The Arrows of Time: Orthogonal Book Three by Greg Egan Read Free Book Online

slid the tuner further along, to a point he’d marked earlier with a speck of adhesive resin: an ultraviolet frequency that would permanently damage the lattice structure of the
photodetector.
    The dark circle showed no visible change, but he’d expected none. He’d just have to trust the physics. He shifted his attention to the second sensor.
    When he was done, Ramiro righted himself on the couch. The navigation console was predicting an impact with the Station in less than four chimes.
    He put on his helmet. ‘We’re too late to use the explosives, aren’t we?’
    Tarquinia’s voice came through the link, but he could hear a muffled version through the couch as well. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It took me longer to catch up than I
thought it would.’
    ‘Don’t worry about it.’ On balance, Ramiro was relieved; the whole idea had sounded like a dangerous gamble.
    The rogue was drawing closer now; Tarquinia was using the manoeuvring engines to ease the gnat sideways. Ramiro waited for the rogue to turn skittish, but their presence had no effect on it at
all. Either he really had killed the proximity sensors, or the saboteurs hadn’t even tried to make use of them.
    Ramiro slid into a safety harness attached to a short rope. Tarquinia had brought the two gnats to within about three stretches of each other; Ramiro could see right through the rogue’s
dome now, into its empty cabin. If he’d been weightless he would happily have attempted to jump straight for the rogue’s hull, but under this much acceleration he doubted that he would
have made it a quarter of the way.
    He poked his legs out through the hatch and reached around with his right foot for the panel that covered the boarding rope. He slid it aside and groped for the hook on the end of the rope.
He’d chosen a cooling bag that left his feet uncovered, allowing him to re-form them easily into hands. He took hold of the hook, released the brake on the reel, then unwound what he judged
to be a little more rope than he’d need.
    Seated on the rim of the hatch with his legs dangling down into the void, leaning a little so he could watch himself through the dome, Ramiro tossed the hook. When it struck the other
gnat’s dome he cringed, expecting the worst; if the rogue’s software was monitoring sound in the cabin, this would be the time for it to scupper the attempted boarding.
    The rogue stayed put. Ramiro was puzzled, but he was beginning to suspect that the saboteurs had baulked at the idea of trying to automate a response to every contingency. Their overriding aim
would have been to keep the rogue on course and on schedule; with the Station deserted and the
Peerless
so far away they had hardly been guaranteed visitors, and any extra layers of
complexity in the software aimed at dealing with that possibility would have carried some risk of jumping at shadows. It was just bad luck for them that their plan had been detected so early; if he
and Tarquinia had left the
Peerless
half a bell later, this whole encounter would have been impossible.
    Ramiro gathered up the rope and tried again. On his fourth attempt, the hook passed through the ring beside the rogue’s hatch. The boarding rope hung down into the void; he didn’t
want to tighten it so much that any jitter in the engines would snap it, but as it was the catenary looked dauntingly steep. He wound some rope back onto the reel, until the dip at the centre was
no more than a couple of strides.
    ‘How long have we got?’ he asked Tarquinia.
    ‘A bit more than three chimes.’
    Ramiro removed his safety harness. The rope that tied it to the cabin’s interior was too short for the crossing, but if he’d substituted a longer rope that would have put him in
danger of swinging down into the gnat’s ultraviolet exhaust. Having had no training in using a jetpack, he’d decided that the bulky device would just be a dangerous encumbrance. If he
lost his grip, or if the boarding rope