The console emitted Gretaesque noises, then the link cut out completely.

Tarquinia turned to Ramiro. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘If it’s as predictable as they’re saying, we’ll match trajectories easily.’

‘You’re not the one who’ll have to climb on board and shut it down.’

‘If there’s any problem, we do have other options.’ Tarquinia gestured to the hold behind their couches. ‘Timed explosives. All we have to do is attach one of these and get out of the way.’

Ramiro could not have been less comforted. ‘High-velocity debris in the void – possibly spiced with antimatter. Do you really want to fly through that?’

‘If we give ourselves enough time, the risk will be negligible.’

‘And how much time is ours to give?’

Tarquinia turned to the navigation console, instructing it through the photonic corset that wrapped her torso beneath the cooling bag. When she’d finished, a flight plan appeared on the screen.

‘If Greta’s theory is right,’ Tarquinia said, ‘we’ll be able to match trajectories with the rogue in slightly more than five bells – about half a bell before the impact. If we set the explosive’s timer for three chimes, that will leave another three chimes for the debris to spread out – enough for the bulk of it to miss the Station. And in three chimes, we can put almost three severances between ourselves and the explosion. The rogue will still be accelerating as fast as it can towards the Station, so if we scarper in the opposite direction we’ll get the benefit of both engines.’

Ramiro was slightly mollified. Three severances wasn’t much on the scale of this map, but it was more than six gross times the height of the Peerless. The shrapnel they were fleeing would never slow down, but it would grow ever sparser.

‘So is Greta right or not?’ he asked. They’d lost the link with the Peerless, so they’d had no updates on the rogue’s actual behaviour.

Tarquinia flicked a switch on the console; a moment later the link was restored.

‘What did you do?’ Ramiro demanded.

‘I vented some air through an outlet next to the photoreceptor,’ Tarquinia explained. ‘Sometimes it just gets dusty.’

Greta asked anxiously, ‘Can you hear me?’

‘Loud and clear,’ Tarquinia replied.

‘The rogue came to a halt three lapses ago, and reversed without a pause. It’s headed straight back to the Station.’

‘Understood,’ Tarquinia said cheerfully. She made no move Ramiro could see, but she must have sent a command through her corset because the flight plan on the screen changed from grey to red – transformed from a hypothetical doodle to a set of firm instructions. The sky through the dome rotated a quarter-turn as the gnat swung around to redirect the engines.

‘We’re really going to do this?’ Ramiro asked numbly. He’d been half-hoping that the rogue would set out for the Peerless instead; forewarned, the mountain’s defenders could have launched any number of pilotless gnats against it, so the risk of it actually striking its target would have been vanishingly small. ‘What if we programmed a collision instead?’ he suggested. ‘Then we can climb out here and wait to be rescued.’ That would mean half a day in the void, but they had locator beacons on their cooling bags and they could take a couple of extra air tanks from the gnat.