Ultima

1 AD 2227; AUC (Ab urbe condita, After the Founding of the City) 2980

“Danger, Yuri Eden! Danger!”

“ColU? What’s the emergency? Another Prox flare? We need to get to the shelter.”

“Be calm, Yuri Eden. You are no longer on Per Ardua.”

“Beth. Beth and Mardina. Where—”

“Your daughter and her mother are far from here.”

“Far?… Are they safe?”

“That I cannot tell you, Yuri Eden. We must carry on in the presumption that they are.”

“So why did you yell ‘danger’ in my ear?”

“It was the only way to wake you, Yuri Eden. The drugs the medicus has been prescribing for you are rather random in their effects, although they are satisfactorily strong.”

“So you lied, right? Since when was an autonomous colonization unit programmed to lie?”

“I fear I have exceeded the parameters of my initial programming rather extensively by now, Yuri Eden.”

“You know, I feel like I’m blundering down a dark corridor. And I open one door after another, trying to make sense of it all. But I’m safe when I’m asleep…”

“Take your time, Yuri Eden.”

“Medicus. That word… I’m still on that damn Roman tub, aren’t I?”

“We are still guests aboard the Malleus Jesu, yes.”

“And—ow!”

“The medicus would advise you not to try to sit up, Yuri Eden.”

“When I sleep, I forget. The crap growing inside me. I forget it all.”

“It’s still here. But so am I, my friend. So am I. Here with you.”

“Well, I can see that. So why the hell did you wake me?”

“You asked me to. Well, to be precise, you asked me to witness and record your last will and testament. I can do that for you. But you have been asleep many hours, Yuri Eden. I thought it best to wake you before—”

“Before the time comes when I never wake up at all, right?”

“It was Stef Kalinski’s suggestion.”

“Ha! It would be. How is she, by the way?”

“The last time I communicated with her she was drinking hardened legionaries under the table. Anything to get the taste of the Romans’ disgusting fish sauce out from between her teeth. That is close to a direct quotation.”

“She’ll outlive us all. Her and her impossible twin, probably.”

“I hope to learn that someday. Yuri Eden, we must press on—”

“Before I pass out again. It’s OK, old pal. May I have a glass of water?”

“Of course…”

“So. My last will and testament. What kind of legal form can we use that will be recognizable in the Roman system? Whatever the hell that is, two thousand years after the Empire was supposed to have fallen. It’s not as if I have much to leave to anybody anyhow. Only the stuff we walked through that final Hatch with.”

“Including myself.”

“Including yourself, buddy. It’s strange to think of you as property but I guess that’s how it is.”

“I am only an AI, Yuri Eden. And in this… different reality… human beings are property, some of them. Some even on this interstellar vessel. So I am less of an exception than you would imagine here. We cannot change such things, Yuri Eden.”

“Maybe not. But my instructions are clear enough. If Stef survives me, my share of you, in the Romans’ eyes, is to go to her. If she doesn’t survive me, you go to Beth, on Earth, if by some miracle you can find her.”

“Quintus Fabius has promised me he will make sure of it, Yuri Eden, with the support of the legion’s collegia.”

“So, let’s begin. I was born in 2067, old style. Getting on for a hundred and sixty years ago, then. Even though I have only lived—”

“Sixty-two years, Yuri. The name your parents gave you—”

“Is irrelevant. I was born in North Britain. My parents were both members of the Heroic Generation, who struggled to save the world from the climate Jolts of the previous decades. Well, they succeeded. And before the prosecutors caught up with them, they had me cryo-frozen at age nineteen. Just as well they never saw me revived on Mars, a century later.”

“Your name, though…”

“Some joker called me ‘Yuri’ when they hauled me out of the cryo tank.”

“Very well. And after a year on Mars—”

“I was caught up in an ISF sweep, with a little help from the Peacekeepers at Eden. Who were sorry to see me go.”

“You are being sarcastic.”

“Yeah, flag it. Found myself waking up again, aboard the ISF ship Ad Astra. A kernel-driven interstellar hulk full of press-ganged losers like me. I made myself popular once more…

“So I spent—what, twenty-four years?—on Per Ardua, planet of Proxima Centauri. With Mardina Jones, and our baby Beth, and you, ColU. Struggling to stay alive. We found others, other ‘colonists’ stranded as we had been, and we fought our way to the Hub of the world, the substellar. There we found— ”

“A Hatch.”

“A step through, just that, and we were back on planet Mercury, across four light-years. So, everything changed yet again, for humanity, for me. I had taken Mardina and Beth home, and that’s where they stayed…”

“But you couldn’t stay with them.”

“For me, it was go back to Ardua, or face jail. So, back to Ardua it was, with Stef Kalinski at my side. Who has her own issues with all of this, by the way.”

“Are you tiring, Yuri Eden?”

“Don’t fuss, ColU. I hate it when you fuss. Back to the story. So, on Ardua, the UN started to clamp down, just like it had in the solar system, because war was brewing up. A war to be fought with kernel-powered ships, over the lodes of kernels on Mercury…”

“Yuri Eden?”

“Still here, ColU.”

“Do you remember how we drove to the antistellar point? The darkest, coldest place on Per Ardua, in the deepest shadow of Proxima. Where we found, among other mysteries, another Hatch.”

“Yes, the Hatch. And we stepped through, Stef and I, and you. We found ourselves under the light of another star. And there was a man, in a cloak and a helmet, striding toward us…”

Quid estis?

“Yes. Do you remember, Yuri Eden?”

Quid agitis in hac provincia?…

2 AD 2222; AUC 2975

The intruders at the Hatch emplacement were first spotted by sharp-eyed Arab navigators aboard the Malleus Jesu. In their quiet chambers aboard the interstellar craft circling high above this world, the Arabs, doubling as observers and mapmakers here at the destination, routinely scrutinized the area around the Hatch through their farwatchers. The newly minted Hatch was the key objective of the mission, after all, and deserved surveillance and protection.

And now Centurion Quintus Fabius himself was in the air, on the way to investigate.

The leather sac of the aerial cetus creaked and snapped as the great craft shifted in the light wind. Quintus was standing alongside the command position, a bank of levers worked by a remex, one of the junior crew who reported to Movena, the trierarchus, the commander of the ship itself. Like Movena, this remex was a Brikanti, and just as arrogant and sullen as Movena herself and all her kind. And yet you couldn’t argue about his competence. As he stroked his levers, great paddles shifted in the air around the flank of the cetus, and the craft moved sweetly in response, heading toward the Hatch, which stood open on the scarred plain that Quintus’s engineers had made when they had unleashed the hot breath of the kernels on this world, and created this wonder.

The bridge of the cetus was a clutter of controls and instruments, and scuffed wooden tables on which lay heaped charts and itineraries, mappings of this world hand-drawn since the expedition’s arrival three years ago. The air was redolent with the characteristic scent of the Brikanti, the folk of the uncivilized north, with the mead they drank and the treated hog-leather they wore, and the tang of the Valhallan tobacco they liked to chew as they worked.

But this mundanity terminated at the window, before which an alien world unfolded before Quintus’s eyes. Even after three years, even after he had walked so much of it—and even after he had changed its face significantly by building roads and camps and the permanent colony, and of course creating the Hatch—still Quintus found this world astounding.

The Hatch itself had been set on a scrap of higher land, overlooking a plain on which native vegetation sprawled, a low scrub of purple and white studded with odd orange cones. The Greek philosophers aboard assured Quintus that the cones were communities of creatures mostly too small to see—cities of the invisible, each mound a Rome of the germs. Farther away the land rose, ascending toward lofty mountains before which foothills stood in attendance. And those mountains and hills, each a massive plug of volcanic rock, had been shaped with terraces and walls and mighty crenellations that cast sharp shadows in the unchanging mother-of-pearl light of the principal sun, Romulus. They were mountains turned into fortresses by beings who had once lived here, and remade their world, and vanished—blown themselves to bits, no doubt, Quintus had heard his gloomier legionaries conclude in the camps. And yet those mountain sculptors evidently shared something with the rudest legionary from the poorest province of the Empire: they had built Hatches.

Well, Quintus had brought his ship here, and the engineers and the legionaries and the slaves had built their own Hatch, and their names would be remembered for it, the ancient number of the legion of which this century was a part inscribed at the foot of the stone Cross of Jesu, which was the only human monument permitted to accompany a Hatch. This was forever Quintus’s Hatch. And this world, the fourth of the family that surrounded this stellar twin, Romulus, would, once the permanent colonia was formally dedicated by the vicarius, become the latest province of a Roman Empire that had now reached to the stars themselves.

This was what he had achieved, he, Quintus Fabius; this was what he had bought at what would be the cost of thirteen years of his own life before he saw home again, and, thanks to the mysteries of near-lightspeed travel, a sundering by many more years than that from the family and friends he had left behind. It was a price he paid gladly; to command such a vessel as the Malleus Jesu on such a mission as this, to build a Hatch, was the pinnacle of his career so far—and likely not to be surpassed, he reminded himself with a twinge of resentment, as it was rare for officers from the provinces to rise much further in the imperial army unless they were wily enough for intrigue and assassination. Yet the Hatch was not for Fabius, or his crew, or any human; the Hatch was a thing in itself, its own purpose as ineffable as that of a temple to a forgotten god.

And now, as he peered down from a washed-out sky, the perfection of the Hatch and its setting was ruined by the intruders. As the cetus made its ponderous way toward the Hatch position, Quintus felt his temper boil up, and he clenched and unclenched one massive fist, feeling the muscles in his arm work.

“Two of them,” said Gnaeus Junius. Gnaeus was Quintus’s optio, his second in command. Gnaeus was peering down at the Hatch location through a finely wrought Greek farwatcher, leather and glass in a wooden tube.

“Give me that.” Quintus grabbed the instrument from Gnaeus’s hands and held it up to his eye. As usual, at first, he saw only darkness.

“You need not squint so much, sir.”

“I’m angry. When I’m angry, I squint.”

“Yes, sir. You also grind your teeth.”

“No, I don’t.”

“No, sir.”

Slim, dark, elegant, his tunic always spotless, Gnaeus Junius was an equestrian, a member of one of Rome’s oldest aristocratic pedigrees. Gnaeus, though so young, was likable, flawlessly competent, and had displayed none of the arrogance or sense of entitlement redolent of so many of his class. Quintus had found him utterly dependable. None of which saved Quintus from a sour resentment that this boy was destined to rise far higher in the army and beyond it than Quintus himself ever could—that the only way Quintus could avoid having to report to this elegant boy someday would be retirement.

Now Gnaeus reminded him calmly of the issue in question. “So, about the intruders, sir. Two of them.”

Quintus studied the strangers through the farwatcher. “A man and a woman. Old enough. In their fifties, or older? That makes them older than any of our veterans, or their wives. Save maybe Titus Valerius of the seventh cohort, who I know for a fact has been lying about his age for a decade. Some men just don’t want to retire.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, even Titus is going to have to retire now. The colonia—that’s his job now, for all the grumbling.” A morning of trying to deal with complaints from the colonists, the veterans who would be left behind on this world, had soured Quintus’s mood, even before this business of the intruders. Nothing will grow in this foreign muck, Centurion… You can’t leave me on the same planet as Caius Flavius, Centurion; he’s had his eye on my wife since the Valhalla Superior campaign and now he’s leering at my daughter!… I swear, Centurion, I swear…

Gnaeus said tactfully, “Well, those aren’t any of our veterans down there, sir, or their families. Nor are they any of the remiges.”

He was right. Eight subjective years after leaving Terra, including five years cooped up on the ship itself, Quintus was sure he would recognize any of the Hammer’s crew and passengers, even the lowliest slave. The complement of the Malleus Jesu was a few hundred, not counting the slaves, with the core of it being the eighty men of Quintus’s century, and an equal number of remiges, the ship’s crew—known by an archaic term deriving from a word for “rowers”—mostly Brikanti, with their own hierarchy and their own officers under the sullen Movena, along with their families. But he did not recognize the intruders below.

“They look like Brikanti—you have to give them that,” he murmured. “Those odd clothes. Jackets and trousers rather than tunics and cloaks. Peculiar colors, aren’t they? Packs on their backs. And what’s that pale sparkle on their shoulders? Looks almost like frost, melting… Impossible, of course. No frost on this world, not on the day side anyhow.”

“And no sign of weapons,” Gnaeus said practically.

Quintus grunted. “I’d want to strip them down and turn out their packs before I could be sure of that. At least they’re not Xin.”

Gnaeus pursed his lips. “I wouldn’t jump to conclusions, sir. The Xin empire is larger than ours, and includes many ethnicities. Even if not Xin themselves, they could be provincials, agents, even mercenaries.”

Quintus sighed. “The tripolar politics of Terra reaching out to us even here, eh, optio? Us, the Brikanti, and the Xin.”

“Well, the Brikanti are our allies, sir. And we’re not actually at war with the Xin.”

“You mean, we weren’t when we left home.”

“True, sir.”

The craft was descending now, with a rattle of chains as ground anchors were dropped from a lower deck. Quintus grabbed his cloak from where he had flung it over the back of a chair and tied it around his neck, checked his sword and ballista were at his belt, and jammed his plumed helmet on his head.

Gnaeus frowned his lips. “You’re going to interrogate them yourself, sir?”

“By Christ’s tears I am.”

“I think it’s best if you approach these people with an open mind. If I may say so.”

“Hmm. If they are Brikanti or Xin, I need to observe the proper diplomatic protocols before I throw their arses in the brig—is that your thinking?”

“Sir, we didn’t bring these people here. I mean, on the Malleus Jesu. And so the only way they can have got here—”

Somehow this elementary observation hadn’t impressed itself on Quintus’s consciousness. “Unless they walked hundreds of miles from one of the indigenous Hatches, the only way is through that Hatch. Which we ourselves constructed—”

“And which has evidently connected itself to the wider network of Hatches, just as it should. But we don’t know where that connection will have been made to. Perhaps to some place even more exotic than the cities of far Xin.”

Quintus, through his temper, saw the sense behind this reasoning. “So we don’t know where they’re from, how they got here, or what they can do. Therefore we don’t know what threat they may represent to us, the ship, our mission. Even the Empire.”

“No, sir.”

“Well, the sooner we find out the better. Let’s get this over with. Back me up, optio.” And he strode without hesitation to the stair to the lower deck.

Behind him he heard the optio snap out commands, hastily assembling a guard unit from on-duty legionaries.

It was a relief for Quintus to hit the ground at the bottom of the ladder, to leave the confinement of the aerial whale and to be able to stride out toward the intruders, putting all his energies into the simple action of walking. To work out his frustrations in motion, in physical exercise: that had been his way since he had been a young bull of a raw recruit in Legio XC Victrix, unable to combat the shadows of privilege, preference and nepotism that had blighted his career in the army from the very beginning. Walking was one thing, but having somebody to punch out would be even better.

But that didn’t appear to be a likely option today. The two elderly intruders just stood there by the Hatch emplacement, watching him approach. They looked somewhat startled—as you might, he thought, if you had just passed through the mysteries of a Hatch itself—but they did not seem afraid, did not seem daunted by the prospect of a fully armed centurion of the Roman army bearing down on them as if he had a kernel up his arse.

One of them, the man, even called out—something. The words sounded vaguely familiar to Quintus, the accent odd, stilted.

Time for a parade-ground bellow, Quintus decided.

3

The craft overhead was like a tremendous airship. It moved smoothly, silently. It bore a symbol on its outer envelope, crossed axes with a Christian cross in the background, and lettering above:

Anchors of some kind were dropped from a fancy-looking gondola. When the craft had drifted to a halt, a rope ladder unrolled to the ground. And as Yuri Eden and Stef Kalinski watched, astonished, a hatch opened, and a man clambered down the ladder.

As soon as he reached the ground, the man started toward them. He wore a plumed helmet, and a scarlet cloak over what looked like a bearskin tunic. His lower legs were bare, above strapped-up boots. He had a sword on one hip, and a gaudy-looking handgun in a holster on the other.

Yuri called, “Who the hell are you?”

The man, striding steadily, started shouting back: “Fortasse accipio oratio stridens vestri. Sum Quintus Fabius, centurio navis stellae Malleus Jesu. Quid estis, quid agitis in hac provincia? Et quid est mixti lingua vestri? Germanicus est? Non dubito quin vos ex Germaniae Exteriorae. Cognovi de genus vestri prius. Bene? Quam respondebitis mihi?”

Always another door, Yuri thought. “Let me handle this.” He spread his hands and walked forward, toward the angry stranger.

“I think I understand your guttural speech. I am Quintus Fabius, Centurion of the star vessel Malleus Jesu. Who are you, and what are you doing in this province? And what is that mongrel tongue of yours? German, is it? From Outer Germania, no doubt. I’ve dealt with your sort before. Well? What have you got to say for yourselves?”

The fellow said something to his female companion, and walked forward, apparently undaunted. But at least he spread his hands, Quintus observed, showing he was unarmed.

Gnaeus Junius caught up with Quintus, panting. Glancing over his shoulder, Quintus saw a small squad of legionaries had followed the optio, all according to regulations. “You’re out of breath, Gnaeus. Double your daily exercise period for the rest of the month.”

“Thank you, sir. Do you really think they’re from Outer Germania? Well, I suppose you should know.”

“And why’s that, Gnaeus Junius? Because, even though my mother tongue is a purer Latin than yours, my father was from Germania Inferior and my mother was from Belgica, which to the likes of you means I may as well be transrhenus myself, is that it?”

“Of course not, sir.”

“We’re not all moon worshippers and bear shaggers, you know.”

“I’m relieved to hear it, sir.”

“And my ancestors did put up a hell of a fight. The legions had to drive us all the way to the coast of the Mare Suevicum before they were subdued.”

“As you’ve pointed out before, sir.”

“So don’t try to flatter me, Gnaeus Junius.”

“Sir—”

“You’re very bad at it—”

“Sir. The intruder is doing something with his pack.”

Quintus saw that the man had turned away from his companion, the woman, and she was opening up the pack on his back for him. Quintus and Gnaeus immediately drew their ballistae, their handguns. Quintus heard the senior man of the squad behind him murmur brusque commands.

The male stranger, seeing the Romans’ reaction, spread his empty palms wide once more and again called out.

“We should jump them,” Quintus said.

“Give them a moment, sir,” Gnaeus said. “They’re speaking again. That tongue does sound more Germanic than not. But, you know, I would swear I can hear a third voice, neither the man’s nor the woman’s.”

Quintus glanced around sharply. The two strangers were alone. “Your hearing is either better than mine, optio, or worse.”

“As if it’s coming from the pack on the man’s back…”

“A belly-speaker? But we are rather far from any theater here. I’ll not be amused by trickery.”

The woman was closing up the pack now. Evidently she had found what she wanted. She held two compact nodules of a smooth, white substance, like small marble pebbles.

“Whatever that is,” Gnaeus murmured, “it’s surely too small to be a weapon.”

“Now who’s jumping to conclusions?”

The woman handed one of the nodules to her companion. They were both watchful of the Romans, and were evidently endeavoring to make sure Quintus’s men could see everything they were doing. Cautiously, they each pressed a nodule into one ear.

