Three seals, with the last at double the blast radius. The saboteurs had no need to damage anything so deep. And even if something went awry in the delivery, that would lead to less harm to these structures, not more.

‘What about the defences?’ Ramiro asked. ‘They won’t have left the collectors sitting there unguarded.’

‘All the original defences at the base were designed to protect the engines from micrometeors – arriving from out of the void at high speed without changing course.’ Giacomo spread his arms. ‘We believe they’ve tried to improve the system since they learnt about the disruption, but anything coming in low above the rocks and moving unpredictably will be a completely different kind of target.’

‘So we have a chance.’ Ramiro was beginning to feel optimistic.

‘I believe so.’ Giacomo had had three years to mull over the same facts; if there was no thrill of delight in his verdict, at least he’d earned the right to issue it.

‘This next request is a little delicate,’ Ramiro admitted. ‘Though I don’t suppose it will shock you.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘I’ll need to talk everything over with Tarquinia,’ he said, ‘but even if she agrees, we’ll have one more proviso: we’ll want to hold onto the codes for the occulters ourselves. You provide the coordinates, we operate the devices.’

‘I understand.’ Giacomo was completely unperturbed.

Ramiro understood that his collaborator could hardly need more time to weigh up the proposal, but he was still taken aback by this placid response. ‘Agata is hoping to find a safer way to cause the disruption,’ he said. It felt incumbent on him to provide a full justification for Giacomo’s ease; he couldn’t drop the discussion just because they’d agreed. ‘I don’t know what her chances are, but this way it will be clear that we can still change the plan at the last moment if she comes up with something better.’

Giacomo said, ‘We’ve always known that that was part of the deal, and we have no problem with it at all.’ He reached across from his rope and clasped Ramiro’s shoulder. ‘To the end of the system, brother.’

‘To the end of the system,’ Ramiro echoed. This strangely dispassionate rebel could not have achieved much without his own knowledge of the future. But then nothing could have been more apt than their enemies’ machine enabling its own destruction.

‘Why do I feel that I have no choice in this?’ Tarquinia complained.

‘Because everything feels that way,’ Ramiro replied. ‘Just ignore it and do what you want.’

She slid away from him beneath the tarpaulin of his sand bed, a silhouette against the red moss-light coming through the fabric from the wall behind her. ‘The codes remain in our hands to the end,’ she said. ‘What is there I could possibly object to?’ She made this sound like a bad thing.