‘Perhaps we could extend the survey for a few more days,’ Ramiro suggested. The planet was turning beneath them as they circled from pole to pole; each successive orbit carried them over a different meridian, and though they’d sampled a wide variety of terrain they were still far short of seeing everything. ‘There has to be a perfect site down there.’

‘Exactly!’ Azelio replied. He gestured at the console. ‘None of these are acceptable.’

‘We can keep looking,’ Tarquinia agreed. ‘A few more days is nothing.’

Azelio excused himself to check on the plants. Weightlessness wasn’t good for them, but it wasn’t worth setting up the tether again – not unless the selection process was going to stretch out into stints, rather than days.

Tarquinia switched to the live feed from the time-reversed camera: dawn was breaking over a red plain criss-crossed by brown fissures.

‘Look at all that land!’ Ramiro marvelled. If every field of wheat in the Peerless were laid out here side by side, they would pass by in a flicker, lost in the vastness. The sagas were full of journeys on foot that had crossed ancient empires and lasted for years, but nothing he’d read or imagined had prepared him for the scale of the world below. ‘How could the first travellers ever give up so much freedom?’

‘I think the Hurtlers might have helped,’ Tarquinia suggested.

‘Yes, but I still wouldn’t have been able to do it. We never belonged cooped up in a mountain; it’s a wonder we didn’t all lose our minds generations ago.’

‘So you’re set on making this your home?’ Tarquinia asked. ‘Esilio’s won you over already?’

Ramiro buzzed softly. ‘Esilio’s one thing, but twelve more years of travelling will probably finish me off.’ He would have relished defying Greta and staying behind when the Surveyor departed – and it would not have undermined the purpose of the mission if the rest of the crew returned to the Peerless with the news that a colony had already been established. But he couldn’t do it alone.

Tarquinia said, ‘And wide-open spaces are one thing, but you can’t eat dirt. Before you start picturing the flowers on your grave, let’s see if anything can take root here at all.’

The probe parted from the Surveyor, separated by a burst of air before it fired its engines to start the descent from orbit. Ramiro peered over Tarquinia’s shoulder to watch the instrumentation feed. Azelio looked on from Tarquinia’s right, and even Agata had left her calculations for a while to cling to the rope beside him.

As the probe slowed to let gravity bring it down, it didn’t take long to fall back behind the Surveyor’s horizon, cutting the link. ‘Do you want to sleep for the next few chimes?’ Agata teased Ramiro. ‘I promise to wake you when all the results are in.’