The second occulter flew over the edge, and recovered as well as the first. Ramiro was wary of becoming complacent — but it made no sense to reason about the machines’ fate without taking account of everything he knew of both the past and the future. The disruption would happen, that was close to a certainty, and the occulters’ behaviour had to be consistent with that. The cosmos was indifferent as to whether the solution of its governing equations described the Peerless obliterated by a meteor, or just a few conspirators managing to shatter a few mirrors. But even the most dispassionate mathematician who’d been told that twelve clockwork insects carrying explosives were crawling across the mountain towards the light collectors would have to accept that the second solution now appeared at least as viable as the first.

The third occulter reported success. The fourth, the fifth. Ramiro said, ‘When this stage is over, we should go and tell Agata and Azelio. They deserve to have their minds put at ease.’

Tarquinia was sympathetic, but not so sure that it would help. ‘Do you think Azelio would get any comfort from this?’

‘Once he’s confronted with the sheer improbability of a meteor arriving at exactly the same time as the occulters, it might change his perspective.’

The sixth occulter landed safely and commenced its upwards crawl. Tarquinia said, ‘After Agata and Azelio, we should break the news to the Councillors.’

‘Really?’

‘Just to taunt them,’ she stressed. ‘No details.’

Ramiro said, ‘Where’s the fun in that? They’ve known for three years that they were going to be defeated.’

‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ Tarquinia replied. ‘I think they convinced themselves that it would be a meteor. No defeat, no surrender, just an act of nature.’

The seventh occulter sent its report. Ramiro squinted at the numbers, confused. ‘What . . . ?’

Tarquinia leant closer to the screen. ‘It’s gone into the void. It fired the air jets to leave the slope, but then something jammed and it couldn’t get back.’

A second report arrived; the accelerometer showed the occulter in free fall.

Ramiro was numb. ‘That’s impossible. How can we lose one when we have no spares?’

Tarquinia said, ‘What if we change some of the targeting? Maybe we can take out two light collectors with one bomb – or three with two.’

Ramiro brought the target coordinates onto the screen. ‘How do we model this? Do we add the pressures from each shock wave?’

‘That will do, for an estimate.’

The estimate told them that the strategy wouldn’t work. The light collectors were spread too far apart, and the blast radius of each bomb was too small.

Ramiro was lost. ‘What is it that we don’t understand? Could one channel survive?’