And when the man spoke again, Quintus was startled to discover he could understand his words.

“Is the translation correct? Can you understand me?”

“He speaks Latin,” Gnaeus breathed. “Rather stilted, formal Latin.”

Quintus growled, “If they could speak Latin all the while, why address us in German?”

“Perhaps they could not speak it,” Gnaeus said, puzzling it out. “Perhaps it is those nodules in their ears that speak it for them. For I think I hear a trace of the German behind the louder Latin words… Or perhaps it is the little fellow they carry in the pack on the man’s back who knows the Latin.”

“And who belly-speaks for the other two, I suppose? Your imagination runs away with you, optio.”

“This is a strange situation, sir. Perhaps imagination is what we need.”

“Let’s get down to reality.” Quintus put his weapon back into its loop at his belt and stepped forward, bunched fists on hips. “What is your mission here?”

The strangers exchanged glances. “We have no mission. We are,” and here the speaker stumbled, as if searching for a precise term, “we are scouts.” The two of them pulled the white pods away from their ears and spoke in their own tongue, briefly.

“Scouts? For what army? Are you Brikanti or Xin or Roman? To which emperor do you pay your taxes?”

Gnaeus murmured, “The Brikanti don’t have an emperor, sir.”

“Shut up.”

The woman said now, “Our speaker has not the right word. We are,” another hesitation, “philosophers. We came through the, the door—”

“The Hatch,” said Gnaeus.

“Yes, very well, the Hatch. We came to discover what is here, on this world. Not as part of a military force.”

“They’re saying they’re explorers, sir.”

Quintus grunted. “They’re lying, then. Romans don’t explore, any more than Alexander did—not for any abstract purpose. Romans discover, survey, conquer.”

“But they aren’t Romans, sir.”

Quintus repeated, “What emperor do you serve?”

The strangers exchanged a glance. “We serve no emperor. Our province is unconquered.” Again they looked uncertain at the translation.

Quintus scoffed. “Nowhere on Terra is ‘unconquered’ save for the icy wastes of the south. Flags fly everywhere—somebody’s flag at least, and more than one if there’s a war in progress.”

The woman tried again. “We recognize none of the names you mentioned. None of the polities.”

Gnaeus said, “Then you can’t come from Terra.”

The woman looked at him frankly. “Not from your Terra.”

Gnaeus’s eyes widened.

Quintus was baffled, and frustrated. “What do you mean by that? Perhaps your country has vanished under conquest, like the kingdom of the Jews. Perhaps your people are slaves.”

“No,” the woman said firmly. “We are not slaves.” She seemed to listen for a moment. “Very well, ColU. I’ll emphasize that. We are freeborn.”

Gnaeus asked, “Who are you speaking to? Who is… Collu? Collius?”

“We are freeborn,” the woman said again. “Strangers to you, strangers in this place, but freeborn. We ask for your protection.”

“Protection?” Quintus rapped his breastplate. “What do you think I am, a vicarius, a Bible scholar? So you don’t have nations. You don’t have owners. Do you have names? You?” He jabbed a finger at the woman.

“My name is Stephanie Karen Kalinski.”

“And you?”

The man grinned, almost insolently. “Yuri Eden.”

Quintus glanced at Gnaeus. “What do you make of that? ‘Stephanie’ sounds Greek—respectable enough. But ‘Yu-ri”—Scythian? Hun?”

“Their names are as exotic as their appearance, sir,” Gnaeus murmured.

“Oh, I’ve had enough of this. We’ve a lot to get done before the Malleus Jesu can leave this desolate place—the sorting-out of the veterans and their colonia for a start. I’ve no time for philosophical conundrums. Disarm them, take them as slaves—find some use for them, if they have any. And if all else fails, find a suitably economical way to dispose of them.”

Gnaeus looked unhappy, but he nodded. “Yes, sir.”

The woman stepped forward sharply. “Quintus Fabius. You’re making a mistake to dismiss us. We can be useful to you.”

He laughed. “How? You’re too old to be a concubine, too flabby and soft to fight—what, can you cook?”

She tapped her skull. “We have knowledge. Knowledge you don’t share.”

Gnaeus said hastily, “She may have a point, sir. We still don’t know anything about these people, how they came to be here. The Greeks have a saying: ‘Knowledge is the most potent weapon.’”

Quintus grunted his contempt for that. “A phrase no doubt cooked up by some shiny-domed philosopher when Roman legionaries first came to his hometown waving their swords.”

“He’s right,” the woman said. “It would be irresponsible of you to discard us without being sure—”

Quintus roared, “Irresponsible? Do you presume to tell me my duty, woman?”

But Kalinski held her ground. “For example, perhaps we have knowledge to share of a common enemy.” She thought it over. “An enemy of Rome, stronger and more wily than even the Xin and the—”

“The Brikanti,” Gnaeus prompted.

Quintus demanded, “Of what enemy do you speak?”

She gestured at the installation behind her. “I speak of whoever wishes these Hatches to be built to straddle the stars. And who manipulates the destinies of mightier empires even than your Rome to make it so…”

But now the man, Yuri Eden, seemed distracted by something. Apparently oblivious of the conversation, he took a step forward.

The legionaries reacted, drawing their weapons and pulling closer to their commander. Quintus too made to draw his ballista.

But Gnaeus laid a restraining hand on his arm, and pointed into the sky. “It is the sunrise, sir. He is puzzled by it.”

Remus was rising, the second star of this double system, brighter than Luna or Venus, brighter than any star in the sky of Terra. Everywhere the shadows became doubled. Romulus never shifted in the sky of this world, but Remus did, following a convoluted apparent path that even the ship’s Arab mathematicians had had difficulty puzzling out.

And a runner came dashing from the anchored cetus. “Centurion! There’s a report of a riot at the colonia. The men are in the granary, and are threatening to burn down the principia—”

“What, again?” Quintus raised his head to the sky and let out another roar. “Father of the Christ, why do you goad me? With me, optio.” And he stalked off back to the cetus.

Yuri Eden watched the second sun rise, entranced.

4

For lack of any clearer orders, it seemed, the troops who had followed their commander out to meet Yuri and Stef waved their short swords, and ordered the two travelers to follow Quintus back to the airship. “No funny stuff, mind.”

Stef helped Yuri hitch the pack on his back as they followed the men, listening to their gruff speech. She murmured, “So they’re all speaking Latin.”

“Or a lineal descendant of classical Latin anyhow,” the ColU said. Reduced to its processing center, the remains of the autonomous colonization unit rode in Yuri’s backpack, and whispered in their ears through the plugs it had provided, projecting translations of their words at the Romans.

“But,” said Stef, “even I can tell there’s a whole bunch of accents in there.”

“Rome always was an amalgam of many nations,” the ColU said. “A forced joining. In the latter days, in the west, provincials—who had been regarded as barbarians in ages before—rose to high command in the Empire. Stilicho, for instance, the best military leader of the late Empire in western Europe.”

“I admire your grasp of history, ColU,” Stef murmured. “Among your other accomplishments.”

“I was programmed to serve as tutor to the children of Yuri’s colony on Per Ardua. My knowledge base is broad.”

Yuri said, “I think she’s ribbing you.”

“Well, I am happy to serve, even though that destiny has changed—”

“And so,” Stef said, “it appears, has the destiny of Rome. The Caesars didn’t travel to the stars. They didn’t even have airships, as far as I know. Maybe the history you remember is out of date, ColU. I wonder if these Romans ever heard of Stilicho.”

“You are right, of course. These are not our Romans. We can be guided by our knowledge of our own history, but we must always be aware that things are different here.”

“Here, on the other side of the Hatch,” Yuri said.

“The word the Romans are using for the emplacement is actually more like Gateway,” the ColU said. “I have chosen to translate it to the more familiar term…”

Stef shook her head. “Here we are discussing a whole new history, as if it was normal. Are we all going crazy? As if it happened every day.”

The ColU said softly, “At least we are coping, Colonel Kalinski.”

And Yuri grinned. “Besides, didn’t it already happen to you once before, Stef, back on Mercury? It is—difficult, though. Do you think if we stepped back through the Hatch—if these goons in fancy dress ever let us—we would find ourselves back where we came from? I mean, on Per Ardua, and with the only Romans in the history books where they belong?”

“Somehow I doubt it, Yuri Eden,” the ColU said. “Having stepped through this door—”

“We can never go back. If there are Romans here, they’re going to be everywhere, right?”

“We must make the best of it, Yuri Eden. And after all, nobody forced us to come here, through the Hatch.”

Yuri looked drawn, tired, Stef thought—ill, perhaps. They had all been through a lot, this long day—even though, as a glance at her watch showed her, with shock, that not an hour had passed since they’d said their goodbyes to Liu Tao, in the middle of the chill farside of Per Ardua, planet of Proxima Centauri. It was obvious they’d traveled a hell of a long way from Proxima, itself four light-years from Earth. And traveled more than mere distance—more than just light-years. What was this place?

They reached the airship.

Stef was shoved none too gently by a legionary’s palm toward a rope ladder. She climbed stiffly, followed by Yuri.

The two of them—three with the ColU—were pushed into a hold at the base of the gondola, roomy but without windows, and lit by a crude-looking fluorescent lamp. They had no view out. They had no seats either; they were made to sit on the floor, with their backs to the wooden wall. The soldiers sat around on their cloaks, talking softly, and looking speculatively at Stef, who glowered back.

The ship, which the Romans called a cetus, lifted with a smooth acceleration, a hiss of bellows somewhere.

“The walls are wooden,” Yuri observed. “And the floor. I see straw, and blood stains, and the whole thing smells of sheep.”

“And goats,” Stef said. “Although that could be the legionaries. This has to be some kind of surface patrol vessel. Starship in orbit somewhere? You wonder what kind of technology they must have up there if this is the best they can do down here.”

“If they have kernels,” the ColU said, “quite crude enabling technologies may be sufficient for other purposes, such as life support. Kernels—which, incidentally, they refer to as vulcans, after the god of the forge. I have translated appropriately.”

The legionaries watched them suspiciously as they spoke, and Stef was uncomfortably aware of how eerie it might seem to these characters—bored, heavily armed soldiers—if she and Yuri appeared to be listening to a voice, even responding to it, that they couldn’t hear. It was almost a relief when one of them grunted, “No talking.”

Stef shrugged. But she saw that Yuri’s eyes were closed anyhow, his arms folded over the backpack on his lap, his head lolling.

It wasn’t long before the airship descended. As anchor chains rattled, the legionaries debated briefly among themselves. Then they stood, opened the door to the short corridor down which they’d come to this hold, and shoved the travelers back to the hatch through which they’d clambered aboard the vessel. There they were made to wait until Quintus Fabius and a few of his officers had gone down the ladder to the ground.

Stef ducked so she could look out of the hatch. She saw an enclosed compound, roughly rectangular, laid out over the purple-streaked ground, with walls of sod and what looked like orange-tinged wood, and central buildings of wood and thatch. Carefully she pulled a slate from her jacket pocket. “Hey, ColU, you might want to see this.” She held up the slate to serve as the ColU’s vision.

“Remarkable. Remarkable! A classic Roman legion’s marching camp. Displaced thousands of years in time, and brought across the stars…”

They were prodded down the ladder.

On the ground, the leader of the little group of soldiers delivered them back to the retinue of Quintus Fabius. Quintus ignored them, but Gnaeus Junius, the second-in-command—the optio, Stef learned—waved vaguely. “Oh, just stand over there and stay out of trouble.”

And trouble there was, as Stef could see. Shoved to the periphery, ignored as the Romans bickered among themselves, she tried to make sense of all this.

Centurion Quintus was in the middle of some kind of argument with a group of legionaries, most dressed in what Stef was coming to think of as the characteristic style of these post-Romans—much as Roman soldiers had dressed in all the history books and reconstructions she’d seen, even if they were generally drabber, dirtier and more battle-scarred. They all wore heavy belts, with loops for weapons and immense, ornate buckles. The belts were the single most striking feature of their costumes, she thought, gaudy, almost barbaric. Quintus dominated proceedings in his scarlet cloak and spectacularly plumed helmet.

But some others wore various other costumes. One tough-looking woman, short, stocky, red-haired, stood fearlessly close to the centurion. She wore a kind of woollen poncho, with tunic, trousers and boots; there seemed to be military insignia on her shoulder flashes, but nothing like Roman designs. Still, she stood beside Quintus Fabius as if she deserved her place. Alongside her were more men and women dressed much as she was, as well as an older man, dark, with a Mediterranean look to Stef’s eyes, wearing a kind of cut-down toga.

Stef heard chickens cluck and sheep bleat, and the voices of women and children as well as the gruffer tones of the men, and she smelled cooking fires. Now that she was on the ground, the fort felt less like a military installation than a small town, if fortified. But there was a stronger burning smell, of straw and some kind of wood. A building on fire?

As the arguments went on, a line of women, bent low under yokes bearing pails of water, made their way past the knots of soldiers, entirely ignored, eyes downcast. Stef stared. Could these be slaves?

Yuri shook his head. “What a day. We came all this way, we stepped between the stars, and now nobody’s paying us any attention.”

Stef shrugged. “People are people. Everybody has their own problems, I guess.”

“Yes,” said the ColU. “What we must do is leverage those problems to our advantage.”

Stef said, “ColU, that messenger told Quintus there was trouble at the colonia. You think that’s what this place is?”

The ColU murmured in her ear, “It was the Roman practice to plant colonies of veteran soldiers in a newly occupied province. An easy way of enforcing imperial discipline, an example of Roman culture for newly conquered barbarians, a military reserve, an occupied fortification. Maybe that’s what’s being set up here. Many of these legionaries, with their families, may not be going home again when the Malleus Jesu leaves this world. Evidently that’s what they’re grumbling about.”

“A fortification against what?” Stef thought back. “We’ve seen some mighty ruins here but no sign of an extant civilization. No animal life even, those clucking chickens aside. What are these legionaries going to wage war against, a slime mold?”

Yuri grinned tiredly. “This is an alien world, Stef. I guess it depends on the slime mold.”

“And also,” the ColU said, “if these Romans can reach this world, so may their rivals.”

“They speak of the Xin,” Stef murmured. “Chinese, do you think?”

“The name ‘China’ has a root in the name of the first dynasty to unify the country. ‘Xin’ could be a corruption of that.”

“And the Brikanti, whoever they are.”

“I am Brikanti.” The woman in the poncho who had been standing with Quintus came striding over. “Whoever you are.” Her language, audible under the translation, was Latin but heavily accented. “I had heard a rumor that Quintus had discovered strangers by his brand new Hatch.”

“Rumors travel fast here,” Stef said.

The woman laughed. “In a Roman camp, of course they do.” She leaned closer to inspect Stef. Her hair was a deep, proud red, and cropped short; she looked perhaps forty years old—maybe a quarter-century younger than Stef herself—but her face, weather-beaten, made it difficult to tell her age precisely. Her eyes were an icy blue. She said, “You dress strangely. You smell strangely. I will enjoy hearing your lies about your origin.”

Stef grinned. “You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you the truth.”

“Ha! That bull-headed centurion might not; we Brikanti have subtler minds. One thing is certain—you did not stow away to this world aboard the Malleus Jesu.”

“How do you know that?”

“The ship is mine. This mission is a joint venture of Rome and Eboraki—and if you don’t know the Brikanti, you won’t know that Eboraki is our capital. In the orbit of the sun we have our own fleets, Rome and Brikanti, but we cooperate on missions to the stars. Quintus Fabius commands the mission and his Roman louts, but I, Movena, command the vessel and its crew. The Roman term for my role is trierarchus. The ship itself is Brikanti, of course.”

“I… think I understand.”

The older man in the toga leaned closer to her as she spoke. “It’s remarkable, Movena. She speaks softly, in a tongue that, to a stranger like me, sounds like your own, mixed in with German perhaps. Yet that—thing in her ear—repeats her words in Latin. But what if we remove it? If I may?” He reached up to Stef’s head.

She was uncomfortable with this, but she hardly had a choice. She glanced over at Yuri, who shrugged. She let the man remove her earphone.

Movena grinned easily. “Don’t mind Michael. He’s the medicus, the ship’s doctor. A Greek, like all the best doctors. And like all Greeks, endlessly curious about trivia. I’m speaking in my native tongue now. Can you understand me?”

Stef heard this only indistinctly, from Yuri’s earphone; Movena’s natural tongue, sounding like Danish with a lilt, dominated her hearing.

Michael said, “Say something in your own speech.”

Stef grinned. “If you damage that earphone, I’ll break your arm.”

“Ha! Remarkable.” He passed back the earphone, which Stef quickly replaced in her ear.

And Yuri coughed, suddenly. Stef saw that he was leaning on a low rampart wall, and she felt a stab of concern for him.

Michael pushed forward. “Please, let me see if I can help you…”

Movena turned to Stef. “Is your companion ill?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“The Greek is an excellent physician—far better than these Romans deserve. He will help, if help is possible.” As the doctor approached Yuri, Movena drew Stef aside. “Now listen to me.”

“Yes?”

“I command not only the ship on this mission. I am senior woman. Quintus Fabius has agreed to this.”

“Senior woman?”

Movena sighed. “Do you know soldiers?”

“I was one myself.”

Movena raised her eyebrows. “Very well. Then you will know how soldiers behave—how they have always behaved. The men, anyhow. In the Roman system, you see, the army is all; their navy is essentially a branch of the army. Whereas in our system it is the other way around. Which is why our systems mesh together so well, when we aren’t arguing, Romans and Brikanti.

“But you need to understand that these Romans are primarily soldiers, and that is how they think of themselves. Most of these legionaries, especially the older ones, have served in war, on conventional military missions—most will probably have seen service in the last Valhallan campaigns against my own people in the northern continent, a war ‘concluded’ with the latest flawed attempt at a treaty, but probably flaring again by now. And in the south the Romans’ uglier wars with the Xin grind on… In such wars, women are booty. Or targets, their bodies a battleground after the men have fallen. Do you understand? Now, this is not a war of conquest; there are no enemies to defeat here, human or otherwise. Nothing to rape and kill. And of course the men have been able to bring their wives and sweethearts, even their children. Such is the way of it—for if you sent a shipful of Roman soldiers off on a year-long mission, alone without women, they’d have buggered each other senseless before killing each other over the favors of the prettiest standard-bearers before they got past Augustus.”

“Augustus?”

She frowned. “The seventh planet of the sun… Where do you come from? But, look, even with female companions available, men are men, soldiers are soldiers—and women are targets, the slaves, the celibate servant girls of the vicarius of Christ, even their comrades’ wives and daughters. You, my dear, are not so old nor so ugly that you are safe.”

“Thanks.”

“And so we protect each other. As I said, I am senior woman. If you have trouble of that sort, come to me.”

“I can look after myself.”

“Good. Do so, and come to me when you fail. Is that clear?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Very well. Now we should pay attention to these little boys with their quarrel…”

Quintus Fabius’s voice boomed out, cutting through the arguments. “Titus Valerius, you old rogue! At last you show your face. I might have known you were behind all this trouble.”

