Ramiro checked the clock on his console. ‘Maybe we can, if the occulter turns up. It’s already three lapses late.’

‘Three days crossing the slopes, and you want it to be punctual to the flicker?’

‘These things move like clockwork, literally. If not to the flicker, they ought to be punctual to the lapse.’

Tarquinia said, ‘If this turns out badly, I’ll drop my anti-messaging principles and let you know . . .’ She glanced at the clock. ‘One lapse from now.’

Ramiro buzzed dismissively. ‘How would that help?’

‘It wouldn’t,’ she admitted. ‘But if you can convince yourself that I’m telling the truth, you can relax and assume that silence means success.’

A row of numbers appeared on the console – a transmission from the occulter, not from Tarquinia’s future self. Ramiro waited, refusing to interpret the numbers in isolation. Then the second brief report followed.

The occulter was stable, well clear now of the cache site . . . and measurably more massive than before, as revealed by its response to the thrust of the air jets. It had picked up its cargo and held on to it, and as the bomb swung down from above the arms, the occulter had successfully compensated for the spin that would otherwise have been imparted.

A moment later a third report announced that the occulter had managed to drill itself into the rock again.

‘One more,’ Ramiro pleaded. To catch the hooks and stay balanced was miracle enough, but the occulter needed to be able to keep moving down the slopes towards the base. If the strings had become tangled around the arms, they’d either end up breaking and freeing the cargo, or the whole mechanism would grind to a halt.

‘And there it is.’ Tarquinia read all the numbers aloud, and worked through the meaning of the torques. The occulter was moving in the normal way, and it was still carrying the bomb. Nothing had jammed, nothing had broken.

‘There it is.’ Ramiro bent forward, willing the tension out of his shoulders, but only a fraction of the pain departed. A dozen and two equally finicky and precarious encounters remained.

Tarquinia said, ‘The mass is less than I was expecting.’

‘The mass of the cargo? You think we lost something? Dropped some component—?’

‘No!’ Tarquinia hesitated. ‘I suppose I’m just admitting that Giacomo seems to have been honest with us. I was afraid he might have downplayed the size of the bombs.’

‘But he didn’t.’ Ramiro was pleased. ‘We’ll need to get every one of them exactly on target, though. A few strides away and we might not even shatter the collector.’

Tarquinia was amused. ‘We just threaded a needle on the slopes, and you’re talking about missing by strides?’