‘You think they want freedom? They just want power.’ Gineto was talking in his hyper-happy baby voice, beaming down at Arianna, pulling faces to make her chirp. ‘The Peerless is all they know. If they’d wanted to take their chances on their own, they could have asked for that any time since the turnaround.’

‘Then what’s the solution?’ Serena demanded. ‘If it were up to me I’d abandon the messaging system, but the Council’s already talking about the bombing as proof of how much we need the warnings.’ Her voice faltered; Agata reached over and squeezed her shoulder.

‘The Surveyor’s not a bad idea,’ Agata conceded. ‘If they can grow crops on an orthogonal world, it would be one of the safest places to start a colony. There’d be a limit to the kind of collisions with home-cluster matter it could suffer in the migrants’ future – since anything really catastrophic in the world’s own past would have destroyed it, or lit it up like Gemma. On a cosmic timescale the entropy gradient would be a problem, but compared with the Peerless or the home world, a planet guaranteed to stay intact for eons would be a haven.’

‘Then it’s worth trying, isn’t it?’ Serena said.

Gineto wasn’t swayed. ‘You think people who don’t want to know the future will migrate to a world where they can step out of their houses and see what a dozen generations of their descendants will have carved into the rocks?’

Serena said wearily, ‘I just want a plan that both sides can live with. If not this, let them split the mountain in two.’

Gineto drew Arianna against his chest to hide his face from her as his expression grew grimmer. ‘The war to decide the size of the pieces would kill us all. If that’s the alternative, the Surveyor can fly with my blessing.’

‘I’m very sorry about your friend,’ Lila said gently.

‘Thank you.’ Agata shifted in her harness. ‘His uncle’s looking after the baby, but it’s hard for the whole family.’

‘Of course.’ Lila offered a moment of sympathetic silence, then delicately broached a different subject. ‘Have you had a chance to think about the gradient problem, since our last meeting?’

‘Not really,’ Agata confessed. She pictured Medoro standing in the corner of the office, the expression on his face enough to convey exactly what he thought of her laziness. It had been three stints since the bombing; she really had no excuse not to get back to work.

Lila said, ‘I’ve had one idea myself, if you’re interested.’

‘Of course.’ Agata leant forward attentively and tried to concentrate.