Through the crowd, Stef could see one of the legionaries being pushed, apparently reluctantly, to the front of a mob of unhappy men. He was burly, with his bare head shaved close, a grizzled gray—and, Stef saw, one arm terminated in a stump, encased in a wooden cylinder. “Centurion, don’t take it out on me. And it wasn’t me who set the principia alight. On the contrary, it was me who organized the bucket chains that—”

“Pah! Don’t give me that, you devil. You were trouble when you were under my father’s command and now you’re just as much trouble under mine.”

Titus sighed heavily. “Ah, well, if I could afford to retire I would have long ago, sir—you know that—and I’d take my daughter, Clodia, home for a decent education and a quiet life, away from the ruffians of your command.”

“Ha!” Quintus waved a hand at the fort. “This is your retirement, you dolt. A city to command. A world to conquer! Why, I’ll appoint you head of the senate if you like.”

“Fancy titles aren’t for me, sir. And neither is this world.”

“The Malleus leaves in under a month, and you won’t be on it. And if you haven’t sorted yourselves out by then—”

“But that’s impossible, sir! That’s what we tried to tell you. That’s why we had to set the principia alight, to make you listen!”

“I thought you said it wasn’t you—”

Titus grabbed his commander’s arm with his one hand. “Listen to me, sir. Our crops won’t grow here. The wheat, the barley, even Valhalla potatoes fail and they grow anywhere. The soil’s too dry! Or there’s something wrong with it, something missing… You know me, sir. I’m no farmer.”

“Yes, and you’re not much of a soldier either.”

“No matter what we do, and we’ve been stirring our shit into this dirt for months now, nothing’s working. Why, this reminds me of a time on campaign when—”

“Spare me your anecdotes. Shit harder, man!”

“It’s not just the dirt, sir.” Titus glanced up at the sky, at the rising second sun of this world. “Some say that bastard Remus is getting bigger.”

“Bigger?”

“This world, this sun, is spinning in toward it. What then, sir? It’s hot enough here as it is. If we are to be scorched by two suns—”

“Rubbish!” Quintus proclaimed boldly.

The response was angry heckling. He faced the mob bravely, but men on both sides of the argument had their hands on the hilts of their swords.

Stef murmured to Movena, “Do the men have a point?”

“Well, they’re right about the second sun. This world circles the big ugly star you see up there—that’s called Romulus; Romans always call double stars Romulus and Remus. But Romulus and Remus circle a common center of their own—they loop toward and away from each other like mating birds, or like the two bright stars of the Centaur’s Hoof, the nearest system to Terra. In a few years, as that second sun swims close, this world will get decidedly hotter than it is now—and then, a few more decades after that when it recedes, it will get colder.”

Stef wondered if this wretched planet was doomed to orbit out of its star’s habitable zone, when the twin got too close—or even receded too far away. “Has anybody modeled this? I mean, worked out how the climate will change?”

“I doubt it. And even if they had, no matter how dire the warning, the orders for these men and their families would not vary. From the point of view of the imperial strategists snug in their villas on the outskirts of Greater Rome, you see, worlds are simple. They are habitable, or they are not. If they are not, they may be ignored. If they are, they must be inhabited, by colonia such as this one. Inhabited and farmed. It is just as the Romans took every country in their reach and appended it as a province—all but Pritanike, of course, thanks to the wisdom of Queen Kartimandia, and we Brikanti escaped their net. If this world is not habitable after all for some subtle, long-term reason, bad luck for the colonists. But at least the Xin won’t have it. Do you see? Though I must say it will be unfortunate if the very crops won’t grow here—”

“I can make soil.”

The ColU’s voice came clearly from Yuri’s backpack. Yuri, reluctantly being examined by the Greek doctor, looked alarmed at the sudden direct communication.

The Brikanti ship’s commander was surprised too. Then, without hesitation, she marched over to Yuri, shoved him around so she could get at his pack, opened it, and peered at the components inside. “What trickery is this?”

“No trickery, trierarchus. I am a machine. An autonomous colonization unit. I am designed to assist humans in the conquest of alien worlds. And in particular, I can make soil.”

“If this is true—”

“Soil is a complex of organisms, many of them microscopic, and nutrients of various kinds. If one of those is missing on this world, I will detect it, and with suitable equipment can begin the synthesis of supplements, the breeding of organisms. Trierarchus, I can make soil.”

“And your price?”

“Safety for myself and my companions.”

Movena considered. “You know, I believe you. Impossible as it seems—but then you two, you three, are walking, talking impossibilities already, aren’t you? If Quintus Fabius believes this too—and, I suspect, if he buys off Titus Valerius by offering him and his daughter a ride off this dust bowl—then perhaps the situation can be resolved. And all you want is safety?”

Yuri was racked by a coughing spasm. The doctor, looking concerned, helped him to sit.

“Safety,” said the ColU from the pack that was still on Yuri’s back, “and medical attention for my friend.”

Movena grinned. “How pleasing it will be for me to deliver this miracle to the arrogant Romans. Let me talk to Quintus.”

5 AD 2213; AUC 2966

By the time the Nail struck Mercury, the ISF spacecraft Tatania had already been traveling for three days. The ship had headed straight out from the Earth-moon system, away from the sun, and was more than three times as far from the sun as the Earth, when Beth Eden Jones picked up a fragmentary message from her mother.

“I’m sorry I had to throw you at General Lex, even if he does owe me a favor. Wherever you end up, I’ll come looking for you. Don’t forget that I’ll always—”

And then, immediately after, the flash, dazzling bright, from the heart of the solar system. The bridge was flooded with light.

Beth saw them react. Lex McGregor, in his captain’s chair, straightening his already erect back. Penny Kalinski grabbing Jiang Youwei’s hands in both her own. Earthshine, the creepy virtual persona, seeming to freeze. They all seemed to know what had happened, the significance of the flash.

All save Beth.

“What?” Beth snapped. “What is it? What happened?”

Earthshine turned his weird artificial face to her. In the years she’d spent in the solar system, Beth had never got used to sharing her world with fake people like him.

“They have unleashed the wolf of war. We, humanity, we had it bound up with treaties, with words. No more. And now, this.”

“They being…”

“The Hatch builders. Who else?”

“And you, you aren’t human. You say we. You have no right to say that.”

The virtual looked at her mournfully. “I was human once. My name was Robert Braemann.”

And she stared at him, shocked to the core by the name.

Lex McGregor turned to face Penny. “So this is the kernels going up. Right, Kalinski?”

“I think so.”

“What must we do? We were far enough from the flash for it to have done us no immediate harm, I think. God bless inverse-square spreading. What comes next?”

Penny seemed to think it over. “There’ll probably be a particle storm. Like high-energy cosmic rays. Concentrated little packets of energy, but moving slower than light. They’ll be here in a few hours. Hard to estimate.”

“OK. Maybe I should cut the drive for a while, turn the ship around so we have the interstellar-medium shields between us and Mercury?”

“Might be a good idea.”

Beth didn’t understand any of this. “And what of Earth? What’s become of Earth?”

Penny looked back at her. “Life will recover, ultimately. But for now…”

McGregor began the procedure to shut down the main drive and turn the ship around. His voice was calm and competent as he worked through his checklists with his crew.

Beth imagined a burned land, a black, lifeless ocean.

As it turned out, she was entirely wrong.

With the drive off, and the acceleration gravity reduced to zero, the crew and passengers of the ISF kernel hulk Tatania took a break—from the situation, from each other. Beth unbuckled her harness, swam out of her couch, and made her clumsy way to the bathroom, locked herself in, and just sat, eyes closed, trying to regulate her breathing. Trying not to think.

But then she heard the rest talking, and the crackle of radio messages. Voices, speaking what sounded to Beth like a mash-up of Swedish and Welsh. Thirty minutes after the kernel drive had been shut down, and the screen of high-energy particles and short-wavelength radiation from its exhaust dissipated, the first radio messages from the inner system were being received by the Tatania’s sprawling antennas.

Gathered once more on the bridge of the Tatania, the passengers and crew listened to the fragmentary voices, staring at one another, uncomprehending. Beth looked around the group, in this first moment of stillness since the Tatania had flung itself away into space from Earth’s moon.

Herself: Beth Eden Jones, thirty-six years old, born on a planet of Proxima Centauri but brought back to Earth by a mother who was now, presumably, burned to a crisp on Mercury—but not before she had forced Beth on this new journey into strangeness.

General Lex McGregor of the ISF: a monument of a man in his seventies, commander of this space fleet ship, looking professionally concerned but unperturbed. Even his voice was soothing, or at least it was for Beth. McGregor, like Beth’s father, Yuri Eden, was British, but McGregor had grown up in Angleterre, the southern counties of England heavily integrated into a European federation, while Yuri had been born in an independent North Britain, and to Beth’s ear McGregor’s accent had the softest of French intonations as a result.

Penny Kalinski: some kind of physicist who had known Beth’s mother, herself nearly seventy, looking bewildered—no, Beth thought, she was scared on some deeper level, as if all this strangeness was somehow directed at her personally.

Jiang Youwei: a forty-year-old Chinese who had some antique relationship with Penny, and who had got swept up on the wrong side of the UN-Chinese war that looked to have exploded across the solar system.

The two young members of the Tatania’s bridge crew: junior ISF officers, male and female, looking equally confused. But, Beth thought, as long as McGregor was around and captain of this hulk, they didn’t need to think, didn’t need to care, regardless of the bonfire of the worlds they had fled and now the utter strangeness leaking through the communication systems. McGregor would take care of them. Or such was their comforting illusion.

And, creepiest of all, Earthshine: an artificial intelligence, with the projected body of a smartly dressed forty-something male, and a look of calm engagement on his face—an appearance that was, Beth knew, a mendacious simulation, a ghost of light. The closest to reality Earthshine came was an ugly lump of technology stowed away somewhere on this vessel, a store of the memory and trickling thoughts that comprised his artificial personality. He was a creature who, with his two “brothers,” locked deep in high-technology caverns on the Earth, had exerted real power over all humanity for decades.

And he’d told her his true name, or one of them: Robert Braemann. He’d known Beth would understand the significance, for her.

All her life, and especially since being brought to Earth against her will, she’d been reluctant to get involved in her parents’ past: the muddled old Earth society from which they’d emerged before they’d come to the emptiness of Per Ardua, planet of Proxima Centauri, where Beth had been born, her home. Nothing had changed in that regard now. She could see Earthshine was still waiting for some kind of reaction from her. She turned away from him, deliberately.

McGregor, swiveling in his command couch, surveyed them all with a kind of professional sympathy. “I know this is difficult,” he began. “It’s only days since we fled what was apparently a catastrophic war in the inner solar system. We feared—well, we feared the destruction of everything, of the space colonies, even the Earth itself. We had no destination in mind, specifically. My mission, mine and my crew’s, was essentially to save you, sir,” and he nodded to Earthshine. “That was my primary order, coming from the UN Security Council and my superiors in the ISF, in the hope that you could lead a rebuilding program to follow.”

“And the rest of us,” said Penny Kalinski drily, “were swept up in Earthshine’s wake.”

McGregor faced her. He was still handsome, Beth thought, despite his years, and he had a charisma that was hard not to respond to. He said, “That’s the size of it. Of course you, Ms. Jones, are here because—well, because I owed a favor to your mother. Ancient history. However, whatever the fates that brought us together, here we are in this situation now. As to what that situation is…” He glanced at his juniors.

Responding to the prompt, the young woman raised a slate. Age maybe twenty-five, Beth guessed, she was solidly built with a rather square face; her blond hair was tightly plaited. A tag stitched on her jumpsuit read ISF LT MARIE GOLVIN, alongside the ISF logo. Beth noted absently that she had a small crucifix pinned beside the tag.

Tapping at her slate, Golvin summarized quickly. “Sir, we accelerated for a full gravity for three days. We shut down the drive, but we’re still cruising, at our final velocity of just under one percent lightspeed.” She glanced around at the passengers, evidently wondering how much they could understand of the situation. “We set off from lunar orbit and headed directly out from the sun. We’re currently three astronomical units from the sun—that is, deep in the asteroid belt. And still heading outward.”

“But now we’re looking back,” Earthshine said. “Now that the drive exhaust is no longer screening our ability to look, and listen. And, instead of news from a shattered Earth, we’re receiving—”

“Messages, all right,” Golvin said. “But messages we don’t understand.”

She tapped her slate, and fragments of speech filled the air, distorted, soaked by static, ghost voices speaking and fading away.

“To begin with,” Golvin said, “these are all radio broadcasts—like twentieth-century technology, not like the laser and other narrow-beam transmission methods the ISF and the space agencies our competitors use nowadays. In fact we picked them up, not with the Tatania’s comms system, but with a subsidiary antenna meant for radio astronomy and navigation purposes. The messages don’t seem to be intended for us—they’re leakage, essentially, that we’re picking up fortuitously.”

Jiang said, “Maybe these are from scattered communities, on Earth and beyond. Radio is all they can improvise. Requests for help, for news—”

“I don’t think so, sir,” Golvin said politely. “For one thing, the distribution is wrong. We’re picking up these messages from all around the plain of the ecliptic—that is, all around the sky, the solar system. From bodies where we have no colonies—none of us, either UN or Chinese—such as the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, some of the smaller asteroids.”

“Survivors, then,” Jiang suggested. “In ships. Fleeing as we are.”

Golvin shook her head with a scrap of impatience. “Sir, there hasn’t been time. Nobody can have fled much farther and faster than we did. And besides, there’s the question of the languages.”

Beth listened again to the voices coming from the slate, both male and female, some speaking languages that were almost, hauntingly, familiar, yet not quite…

Earthshine said, “I can help with some of this. My own systems are interfaced with the ship’s; I have a rather more extensive language analysis and translation suite than the vessel’s own.”

McGregor grunted, as if moved to defend his vessel. “Nobody expected the Tatania to need such a suite, sir.”

“Evidently the situation has changed,” Earthshine said smoothly. “There seem to be three main clusters in these messages—three languages, or language groups. The first, the most common actually, is what sounds like a blend of Scandinavian languages, Swedish, Danish, mixed with old Celtic tongues—Gaelic, Breton, Welsh. The grammar will take some unpicking; much of the vocabulary is relatively straightforward.” He glanced at Jiang. “The second group you might recognize.”

Jiang, frowning, was struggling to listen. “It sounds like Han Chinese,” he said. “But heavily distorted. A regional dialect, perhaps?”

“We’re hearing this from all over the solar system,” Golvin said. “If it’s a dialect, it’s somehow become a dominant one.”

Penny asked, “And the third group?”

Golvin said calmly, “Actually, that’s the easiest to identify. Latin.”

There was a beat, a shocked silence.

McGregor said, “I might add that we’ve had no reply to our attempted communications, by conventional means, with ISF command centers. And, of course, we haven’t replied to any of these radio fragments. The question now is what we should do about all this.”

Penny nodded. “I don’t think we have many options. I take it this vessel can’t flee to the stars.”

McGregor smiled. “This is, or was, a test bed for new kernel technologies, to replace the generation of ships that first took your parents, Beth, to Proxima Centauri. But it’s not equipped for a multiyear interstellar flight, no. In fact we don’t even have the supplies for a long stay away from dock; as you know, our escape from the moon was arranged in something of a panic.”

“We need to land somewhere soon,” Beth said.

“That’s the size of it.”

“But where?”

“Well, we don’t have to decide immediately. We’re still speeding out of the solar system, remember. It took us three days under full power to accelerate up to this velocity; it will take another three days just to slow us to a halt, before we can begin heading back into the inner system.”

Golvin said, “And then we will have a journey of several more days, to wherever we choose as our destination. We’ll have plenty of time to study the radio communications, maybe even make some telescopic observations of the worlds. Maybe,” she said brightly, “we’ll even be in touch with ISF or the UN by then.”

“I doubt that very much,” Penny said drily.

“Yes,” said Earthshine, watching her. “You understand, don’t you, Penny Kalinski? You suspect you know what’s happened to us. Because it’s happened to you before.”

McGregor stared at him, frowning, evidently unsure what he meant. “Let’s not speculate. Look, I’m the Captain. I’m in command here. But the situation is… novel. I’d rather proceed on the basis of consensus. I’ll give the order to fire up the drive for deceleration. Do I have your agreement for that? When we’ve come to a halt, we’ll review our situation; we’ll make decisions on our next steps based on the information we have to hand then.”

“Good plan,” Penny said. “Unless, by then, somebody makes those decisions for us. Think about it. We’re in a massive ship with a highly energetic drive, about to plunge back into a solar system where—well, where we may not be recognized. We’ll be highly visible.”

“Fair point. But we have no choice. All agreed? Then, if I can ask you to prepare for the burn, to make your way to your couches and lock down any loose gear…”

6

The trierarchus of the Brikanti vessel Ukelwydd was known to her crew, as she was known to her family and associates, only by her given name: Kerys.

It was a custom of the Brikanti, especially those Pritanike-born, to eschew the complex family name structures of their fiercest rivals, the Romans, all of whom seemed to trace their lineages all the way back through various senatorial clans to the Romans’ Etruscan forebears, and also the traditions of the Brikanti’s oldest allies, the Scand, with their complicated son – or daughter-of-this-fellow naming convention. Such as the tongue-twisting surname of Ari Guthfrithson, the druidh who stood before Kerys now, rather ill at ease in the commander’s cabin, and looking at her with growing exasperation.

“Trierarchus, I get the sense you’re not listening to me.”

Kerys allowed herself a grin. “Well, you’re right, druidh Ari, and I apologize. It’s just we’ve been so busy—prospecting like crazy at this latest teardrop before we move on to the next, and the next, following a schedule drawn up by some idiot in Dumnona with a blank parchment and a blanker mind and absolutely no experience of what life is actually like, out here in the expanses of Ymir’s Skull… And you walk in with this incomprehensible news of—what? A ship out in the void?”

“A ship that shouldn’t be there, trierarchus.”

“You see what I mean? Incomprehensible. Would you like a drink? I’m stocked up with the usual.” Meaning Brikanti mead and Scand beer.

Ari raised an eyebrow. “I haven’t heard the rumors that you have some wine from Italia tucked away in here, by the way.”

“Hmph,” Kerys said, reaching for the relevant bottle in a compartment of her desk. The Roman bottle was pottery, shaped like a miniature amphora, and came with a couple of matching mugs into which she poured the ruby wine, working with care with the ship’s thrust operating at less than full weight. “You’ve sophisticated tastes for one so immature.”

“I’m twenty-nine years old, trierarchus,” he said, sipping his drink.

“Younger than me by the best part of a decade, by Thor’s left arse cheek.”

“Well, I am a druidh, Kerys.”

The word derived from an old Brikanti word for “oak,” Kerys knew, and signified “great knowledge.” Ari was one of the generalist scholars that all Brikanti ships carried, if they had the room, as opposed to specialists in ship engineering, or in navigation in the deep ocean of vacuum the Brikanti called Ymir’s Skull, or in other essential functions. Ari was assigned here to explore the unknown, to study and categorize the new. After all, each of the fragments of ice and stone and metal that made up the giant belt of worldlets known as the Tears of Ymir—resource lodes it was the Ukelwydd’s mission to survey—was a new country in its own right; you never knew what you were going to find.

