“I don’t know,” Nino repeated flatly.
“What did you use to stop the feeds?” she asked.
“These.” He opened two pockets and took out some small rocks. “I jammed them under the emergency shutoff levers for the liberator tanks. I was told to do that for as many feeds as I could, until the machinists got word to shut down all the engines.”
There were several such levers in each feed chamber—some of them far from the machinists’ posts. The chambers were so crowded with equipment that it would have been no great feat to enter and leave them unseen, especially while everyone was confined to their benches.
Yalda took one of the rocks from him. It was a kind of soft powderstone, shedding a fine sand even as she handled it. Jammed under a lever, before long it would have simply crumbled and fallen away. If Nino hadn’t been caught in the act they might never have known what had really happened, and ended up convinced that the feeds themselves were at fault.
“And then what?” she asked.
“Nothing else,” Nino said. “If I didn’t get caught, I was meant to blend in again: just go back to my station and do my job.”
“So after the sabotage was over, you’d be ready to pull your weight?” Yalda asked sarcastically. “Ready to be part of the team again?”
“I never wanted to harm anyone!” Nino protested vehemently. “The Peerless was meant to drift in the void for a while—that’s all. Once the Councilor got what he wanted, why would I bear any ill will toward you?”
“Whatever your background really is,” Yalda replied, “you’ve seen more than enough since we recruited you to know how dangerous this was. Don’t pretend that it never crossed your mind that you could have killed us all.”
Nino tensed angrily at the accusation, but his silence stretched on too long to end in an indignant denial. “I asked the Councilor about that,” he admitted finally. “He said if the mountain crashed into the ground, it would be a mercy.”
“A mercy?”
Nino looked up and met Yalda’s gaze. “He said the whole idea of a city in the void was insane. One by one, things would go wrong—things that couldn’t be fixed without help from outside. Within a generation you’d all be starving. Eating the soil. Begging for death.”
Yalda sent a message up to the nearest construction workshop, summoning people with the skills to create a secure prison cell, but she expected it would take a couple of days for them to arrive, lugging supplies. As a stopgap she shifted the food out of the pantry that served the navigators’ post and improvised a latch for the door, using tools and spare parts from the adjacent feed chamber. The navigators would be sleeping in shifts, so there would always be at least two of them awake—and by moving the bed right next to the pantry door, it provided a barricade and allowed even the sleeper to act as a third guard.
Babila had offered to escort Nino up through the mountain and organize his incarceration in a distant storeroom—for the sake of getting him as far away as possible from anything vulnerable to further sabotage—but Yalda preferred to have him nearby, in case she thought of something important that she’d failed to ask him about Acilio’s scheme. According to the recruitment records Nino was unschooled, but as an experienced farmer he’d been destined for the same job on the Peerless. Yalda had no reason to trust him to tell the truth about anything, but his account of his own actions struck her as plausible, even if he was probably embellishing the story or omitting details in order to portray himself in the best possible light.
As her sense of shock and anger faded, Yalda found herself feeling a kind of battered exhilaration at the way things had actually unfolded. The Peerless had been tripped, three times, but it had kept its balance—and if the test had been unwelcome, the outcome was still worth celebrating. They had proved that the machinery on which their lives depended was every bit as resilient as they’d hoped—and they had humiliated an enemy in the bargain.
Perhaps she and Eusebio had been foolish not to anticipate how far Acilio would go. But what more could they have done to protect themselves? Hired people to travel the world and check every crew member’s story? That would have done wonders for the recruitment rate—and told them nothing of value, since every runaway lied, with good reason.
If Nino’s actions really were the end of it—the old world’s last feeble swat at the new—that was cause for celebration, too. As Daria had said, separation was painful, but it was time to break away from the old influences.
We can’t spare his life, Frido told Yalda, raising the words across his chest. Perhaps his silence was out of concern for the prisoner’s feelings—but then, Babila was sleeping, and they all grew tired at times of shouting over the sound of the engines.
