Ramiro recalled his own farcical attempt to steal the authorship of the fake inscription from her. It still seemed wisest to keep that to himself, but he didn’t need to confess anything to make the case for a more robust strategy.

He said, ‘There are plenty of people on the Peerless who could have planned this shutdown long before they heard about it.’

‘You mean saboteurs?’ Agata asked coldly. ‘The people who murdered the camera team? You want to replace a meteor strike with a bomb?’

‘Of course not.’ Ramiro spoke more carefully. ‘Most of the anti-messagers found those murders abhorrent, but a group of them could still be planning a way to cause the disruption without hurting anyone. And if they’re intent on using explosives at all, we can try to replace that with something better.’

Tarquinia understood. ‘We have seven stints to work out a plan of our own, and then we can try to sell it to these would-be saboteurs. That way it becomes a hybrid effort: their motives predate the news of the disruption, but if they’ve left the details too late we might be able to offer them a technological edge.’

Azelio hummed with frustration. ‘What’s all this talk of replacement? If a meteor is going to hit us, it’s going to hit us! You can devise as many ingenious plans as you like to try to sabotage the system at the very same moment, but if there’s a rock on its way, nothing you do is going to make it disappear.’

‘If there’s a rock on its way, that’s true,’ Ramiro conceded. ‘But until we know that there is, why should we assume that? The history of the next twelve stints ends with the messaging system failing; we’re about as certain of that as we can be. Some sequence of events has to fill the gap between that certainty and all the other things we know. So which snippets would you rather the cosmos had on hand to complete the story? Just one, where a meteor hits the Peerless? Just two: a meteor, or a bomb? Making our own preferred version possible won’t rule out everything else – but if we don’t even try, we’ll rule out our own best hope entirely.’

Agata brought a schematic onto her chest. ‘Whatever the details of the final design they used, each channel must have components something like this.’