‘We need to eat now,’ Tarquinia declared, tugging at the lid on the store beside her couch.

‘I don’t have much appetite,’ Ramiro protested.

‘That’s not the point,’ Tarquinia said flatly. ‘You’ve only had half a night’s sleep, and you’re going to need to be alert for this. It’ll take a bell for the loaves to be digested, so this is mealtime.’

Ramiro buzzed at her presumptuousness. ‘Yes, Uncle.’

‘I’m your pilot, that’s worse. Can your uncle toss you out into the void?’

He took the loaf that she handed him and bit into it dutifully. It was a struggle to force the chewed food down his oesophagus; half the flesh that usually helped him to swallow had been ossified.

When he’d finished, Ramiro brushed the crumbs from his gloves. ‘What happens if we get this wrong?’ he asked. ‘If we scare the rogue into some kind of evasive manoeuvre that changes its trajectory, but it’s still not enough to stop it hitting the Station . . . could that skew things so that the plume ends up aimed at the Peerless?’

Tarquinia had already thought it through. ‘Any collision at this speed is going to give the Station so much energy that it will be oblivious to the Object’s gravity: it will be travelling on a virtually straight line, not whipping around in an eccentric orbit. So even if the impact’s skewed, either the Station will crash on the side where it was meant to crash, or it will miss the Object completely and fly off into the void.’

‘So the worst that can happen is that the saboteurs get what they want: a delay in the turnaround.’ Worse was possible for the two of them, but Ramiro was trying to calm himself for the task ahead, not give himself a reason to back out completely.

Tarquinia said, ‘As far as I can see. But the problem then is how people will respond.’

‘You mean . . . retribution?’ Ramiro hadn’t been thinking that far ahead. ‘The migrationists will be in trouble just for trying this stunt, whether or not we manage to stop it.’

‘I think a lot of travellers will be a great deal more displeased if the turnaround is actually postponed for a generation than they would have been by the mere effrontery of the attempt.’ Tarquinia sounded bemused: hadn’t Ramiro invested a third of his life preparing for the event?

‘I’d be disappointed,’ he confessed. ‘But it’s not as if everything I’ve done will have been wasted. Even if the delay is so long that they decide to replace the whole system with something more modern, they’ll still end up using a lot of my ideas.’

‘Hmm.’ Tarquinia was surprised, but she wasn’t going to try to argue him out of his position. ‘Most people have been looking forward to this for a long time, though – and for someone who hasn’t directly contributed to it, it’s living through the turnaround that would make all the difference. You get to take some pleasure in having made it possible, whenever it happens. The rest of us will just be robbed of the biggest thing we hoped to see in our lives.’