Agata was unmoved. ‘So you’ll trust the same fanatics who killed seven people in the camera workshop to be scrupulous now about sparing lives?’

Ramiro spoke bluntly. ‘Whoever attacked the workshop intended to kill those instrument builders – they were targeting people’s skills as much as the machinery. We shouldn’t assume that Giacomo’s group have any other goal beyond damaging the system itself.’

‘Why would a single technician even be down there, when they all know the disruption’s coming?’ Tarquinia added. ‘Whether they’re expecting a bomb or a meteor, it’s an obvious place to avoid.’

‘And what if the damage goes deeper?’ Agata argued. ‘What if the hull is breached?’

‘Most of that area’s taken up with the cooling system for the engines,’ Tarquinia said. ‘That’s self-contained: if it’s damaged, it’s not going to vent any of our own air to the void.’

‘The light paths run all the way along the axis,’ Agata replied. ‘Blow up the optics on the outside, and there’s no guarantee that you won’t be connecting every channel straight to the void.’

‘But they’ll be sealed, for sure,’ Ramiro protested. ‘To keep contaminants out of the beams.’

‘Sealed along the whole length of the mountain, well enough to hold against a vacuum?’ Agata’s tone was scathing. ‘All twelve, with no chance of failure?’

Tarquinia said, ‘If the Councillors want to impress voters with the value of foresight, they’ll have spent all their resources for the last three years reinforcing every scant of those tubes.’

Agata buzzed sardonically. ‘You mean the resources left once every Councillor had ensured that they could personally survive a meteor turning the mountain into rubble?’

Ramiro glanced at his console. Since he’d been back in his apartment he’d been wondering if his resolve to shun the system would ever falter, but now he felt an almost physical craving for the very thing he’d always reviled.

‘What does Giacomo say?’ he asked Agata. ‘Is he expecting us to cooperate?’ The answer to that might not settle things as clearly as a message from his future self – but even if it rang false and he concluded that Giacomo was lying, he would still have arrived at a prediction of sorts.

‘I thought you didn’t want to know the future,’ Agata replied.

‘If Giacomo knew for sure that we wouldn’t go along with this . . .’ Ramiro struggled to classify the consistent possibilities. ‘He’d still have to put the proposal to us, wouldn’t he? Or how could he know that we’d refuse?’

Agata said, ‘He claims that his people do use the occulters. Make of that what you like.’