“Here’s to druidh, then,” Kerys said, raising her mug. “And let’s get back to work before we’re too drunk to concentrate. What of this ship you found?”

“Not me, in fact, trierarchus. Your astronomers were using their farwatchers, fixing our position and mapping a sky full of Ymir’s teardrops, as they do day and night—”

“Or so they claim in their duty logs.”

“They spotted this thing. A point of light in the sky, moving steadily. You understand, trierarchus, that if you split open the spectrum of the light from such an object, you can learn about its nature and trajectory.”

“I may not be a druidh but I know that much.”

“I apologize. Well, the astronomers had thought it was just another teardrop, previously unmapped. Or perhaps a hairy star wandering in from the greater void.”

Kerys prompted, “But in fact…”

“In fact this object is beyond the main belt of Ymir’s teardrops. It is heading nearly directly away from our position—away from the sun, in fact. Its apparent motion across our field of view is quite small, but it is receding swiftly. Not only that, the object is actually decelerating. You can tell that from the shifting shadow bands in the unfolded light—”

“Yes, druidh. Thank you.”

“I apologize again.”

“Decelerating. Is this a ship?”

“Yes, trierarchus. You won’t be surprised to know that the split light shows it to be using a kernel drive, like the ships of all the empires. But it is not a configuration we recognize, not from any of the empires, not ours, not Roman or Xin.”

“You have challenged it?”

“We have—or rather our signalers have, following my suggestion.”

“Hm. Maybe I should have been informed before such a step was taken.”

Ari Guthfrithson sighed, and poured them both some more Roman wine. “Would you have paid attention, trierarchus? Your mind has been focused, rightly, on the operations at the teardrop, and our course to the next. The hail was routine. It was thought best not to disturb you until—”

“All right,” she said grumpily. “I take it no reply was received to our hail.”

“None. We have in fact heard the rogue being hailed by other vessels, Roman and Xin both; again we have heard no reply.”

Kerys frowned. “But if it’s not Brikanti or Roman or Xin, then what? Some kind of pirate?”

“If so, evidently formidable. That’s the situation, trierarchus. Given the deceleration we can see, we know that this rogue will slow to a halt in three days. We also happen to know that the Ukelwydd is the closest Brikanti vessel to the object. And we have the chance to be first to intercept.”

Kerys eyed the druidh. “I think you’re telling me a decision point is approaching.”

“At which you will need to report back to the fleet headquarters at Dumnona, trierarchus. If we were to abandon our mission here and intercept the rogue—”

“When will it come to a halt?”

“Two more days. By which time—” Ari grabbed a bit of parchment and quickly sketched positions. “Ymir, the god who built the cosmos, made a single stride from the sun to the place where he built Midgard,” he said, a bit of rote taught to all students of interplanetary navigation at the college at Dumnona—and it amused Kerys that he used the old Brikanti word for the world, rather than the Roman “Terra” long incorporated into his people’s everyday language. “Here we are about three Ymir-strides from the sun. The rogue is here, more than half a stride farther out, but along a different radius from our own. We calculate that if it keeps decelerating as it is—we’ve no guarantee about that, of course—it will come to a halt here, in about three days, farther out along that radius, about five strides from the sun.”

“Hm.” Kerys spanned the distance between Ukelwydd and the rogue with her hand. “If you’ve drawn this roughly accurately, then we are perhaps two Ymir-strides from the rogue’s final position. And we have three days to get there? Could we do that?”

“The engineers say that we could do it with a double-weight acceleration load all the way—a day and a half out, a day and a half to decelerate.”

“The crew will love that.”

Ari said drily, “They will relish the challenge.”

“Perhaps. You advise me well, Ari…”

It was clear to Kerys that her commanders would order her to intercept this rogue, if she could, to be the first there, beating the Xin, the Romans.

The Brikanti were the weakest of the three great powers of Earth, spread thin along their northern margin, a vast terrain of mostly unproductive land: the northern coasts of the Eurasian landmass, the Scand countries, Pritanike and Iveriu, and the northern reaches of Valhalla Superior, though that was under constant threat from the Roman legions whose roads and marching camps crisscrossed the great plains to the south of the vast continent. Since the days two millennia past when Queen Kartimandia had used guile to persuade the Romans under Claudius to invade Germania rather than Pritanike, the Brikanti and their allies had relied for their survival not on brute strength, not on numbers and vast armies, but on cunning, on ability and knowledge. And the chance to acquire new knowledge was never to be passed up. That was why the Ukelwydd was out here scouting for treasure amid the Tears of Ymir in the first place.

The rogue ship represented opportunity—an unknown opportunity, but an opportunity even so. It would be Kerys’s duty to grasp that opportunity, she was sure.

She began to roll up her charts of Ymir’s Tears. “Well, Ari, if I am to speak to Dumnona, I will need a draft mission plan. I don’t think we’ll be allowed to ignore this.”

Ari stood. “I took the liberty of getting that process started already, trierarchus.”

“You know me too well. Get on with it, then, and I’ll make my way to the communicators.”

7

The Tatania finally drew to a halt five astronomical units from the sun. Halted in emptiness.

This was the orbit of Jupiter, Beth was told, a giant bloated world with a retinue of moons like a miniature solar system in itself, a world that would have dwarfed any planet in the Proxima system—even the Pearl, which had been bright in the permanent daylight of the Per Ardua sky. But this monster among planets was on the far side of the sky just now, invisibly remote, and the ship hung in a void, star-scattered, where even the mighty local sun was a mere speck of fire, a source of sharp rectilinear shadows. If only Jupiter had been closer, Beth thought, there might not be this sense of abandonment, of isolation.

But they were not alone. The foreign ship had already been waiting for them here, even as, after three days of burning the kernel drive, the Tatania’s velocity relative to the sun was reduced to zero.

The Tatania had been repeatedly hailed, over radio frequencies Marconi could have exploited, and Earthshine had at last been able to put together a rough translation. This was a vessel called the Ukelwydd, which was a word similar to the Welsh for “mistletoe.” It was part of a fleet commanded from a place called Dumnona, which Earthshine speculated might be in Britain, on Earth. That fleet was a military arm of a nation, or federation, called something like the “Brikanti.” As the Tatania was not recognized as a vessel either of the Brikanti, or of the Latin-speakers, or the Xin, and as it refused to respond to any hails, it would be regarded as a pirate and treated as such.

The Ukelwydd was evidently a kernel-drive ship like the Tatania, and its basic hull was a cylindrical shape, like the Tatania’s, the most obvious design choice in response to the high thrust levels of the kernel drive—and, according to McGregor, it had blasted out here at multiple gravities to overhaul the Tatania. Even from the first glimpse, Stef thought, the Ukelwydd had the look of a fighting ship, with an evidently massive hull, heavy armor around the kernel-drive units in the base of the ship, and what looked like scarring, the result of weapons fire, in the insulation that swathed the main body.

Hours after the first encounter, still the hails came from the Brikanti ship, and still the crew of the Tatania failed to reply.

All on board the lightly manned Tatania, passengers, Lex McGregor, his command crew—and the three-strong engineering crew who Beth hadn’t even seen before now—were ordered up to the bridge for this extraordinary encounter. Ten people, Beth thought, if you included Earthshine as a person, ten survivors of Earth and moon and the UN-Chinese war. Ten survivors of a whole history that seemed to have been lost here, if the ship waiting to meet them was anything to judge by.

Now Penny said drily, “Lex, explain again the logic of why we’re just sitting here?”

He sighed. “Penny, the Tatania looks tough but she’s no warship, unlike that bird of prey out there. You saw the way she maneuvered when she moved in close—swept in like a bloody Spitfire. Conversely we’re a hulk, literally, a scow for carrying garbage and passengers. We’ve nothing to fight with—”

“Save a couple of handguns,” said one young engineer, sourly.

“Yes, thank you, Kapur. All we can do is bluff. At least give an impression of strength by not jumping when we’re ordered to. Believe me—in many confrontations, posture is everything. Why, I remember when I was boxing champion four years in a row at the ISF academy, I could win a fight just by the way I looked at my opponent at the weigh-in—”

Penny said, “Perhaps we ought to stick to the point? Fascinating though your anecdotes always are, Lex.”

Earthshine turned to her, his face blank, expressionless—eerily so, Penny thought. He said, “But what is the point, Colonel Kalinski? Sooner or later we must all face the reality of what has happened here. But you, most of all—you should be our guide. Because it has happened to you before, hasn’t it?”

He had hinted at such secrets before, Beth realized, but not so openly. Now every eye on the bridge was on Penny.

She scowled at Earthshine. “That’s my business. My personal business.”

“Not since you and your impossible sister came to see me in Paris, all those years ago. And we visited your parents’ graves—do you remember? Of course you do. And there on the stone of your mother was proof that your sister—no, you were the impossible one, weren’t you? It’s so easy to get confused, isn’t it? But since then, you see, since that strange day decades ago, I have been involved in your secret, in your peculiarly twisted lives—”

“Much good it’s done any of us.”

“At least it has given us a clue as to the nature of the transfiguration we have now endured. From a solar system riven by war, to this, this new landscape with a warrior-bird spaceship called Ukelwydd that hails us in a mixture of Norse and Gaelic…”

Lex McGregor shook his head. “Earthshine, as we stand in peril from an alien battleship—what the hell are you talking about?”

“We live in strange times, Captain. Times when the fabric of reality has a tendency to come unstuck, and then to ravel itself up again, but with flaws. That battleship wouldn’t belong in our reality—as we do not belong here—as Stef Kalinski, once an only child, did not belong in a reality inhabited by her twin sister, Penny here. Everything changed, that day when the Mercury Hatch was first opened, for Stef Kalinski. Now, with the huge pounding of the UN-China war, perhaps everything has changed for the rest of us—”

Light flashed from a dozen screens all around the deck.

“Missile fire!”

It was engineer Kapur who had shouted, pointing at the nearest screen. Beth saw fast-moving lights, an impossibly bright glare.

Golvin had to expand the field of view of the screens to give an image that made sense. The Brikanti ship still hung in space. But sparks of fire had swept out of emplacements in that battered hull, were sailing out into space—and were turning, visibly converging on the screen’s viewpoint, on the Tatania.

“I guess they ran out of patience,” Penny said.

“Get to your couches!” McGregor yelled, pushing his way to his own position. “Strap in! Golvin, their trajectories—”

“The birds are heading for the lower third of the fuselage. I’m seeing kernel radiations, Captain. The missiles are kernel-tipped, kernel – driven.”

Penny and Jiang pulled each other through the air to couches side by side, back from the control positions. They strapped in hastily, then grabbed each other’s hands.

Jiang said, “After all we’ve been through—”

“We’re not dead yet, Jiang Youwei.”

Beth, isolated in her couch, longed to be closer to them, closer to anybody, to have a hand to hold.

McGregor glanced over his shoulder. “Everybody in place? Good. Those birds are closing. Brace!”

When the missiles struck it felt as if the whole ship rang like a gong.

The roar of noise passed quickly, to be replaced by a chorus of alarm howls from the bridge instruments, and panels glared with warnings of catastrophic failures. The crew worked quickly, going over their displays, shouting complex technical data to each other. The Tatania was tumbling, Beth gathered, falling out of what must have been a spectacular explosion. She could feel the slow wheeling, as the rump of the ship turned over and over.

“The pressure bulkheads are holding,” Kapur called.

Golvin said, “Captain, the strike was surgical. They hit a circumference around the hull. The blasts were shaped, I think. They cut away our lower third.”

McGregor growled, “So they snipped off the kernel drive.”

Penny said, “These Brikanti, whoever they are, use kernel technology as routine weapons of war. Even we never went that far, not until the Nail, the last desperate throw. To fight our kernel war we had to improvise… What kind of people are they?”

“You might soon find out,” McGregor said grimly. “A party is cutting its way through the outer airlock door. They must have come aboard before launching those stingers. Oh, put away your pop gun, Kapur. Resisting will only get us killed the quicker.”

“We don’t belong here,” Penny said. “Earthshine’s right. Any more than I belonged in Stef’s reality, after the Mercury Hatch. My God, Lex, these characters make you look like a UN diplomat—”

Now the lights started to go out all over the bridge, Beth saw. Even the screens went dark, displays fritzing to emptiness. The bridge crew hammered their touchpads and keyboards and slates, and yelled instructions into microphones, without success.

“It’s all shutting down,” Golvin said. “We’re losing everything.”

McGregor demanded, “Is it the Brikanti?”

Jiang said, “They communicate by crude radio. I would be surprised if they could hack into our sophisticated information systems to do this.”

And Beth turned to look at Earthshine. While the rest of the bridge shut down—even the main lights were flickering now—he seemed to be glowing, oddly, from within, as if transfigured. A golden light.

“You,” she said. “It’s not the Brikanti doing this—this isn’t part of their attack. It’s you, Earthshine.”

McGregor turned on him. “What the hell are you doing to my ship, you old monster?”

Earthshine stood up from his couch, his virtual body passing through the harness. “Saving you all. General, the only asset we have in this reality is the knowledge we bring from—where we came from. I have taken that knowledge into myself, for safekeeping. Even the ship’s physical systems are being destroyed, now they are drained of data. The Brikanti have captured a useless hulk. I will use the knowledge I have stored in myself to bargain for our lives.”

McGregor roared, “And who the hell put you in charge?”

“I just did. And now, I think—”

The door slid open.

A party of figures floated into the bridge without ceremony, in clunky pressure suits of what looked like leather and steel ribbing, each bearing a stylized rifle with bayonet fixed. They all had their faceplates open, and they stared around at what was evidently a very unfamiliar environment. At a quiet word from a central figure, they spread out quickly into the bridge, one standing over each crew or passenger.

Beth found herself facing a short, squat, heavily built man; she had to raise her hand to shield her eyes from a flashlight attached to his weapon that he shone in her face.

“Nobody resist,” McGregor murmured. “We’re in their hands now.”

The leader of the invading party lowered her rifle—she was a woman, pale complexion, perhaps fortyish—and she made straight for Lex McGregor, the obvious command figure. She spoke, softly but firmly, and Beth heard a simultaneous translation come from a speaker on a console.

“My name is Kerys. I command the vessel Ukelwydd—”

“I know who you are.” Earthshine stepped toward her.

The warriors tried to block his way and waved their weapons at him, but the golden figure simply walked through them. A couple of men broke away, evidently panicked by this eerie display.

The commander, however, stood her ground.

“Trierarchus Kerys, my name is Earthshine. And we need to talk.”

8 AD 2222; AUC 2975

It took a month after Stef and Yuri emerged from the Hatch before the Malleus Jesu was ready to depart from the double-star system of Romulus and Remus for Earth—or Terra, as the Romans and Brikanti called it. The setting up of the permanent colonia continued apace, even as ferry craft blasted up to the orbiting starship carrying away personnel, equipment and supplies for the return journey. Stef was bemused to observe that the ferries themselves were driven by small clusters of kernels—“vulcans” as the Romans called the energetic wormhole-like anomalies—even in the atmosphere of an inhabited planet, like this one. No such craft had ever been allowed anywhere near the surface of the Earth, her Earth, not before the final war of 2213 anyhow.

Early one morning, with six days left to departure, Stef Kalinski was approached by a Brikanti who introduced herself only as Eilidh. Tall and spare, Eilidh was dressed much as trierarchus Movena was in a hooded woollen poncho, trousers, boots. But unlike Movena, Eilidh wore a heavy belt as the Romans wore, with a gaudy brass buckle and loops for weapons, though empty.

Stef, as had become her habit, had been spending her free time at the Hatch site with her slate, trying ineffectually to learn a little more of the physics of the enigmatic emplacement. Now Eilidh asked Stef if she would care to join her in a final aerial tour by cetus of the area around the colonia site.

Stef guessed she was maybe fifty, a little older than Movena, but a good deal younger than Stef herself. “I might have taken you for a Roman with that belt.”

“The trierarchus, Movena, remains independent of the Roman military command. I on the other hand am officially a tribune, an officer subordinate to the centurion. I am a kind of liaison between the two command structures. Complicated, I know, but it seems to work… As to the tour, we seek to complete our mappings of this place. And we have photographers, artists, to capture the likenesses of the structures left behind by the indigenes. We want to leave with some record of this world as it exists before the children of these Roman soldiers breed like rabbits and dismantle the fortress-mountains for building materials for their roads. I myself am a command officer but serve the trierarchus as a druidh, a scholar, hence my own interest. I have undergone some of the training… Will you come?”

“I’d bite your hand off.”

Eilidh pulled a face. “A vivid expression and oddly Roman. This was Movena’s idea; we would be fascinated by your response. We’ll be gone a couple of days. Bring what you need. We leave in an hour.”

So, in the unvarying light of Romulus, and as trumpet blasts roused the Roman colonia from its slumber for the first watch of a new day, Stef stood side by side with Eilidh before the big observation window of one of the expedition’s two cetus airships, as the ground fell away beneath them. Stef looked for the small barracks block where Yuri was resting, with the ColU for company; Stef would be supported in her translation by the buds in her ears, themselves smart little gadgets.

Eilidh gestured to the west, where mountains strode across the landscape. The sky was clear, and Romulus cast a pearly light that spun shadows across the mountain chain, sharp and unvarying. “Most of the interesting structures are to be found in the mountains. So that’s where we’ll make our way. This expedition is only a final reconnaissance. The Arab navigation team with their farwatchers, working from orbit, have mapped much of the planet. And with our two cetus craft, we’ve completed two circumnavigations, one equatorial from substellar to antistellar, and the other pole to pole. The farside is, of course, masked by ice, as are the shadow faces of all worlds like these, huddling close to their suns. But the air remains breathable, and there is life, and some structure.” She smiled. “I have spent happy hours with Centurion Quintus Fabius and his staff studying these maps, plotting the routes of roads yet to be built, ports and transport nodes to be founded at river confluences and estuaries—sketching the provinces to be carved out of these silent landscapes someday. There have even been war games, military exercises, as Quintus and his boys have imagined how to counter new Hannibals marching through those sculpted mountains.”

“You are Brikanti,” Stef said carefully. “I understand that Brikanti is a distinct nation. Independent of the Romans and their Empire.”

Eilidh looked at her sideways. “You really do know nothing of us. Yes, Brikanti is an independent nation. The heartland is Pritanike, an island separated from the mainland of Europa, and therefore from the Romans’ ancient holdings.”

Stef hazarded, “An island the Romans called Britannia?”

“Well, they still do, in their arrogance. For most of our history we’ve traded with Rome peaceably enough. The Romans are the better soldiers; we are the better sailors. We build on the expertise of our Scand cousins, who have always been expert shipbuilders, back to the days of longships with their wooden hulls and woollen sails. When the Scand first burst from their northern fastnesses—they had run out of land to parcel out to too many sons—they were pirates and raiders, and the Brikanti and the Romans made a rare show of unity to beat them back. But it was the Brikanti in the end who forged alliances with the Scand. We had far-seeing leaders in those days—unlike the current lot—who were able to see the potential of this new nation of warriors and traders. There was a kind of revolution of the heart. With Scand ships and their expansive spirit, Brikanti stopped being a rather defensive ally of the Empire and began to forge its own global ambitions.

