimed in the opposite direction to their initial orientation there was no spillage from them reaching the Peerless; if the astronomers hadn’t known the gnat’s earlier trajectory they would never have been able to locate it. Ramiro would have enjoyed the challenge of instructing a second unoccupied gnat to seek out the first for a mutually destructive collision at the greatest possible velocity, but the gentler approach was going to be much trickier to achieve, and from his present perspective a great deal less enjoyable.

‘What were they thinking?’ he asked wearily.

‘Who?’

‘Pio’s group. We get all those earnest speeches about their fears for our descendants, and then suddenly they’re trying . . . what? Some kind of feint involving the Object?’

‘Feint?’ Tarquinia pondered the idea. ‘Whatever they’ve programmed the gnat to do, I don’t see how they could call it off now, even if they wanted to.’

Ramiro took her point: the kind of communications system that could connect to such a distant target wasn’t something a disgruntled minority could have set up in secret out on the slopes. ‘They might still have a shutdown code that they could offer us,’ he said. ‘Something we’d have to transmit on their behalf.’

‘That’s possible,’ Tarquinia agreed. ‘Or they might just offer us the flight plan itself. It was pure luck that we spotted the thing at all; they might have thought they’d still have that to bargain with.’

Ramiro buzzed disdainfully. ‘Some people are very bad losers.’

Tarquinia said, ‘I don’t think it’s that. It’s not just pride; I think they’re genuinely afraid. I don’t know what I’d do, myself, if I honestly believed that everyone around me had just voted for a literally suicidal folly.’

‘If you honestly believed it, you’d have a good reason,’ Ramiro countered. ‘You’d try to talk the rest of us around, while staying open to the chance that you might be mistaken. There’d be no need for extortion.’

Tarquinia wasn’t convinced. ‘It’s a strange situation that we’re in. We have a whole range of ideas about the interaction of thermodynamic arrows, some of them better supported than others, but none of them conclusive. And if we can’t reconcile everyone’s intuitions, what counts as a perfect solution? Even if we’ve all listened to each other’s arguments in good faith, it’s always possible that someone’s going to end up believing that we’re heading for annihilation – and that by the time the evidence is indisputable, it will be far too late to retreat.’

Greta said, ‘We have a theory.’

Ramiro strained to hear her; the UV link to the Peerless was noisier than anything he’d experienced before.

‘So far, the rogue’s just followed a straight line,’ she said. ‘Maximum acceleration away from the Station, then maximum deceleration, without veering at all. If it keeps this up, we know exactly where it’s going to come to a halt – and there’s nothing there. It’s not a destination. It’s a staging point.’