Why not? Yalda wasn’t surprised by his advice, but she’d been dreading its eventual arrival from some quarter or another.
Once we have all the information we can get from him, Frido replied, the most important thing is deterring anyone else in Acilio’s pay. If we can’t find the other agents, the next best thing is to make them too afraid to act.
Yalda did not find this persuasive. Once we’re no longer visible from the ground, Acilio has no stake in doing anything more to us. Whatever setbacks we suffer, they can’t embarrass Eusebio if they go unseen. And even if Acilio did want to harass us further, how could any agent be rewarded for carrying out his wishes when the payoff couldn’t possibly depend on it? She could understand Acilio’s deal with Nino: even if Nino had no way of seeing it honored, his brother could have gone to Acilio and said “Everyone knows the rocket went dark, so where’s the money you promised us?” But given that Acilio had made no effort to annihilate the Peerless at launch, she couldn’t see him offering a second saboteur money for his family conditional on the Peerless failing to return at all.
You may be right about that, Frido conceded, but even if Nino wasn’t trying to kill us, he certainly betrayed us. He has no place among us anymore. People won’t accept anything less than his death.
“So are you planning on staging an uprising if I don’t agree?” Yalda hadn’t trusted her intended sarcasm to come across in symbols alone, but after shouting the words over the engine noise she wasn’t sure that the shift in modes had been particularly helpful.
“All I’m saying is that it will weaken your authority,” Frido shouted back.
So I should kill a man for the sake of my authority?
Frido considered the question seriously. I suppose that depends on how many people you think will die, if you lose control here.
Yalda said, “I don’t flatter myself that I’m the one pillar of sanity that can keep the Peerless on course.”
“I’m not suggesting that either,” Frido assured her. But whenever power changes hands, there’s a risk of violence—unless you just resign at the first hint of dissatisfaction.
Yalda didn’t know how to reply to that. Did Frido covet her position? It had been less than two days since the launch, less than four since Eusebio had given her this role. She found the burden so unwelcome that the thought of anyone aspiring to take it from her had never crossed her mind before. But if it was so unwelcome, perhaps she should relinquish it? If Eusebio had appointed Frido ruler of the Peerless she would never have objected; why not correct his decision before anyone grew too attached to the status quo?
And then instead of Nino dying to keep her in power, he could die to give her an easy life.
The observation chamber was a shallow cave cut into the side of the mountain, sealed against the void by a tilted dome of clearstone panes. Standing at the edge of the cave, Yalda gazed down the slope and confirmed that the plains from which the mountain had once risen truly were gone. A haze of scattered light from the engines spilt past the rim of the mountain’s base, like the harbinger of some spectacular dawn, yet it was above that glow—though still unprecedentedly downhill—that the blazing sun was now fixed. Yalda stretched out her arm, and with her rear eyes saw the shadow it cast on the roof of the cave.
The polygons of clearstone around her had become pitted by debris during the launch; the flaws caught the sunlight, creating distracting specks of brightness that competed for her gaze with the true sky beyond. She would have struggled to locate her target, had she not known in advance where to search for it: about halfway between the sun and the “horizon” implicitly defined by the chamber’s floor.
To her naked eye the slender crescent cradled a disk of featureless gray, but through the theodolite’s small telescope the planet’s night side was revealed as an elaborate patchwork of hues. She recognized a few tiny splotches of pure wheatlight, but mostly the colors of the forests and fields were woven together too tightly to separate. She thought of Tullia—on the peak of this very mountain, not so long ago—hunting for the spectral signature of plant life on other worlds.
No cities were visible at this remove. No wildfires, either; even if the crater the Peerless had left behind was still smouldering, here was proof that the launch had not created another Gemma. Yalda shuddered, imagining for a moment how it would have felt to look back and discover that everything they’d been fighting to protect had been consigned to flames.