“Now our own northern empire stretches across the reaches of Europa, and also Asia, where we have a long frontier with the Xin. We are one of the three great powers, I suppose you might say, who dominate Europa, Asia, Africa between us. And we battle over the spoils of the Valhallan continents to the west, much to the chagrin of the native inhabitants.” She tapped her heavy soldier’s belt. “But Valhalla is an arena useful for developing military capabilities.”

Stef said, “And you are able to work with the Romans.”

“Yes. At this time we are officially at peace; the two of us are closer to each other than either of us is to the Xin… In other ages the pattern changes, though the underlying relationships endure.”

“Your culture is different from the Romans in other ways,” Stef said. “Women are stronger.”

Eilidh grinned. “Well, the Romans have strong women too, but they are powers behind the throne—the wives and mothers and sisters of emperors and generals. Our culture has a history of strong women, going back to Kartimandia, who saved us from the Romans.” She looked at Stef. “Is this a story you know? It is two thousand years old; every Brikanti child could tell it.”

Stef shrugged.

“You see, Julius Caesar had already set foot on our island, and had planted the dream of conquest in the Romans’ empty heads. Fifty years later Kartimandia, queen of a realm in the north, was informed that the time had come, that the legions were massing in Portus Itius on the coast of Gaul for the invasion. It was she who traveled in person to Rome, she who managed to persuade Emperor Claudius that there was much greater glory to be gained if he turned his legions north, into Germania transrhenus, which even his glorious predecessor Augustus had failed to conquer. Continental provinces would be easier to consolidate for the Romans, and besides, she pledged to become an ally of Rome so that the invasion was unnecessary. She made a good case, it was said, much to the surprise of many Romans. But, despite the Romans’ prejudice at the time—and despite what Caesar said about us—we were no hairy savages, and Kartimandia was sophisticated and wily.

“Well, it was Outer Germania that felt the tramp of the legionaries’ boots and not the fields of Pritanike. Kartimandia, with some Roman help, went on to consolidate her hold on the whole of southern Pritanike, and her successors made themselves valuable allies of Rome by becoming a secure exporter of grain, wool and leather to supply the Empire’s continental armies. The Brikanti have never forgotten the achievements of Kartimandia. And forever since, Brikanti women have won positions of power.”

Stef and Yuri had quietly talked over some of this with the ColU, as they speculated how this history had diverged from their own. In the account lodged in the ColU’s memory, at the time of the invasion of Britain, a woman Roman historians knew as Cartimandua had indeed ruled a kingdom in the north of Britain, called by the Romans “Brigantia.” And northern Germany, meanwhile, had never been conquered by Rome after the disastrous loss of three legions in the Teutoberg forest a generation earlier. Not so here. Stef supposed that even if they could figure out how history had diverged to deliver this strange new outcome, there was a deeper question of why. Why this history—why the change now? And how had she and her companions survived the transformation of human destiny?

Eilidh, evidently sharply intelligent, was watching her. “Much of this is unfamiliar to you, isn’t it? Someday we must explore our differences fully. Yet, whoever you are, wherever you come from, I see your soul. Watching you at the Hatch, I saw the wonder in your eyes.”

Stef shrugged. “Guilty as charged. In my—home—I was a philosopher, as the Romans would say. I studied the kernels, and later Hatches, because I wanted to understand how it all worked.” That had been her goal since she was eleven years old and she’d stood with her father on Mercury, and watched a kernel-driven manned spacecraft drive like a spear of light into the heavens. “Where do the kernels get their energy from? How do the Hatches work? What are they for? Why are they here? How was it I and my companions came walking out of that thing ourselves? And, frankly, I’m fascinated by what you’ve done here. On this world you’ve gone beyond anything my people ever achieved. You’ve built a Hatch…”

Eilidh grinned. “We have, haven’t we?”

Eilidh had the cetus pause over the Hatch construction site: the dull sheen of the Hatch installation itself at the center, the land shattered and melted for a wide area around that central point, and a loose cordon of bored-looking legionaries playing knucklebones with fragments of broken rock.

Eilidh and Stef sipped Xin tea. There was no coffee to be had, one miracle of globalization that evidently hadn’t translated to this timeline. Yuri had joked about going into business cultivating the stuff once they got back to Earth. But Yuri’s health was worsening; he’d been in a continual decline since they’d emerged from the Hatch…

Stef tried to concentrate on what Eilidh was telling her.

“To create a Hatch is like mating wild boar: a simple act to understand but dangerous in practice, especially if you get in the way… You take kernels. You arrange them in a spherical array, with all their mouths directed inward, to a single point in space. And at that center you place one more kernel, its mouth tightly closed. You understand that kernels can be handled with etheric fields?”

By which, Stef had learned, she meant electromagnetic fields. “Of course. We too first found kernels on Mercury. You can position them, even close or open their mouths to control their energy output.”

Eilidh frowned. “Some of your terms are unfamiliar, but clearly we agree on the essence. Well then, with sufficient kernels, held with sufficient precision, there is an inward blast of energy. You can only watch this from a distance, and many lives were spent in determining that distance precisely.

“The configuration holds for only a splinter of time before the arrangement is blown apart. The land, the air all around is shattered, melted, by an outpouring of heat and shock waves—well, you see the result here. But if you get it right, when the glowing gases and the rain of liquid rock and the shocked air have all passed, and you can go back in to see—when all that is done, what is left is a brand new Hatch in its neat installation, just as you see here.”

Stef frowned. “I’m not sure I understand. You don’t have to construct the Hatch?”

“No more than we have to ‘construct’ a chicken emerging from the egg. Our druidh speculate that there is a Hatch implicit in the form of every kernel. It is merely a question of breaking the egg to release the chick, to use the kernels’ own energy to shock one of their brood to adopt this new form. You never discovered this?”

“My culture was more cautious than yours. More timid, perhaps. We would never have won approval for such an experiment.” For better or worse, she thought, we cared more about the lives of our technicians than to spend them on such stunts. Even if it had occurred to us to try. “How did you get the idea? I can hardly believe you found such a specific arrangement by trial and error.”

Eilidh smiled. “We did not. Somebody else found it for us.” Now the cetus was rising, turning its prow to the jagged row of mountains on the misty horizon. “We first found the kernels on Mercury—as did you, yes? We were already traveling beyond Terra—well, obviously. We had big ships driven by Xin fire-of-life, and by potent liquid elixirs… I fear our common vocabulary is not yet rich enough.”

Gunpowder and chemical propellants. “I get the idea.”

“Such substances had been discovered and developed during centuries of war. We had already flown to Luna, to Mars, though many died in those days, and our first attempts to plant colonia on those bodies were often catastrophic…”

Stef’s head swam. Without the fall of Rome in the west, without the Dark Ages, could technological development have been that much faster? She imagined a medieval world with crude rocketships lumbering into space, with lessons slowly being learned about the vacuum of space, about radiation, about weightlessness, by cultures utterly unsophisticated in the relevant science—lessons learned the hard way, at the expense of many deaths. She was thrilled at the idea. Thrilled and appalled.

“Then came Mercury,” Eilidh said. “There was a war of acquisition, more intense than most. We all wanted Mercury and its resources to capture the energy of the sun, you see. It was seen as a strategic position in terms of advantage for the future. And just how strategic only became clear when a Xin party stumbled across a field of kernels.”

“Ah.”

“After the usual blood toll the kernels were tamed, their energies used to drive our ships, and they were unleashed as weapons of war.”

That simple phrase managed to shock Stef, despite all she’d witnessed in her own home timeline. “Surely not on Earth itself.”

Eilidh just returned her look. “But we are speaking of the Hatches. The first Hatch of all was found on Mercury, in the kernel field.”

“As it was for us,” Stef said.

Eilidh raised her eyebrows. “On a different Mercury too? We do have much to discuss. Of course the Hatch was opened; of course there were attempts to pass through… None of those who entered, unwilling slaves, bold soldiers, curious philosophers, ever returned.”

“Perhaps they are still in transit.”

“In transit?”

“Our Mercury Hatch is connected to one on Per Ardua. Umm, which is a world of Proxima Centauri. Which is—”

“The nearest star, in the Centaur’s Hoof. For us, it has been given the same name. Proxima.” She smiled, a little sourly. “So there are Romans in your country too.”

“Were. Long story. Look, it’s only four years as light travels between Mercury and Proxima. So it’s possible to go there and step back with only eight years elapsing.”

Eilidh frowned as she puzzled all that out; Stef had no idea how much understanding of such basic physics they shared.

“The point is,” Stef said, “maybe your Hatch on your Mercury was hooked up to somewhere else. Somewhere much farther away.” There was no reason why that shouldn’t be true, she realized. They knew so little, despite the decades that had passed since her own first brush with all this strangeness. “Your travelers may have arrived alive and well, but just haven’t had time to step back home yet. Maybe they are still traveling, oblivious.”

“It’s possible. Oddly there is a soldiers’ legend along those lines. Perhaps the travelers have gone, not to Proxima, the nearest star, but to Ultima, the furthest star of all.”

Stef frowned. What could that mean? The furthest star, in an expanding universe full of galaxies and clusters of galaxies…

“But, though we have not walked through the Hatches to Proxima and its worlds, we have journeyed there in ships—ships like the Malleus Jesu, orbiting high above. When we got there, on the third planet from the star—”

Per Ardua.

“—we found a kernel field, not unlike that on Mercury—by then we had learned how to search for such things—and we found a Hatch, and we found instructions on how to construct a fresh one. Just as I have described.”

“Instructions. Of what kind?”

“Enigmatic. Graphic, but enigmatic. Enough for us to work out the rest, after—”

“Another blood toll.” Stef remembered the builders, natives of Per Ardua—her Per Ardua. She had seen little of them, but she knew Yuri remembered them with affection from his early, near-solitary years on the planet. “These graphic instructions—was there any sign of the natives who created them?”

“None. So I’m told. Not a trace save these odd diagrams, and even they were lodged inside a Hatch.” She eyed Stef. “It was another scrap that doesn’t fit, another fragment of a lost history. Like you and your companions. What do you think?”

A scrap like her own unexpected sister in the Hatch on Mercury, Stef thought. The first reality tweak of all. She shrugged. “I don’t know what to think.”

“Well, keep trying. And now—look down.”

The cetus was now sailing serenely over mountains.

The sun of this world was not high, it might have been an early afternoon at a temperate latitude on Earth, and shadows pooled in the valleys that separated the peaks. The second sun was in the sky too and cast a fainter double shadow. Ice striped the taller peaks, and rivers flowed through the valleys like bands of steel. And, save for the shadow cast by the cetus itself, Stef could see nothing moving down there, no people, no animals, not so much as a thread of smoke.

But everywhere she looked, Stef saw artifice. Every mountain seemed to have been shaped, regularized as a pyramid or a tetrahedron. The valleys looked as if they had been shaped, too, straightened. Some of the peaks were connected by tremendous bridges of stone. Many of the mountain walls were terraced, so that it looked as if giant staircases climbed their flanks, while others had huge vertical structures fixed to their faces, almost like the flying buttresses of medieval cathedrals, or were deeply inscribed with gullies and channels.

Eilidh was watching her. “Tell me what you see.”

“It’s like a simulation.”

“A what?”

“Sorry. Like a model. A mock-up of a mountain range. It doesn’t look real.”

“Yet it is real. This planet is laced by mountain ranges; it is, or at least was, very active. And all of them have been shaped and reshaped by hands unseen, just as you see here. All as far as we have visited and studied. There’s much you can’t see from the surface. We burrowed into one mountain, sounded out others. The mountains are hollowed, strengthened within by huge remnant pillars of rock. They have been transformed into immense granite fortresses, or so it seems. For the Roman military engineers, who eat and breathe fortifications, this is Elysium, as you can imagine.”

“We noticed this the minute we stepped out of the Hatch,” Stef said, wondering. “I never dreamed the whole world was like this. But—who built all this? And where are they now?”

“That’s the puzzle. These vast mountain-fortresses are all pristine, save for some evidence of erosion and rock fall—natural breakdowns. There’s no evidence they were ever inhabited, let alone fought over. Meanwhile, across the planet, we have found no trace of life more complex than those orange chimney-stacks of bugs you see piled up on the plains. Nothing moved here, not until the legionaries arrived, and they don’t move much either. Ha! I do have a theory, for what it’s worth. I may be limited as a druidh but I’ve seen as much of this world as anybody.”

“Tell me.”

“The farside, the dark side, is—damaged. I’ve seen vast craters, their rims protruding above the ice. And there is a very odd range of mountains running virtually north to south down the rim of one of the continents there, buried though it is under the ice.”

“Like the Andes.”

“The what?”

“A mountain range in, umm, Valhalla Inferior, I think you call it.”

“Like that—yes. Now, these mountains had been modified, but not as fortresses. We saw evidence of vast installations, like cannon muzzles, all along the western faces of the mountains. My colleagues, especially the Romans, thought these must be weapons, but they didn’t look like very effective weapons to me. The only purpose I could think of…”

“Yes?”

“Perhaps these were, not weapons, engines. Rockets intended to fire together, powered by kernels presumably, blasting all along this great seam along the belly of the planet—”

“My God. You think they were trying to spin up the planet?”

“It’s possible. Maybe there was some great project to make this world more hospitable. The approaches to the second sun, you know, do make life difficult here, for the native life as for the Roman colonists.”

The ColU had worked out that this was a double-star system in which both partners were red dwarfs—small, miserly stars, like Proxima, so small and dim they hadn’t even been detected from Earth. The ColU had said the nearest such system to Earth must be at least seven, eight, nine light-years out.

“Of course,” Eilidh said, “most of this world’s life, like every living world, is comprised of bugs that inhabit the deep rocks, miles deep, feeding off seeps of water and heat and minerals. We found them here when we were running deep mining trials—as one always finds them, on every world. They won’t care if there is one or two suns in the sky, or more. So long as the world itself lasts, they will too.”

“I take it the great spin-up never happened.”

“It appears there was a war to stop it. Evidently not everybody agreed with the visionary engineers behind the scheme. The big spin-mountain engines were attacked—we have seen the damage.”

“If this is all so, then what happened to the natives after that?”

“I can only guess. Perhaps they were appalled by the damage done by their kernel war. The building of their mountain refuges might have been a last burst of sanity before the madness—or possibly the other way around.”

“But despite all that they are gone.”

“Perhaps there was something like a plague, or…” She eyed Stef. “You have more sophisticated machines than us, as evidenced by Collius. There may have been other weapons that were used to eradicate all higher forms of life from this world, before they wrecked it altogether.”

“Leaving it to the deep bugs to start again, I suppose.”

Eilidh sighed. “That, and a world like a dead emperor’s folly.”

It was yet another planetary tragedy, Stef realized, caused by the availability of the kernels. “I think I envy those deep bugs, you know. Resting in their gloomy chambers, far below all the commotion of the surface. Life must seem so simple, and so safe.”

Eilidh grunted. “But not for the likes of us.”

“So,” Stef said, trying to understand, “you come out into interstellar space in kernel-driven hulks. We got as far as Proxima.”

Eilidh frowned, evidently struggling to understand, but she nodded.

“You’re exploring,” continued Stef, “maybe scouting is a better word, and you’re planting colonies, colonia, on any habitable world, in advance of the other guy getting here first.”

“That’s the idea.”

“But when you find a world seeded with kernels, you create a Hatch. Is that right?”

“This is my own second such expedition. It begins with the vicarius blessing the seeded ground…”

“You create the Hatch—presumably it connects itself to some higher-dimensional network—but then you never try to use it.”

“Well, the Mercury Hatch led nowhere, as far as we know. Whatever the Hatches really are, wherever they go, they aren’t for us.”

“Then why build them?”

Eilidh smiled with a touch of cynicism. “Perhaps you aren’t as spiritual a people as we are, Stef Kalinski. One thing that unites us Brikanti with the Romans is a worship of Jesu, of the Cross on which He died and the Hammer that He wielded against His foes… To us the kernels are a great gift. Look how much we have been able to do: we have transformed our own world, we have traveled to the stars—”

“You smite your foes.”

“Quite so. Some believe the kernels are a gift from God, Father of Jesu—though older superstitions persist; some of the country Romans still speak of old gods like Vulcan, and some Scand believe a kernel is a gateway to Ragnarok. And in return for this gift, we do what is evidently asked of us, which is to cause fields of kernels to blossom into Hatches. What are the Hatches for? Perhaps some future generation will be able to answer that. In the meantime, we travel, we harvest the kernels, we build the Hatches. For such seems to be the scheme of things; such is what we are required to do.”

“Just as my own ancestors once built cathedrals, perhaps. Some dumb legionary might be content to follow orders, mindlessly, without inquiring. You can’t be happy with that.”

“I’m Brikanti. My ship is my true purpose. And besides, there’s very little I can do to change the trajectory of my society. Could you? But speaking of changing trajectories…”

The great ship turned in the air, and Stef saw its shadow swim across the sculpted mountains below.

Eilidh said, “Our adventure is over already. Well, there is much to do, a five-year star flight to plan. I hope you have found the day instructive. More tea, my friend? Shall I call for a fresh pot?”

But Stef was receding into her own thoughts. Too slowly, in her aging mind, new problems were occurring to her. The Hatch on this world had evidently only existed for a year or two, since these Brikanti and Romans had come here and built it. But she and Yuri had walked into the Hatch on Per Ardua long before that—seven or eight or nine years ago—they had walked into one end of a space-time tunnel years before the far end had even existed… So where had they been, for all that time?

She started shivering, uncontrollably. Eilidh draped her thin shoulders in a blanket.

9

When Stef returned to the colonia she learned that Yuri had been taken to the legionaries’ small hospital. She hurried that way, concerned.

When she got to the hospital she was directed to a kind of operating theater. She’d glimpsed this place before; it looked to her more like a butcher’s shop, with alarming-looking surgical instruments suspended on the wall. But, she was told, it was hygienic enough; Michael and his Greek-trained medics and their Arab advisers knew enough about antisepsis and the risk of infection to keep the place reasonably clean.

Here she found Yuri, slumped in a chair, and the ColU—or rather its processing unit, a baroque tangle of metal and ceramic—sitting on a tabletop. Titus Valerius stood by, the big veteran soldier who had caused Quintus Fabius so much trouble with his small rebellion on the day Stef and the others had walked out of the Hatch.

And, standing in the center of the room, looking scared and uncomfortable, was a boy, dark, Asiatic, slim, age perhaps thirteen or fourteen—but he was so skinny it was hard for Stef to be sure. He wore a grubby tunic and no shoes; his feet were filthy. Medicus Michael hovered by the boy, looking abstracted, fascinated.

Stef made her way toward Yuri, nodding at Titus. The big man was picking at the nails of his one good hand with the top of a full-scale sword, a gladio, propped in his opposing armpit. He nodded back to Stef, and his gaze raked over her elderly body in the way of all legionaries. But she felt as safe with Titus as she did with any of the Romans; she had met his young daughter, Clodia, who he had brought on this space mission as a small child, after the death of her mother.

Yuri looked up, pale, but he smiled. “Good trip?”

“Eye-opening. Are you OK? What’s going on here?”

“It’s not about me, for once. In fact you’re just in time.” He gestured at the boy. “This is something new. Introduce yourself again, son.”

