The altimeter kept working, timing slow infrared pulses that were making it down and back through the dust. Half a dozen strides above the ground, Tarquinia cut the main engines and switched on the air jets to cushion their fall. Ramiro had barely registered the plummeting sensation before the impact drove him hard into his couch. The jolt left him shaken, but when he moved slightly in his harness he felt no pain.

Tarquinia swept her rear gaze across the cabin. ‘Anyone hurt?’

‘I’m fine,’ Agata replied, and Ramiro and Azelio echoed her.

The view through the window was so dark that the pane might as well have been a mirror, reflecting back the lights of the cabin. Tarquinia redirected the time-reversed camera to a side-mounted lens; the image showed red dust swirling over the ground, darkening the sky and blotting out the horizon. The sight dragged Ramiro’s attention back to the sound of the wind on the hull; he could hear the difference as the visible signs of each gust rose and fell.

‘Is this just . . . weather?’ he wondered. ‘Like the home world?’ He’d read about dust storms in the sagas, but it was hard to know which parts of those stories were real.

Agata said, ‘I read a memoir by one of the first travellers, a woman named Fatima. She described the dust blowing around at the site of a rocket test, jamming all the clockwork.’

‘But it shouldn’t be harmful to people, should it?’ Ramiro had no idea how fast the wind would need to be blowing before the dust would start abrading skin.

Tarquinia swivelled her couch around. ‘I don’t expect so, but no one is going out for at least two bells. I want to be certain that the ground isn’t hot – and I don’t care whether or not Esilio thinks we’re yet to use the engines.’

Ramiro turned beseechingly to Agata, but she said, ‘Good policy. In Esilio’s terms, the engines’ exhaust came from the environment and entered the rebounders, so that’s violating the local arrow already. We should treat all these non-equilibrium situations as uncertain, and only assume that temperatures will be uniform when everything is settled.’

They passed the time checking the Surveyor for damage, but even the weakest points on the hull – their repairs along the Hurtler gash – seemed to have survived the landing intact. When Tarquinia ran out of things they could inspect – short of taking the engines apart and putting the rebounders under a microscope – they brought out some loaves for a celebratory meal, and Azelio took photographs to show his niece and nephew.

Two bells after they’d touched down, the instruments showed the hull’s external temperature to be no different from the cabin’s. No one challenged Ramiro when he finally moved towards the airlock.