Read The Arrows of Time: Orthogonal Book Three for Free Online

course. Put it together, then I’ll get the optics workbench.’
    ‘You have an
optics workbench
?’
    ‘A small one.’
    The bench was half the size of Ramiro’s torso, but it let them measure the angle between the scope’s axis and the coherer’s beam. By the time he had the crude weapon aligned,
he looked out through the dome to see that the gnat had rotated again without him even noticing. The engines were dragging them backwards now, giving them a trajectory much like the parabola of a
ball thrown under gravity – albeit in some very strange game where the skill lay more in controlling the direction of the ongoing force than in the initial toss.
    ‘Do you have children?’ he asked Tarquinia.
    ‘No.’
    ‘So what did your brother say, when you told him about this?’
    ‘He wished me a safe journey,’ Tarquinia replied.
    Ramiro said, ‘If I’d told my uncle, I probably wouldn’t be here at all.’
    ‘Hmm.’ Tarquinia sounded sympathetic, but reluctant to take sides. ‘So let’s neither of us do anything reckless,’ she said. ‘If we play this right, your
family need never even know that you were out here.’
    The gnat reached the top of its parabola and started falling back towards the Station. Ramiro glanced up from the navigation console, unable to dismiss a stubborn intuition that the event ought
to be visible somehow, but nothing in the view through the dome had changed.
    The
Peerless
was still tracking the rogue and sending updates; the thing was five dozen severances away, off to Ramiro’s left and ‘below’ him – in the sense of
‘down’ rammed into his body by the engines, the opposite of that in his tossed-ball analogy. He slid his head past the edge of the couch and examined the sky with his rear gaze, knowing
full well that there was nothing he could hope to see. Even if he’d slipped on the ultraviolet goggles that Tarquinia had given him from her trove of gadgets, the rogue’s engines were
pointed away from him. A similarly equipped passenger on the rogue might have seen the UV flare from the gnat ahead of them, but Ramiro was hoping that the saboteurs had had no chance to augment
the vehicle with extra hardware.
    ‘We need to eat now,’ Tarquinia declared, tugging at the lid on the store beside her couch.
    ‘I don’t have much appetite,’ Ramiro protested.
    ‘That’s not the point,’ Tarquinia said flatly. ‘You’ve only had half a night’s sleep, and you’re going to need to be alert for this. It’ll take a
bell for the loaves to be digested, so this is mealtime.’
    Ramiro buzzed at her presumptuousness. ‘Yes, Uncle.’
    ‘I’m your pilot, that’s worse. Can your uncle toss you out into the void?’
    He took the loaf that she handed him and bit into it dutifully. It was a struggle to force the chewed food down his oesophagus; half the flesh that usually helped him to swallow had been
ossified.
    When he’d finished, Ramiro brushed the crumbs from his gloves. ‘What happens if we get this wrong?’ he asked. ‘If we scare the rogue into some kind of evasive manoeuvre
that changes its trajectory, but it’s still not enough to stop it hitting the Station . . . could that skew things so that the plume ends up aimed at the
Peerless
?’
    Tarquinia had already thought it through. ‘Any collision at this speed is going to give the Station so much energy that it will be oblivious to the Object’s gravity: it will be
travelling on a virtually straight line, not whipping around in an eccentric orbit. So even if the impact’s skewed, either the Station will crash on the side where it was meant to crash, or
it will miss the Object completely and fly off into the void.’
    ‘So the worst that can happen is that the saboteurs get what they want: a delay in the turnaround.’ Worse was possible for the two of them, but Ramiro was trying to calm himself for
the task ahead, not give himself a reason to back out completely.
    Tarquinia said, ‘As far as I