In decent Latin, the boy said in a wavering voice, “My name is Chu Yuan. I am fourteen years old. My family are scholars and merchants in Shanghai. My father is a soldier with the Twenty-fourth Division of the Imperial Army of Light. He was stationed in Valhalla Inferior. He took his family there, including myself, the eldest son…”

Yuri winked at Stef. “Valhalla Inferior—South America. For centuries you’ve had tension between the Chinese coming in from the west, basically holding the coastal plain and the Andes, and the Romans coming in from the east through Amazonia, as well as south from their holdings in Mesoamerica.”

“And the native people caught in the crossfire.”

The ColU said drily, “At least they were not exterminated by crowd plagues, as in our history. The Vikings—the ‘Scand’ allies of the Brikanti—had already been traveling to the Americas for centuries, allowing immunity a chance to build up. But the war fronts ebb and flow.”

“Our fort was overrun,” Chu said now. “My father was killed. My mother ran away. I was captured, enslaved by the glorious soldiers of Rome.”

That made Stef pause. “He’s a slave?”

Yuri shrugged. “His parents were grooming him to be a scholar, I think, or a clerk. But the Romans caught him, and he ended up a slave on this tub.”

Stef stared at this boy, trapped in a category of humanity she never thought she would have to deal with. She’d found it almost impossible to function in the colonia, for the slaves were everywhere, if invisible to a Roman eye. And it wasn’t just the subjugation of human beings that distressed her but the level of daily, almost casual brutality. Even for routine punishments there were blood-stained stakes, lead-tipped whips. She’d always rather admired the Romans, for their literacy, their order, their engineering, their respect for the law. Now, she was finding, she’d never fully imagined this side of their civilization.

“Well, what’s he doing here?”

Michael beamed. “He is a gift, at the orders of Centurion Quintus Fabius. He has been delighted by the work of Collius in the colonia, the advice on soil preparation, crops, irrigation.”

The ColU, sitting on its tabletop, seemed to Stef to twinkle. “I’m Collius the oracle now.”

“Shut up,” said Yuri mildly.

“Yes, Yuri Eden.”

“So the centurion, you see, aware of the ColU’s cut-down state, has kindly donated him the legs of this boy here.”

Stef frowned. “I don’t understand.”

Michael said hastily, “Let me explain. I have adapted your backpack, Yuri Eden.” He drew this out from under a bench; it looked much as it had before, save the straps had been shortened. He brought this to the boy who slipped it on. “The ColU itself will ride in the pack. And then your talking, all-seeing glass…”

Yuri’s slate had been set into a leather pouch, and Michael now hung this around Chu’s neck, fixing it with straps around his chest.

Stef said, “I don’t believe it. This boy is going to be your pack mule, ColU?”

“We have been rehearsing,” the ColU said. “Chu. Walk forward. Turn right. Turn left.”

The boy marched across the theater floor, as passive and obedient as a puppet, head downturned. A slave’s walk.

“This is obscene,” Stef said.

Michael held up his hands. “Now, madam, Yuri warned me you might react like this—”

“It could have been a lot worse, Stef,” Yuri said. “Why do you think Michael here is involved at all?”

“Tell me.”

“Because the centurion’s first idea was to have the pack and slate stitched to Chu’s flesh, so they couldn’t be stolen.”

Titus Valerius raised a hand tentatively. “Can I speak? I’m part of the centurion’s idea also. I will accompany the boy wherever he goes, to ensure the safety of the oracle.”

Stef grinned sourly. “I know the military mind. A nice cushy job to buy you off after that business with the granary, Titus?”

Titus shrugged massively. “I follow orders.”

“Well, it’s still obscene,” Stef said.

Yuri said mildly, “Would you send Chu back where he came from?”

Chu turned his head at that, looking alarmed.

“I will care for this boy,” the ColU said firmly. “I will ensure his own needs are met, as he serves mine. We cannot save all the slaves in this Roman Empire of theirs, Stef Kalinski. But I can save this one, this boy.”

Stef bowed to the inevitable. “Fine. I suppose all other options are worse…”

She tried to tell Yuri and the ColU something of what she’d learned that day.

“So these people, these Romans, send ships to the stars and build Hatches without any understanding of why. Purely as a ritual, a mechanism, as ants build a nest.”

“Perhaps that’s a good analogy, Stef Kalinski,” said the ColU. “The nest as a whole benefits from the actions of individuals. In the same way the Hatch network must benefit in some way.”

Michael had listened closely to their conversation. He offered, “Perhaps it fits the Romans’ character too. At least, these soldiers. They are used to serving a larger entity without question—I mean, the Empire, the army. I, a Greek, can see this.”

“I resent that,” said Titus Valerius.

“Oh, you do?”

“Yes! Legionaries aren’t ants. We know precisely why we’re fighting. For our companions.”

Michael sighed. “Just as ants follow the lead of their neighboring ants, and so the structure of the hive miraculously emerges. My point exactly.”

Titus growled, baffled.

Stef said, “Yuri, did you know that kernels have been used in war here? On Earth itself. For centuries, I think.”

“Somehow I’m not surprised,” Yuri said weakly. “Can you think of any way in which this new humanity is better than the old?”

“Only one,” said the ColU. “They’re better at building Hatches.”

10 AD 2213; AUC 2966

The moon was different. That was the first thing Beth Eden Jones noticed as the Ukelwydd sailed toward the Earth, still decelerating, kernel drive burning bright.

It was a chance navigational alignment that brought the incoming ship close to the satellite, close enough for the kernel energies to cast a glow on the surface. On the dark side lights were scattered, and domes reflected the ship’s fire like droplets of mercury. But when the day side opened up, with the moon receding behind the Earthbound ship, even Beth—a stranger to the solar system until she stepped through a Hatch from Per Ardua to Mercury at age twenty—could see how the ancient terrain was disfigured. The smooth grayness of the maria, the seas, was gouged and scarred with immense rectilinear workings, and the whole face was masked by rays from brilliant, sharply defined new craters. The maria landforms were obviously artificial, the result of centuries of human mining for resources, here on this version of the moon. It took a while for Beth to understand that the new craters, the bright rays, were human-made features too: the scars, not of industry, but of war.

Having passed the moon, the ship turned for Earth, a button of light in the sky. But again Beth could immediately see differences from the world she remembered, even from this distance. There was no gleam of ice, for one thing, at either pole. And whole swaths of the planet, in central America, central Africa, Australia, were bare of life, as if the green had worn away to expose the rocky bones of the world.

The Ukelwydd, with the ruin of the Tatania in tow and the hulk ship’s tenfold crew aboard, settled neatly into a high-inclination orbit around Earth, or Terra as the home world was called by the Brikanti. The crew of the ISF ship was restricted to their sparse quarters for a full day, as the Brikanti went through their arrival protocols.

After this brief confinement, Ari Guthfrithson, the ship’s leading druidh, invited Beth to join him to view the world, for soon the orbital pass would take the ship over Britain and north Europe, the home of the Brikanti and their allies, including Ari’s own people.

Beth was pleased to see Ari. She felt she had grown relatively close to this calm scholar in the days they had spent on this ship. He was younger than she was, but not by much. He wasn’t exactly handsome, but like all the Brikanti crew he seemed to be exceptionally well groomed, with neat hair and finely shaped sideburns—she had glimpsed him using a portable kit, scissors, a nail file. She was attracted to him, she thought, if only faintly.

And today the general mood was good. The Ukelwydd crew seemed relaxed as they switched over from flight mode to less demanding orbital operations.

“Plus,” said Lex McGregor as he joined Beth and Ari at a big observation window, “maybe they are looking forward to getting rid of us. I know the military. The sooner they can kick a problem upstairs the happier they will be.”

Ari’s voice, softly translated for Beth through Earthshine’s systems via her earpiece, was calm, melodious. “Actually ship’s crew are not used to dealing with people directly. In space conflicts, a personal encounter with the enemy is rare; the defeated rarely survive to become prisoners. And of course your Earthshine, whose nature we cannot understand, represents a double conceptual problem for us.”

“Well, I’m sorry about that,” McGregor said drily. “But he is the reason we’re all here in the first place. The objective of the flight of the poor old Tatania was specifically to save Earthshine from the consequences of our own upcoming war.” He glanced down at the world, over which the ship drifted silently. “Though whether by bringing Earthshine to this place really counts as ‘saving’ him—I suppose I’m relieved I’ll never have to justify that to my superiors, wherever they are… I’m sorry, I’m maundering.”

Ari said, “Your destiny at a higher level than that has not yet been decided.”

McGregor frowned. “I don’t understand. This is a Brikanti ship. I don’t know anything about your government, your empire—whatever—but surely we’re under your protection.”

“I’m afraid it is more complicated than that.” Ari gestured. “Look around.”

And when Beth looked away from the bright surface of the planet she saw an array of brilliant, unwinking stars against the dark background of space.

Lex McGregor whistled. “Wow. Space habitats. I see tori, cylinders, platforms—mirrors, antennas…” He clenched a fist. “We’ve barely been allowed near a window. I never even noticed all this junk before.”

“Junk?” Ari smiled. “I have been told that, where you come from, space is much less populated, comparatively. We find that difficult to understand. With kernel-drive ships it is easy to haul vast loads into orbit, or to ship materials in from such sources as Luna or the Tears of Ymir.”

“But, Ari, they—umm, we—are more wary of kernels than you are. Kernel drives aren’t allowed on the Earth. Nowhere closer than the far side of the moon, where Penny Kalinski and her sister once worked. Of course, when the final war came, all bets were off.”

“But I point out that the hardware you see in space around us represents the various forces who have taken an interest in you.”

Beth said, “You mean the Romans, the Xin?”

“I do.” Ari studied her, his face open, inquisitive. “I still know little of your own history. What hints I have heard are fascinating—the differences from our own. For now, you need to understand this. From what I have gathered, your history was rather more complex than ours has been. Fragmented. Essentially our world, and now the worlds beyond Terra, have been dominated by the rise of two powerful empires, Rome and Xin. Though other polities have come and gone, those two great poles of power have competed for control of the great landmasses of Asia and Europa for two thousand years. And for the last thousand years or more they have contended over the territories of the rest of the world also. The only significant exception has been my own federation, the Brikanti. Starting with a Pritanike that stayed independent of Rome, the Brikanti have managed to retain a kind of land empire of their own.”

He studied their faces. “Terrible wars have been fought, on this world and elsewhere. Why, the battered face of Luna is a reminder of that. It is said that when the war up there was at its height, and the face of the satellite burned in the sky, a hail of debris, rocks from the great lunar detonations, rained down on Terra. Those accidental rock falls could not be distinguished from purposeful attacks, and a new wave of war was initiated on Terra itself. However, war and competition drove innovation. In many ways, it is clear, my culture is less technologically advanced than yours—but not in others.

“And we survive, and poor Terra, almost as battered and scarred as Luna, has survived as an abode for humanity. This is because we, the competing powers of Terra, have found ways, if not to cooperate, at least to manage our conflicts. To sublimate them into angry diplomacy.”

McGregor said, “Are you saying we are now the subject of this ‘angry diplomacy’?”

Ari sighed. “The whole world saw the Ukelwydd come sailing in with the wreck of a ship of unknown origin. Our crew is riddled with spies for Xin and Rome. Of course it is; it is to be expected. You represent treasure, or perhaps danger, of unknown potential. We Brikanti spotted you first, and showed the initiative to retrieve you, but that is not to say that Xin and Rome are happy for us to keep you to ourselves. And as a result, right now, this ship, and you, are the subject of scrutiny. And as they watch us, they watch each other too.”

McGregor grunted. “And everybody is armed to the teeth.”

“That’s the idea. The fact that there is a native Xin among you, or so we would classify Jiang Youwei, makes the situation that much more complex; all sides feel they have a claim. At some point the trierarchus, as the command authority on the spot, will need to decide whether it is worth the risk of trying to transport you to Brikanti territory on the ground, or else to give you up to either Rome or Xin—or even to cast you adrift in your Tatania and let them fight it out over you. For we Brikanti, you see, are a small and nimble power who strive to stay safe by not being trodden on by either of our world’s lumbering giants…”

Penny Kalinski joined them now, entering through the door at the back of the cabin. Swimming easily in the absence of gravity, she looked comfortable in a loose-fitting Brikanti costume of tunic and trousers. She was carrying a slate, and sipping something from a covered pottery mug. “Watered-down mead,” she said to Beth. “Pleasant stuff.”

Beth had to smile. “You look as if you fit in here, Penny.”

“Well, what can you do but make the best of it? I doubt we’re going home any time soon. Even if ‘home’ still exists, in any meaningful sense. So what’s going on? I heard we were due to pass over Britain; I wanted to come see.”

Lex McGregor did a double take, turned to the panorama of the world below, and frowned at what he saw. “Really? That’s Britain? What the hell?”

Beth, a stranger to Earth, had comparatively little preconception about what she expected to see, looking down on Britain / Pritanike. She saw a kind of archipelago, a scatter of islands off the shore of a greater continent to the east. There was a grayish urban tangle laid over the green-brown of the countryside on the eastern coast of the larger of the islands, nearest the continent; she saw the glitter of glass and metal, arrow-straight roads. And in the mountainous country of an island to the far north she saw tremendous rectangular workings that looked as if they might rival the minefields of the lunar maria.

Lex said grimly, “I was born in England. The southern counties, Angleterre. I have seen my home country from space many times. But I do not recognize that. Half of it’s missing altogether.”

Penny touched his shoulder. “History’s been different here, Lex. Rome in the west never fell, apparently. Here, they industrialized centuries before we did. With the consequences you’d expect.”

“Greenhouse gases. Deforestation. Sea level rises?”

“That’s it. It will all have gone a lot farther and a lot earlier than in our timeline. We had the great twenty-first century crisis of the climate Jolts, the heavy-handed repair work of the Heroic Generation. Maybe here, as it unfolded more slowly, they understood it all less—maybe they cared less—and just adapted to it. I think we can expect to see the coastlines transformed all around the world. Lowlands lost, like south and east England here.”

McGregor squinted. “That big sprawl in northern England looks like it’s centered on York.”

“That is Eboraki,” said Ari. “The capital of an independent Pritanike since the days of Queen Kartimandia herself, she who defied Rome. It has always been a city of war. Later, in the early days of contact between my own ancestral people and the Brikanti, for some years Eboraki was held by us. It was a Scand city, not a Brikanti one.”

Penny grinned. “But all that’s a long time ago. Forgive and forget?”

“At least we Brikanti and Scand loathe each other less than we loathe the Romans and the Xin. Now Eboraki is the capital of a world empire—though we have no emperors.”

Lex said, “The development on the scraps of high ground to the south of the Thames, beyond the Isle of Dogs. That might be some version of London.”

“That is Lund,” Ari said. “The most obvious gateway to Europa, and the Roman provinces. The town was a petty community before contact with the Romans; there was no particular purpose for it. After Kartimandia it became a trading hub with the Empire, and the nearest to a Roman city in Pritanike. But it was always dwarfed by Eboraki.”

McGregor pointed. “And what the hell did you do to Scotland?”

Ari frowned. “We know it as Kaledon. An arena of heroic engineering.”

“It looks like you demolished mountains,” McGregor said. “Some areas look like they’ve been melted.”

“Some have been,” Ari said. “A kernel-drive spacecraft, landing or taking off, generates rather a lot of heat.”

“My God,” Penny said. “They really have brought kernel technology down to the face of the Earth. All that heat energy dumped into the ground, the air. It’s a wonder they haven’t flipped the whole damn planet into some catastrophic greenhouse-warming event, into a Venus.”

“Maybe,” Lex said, “they were lucky. They got away with it. Just. Perhaps there are other timelines where precisely that happened. Does that make sense, Kalinski? If there are two timelines, why not many?”

“Or an infinite number.” She grinned, lopsided. “That had occurred to me too. You’re thinking like a scientist, McGregor.”

“I’ll cut that out immediately.”

Ari followed this exchange closely.

Now the island cluster was passing away to the northwest, and the ship was sailing over the near continent—Gaul to the Romans and the Brikanti, France to the crew of the Tatania. The countryside, where it was spared by the sea-level rise, glowed with urbanization. But on the track of a broad river Beth made out a neat circular feature, a set of rays spanning out from it, a lunar crater partially overgrown by the green. She pointed. “What’s that?”

Ari said, “Once a major city of the Roman province. Destroyed in a war some centuries back, by a Xin missile that got through the local defenses.”

Penny said, “The missile—kernel-tipped? It was, wasn’t it? So it’s true. You people don’t just use kernels as sources of power on Earth. You actually use them in weapons, to fight your Iron Age wars.”

Ari Guthfrithson frowned. “Would you have me apologize for my whole history? And is your history so laudable?”

McGregor murmured, “We’re missing the point here, Penny. Forget your judgments. We need to learn as much about this world as we can while we’ve got the chance.”

Penny nodded. “You’re right, of course, since it looks like we’re going to be stuck here.” She thought it over. “The Ukelwydd is following a high-inclination orbit around the Earth—around Terra. That is, the orbit is tipped up at an angle to the equator—”

“That is intentional, of course,” Ari said, “so that our track takes us over Pritanike and the landing grounds of Kaledon.”

“But that means we get to fly over a good span of latitudes. And as the planet turns beneath us, with time we get to look down on a swath of longitudes too. Give me a few hours with a slate, and I’ll capture what I can. Then with some educated guesswork maybe we can figure out the story of this world…”

11

Twelve hours later Penny called her companions, with Ari, back to the observation lounge. She’d found a way to project slate images onto a blank wall, and had prepared a digest of her observations of the turning world beneath.

She showed them landscapes of dense urbanization, the cities glowing nodes in a wider network of roads and urban sprawl. “Welcome to Terra,” she said drily.

“This is Europa—Europe. Some of the oldest Roman provinces. Give or take the odd invasion from Asia, this whole swath from the Baltic coast in the north to the Mediterranean in the south has been urbanized continually for more than two thousand years, and the result is what you can see. Many of the denser nodes map onto cities we’re familiar with from our own timeline, which are either successor cities to Roman settlements—like Paris, for instance—or, in places the Romans never reached in our timeline, they follow the geographic logic of their position. Hamburg, Berlin. The nature of the country is different farther north, the Danish peninsula, Scandinavia. Just as heavily urbanized, but a different geography.”

“The heartland of my people,” Ari said. “You may have images of the canal which severs the peninsula from the mainland. A very ancient construction, which was widened extensively when kernels became available.”

Penny goggled. “You’re telling me you use kernels to shape landscapes as well? On Earth?”

“This is Terra, Penny,” McGregor said evenly. “Not Earth. I guess that’s their business.”

Penny showed images now of a desolate coastline, an angry gray sea, ports and industrial cities defiant blights on the gray-brown landscape. “This is northern Asia,” she said. “In our reality, the Arctic Ocean coast of Russia. There never was a Russia here, I don’t believe. But nor is there any sign of a boreal forest at these latitudes. Even the sea looks sterile—nobody fishing out there—and no sign of any Arctic ice, by the way, though we haven’t been able to see all the way to the pole.”

