Tarquinia said, ‘I’m going to unbalance the main engines.’

Ramiro’s shivering grew worse. ‘Manually?’

‘Yes,’ she confirmed.

The manoeuvring engines delivered a modest push that any trained pilot could use manually, for docking. Severing the main engines from the feedback loop of accelerometers and gyroscopes that aimed to keep their thrust perfectly symmetrical, and then imposing a deliberate asymmetry to try to push their neighbour off course, would escalate the speed and violence of the interaction between the gnats by an order of magnitude. Tarquinia had the stronger engines – but the gnats could easily smash each other into rubble without anyone winning.

Ramiro said, ‘Automate it.’

‘We have eight lapses to impact, Ramiro. We don’t have time to rewrite the navigation system.’

‘What I’m thinking of would take a very small change.’

‘We don’t have time!’ Tarquinia repeated.

Ramiro struggled to find the words to sway her. ‘Do you trust what I did for the Peerless? Most of the tricks I used there were things I learnt from the woman who programmed the gnats. I know their navigation software backwards – and I’ve been revisiting it in my head from the moment Greta sent me out here.’

‘You don’t think I can do this myself?’

‘I’d trust my life to you as a pilot,’ Ramiro promised her, ‘but no one has the reaction time they’d need to make this work. All we have to do is poke a skewed target value into one register, and instead of disabling all the guidance sensors we’ll have enlisted them: we’ll force them to deliver a measured push, whatever the rogue does, no more and no less. Everything you usually rely on to keep you flying straight will be working towards this new goal. Can you really do better than that by gut alone?’

In the silence, Ramiro glanced up at the Object. It still looked absurdly small, but in another few lapses he’d see how big a target it made. Tarquinia seemed paralysed with indecision; if he let himself drop now he could take his chances with his air tank, while hoping that she came to her senses and simply flew away from the rogue in time.

Tarquinia said, ‘How do we do this?’

Ramiro was confused. ‘Do what?’ Settle the argument before they were dead?

‘How do we automate the push?’ she asked impatiently. She’d accepted his plan.

Ramiro described the commands for the navigation system, raising the glyphs on his own skin as he spoke, picturing them repeated on Tarquinia’s body under her own corset’s empowering gaze.

As Tarquinia echoed the last command back to him, the opposing hulls began to screech and shudder. The shaking cost Ramiro’s good foot its grip on the rope; the other one fell back against the hull. He barely felt the knock, but when he looked down there was a swarm of brilliant yellow specks dropping away into the void, endlessly replenished from his disintegrating flesh. The balance of energies that tamed his body’s chemistry was coming to an end; the damaged tissue was making ever more light, wrecking all the finely honed systems that had held the process in check. His only chance to survive would be to part from it, but in this juddering chaos he doubted he could take a knife from Tarquinia’s hand, let alone use it.