‘I can’t lie to you,’ Greta replied. ‘The disruption is not a voluntary shutdown, it’s proof of a grave threat to the integrity of the Peerless. Knowing that it’s coming will help minimise the danger and ensure the continuity of governance – but beyond that, I know no more than you do.’

Agata brought a basket of loaves from the pantry and passed it around. ‘I don’t know why everyone’s so gloomy,’ she said, breaking the silence. ‘The whole idea of a collision makes no sense to me.’

Ramiro approached the subject warily. ‘What if the Councillors and their entourage are prepared to travel to Esilio? They wouldn’t have an easy life there, but over time they might be able to build up their resources to the point where their descendants could protect the home world. There needn’t be a contradiction.’

‘I’m not talking about the inscription,’ Agata replied. ‘Whatever hit the Peerless would have to be large enough to disrupt the messaging system immediately, or there’d be a message describing the initial effects of the impact: a fire on the slopes, a breach of the hull – even if people didn’t have time to narrate it, there’d be instrument readings sent back automatically. But anything that large ought to be visible as it approached. Even if it was travelling at infinite speed, it would cast a shadow against the orthogonal stars that we could pick up with time-reversed cameras.’

Azelio was hanging on her words, desperate for reassurance. ‘What if it comes in from the wrong direction?’ he asked.

‘There is no wrong direction if you deploy the cameras properly,’ Agata insisted. ‘Suppose this meteor is approaching with infinite speed from the home cluster side. That would render it invisible from the mountain, but if it passed a swarm of time-reversed cameras looking back towards the mountain, they’d see the meteor’s shadow against the orthogonal stars before it was actually present.’

Ramiro wasn’t persuaded. ‘That all sounds good in theory, but the surveillance network certainly wasn’t that sophisticated when we left. There’d be some serious technical challenges with processing the data fast enough and getting the result back to the Peerless before the impact. It wouldn’t be trivial.’

‘And that’s the measure of things now?’ Azelio was incredulous. ‘You’re saying that everything we do to protect ourselves is only possible if it’s trivial? I thought this was all down to probabilities! How likely is it that people who desperately want to solve these problems could just sit at their desks fretting about it, while making no progress at all?’

He turned to Agata for support, but her confidence was wavering. ‘I spent years in that state myself,’ she admitted. ‘It’s not that difficult to achieve.’

Azelio lowered his gaze. ‘We should start our own evacuation, then. Bring as many people as we can on board.’