Ari shrugged. “It is dead country. It always has been dead. Good only for extraction of minerals, methane for fuel.”

Penny tapped her screen. “I’m going to pan south. The extent of the main Roman holdings seems to reach the Urals, roughly. Whereas you have the Xin empire, presumably some descendant of the early Chinese states we know about, extending up from the north of central China through Mongolia and eastern Siberia, all the way to the Bering Strait. In Central Asia, though—”

More craters. A desolate, lifeless landscape.

This made Beth gasp. “What happened here?”

Ari sighed. “The steppe was historically always a problem. A source of ferocious nomadic herdsmen and warriors, who, whenever the weather took a turn for the worst, would come bursting out of their heartland to ravage the urban communities to the west and east. Finally Xin and Rome agreed to administer those worthless plains as a kind of joint protectorate. It is an arrangement that worked quite well, for centuries. Mostly.”

McGregor’s grin was cold. “Mostly?”

“Wherever two great empires clash directly there will be war. And when weapons such as the kernels are available—well, you can see the result.”

Penny said, “Here’s the Xin homeland. Again there seems to be a historical continuity with the cities and nations we know about from the early first millennium…”

Some of the images had been taken at night. Half a continent glowed, a network of light embedded with jewel-like cities—and yet here and there Beth could see the distinctive circular holes of darkness that must be relics of kernel strikes.

Ari was watching Beth, as much as he was following the images. “Your reaction is different from the others. You seem—dismayed.”

“That’s one word for it. I grew up on an empty world.”

“Ah. Whereas all this, in comparison, billions of us crammed into vast developments—”

“How do you breathe? How do you find dignity?”

“You mean, how will you live here?” He smiled. “Beth Eden Jones, you, of all the crew of the Tatania, are by far the most intriguing to me. The most complicated. If fortune allows it, I hope to be able to help you find a place in this, the third world you have had to learn to call home…”

Penny said now, “As Ari has told us, the rest of the world is a kind of playpen for the three superpowers of Eurasia. Here’s Australia.”

Beth saw arid crimson plains like a vision of Mars, pocked with the circular scars of explosions, the rectangular wounds of tremendous mines.

“Mined by the Xin,” Ari said.

“My mother was from Australia,” Beth said. “I visited once. What happened to the native people here?”

Ari looked at her curiously. “What native people?”

“Africa,” Penny announced, pulling up image after image. “To the south, extensive mining and farming by the Xin, it seems. To the north, the Sahara—but look at it…”

The desert was covered by a grid of huge rectilinear canals.

Ari said, “One of the Romans’ most significant projects. And they are slowly succeeding in making the desert bloom, as you can see. But there is a danger that in years to come, as they advance their colonies ever farther south—”

“And the Xin work their way north from their southern farmlands,” McGregor said, “they’re going to meet in the middle, and clash. It will be Central Asia all over again.”

“Let us hope not,” Ari said fervently. “But, yes, those of us druidh who devote their efforts to projections of the future see this as one possibility.”

“Here’s South America,” Penny said.

“Or Valhalla Inferior,” Ari said mildly. “A battleground between the Xin and the Romans for centuries.”

Beth saw farmland and mining country cut across by vast river systems, and scarred by swaths of desert. “What about Amazonia?”

Penny said drily, “You’d never know the rain forest had ever been there. And again, we’ll probably never know what happened to the indigenous populations.”

In North America, images taken in the dark of night showed a band of fire that Beth thought roughly followed the Canadian border with the United States.

Penny said, “The continent is relatively undeveloped. There’s a big city of some kind on the site of St. Louis, another in Massachusetts. Other than that, small towns and army bases. There is what looks like a Roman legionary fortress on the site of downtown Seattle, for instance, where I grew up—I looked to see. And this is the only place on the surface of the Earth where it looks like there is active warfare in progress.”

Ari said, “This is an arena I know well—I have served here. We Scand reached this country first, more than a millennium ago, and then the Brikanti followed us—and the Romans, some using Scand ships, came soon after. Now, to the north is Brikanti country, once thickly forested, where we extracted wood for our oceangoing ships. Our principal city, near the east coast, is called Leifsholm. To the south, farmland developed by the Romans, a great breadbasket. Their own provincial capital, on the course of a mighty river, is called Messalia. We meet at the latitude of the inland seas. There are no great cities here. In a sense it is a question of tradition, of history. The old countries, Europa and Asia, are where you build cities, whether you are Xin or Roman or indeed Brikanti. The rest of the world is to be exploited.”

Penny said, “That border country looks like a war zone.”

“So it is,” Ari said. “The Romans like to send their legions marching north. We oppose them with fortresses and counterraids.”

“I thought you guys cooperated. You run interstellar missions together, for instance.”

Ari shrugged. “We cooperate when we fly to the stars, while warring on Terra, in the Valhallas. It is a kind of game. Lethal, of course, but a game. The Romans give their legions marching practice and their generals triumphs. We, conversely, enjoy tripping them up. It is not logical, but when has the politics of empire ever been rational? We must retain our separate identities somehow, Penny Kalinski. And after all, the Romans did consider invading Pritanike once. You don’t forgive something like that.”

Penny shook her head. “A continent as one vast military training ground.”

“But what else is such a barren continent good for?”

“You’d be surprised,” Penny said fervently.

McGregor said, “So, an endless three-way war, now extended out into the solar system, it seems.”

“It has gone this way for centuries,” Ari said. “It is our way, evidently—”

“Giving away our strategic secrets, are you, druidh?”

Beth turned to see Kerys the trierarchus, the ship’s commander, walking into the cabin through the door at the rear. She was followed by a solid-looking Earthshine, an impressive display of virtual projection from the unit in which the old Core AI was stored.

Ari came to a kind of attention. “That wasn’t my intention, trierarchus. I believe that I have learned as much about the home of Beth Eden Jones and her companions as I have revealed about ours.”

Lex McGregor grinned. “And I bet that’s true, you slippery little rascal.”

Kerys walked to the window, hands clasped behind her back, and peered around, beyond the glowing surface of Earth, into space. “Well, our rivals cluster close. They wait on a decision on how we are to dispose of you, the crew of the Tatania. And, needless to say, my superiors at Dumnona have devolved the decision to me.”

Lex McGregor said evenly, “My heart aches for you.”

Kerys arched an eyebrow. “A fine way to talk to an officer who holds you dangling by the testicles.”

McGregor barked a laugh.

“What am I to do with you yourself, for example, General Lex McGregor? Look at you, old and gray, your prime a distant memory. What possible use are you? I might throw you over to the Romans; you might make them laugh, briefly, if they dump you in the arena with a gladiator or two.”

McGregor grinned, fearless. “I’d like to see them try that. Madam, I would have thought my value is obvious. I come from an entirely different military tradition, an entirely different spacefaring background.” He tapped his grizzled pate. “And now all that experience can be put at your command. But,” he said severely, “I come with strings attached. I want my crew with me, Golvin, Kapur, the others—all five of them. Without them I could not function, and would not try. Conversely, throw even one of them to the Romans or the Xin and I will follow.”

“Your loyalty is commendable,” Kerys said, her face kept carefully blank. “You, Penelope Kalinski: frankly your value is obvious even to me. The philosophies and mathematics you display, the technologies you wield—if you spent your remaining years teaching Brikanti students even a fraction of what you know, you could be of immeasurable value.”

Penny nodded her head. She was composed, Beth thought, unmoved, as if she’d thought her way through this already. Penny said, “I can think of worse ways to spend my life. I would need Jiang with me, of course.”

“We can debate that,” Kerys said neutrally. “As for you, Beth Eden Jones—”

She stared closely at Beth, and Beth found herself touching the tattoo that sprawled over her face, a relic of her childhood on Per Ardua: a mark the Brikanti seemed to regard as savage.

“I can vouch for her,” Ari said quickly, forestalling whatever judgment Kerys was about to pronounce. “Trierarchus, she is in many ways the most interesting of all. She was born and grew up on the planet of another star! Embedded in a system of native life of which we have no knowledge—as you know, our ships found no such life on any planet of the star Proxima. She was brought back to Terra as a young adult, and as an outsider she is probably a better witness to that culture than any of these others. Again I cannot say precisely what I would learn from her, given time, but—”

“All right, druidh,” Kerys said, raising a hand. “You’ve made your point.”

“Which leaves me,” Earthshine said silkily.

“Indeed. And you present the greatest challenge of all. The machinery that sustains you is impossibly far beyond our understanding—I would have no way of knowing if it represented some kind of danger to my country.”

“Nor what its potential might be,” Earthshine said, “if you were able to learn from it.”

“Very well. But what of you?” She walked around him, inspecting him; she passed a hand through his arm, making pixels scatter in the air, and Beth saw Earthshine flinch as his consistency protocols were violated. “What are you? Not a man. Are you any more than a puppet? Is there a mind in there?”

“I have been accused of being insane,” he said, smiling coldly. “Can one be insane without a mind? And let me remind you what I have stored, in my artificial mind, my roomy memory: the secrets of what made the Tatania fly. The hulk you captured is scrap metal. And I have all the records we brought with us of our reality, and everything we achieved there.”

Kerys frowned, but Beth could see she was intrigued. “Such as?”

“Let me show you. Please, do not draw your weapons…” He gestured in the air, cupping his hands.

An image congealed before him, a sphere maybe a half-meter across. The bulk of the surface was gray-white ice glistening in the light of an invisible sun, but the blue and green of life sprawled in great patches under curving lids of glass.

Ari gasped. “It is beautiful.”

“It is a world. An asteroid, what you would call a Tear of Ymir. The largest of all—you must have given it a name; we call it Ceres.”

“To us this is Höd,” Ari said. “After the blind half brother of Baldr, favorite child of the old gods.”

“This is what we built there, these great Halls. And Ceres became the hub from which the exploitation of the asteroids progressed. Here is another world.”

He snapped his fingers, and icy Ceres was replaced by a more familiar world, a burnt-orange ball, its surface scarred by canyons and craters, ice caps like swirls of cream at either pole.

“Mars,” said Kerys.

“Yes—a name we share. Look what we built there.” He pulled his hands apart. The planetary image exploded, becoming misty and faint, but the center, before Earthshine’s chest, zoomed in on a sprawling city, a tower at its heart—a needle-like structure whose height only became apparent when the scale was such that people could be made out individually, in pressure suits at the base of the tower.

“This is the Chinese capital, in a region we called Terra Cimmeria. I know how all this was built, even the great tower. I can help you discover it. And more. Again, do not be alarmed…”

On his upturned hands, a series of animals walked, elephants, bison, lions, horses, each three-dimensional image scaled against a human figure.

The Brikanti stared.

Earthshine said, “I and my brothers were created, some centuries ago, for this, above all else. To save the diversity of living things. The destruction of our natural world was not so advanced as it is here, despite centuries of ardent effort,” he said drily. “These animals are known to you only through fossil remains, from bones you find in the ground. To you, the elephants and the apes and the whales are as remote as the dinosaurs. I store genetic data—that is, the information required to recover these animals, to rebuild them. I can give you back your past.”

The animals melted away; he lowered his hands.

“Also I have books,” Earthshine said. “And art. Think about that. Two millennia of a different tradition.” He tapped his skull. “All stored in here—”

Kerys cut him off. “The logic is obvious. Whatever we make of you, we can’t allow you to fall into the hands of our rivals. Welcome aboard,” she said simply.

Earthshine inclined his head, as if he’d expected no other reaction.

Oddly, Beth noticed, Ari Guthfrithson the druidh appeared more skeptical; she would have imagined the scholar in him would have responded to Earthshine’s pitch.

“Well, now that’s decided, we have work to do,” Kerys said briskly. Again she glanced out the window. “I don’t need to inform Dumnona of my decision; I only need to implement it. And no need to give that lot out there any notice. Ari, take charge here; I want all these people strapped in their couches for landing in an hour.”

“Yes, trierarchus.” But as Kerys stalked out of the cabin, Ari continued to stare at Earthshine.

The virtual smiled smoothly. “Is there something more you want, druidh? After all, the decision is made.”

“Yes. But what strikes me is that in all your bamboozling presentation of the miracles you offer, you never once suggested what it is you want in return.”

Earthshine spread his hands. “Your trierarchus has guaranteed me continued existence. Isn’t that enough?”

“Not in your case, no. I don’t think it is.”

And, studying Earthshine, and the cautious reactions of Penny Kalinski and even Lex McGregor, Beth had a profound suspicion that he was right. That there was far more going on here than Earthshine was yet revealing.

But a warning trumpet sounded piercing blasts, and they hurried to their acceleration couches. There was no more time for debate.

12 AD 2222; AUC 2975

Even from the ground, on the nameless planet of Romulus, Stef Kalinski had spotted the Malleus Jesu, star vessel of the Classis Sol of the Roman imperium, orbiting in the washed-out sky, a splinter of light. But it was not until the final evacuation from the planet, as she, Yuri, the ColU, and Titus Valerius with his daughter, all rode one of the last shuttles into space, that Stef first got a good look at the craft.

The Malleus Jesu was a fat cylinder of metal and what looked like ceramic, capped with a dome at one end, a flat surface at the other. It looked as if it was held together with huge rivets. There were windows visible in the flanks of the tremendous hull, protected by venetian-blind shutters. The whole craft spun slowly on its axis, presumably to equalize the heating load it received from the sun. The walls were ornately carved with figures in the Roman style: heroic military men striding over defeated peoples, or marching from world to world. Even the rim of that leading dome was elaborately decorated, though the dome itself looked like a crude layering of rock.

Titus Valerius was a massive presence in the seat beside her; he smelled of sweat, stale wine, and straw. Titus pointed at the base of the craft. “Kernels. A bank of them. To push the craft, yes?”

“I know the theory,” Stef said drily.

“Push halfway, turn around, slow down the other half and stop at Earth.” He pointed again, at the dome. “Shield from space dust. Rock from world below. Shoveled on by slaves in armor.”

By which he meant, Stef knew by now, some kind of crude pressure suit.

Yuri, pale but intent, peered out. “It looks like Trajan’s Column, topped by the Pantheon.”

Stef sniffed. “Looks more phallic to me. The Penis of Jesus.”

“Oh, come on. This is just great. An imperial Roman starship!… We know they lack sophisticated electronics, computers. I wonder how the hell they navigate that thing.”

“The drive isn’t always on,” said Titus.

Stef realized that a more precise translation of his words might have been, The vulcans do not always vomit fire.

“Every month they shut it down, and turn the ship.” He mimed this with his one good hand, like aligning a cannon. “The surveyors take sightings from the stars. Then they swivel the ship to make sure we’re on the right track, and fire up the drive again. It’s like laying a road, on the march. You lay a stretch, and at the end of the day the surveyors take their sightings to make sure you’re heading straight and true where you’re supposed to go, and the next day off you go. Works like a dream. Why, I remember once on campaign—”

“Navigation by dead reckoning,” said the ColU. “Taking sightings from the stars—simply pointing the craft at the destination. They have no computers here, Colonel Kalinski, nothing more complex than an abacus. And they have astrolabes, planispheres, orreries, sextants, and very fine clocks—all mechanical, and remarkably sophisticated. But, Colonel, this starship is piloted using clockwork! However, if you have the brute energy of the kernels available, you don’t need subtlety, you don’t need fine control. You need only aim and fire.”

Titus pointed again at the craft. “Seven decks. Each sixty yards deep.” He counted up from the base of the ship. “Kernels and stores, farm, slave pen, barracks, camp, town, villas of the officers. Plus a bathhouse in the dome for the officers.”

Stef frowned, figuring that out. The word the ColU translated as “yard” was a Roman unit about a yard in length, or roughly a meter. “That must make the cylinder something like four hundred meters long. And, judging by the proportions, around a hundred meters in diameter. What a monster. Titus, we’ve been told very little about this flight.”

He grunted. “That’s officers for you. Don’t tell you a damn thing about what you’re supposed to do, even as they kick you up the arse for not doing it right—”

She asked patiently, “Such as, how long will the flight be?”

“That’s easy,” he said. “Four years, three hundred and thirty-six days. Same as coming out.”

“Hallelujah,” the ColU said drily. “A precise number at last. And are you under full gravity for the whole trip?” Silence. “That is, when the drive is on, do you feel as heavy as you do on Terra?”

The legionary puzzled that out. “Yes,” he said in the end. “The officers don’t want you bouncing around going soft, like you were on Luna, or Mars. The training’s tougher in flight than it is on the ground.”

“I’ll bet,” Stef said. “I know the military. Locked up in a big tin can like this, they’ll keep the lower ranks as busy as possible to keep them from causing mischief.”

The ColU said, “With the numbers the legionary has provided I can at last estimate how far we are from home…”

If the drive burned continually, exerting an acceleration equivalent to one Earth gravity, after about a year the ship’s velocity would be approaching the speed of light.

“Of course we won’t pass lightspeed but we’ll run into time dilation. Time on the ship will pass much more slowly from the point of view of an observer on Earth—”

“I have two physics doctorates,” Stef snapped. “I know about relativistic time dilation.”

“Well, I have two fewer doctorates,” Yuri said tiredly. “Give me the bottom line, ColU.”

“If the journey takes us, subjectively, four years, three hundred and thirty-six days, then eleven years and ninety-one days will have passed on Earth. That’s not allowing for small corrections because of the shutdown periods. And the double-star system of Romulus and Remus must be some nine light-years from Earth. Titus here will have spent maybe ten years traveling to the destination and back, plus another three years or so on the ground—a thirteen-year mission. But by the time he returns home, about twenty-five years will have passed on the ground.”

Titus shrugged. “That’s what you sign up for. Got my daughter with me, on the ship. No other family to worry about. And back home the legion’s collegia will make sure we get treated right, with our pay and pensions and such.”

The ColU said, “Perhaps it takes an empire, solemn, calm and antique, to manage operations on such scales.”

“We Romans get it done,” Titus said simply. “We’ll be joining the Malleus soon. Make sure you’re buckled into your seats.”

The ferry docked with a port on the slowly turning hull of the starship. Stef saw that the hull here was blazoned with large “V” symbols; she assumed she was landing at the fifth deck, then, which Titus had called the “camp.”

She knew that an ISF crew would not have attempted a docking with a rotating structure, save at the axis. By contrast the crew of this ferry took them in with terrifying nonchalance, swooping down on the slowly turning Malleus, until they drove straight into a system of nets that fielded them neatly and dragged them down to the hull, where docking clamps rattled noisily against the base of the craft. Once the docking was complete she heard whoops and backslaps from behind closed doors. She had met none of the pilots but had glimpsed them on the ground. They were young Brikanti, male and female, cocky, smart, and they enjoyed showing off their skills before the nervous, superstitious, ground-based Romans. As she unbuckled from her seat, Stef offered up silent thanks that this risky display of super-competence was at an end.

One by one they were led out through a port in the base of the ferry, and down through thick layers of hull metal and insulation into the body of the Malleus Jesu. They were weightless, of course, save for the faintest centrifugal tug toward the wall of the rotating craft.