She recorded the bearing from the theodolite’s dials, then took sightings of Gemma, the inner planet Pio, and a dozen bright stars. Four Hurtlers were visible, long gleaming barbs skewering the scene like the tools of a blind but indefatigable assassin. Clockwork and gyroscopes wouldn’t be enough to guide the Peerless safely to its destination, the empty corridor where it could drift for an age without fear of being stabbed from any angle. Only a routine of meticulous observations, calculations and adjustments could lift the odds of a successful journey above those of Benedetta’s automated probes.
The calculations took more than a bell, but the results were encouraging: the Peerless’s position and orientation were very close to the values specified in the flight plan, and the small adjustments she’d pass on to the feed chambers would easily nudge the vehicle back toward that ideal path.
Yalda was reluctant to leave. She aimed the telescope at her old home again, trying to commit its unfamiliar face to memory. On the ground, there’d been farewell after farewell, but this was the final parting.
As a pang of loneliness grew in her, she tried to assuage it by confronting the subject directly. If she’d had the chance to bring anyone she wished along with her, who would she have chosen? Eusebio and Daria would have been enough to keep her company, she decided; better that Lidia and the children, Giorgio and his family, Lucio and the others all stayed put. If everyone she cared about had come along for the ride, she might have felt tempted to abandon the idea of the Peerless ever returning, content to imagine this fortunate few, safe and self-sufficient, drifting on through the void with their rear eyes firmly shut.
Satisfied that the emergency had passed and no more saboteurs were likely to emerge in her absence, Yalda decided to take a short trip up through the mountain. She’d received news of some minor damage via the rope network, and though the repairs were reportedly proceeding smoothly she wanted to see how things stood for herself.
One of the feed chambers for the second tier of engines had suffered a partial ceiling collapse during the launch; it had been empty at the time, so no one had been harmed. When Yalda arrived a work team was still shifting rubble, and Palladia, a former mining engineer who’d been involved in the construction phase, was on site assessing the damage and making plans to insert a new supporting column.
“Can you fix this in five stints?” Yalda asked her. The second tier wouldn’t be firing quite that soon, but as well as having its damaged parts replaced the feed mechanism would need to be cleaned, inspected and tested—none of which would be possible while there was building work going on.
“Three stints,” Palladia promised her. Yalda looked around the chamber at the women and men with wheelbarrows, shovels and brooms, collecting up everything from fist-sized chunks of hardstone cladding to innocuous-looking streaks of powdered sunstone that had fallen through the broken ceiling from the surrounding lode. If the liberator tanks had ruptured, innocuous would not have been the word for it.
“I think it’s good for morale that there’s something to be fixed,” Palladia mused. “Once you’ve repaired a building with your own hands, you really have a stake in it.”
“You could be right,” Yalda said. Nobody wanted to feel like a caged vole that Eusebio had tossed into the void, a breeding animal who was only here for the sake of their remote descendants’ accomplishments. “Still, I wouldn’t hope for too much more of the same.”
“The kind of compressive forces that the launch produced here won’t ever be repeated,” Palladia replied, “but when the weight of the mountain vanishes entirely, that will be an experiment we’ve never really carried out before.”
When the workers took a meal break, Yalda sat and ate with them, joining one group in a quick game of six-dice. The pantries on every level had been stocked with loaves—and holin, which the women passed around unselfconsciously, as if it were some kind of condiment. The few men in the team, most of them accompanied by their cos, appeared comfortable enough in this strange new milieu, and if anyone was suffering regrets over the ties they’d severed, the camaraderie here surely dulled the pain.
After the meal the cleanup resumed, but Yalda was out of synch with her hosts and in desperate need of sleep. When she woke she bid Palladia and the crew farewell, and continued her long trudge upward.
The moss-lit staircase stretched above her interminably, the view barely changing as she ascended. The higher engine tiers were undamaged—or at least, they’d passed a superficial inspection, and any further attention could wait until the second tier was in perfect shape—so she’d have no cause to linger in those deserted chambers. She could still hear the sound of the engines below, but distance took the annoying edge off it, leaving an almost reassuring buzz.