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

void.
    ‘Tarquinia?’
    ‘Do you need help?’
    He could ask her to bring out a knife and amputate his foot, but that would take too long. ‘The wound isn’t stable,’ he said. ‘I’d better not come back into the
cabin.’
    ‘What do you mean, it isn’t stable?’
    ‘The burn’s denatured the tissue to the point where it might be explosive. You’d better start the manoeuvre, and I’ll drop out here.’
    ‘You can’t drop, Ramiro.’ Tarquinia presented the verdict as if she’d brook no contradiction.
    ‘I trust you,’ he said. ‘If I survive this, I know you’ll come and get me.’
    ‘If we were clear of obstacles, you can be sure I would,’ Tarquinia replied. ‘But if you let go of that rope now, I won’t have time to deal with the rogue and pick you up
before you come to grief.’
    Ramiro felt himself scowling in disbelief; his pain-addled brain was proffering an image of him tumbling away into the safety of the void. With no rock beneath him, what was there to fear? But
if he insisted on taking the gnats’ frame of reference and its fictitious gravity seriously, to complete the description he’d need to include the two things above him: the Station and
the Object, falling straight down. Letting himself fall, too, wouldn’t protect him: those giant battering rams had already gained too much velocity. Turning his air tank into an improvised
jet to push himself sideways might just get him clear of the Station in time, but the Object was too large, his aim too unreliable.
    He stared down at the sparks escaping from his foot. ‘Maybe this won’t go off – but if it does I don’t want us both dying.’
    ‘Then stay where you are!’ Tarquinia insisted. ‘It’s the shock wave in air that kills bystanders; if anything happens, the dome and the void will protect me. Look, we
don’t have time for a debate! I’m going to start the manoeuvre now. If you get into trouble, shout.’
    Ramiro said, ‘All right.’
    He adjusted his grip on the rope, taking the opportunity to rest one arm for a lapse. He didn’t think it would be wise to try to mess with the cooling bag to let him extrude a fresh pair
of limbs, but if fatigue really did start to threaten his hold he could try tying his corset’s photonic cable in a loop around the rope.
    As the gnats drew closer together, the centre of the rope dropped lower, nearer to the engines. Ramiro began climbing towards Tarquinia’s side, alarmed at how much harder it was to make
progress with the rope at a steeper angle. Tarquinia poked her head out through the hatch, then reached down and began winding the rope in; Ramiro could see her straining to shift his weight, but
she was doing much more than sparing him the effort of the climb. With the rope shortened the angle improved, and Tarquinia kept winding until it was nearly horizontal again.
    Then she disappeared back into the cabin, and the gnats moved closer still.
    Ramiro clung on, trying to ignore the revived throbbing of his foot. Everyone had imagined the rogue defending itself with antimatter, or elaborate software to deal with would-be intruders. But
the measure that had actually defeated him might not even have been a deliberate strategy: in those last days at the Station, whoever had reprogrammed the navigation system might simply never have
had an opportunity to restock the decommissioned gnat with cooling air. At this very moment, they might be fretting over the possibility that their weapon had overheated to the point where every
photonic lattice had cracked and the rebounders’ mirrors had split into shards.
    Tarquinia turned the gnat so that its flat belly faced the rogue’s. Ramiro scrambled to keep himself away from both the engines below and the approaching slab of hot rock. As Tarquinia
eased the gnats’ bases together he found himself suspended half a dozen strides below the hatch through which he’d left the cabin. With the side of his body resting against the polished