‘We had no time window with the cache,’ Ramiro pointed out. ‘There’s no comparison with the base. In fact, if I was working for the Council I would have told them to build decoys: dozens of structures mimicking the light collectors, with exactly the same optics protruding from the surface. Who’s to know which ones really feed into the tubes?’

Tarquinia said, ‘Giacomo’s group has had three years to think about all that. If they’d had any doubts about the coordinates they could have gone for a different strategy. If we start trying to second-guess them now, we’ll go out of our minds.’

‘Yeah.’ Ramiro turned back to the console and read through the last report again, until he’d convinced himself that the numbers could not mean anything but success.

The next two encounters went as flawlessly as the first, but as the time for the fourth pickup came and went there was silence from the link. It stretched on for more than half a bell, until the fifth occulter began reporting.

Three bells later, the same thing happened again. They’d lost two machines.

At the second last scheduled rendezvous, the occulter missed the hooks and flew right past the cargo, its mass unchanged. Tarquinia stepped in, sending it looping back to try again – not at the same coordinates, but a progression of slightly shifted locations. Ramiro stood aside and watched her work, wishing more than ever for a camera as she swept the occulter over the slopes, trying to engage with a cache that had either slipped a little out of place or simply fallen away into the void.

After the fifth attempt she stopped the occulter and had it drill back into the rock.

‘Can we send it to another cache?’ she wondered.

Ramiro checked the positions of the three caches for which they’d had no occulters. This one would have to double back to reach any of the three – depleting its air tank to the point where it would not be able to make it to the base.

‘It’s as good as lost,’ he said. ‘We now have no spares.’

The last pickup was still almost a bell away. Tarquinia said, ‘Do you want to get some loaves? I’ll stay here in case there are any surprises.’

As Ramiro stood in the queue in the food hall, he noticed a group of diners stealing glances in his direction then turning away with pained expressions, as if his presence were mildly embarrassing. Perhaps he’d become a figure of pity for wasting half his life on the expedition, to so little avail. But if all the real action had been back on the mountain, what exactly had anyone here done to earn the right to look down on him this way?

‘I trust you’re keeping out of trouble.’

Ramiro turned to see the woman who’d addressed him, three places behind him in the queue.