‘In principle it could be. But when I got to the far end I found something peculiar: it looks as if the cooling air is actually routed through the beam. Why do that, except to make life harder on anyone tampering with it?’

‘So if there’s a bomb,’ Agata said, ‘it might be anywhere inside a hardstone beam that spans the diameter of the Surveyor. And the only way we’ll ever know for sure is if we cut the whole thing open – in a place where there’s barely room to move, let alone the space to wield tools safely.’

Tarquinia inclined her head admiringly. ‘Trust Verano to find a civilised solution.’

Agata hummed with distaste. ‘Is there such a thing as a civilised bomb?’

‘Well, no,’ Tarquinia conceded. ‘But the Council would have asked him to fit a booby trap, and at least he made that idea redundant. There’s no way that Ramiro alone – or even the four of us – could have taken that hiding place apart and left the Surveyor functioning. A booby-trapped bomb would probably have been triggered by accident, long ago. We can thank Verano for finding a way to make the thing as good as tamper-proof, without turning it into a death sentence.’

Agata said, ‘I’ll send him flowers when I get back. But if we can’t get the bomb out and leave the Surveyor functioning—’

‘We couldn’t have done it in the void,’ Tarquinia interjected. ‘But with an external atmosphere, there’s no comparison. I think even the most paranoid Councillor would have reasoned that if Ramiro had proposed the mission merely as a cover for an attack on the Peerless, he would hardly have been willing to spend twelve years actually detouring all the way to Esilio just to remove this thing.’

‘You really think you can go back down there and slice the beam open?’ Agata gestured at the curves still imprinted into Tarquinia’s body.

Tarquinia said, ‘Not just like that. First we take out most of the cooling pipes. Then we drill inspection holes in the beam, to see what we can see. The whole exercise could take a while, but it’s not impossible.’

‘Assuming there are no other problems. Assuming there really is no booby trap.’

Tarquinia said, ‘Yes.’

Agata slumped against the side of the shaft. Before she’d approached Tarquinia, she’d been picturing the bomb hidden behind a false wall at the back of the pantry, requiring nothing more to disarm it than the snip of a cable.

Tarquinia began smoothing out the kinks in her flesh. ‘I’m not going to try something like this without unanimous assent. And just because you raised the idea yourself doesn’t mean that you can’t change your mind.’