The Clockwork Rocket

dispute—”

Babila held up a hand to stop her. “I don’t care about anyone’s squabbling ancestors. His name and position should be enough for the people who return to find him and kill him.”

Yalda said, “Yeah, we’re not interested in those barbaric generations-long feuds.”

One of the tape writers sprung to life; Yalda stepped forward and began decoding the message. “From chamber one,” she read. “Intruder captured. Claims he’s alone. Bringing him to you.”

Half a bell later, four machinists entered the navigator’s post. Pia, Delfina and Onesta were walking in single file, carrying their captive on their shoulders; they’d extruded extra arms to hold him in place, but he did not appear to be struggling. The fourth machinist, Severo, was too short to join in the formation, so he walked ahead of the women as a lookout.

The machinists dropped their burden in front of the navigators; the saboteur crouched on the stone, his face turned to the floor. He wasn’t wearing a name tag, but Yalda was almost certain that she recognized him.

“Nino?”

He didn’t reply. She squatted for a better look; it was him. She still remembered handing him his tag before Eusebio’s big speech.

“Why?” she demanded, angry and perplexed. Nino had witnessed Benedetta’s crash, but he had still chosen to stay with them; she’d thought that was a sign of his commitment. “What did Acilio offer you?”

At the mention of the name Nino’s rear eyes flickered toward her, all but confirming her guess. “Is there anyone else here working for him?” she asked.

Nino’s reply was inaudible beneath the noise of the engines. “Speak louder,” Yalda yelled. “Who else did he recruit?”

“I only know about myself,” Nino insisted. “If there are others, I was never told.”

Yalda addressed the machinists. “You did a good job. You should go back to your posts now; I don’t want any feeds left unguarded.”

“Are you sure you can control him?” Delfina asked. “He’s a fast runner. You should fetch some melding resin.”

Melding resin? Yalda said, “We won’t let him out of this room. Please, protect your feeds.”

When they’d gone, Yalda sat on the floor in front of Nino. “Tell me the truth,” she pleaded. “Is there anyone else? If the Peerless ends up damaged, it’s your life too.”

“There are tools in the next chamber,” Babila announced darkly. “Frido could fetch them for us.”

“Tools?”

“Screwdrivers, chisels, awls,” Babila explained.

Yalda said, “Just… let me talk to him.”

She turned back to Nino. “Start at the beginning. If you want us to believe you, you have to tell us everything.”

Nino kept his eyes cast down. “I lied to you,” he admitted. “I have children.”

Yalda recalled him claiming that his co had died when he was young, but she’d never believed that; she’d thought he was fleeing from pressure to raise a family. “So why be apart from them?”

“Gemma destroyed my farm,” he said. “I was already in debt. The Councilor said he’d pay what I owed—and pay my brother enough to look after all the children.”

“In return for what?”

“First, just to join you and… spy for him.” Nino’s voice faltered, though Yalda wasn’t sure if he was ashamed of his actions or merely embarrassed. “I was hoping that might be enough—that I might not have to go into the void myself. But then he gave me instructions for jamming the feeds, and said he’d double the payment to my family if the Peerless went dark within one bell of the launch.”

“How did he know any details about the feeds?” Yalda had forgotten where Nino was meant to be working, but he certainly hadn’t been in training for a machinist’s job.

“I don’t know,” Nino replied. “The Councilor knew more about this rocket than I did. He must have had other spies.”

“Other spies where?” Yalda pressed him. “In the construction crew, or among the travelers?”

“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