Ramiro was on watch, so he stayed in the front cabin monitoring the probe’s data feed long after everyone else had gone to bed. Sitting meekly on the surface of Esilio sending back images of the surrounding landscape, the probe encountered no conspiracies of air, or rock, or heat to impair it. Its temperature remained stable – despite the heat that its photonics would be generating in the normal course of things – which seemed to imply that it was exchanging thermal energy with its surroundings in the usual way. Agata appeared to have been right about that much: the earlier, unanticipated heating had taken place for a perfectly good reason, and there was no risk of it happening again while the probe was motionless on the ground.

Tarquinia had put the Surveyor into a new orbit, so high that it matched Esilio’s rotational period, keeping the probe permanently in their line of sight and allowing the link to remain open. Through the window, the planet itself had shrunk to an enigmatic grey disc, but as Ramiro swept the distant cameras back and forth across the starlit plain, the new world appeared as innocent and tranquil as he could have hoped it to be.

‘I’m happy with the site,’ Azelio announced. ‘The probe can’t verify every detail, but nothing it’s shown us makes me think we were wrong about the geology of the area.’

Tarquinia turned to Agata. ‘Any problems?’

‘No,’ she replied. ‘If we’re careful, I think we can do this safely.’

‘Ramiro?’

Ramiro had no objection to the site, but they could at least try to deal with the one unsettling phenomenon they’d already witnessed. ‘What if we lower ourselves through the atmosphere more slowly than the probe?’ he proposed. ‘That should keep frictional heating to a minimum, whether you look at it as an ascent or a descent.’

‘It would mean more heat from the engines,’ Tarquinia pointed out.

‘We’ve had no problem with that for a year at a time,’ he replied. ‘I know: venting cooling air into Esilio’s atmosphere might not be the same as doing it in the void. But wouldn’t it be the most cautious approach: moving slowly, trying to keep our temperature constant?’

Tarquinia looked to Agata.

Agata said, ‘I think Ramiro’s instincts are sound. The closer we can stay to thermal equilibrium, the more predictable things should be.’

‘All right then. A slow descent it is.’

Tarquinia turned to her console and began plotting their course down from orbit.