‘I’ll do my best.’

Ramiro hugged the rope. The immediate effect of Tarquinia’s shoving was imperceptible, but it wouldn’t take long before the rogue sensed itself drifting off course – and no tampering by the saboteurs was needed to ensure a response. The navigation system would adjust the power in the individual rebounders, skewing the direction of the main engines’ thrust to try to compensate for the deviation.

Above, still, there was nothing but stars. How hard could it be to miss a target too small to discern? Ramiro flinched suddenly, his teeth aching with a hideous vibration. It was over in an instant, but his skull kept ringing. One gnat must have suffered a brief drop in thrust, scraping hull against hull.

He steadied himself and tightened his grip. He still had no real sense of motion; if he closed his eyes, he might have been clinging to the side of a wall back in the Peerless, somewhere out near the rim. But now that Tarquinia had gone beyond simply matching the rogue’s trajectory, there could be no more placid mimicry: the instruments that were detecting her provocations were not so perfect and standardised that their response could be predicted and allowed for in advance. The rogue wasn’t even trying to shake them off – with the proximity sensors dead, it thought it was moving untrammelled through the void, in battle with nothing but its own errors.

Ramiro cried out in shock before he knew why: the hulls were moving apart. Tarquinia said, ‘I’ve got it, I’ve got it!’ The gap began to shrink, then the surfaces made contact again with an ugly grinding sound.

Ramiro was shivering. If the gnats separated and the rope snapped on the wrong side, he needed to be ready to release his hold to stop his body being slammed against the overheated hull. Better to end up dashed against the walls of the Station than be flayed by heat from head to toe.

He looked down at his ruined foot. It had grown numb again, but the luminous discharge was unabated. In all the years since the launch, only three people had gone to light in the Peerless; Ramiro had never paid much attention to the accounts he’d read of the phenomenon, other than fixing in his mind the importance of fleeing if he ever saw a glowing liquid seeping from someone else’s wound. All he could do was wait for the manoeuvre to be finished so Tarquinia could bring him a knife. He looked to the zenith and finally spotted a tiny pale oval against the star trails.

‘How’s our course?’ he asked. They’d pushed gently against the rogue – not gently enough to remain unopposed, but there had to be some small chance that the net result had ended up in their favour.

‘Not good,’ Tarquinia admitted. ‘We’re still aimed at the Station.’

Ramiro tried to accept the news calmly. ‘What more can you do? Give me a couple of lapses with a knife, then we can fly away.’ He could still survive this: he just had to cut through the rope on the rogue’s side before starting work on his leg.