Once inside the main body, Stef had to adjust her orientation, her sense of up and down, even as she was battered by a barrage of sensory impressions: brilliant lights, smells of animals and humans, a clutter of structures, heaps of supplies and equipment, and people swimming everywhere in the air. The ship stood upright, essentially. The hull surface she had passed through was no longer a floor or ceiling, but a vertical wall. And she had a clear view across the interior of the cylindrical hull; “floor” and “ceiling” were tremendous plates below and above her, slicing off the fifth deck, this pie-shaped section of the craft—though the plates were pierced by gaps through which passed pipes, ducts and, at the center, a kind of fireman’s pole arrangement from which chains dangled, connecting this deck to the rest of the ship. Pillars of steel were bolted in place across the area too, adding structural support between floor and ceiling, she guessed the better to withstand the thrust of the kernel engine. It was a vast, cavernous space, this deck alone, sixty meters deep and a hundred across, and illuminated by sunlight from the windows and big, crude-looking fluorescent strip lights. The tall pillars spanning floor to roof gave the place the feeling of a cathedral, to Stef’s sensibilities.

And set up on the floor plate was, yes, a camp, just as Titus had said, a near copy of the colonia down on the ground, a rectangle with rounded corners, like a playing card, set slap in the middle of the circular deck. Looking down across the deck from her elevated position at this port, Stef recognized the crosswise layout of the main streets; there was a handsome building of wooden panels that might be the principia, next to it a small chapel, and beyond an open space that might be a parade ground or training area. There was even a row of granaries, though she saw nothing like barrack blocks. All these structures looked conventional enough, with wood-panelled walls and red-tiled roofs. The walls of the principia, the headquarters, even looked as if they were plastered. But, looking more closely, Stef could see that the buildings were built on frameworks of strong steel girders, firmly riveted to the hull plates.

And she was treated to the surreal sight of Roman legionaries paddling through the air above the “camp,” pulling themselves along ropes strung across the cavernous deck, manhandling heaps of supplies wrapped up in nets, food, clothes, even weapons.

A Roman camp, in interstellar space! But then, she knew, this mixture of antiquity and modernity was typical of these strange late Romans.

From conversations with Eilidh, Movena, Michael and others, she’d gathered something of the altered history of the Empire, compared to the account she was familiar with—a history that had brought a Roman legion to a distant star. After Kartimandia’s time, Germany had ultimately been conquered up to the Baltic coast. It was Vespasian, later emperor, who planted the eagle of Rome on the bank of the Vistula. After that, with the German tribes civilized, there had been no barbarian hordes to cross the Rhine in the late fourth century as in Stef’s world, the event that had ultimately destabilized the Empire in the west. Rome had continued to rule. In the end, however, the Empire had reached natural limits on the Eurasian landmass, penned in by the Xin to the east, the Brikanti to the north, and the deserts of North Africa to the south. For centuries Rome had grown inward-looking, static, its citizenry heavily taxed, its imperial elite self-obsessed, remote and over-powerful—and unstable, subject to endless palace coups.

That had all changed in the twelfth century AD. By then the Brikanti had already been in the Americas for two hundred years, thanks to their adventurous Scand partners, and had explored the coast of Africa, seeking the lands below the equator. Belatedly the Romans followed them into this new world—and the centuries of stasis were over. In a new age of expansiveness and conquest, the Romans remembered their ancestors, who they had imagined as stern, lean men plowing their fields and going to war. It was as if the Empire had been cleansed. Though the modern Romans remained Christian, traditional forms of society and the military—such as the legions—had been revived. Even old family naming conventions had been dug up, ancient lineages ferociously researched. Which was why a planet of a distant star had been colonized by units of the ninetieth legion, called Victrix, in commemoration of a tremendous victory over the Brikanti just south of the Great Lakes. In later centuries the need to avoid the use of explosive weapons inside pressure hulls, in spacecraft and surface habitats, had even led to a revival of the traditional weapons of hand-to-hand combat, spear and sword and knife, pilum and gladio and pugio.

But Stef was sure no Roman of the “old” history she knew had ever seen a sight like the one she glimpsed on the far side of this fifth deck, as a squad of legionaries under the control of a hovering tribune struggled to fold up the squirming hull of a deflated cetus airship.

Titus gathered the newcomers together. He was carrying the ColU in its pack, handling it as tenderly as a baby, Stef observed. “Come on. Soldiers’ business on this deck. You’re in the civilian town, next one up.” Grabbing a rope, he pulled himself one-handed away from the docking port, and headed up to the ceiling.

Stef and Yuri glanced at each other, shrugged, and followed. Stef made sure she let Yuri go first, unsure how strong he’d be feeling today, but he seemed to be moving freely enough. Maybe a lack of gravity for a while would be good for him. She called up after Titus, “Why are you carrying the ColU? What about Chu?”

“He’ll be taken straight to the third deck.”

She remembered. The slave pen, Titus had called it, above the farm, below the barracks.

“Slaves are stupid creatures and more so without gravity. They flap around uselessly and puke everywhere. They’re best strapped down for the duration. You won’t see Chu until we’re under way and we get stuff properly sorted out on board.”

She was in no position to argue.

They passed easily through an open port up to the sixth deck—open, but Stef noticed there was a heavy iron hatch on hinges over the port. She imagined whole decks of this vessel needing to be locked down in case of some disaster, a blowout perhaps—or even in case of a rebellion by disaffected soldiers, or the slaves in their belowdecks pens.

As they swam up, following more ropes, Stef wasn’t surprised to find that on this deck, which Titus had curtly labeled the “town,” was indeed a small town of the Roman type, or at least a section of one, like a walled-off suburb. Rising easily into the air above tiled rooftops, she glimpsed a grid layout of streets centered on an open space, a forum perhaps, surrounded by multistory porticoes and with a small triumphal arch at one edge. Built up against one section of hull wall were banks of seats over an open space, a kind of open-air theater. And around the circuit of the hull walls ran a track, for racing or other sports. Everywhere people swarmed in the air: men, women, children, hovering over the buildings and ducking down into crowded streets. The noise in this enclosed space, and echoing off yet another roof partition above, was tremendous, a clamor of voices that sounded like a sports crowd.

Stef felt overwhelmed by the sheer vivacity of it all, the complexity, and she realized how little she’d seen of this mobile community down on the planet—and now here it was, cramming itself back into this tin can in space for the five-year journey home. But, even more so than on the military camp deck below, she smelled the sour stink of weightlessness-sickness vomit, and laced in with the general noise she heard the wail of infants. Any children under three must have been born on the planet itself, she realized, and they must be utterly bewildered by the environment of the ship.

With effortless skill, impressive given he had only one hand to use and with the ColU pack on his back, Titus led them down through a lacing of guide ropes to a neighborhood a block away from the forum. “You’ve been assigned a house down there. Not a bad district; there’s a decent food shop and a tavern. You’ll need to sign in with a councillor, he’ll find you, and the optio will come and check on you before the engine fire-up… Any questions?”

Yuri asked, “Why do you put tiles on the roofs? We’re inside a spaceship.”

Titus shrugged. “It does ‘rain’ in here sometimes. You have to cleanse the air of dust. And besides, it’s tradition to have tiles on your roof. We Romans don’t live like animals, you know.”

Stef said, “I can’t get over how big all this is. How many people aboard, Titus, do you know?”

“Well, the core of it is us, a century of the Legio XC. Eighty men give or take. But then you’ve got the officers and the staff and the auxiliaries, and then you’ve got our wives and families, and then you’ve got the merchants and cooks and artisans, and doctors and schoolteachers and such. Oh, and there’s the ship’s crew, mostly Brikanti, or Arab. What have I forgotten?”

“The slaves?”

“Oh, yes, the slaves,” Titus said. “As many of them as there are soldiers and other citizens. I’d say five, six hundred warm bodies on the ship.”

“That’s a lot of people.”

“But it’s the Roman way. You can’t do it much smaller than that, miss.”

“Quite,” said the ColU. “And that’s why the ship itself has to be so big. Stef Kalinski, we know these people have no grasp of fine engineering. Small-scale, closed life-support systems would be beyond their capability. So they build big! They bring along a massive volume of air and water—you said there was a whole deck devoted to farming, Titus?”

“Yes. A lot of greenery up on the villas deck too.”

“They build so big that this ecology is reasonably buffered, stable against blooms and collapses, despite the crudeness of the technology. It’s all logical, in its way.”

Yuri said, “So when will they fire up the kernels, Titus?”

The big man grinned. “Six hours. You want to be lying flat when they sound the horn. And believe me, you want to be indoors. It’s not like the camp here. No discipline. Nobody listens to the warnings. There’ll be a sky full of babies and their shit, suspended overhead. You do not want to get caught in that rain when it falls. Come on, your residence is just below. I’ll get you settled…”

Stef thought they descended like angels into the street where they would live for the next five years.

Six hours later, right on cue and accompanied by trumpet blasts, the banks of kernels at the base of the craft fired up. Stef imagined arrays of the enigmatic wormholes being prodded open to release their energies, streams of high-energy radiation and high-velocity particles, morsels of thrust pushing ever harder at the huge, ungainly structure of the Malleus Jesu.

As the acceleration built up, Stef, sitting with Yuri and the ColU in deep couches in the small house to which they’d been assigned—surrounded by plaster walls with crudely painted frescoes—heard cracks and pops and bangs as the giant frame absorbed the stress, the rattle of a tile falling from a roof. She imagined the ship’s basic structure would be sound: it was built of good Scand steel, Eilidh had assured her, not your Roman rubbish. But even so, after three years in microgravity—three years of neglect, as everybody was busy on the surface of the planet—there would be point failures, breakages of pipes and cables. Now there were shouts and distant alarm horns as, she imagined, emergency teams dealt with various local calamities. She even heard a rushing collapse, like an ocean wave breaking, as, perhaps, some small building fell in on itself.

Then there were the people. As she and Yuri sat in the semi-gloom—no lamps could be lit during the fire-up; that was the rule—and as the weight built up and pressed her into her chair, all around her on this deck with its model-railway toy town, she heard cries and groans, the clucking of distressed chickens, the barking of confused dogs, and the crying of children.

Five years of this, Stef thought. She closed her eyes and tried to relax as the acceleration pressed down on her.

13

A week after the fire-up, Stef broke a tooth.

In this most exotic of environments, a starship run by a Roman legion, it was the most mundane of accidents, caused by biting down on a slab of coarse Roman bread. She knew by now something about the tumors that riddled Yuri’s body, detectable by the ColU but untreatable by it without the medical suite in the physical body it had left behind on Per Ardua. Yuri hadn’t wanted to tell her; she’d forced it out of Michael, the kindly physician. Compared to Yuri’s problems, this was nothing.

Nevertheless, her tooth hurt.

Through one of their slates, the ColU, inspecting the tooth, clucked sympathetically, and Stef wondered absently when this farming machine had picked up that particular speech trait. “An unfortunate accident,” it said. “Your teeth are very healthy for a woman of your age.”

“Thanks.”

“But nothing’s going to protect you from an unground grain in a loaf of bread. And unfortunately there’s nothing I can do for you. Lacking my old body, my manipulator arms—once I could have pulled the broken tooth for you, or even printed you a repair or a replacement. But now that I am disembodied—”

“So what am I supposed to do? Tie a length of string to a doorknob?”

“You must ask the Romans for help.”

“The Romans? I’m to go to ancient Romans for dental work?”

“Well, they’re not ancient Romans,” Yuri pointed out gently. “And it’s not a Roman you’ll be seeing but a Greek—Michael—go find Titus Valerius and have him take you to Michael. I can tell you from experience, he might not know so much, but he listens. Why, I’d bet legionaries lose teeth all the time.”

“That is not reassuring.”

Still, she had no better options. She waited a couple of days, munching her way through their hoarded supply of ISF-issue painkillers, brought in their packs through the Hatch. She had the illogical feeling that if only she could have a decent hot shower she’d feel a hell of a lot better. But there was no running water available within much of the ship, save in the bathhouses. Every morning and evening you washed from a bowl that you carried into your room from a communal supply.

At last, as the ColU had suggested, she asked the medicus for help.

Michael grinned back. “I’ll need supplies from the officers’ clinic. I take any excuse to go up to the villas. Come find me tomorrow.”

The next day, Titus Valerius led Stef through the sketchy township to the “ascension,” as the crew called it. This was the central shaft, open at every deck, that led along the axis of the ship. A stout fireman’s pole ran the length of the vessel, and a series of platforms and cages regularly rose and fell along its length, hauled by rope-and-pulley arrangements.

There were many breaks in the decks, Stef had learned. You would often come across holes in the floor fenced off for safety. But these were mostly offset from each other, the floor holes not matching the ceiling, for obvious reasons of safety. The ascension, though, was the one shaft open to all decks. Stef thought this great way had a certain unifying aesthetic appeal, a tremendous shaft that penetrated the metal heaven above and the ground under your feet, and spanned from officer country in the crown to the engineers and their kernel arrays at the root of the ship. But the soldier in her recognized the value of a fast road that could take a squad of legionaries straight to any part of the ship within minutes or less. The Romans had always built their Empire on roads, and that, it seemed, was still true now.

So, with a nod to the bored-looking legionaries who manned the system, Titus Valerius escorted Stef up from deck six, the township, to deck seven, the deck of the villas. Sitting in a steel elevator-like cage, it was like ascending into a park. Stef’s first impression was of green, the green of grass, trees, bushes, and moist, pleasantly warm air. She glimpsed only a handful of people—a group of men in togas and carrying scrolls, holding some earnest discussion beside the waters of a lake, a rectangular basin surrounded by slim nude statues. She might have been looking at a scene from two thousand years ago, the senators plotting the assassination of Caesar, perhaps. But over the heads of the debaters soared a metal vault, riveted and painted sky blue. The light, which felt warm and authentically like sunlight, came from fluorescent lanterns that dangled from the ceiling. And the surface of the pond, strewn with lilies, bore a subtle pattern of ripples, a product of the slightest irregularities in the kernel drive that thrust this scrap of pretty parkland through interstellar space. She wondered briefly how they covered over this water feature when the drive was turned off and the gravity disappeared.

Titus Valerius led her along a path by the lake, stone blocks set in the short-cut grass. He was a slab of muscle, out of place in this rather effete setting. “We’ll meet the doctor at the quarters of the optio, Gnaeus Junius. Which is not the grandest up here, believe me. They modeled this whole deck, so they say, on a villa of the Emperor Hadrianus, in Italia itself. Although that was probably a lot more than a hundred paces across.”

“I can believe it.”

“Waste of space if you ask me.”

“That’s officers for you.” But she remembered the ColU’s speculation about the life-support systems in this big hulk of a ship. “You know, Titus, this park might be part of the ship’s design, as well as a luxury for the officers. It’s probably good for the ship as a whole, to have all this greenery up here—”

“Hush.” He’d frozen.

From a clump of trees, a slim face peered out at them. Some kind of deer, evidently. It held Titus’s gaze for a second, two. Then it turned and bounded into the shadow of the trees, and Stef glimpsed a slim body, a white tail.

Titus growled as they moved on. “They won’t let us hunt, you know.”

Stef laughed. “There can’t be more than a handful of animals up here. And it wouldn’t really be fair, Titus; they couldn’t run far in this metal box.”

“True. A well-shot arrow could reach from wall to wall. But still, the hunter in me aches to follow, one-armed or not.”

She patted his shoulder. “You’ll be home in a few years, Titus Valerius, and then you can hunt all you like.”

“I’ll take you with me,” he promised. “Meanwhile here we are—home away from home for the equestrian and his subordinate officers.”

Gnaeus’s “quarters,” set close to the curving hull wall, turned out to be a compact cluster of buildings centered on a cobbled rectangular courtyard, and surrounded by a fringe of carefully manicured garden. There was a gate, wide open, and Titus walked in boldly, followed by Stef. A fountain bubbled from a stone bowl at the center of the yard. The buildings were neat, single story, walled with plaster painted white and roofed with red tiles. Steam drifted from the windows of a blocky building in the corner. The only concession to the environment of space travel that Stef spotted were a few steel bands to hold the stonework in place in the absence of thrust gravity.

Titus saw Stef looking curiously at the rising steam. “A bathhouse. Do you have steam baths where you come from?” He pointed up over his head. “The whole dome up there, in the nose of the ship, is one big bathhouse. I’ve never been up there, I can tell you that. They say there are cohorts of whores up there, male and female, exclusively for the use of the officers, whores who never even see the rest of the ship, let alone the target planet. The lads spend a lot of time on the march speculating about that.”

“I can imagine.”

“But the most senior officers, like the optio, have their own private baths too. There’s plenty of heat from the kernels to fire the hypocausts, and plenty of slaves to serve you, so why not?. . .” He frowned. “Speaking of slaves, we should have been met by now, by one of the optio’s household slaves, or failing that, a guard.”

“I meant to ask you about the slaves. We still haven’t seen Chu Yuen since we left Romulus.”

“Well, there’s a problem down in the pen.” He rubbed his nose with the wooden stump of his arm. “I might suggest the optio has a couple of men posted up here. We’re not expecting trouble, but you never know—you can’t have fellows just wandering in as we have.”

“I heard that.” Gnaeus Junius, in a loose-fitting toga, came walking from one of the buildings, trailed by Michael, who was more plainly dressed in tunic and light cloak, with a satchel at his waist. Through the open door behind the two men Stef glimpsed lantern light, a low table covered by scattered scrolls, some kind of fresco on the patterned walls—a mosaic on the floor?

Titus stood to attention. “Sorry, sir. Didn’t mean to be insolent.”

“Not at all. That’s good advice, about posting guards. Sort it out when you return to barracks, would you? And consult the other officers about a similar arrangement, at least until the slaves are back.” He smiled at Stef. “It’s good to see you again, Colonel Kalinski. How are you enjoying the journey?”

“I’m intrigued by it all. But I have a tooth that wants to get off.”

Titus grinned. “Broke it on a bit of bread. Whatever army you once served with, you wouldn’t last a month on the march with a Roman legion, madam. With all respect.”

“That’s probably true of most of us.” Michael deftly produced a small mirror on a probe from the satchel on his waist, asked Stef to open up, and made a quick inspection. “No sign of infection or other injury. I’m afraid the tooth will have to come out, however.”

Stef winced. “I was afraid you’d say that. I’m not terribly good with pain.”

“Don’t worry. I have treatments, in particular a paste concocted from certain flowers unique to Valhalla Inferior. You won’t feel a thing.”

“I’ll say you won’t,” Titus said with a grin. “They give me that stuff when I have problems with the stump. Why, I remember once on campaign—”

“Oh, hush, legionary,” the optio said, “you’re not in barracks now.”

“Sorry, sir. Stef asked about the boy, Chu Yuen, who was assigned as a carrier for, umm, Collius.”

Gnaeus nodded seriously. “There is an issue in the slave pen, I’m afraid. None of the slaves have been released yet, since the launch.” He smiled. “Which has caused rather a lot of grumbling from those who miss their little conveniences.”

Conversations about the slaves always made Stef wince. Yet she felt compelled to press the point; as the ColU had said Chu at least was one slave they maybe could protect. “You couldn’t make an exception for the boy? He was remarkably useful.”

Gnaeus glanced at the doctor. “Well, Michael, you’re due to go down to the pen for another inspection anyhow. Why not seek out the boy, and see if he’s fit to be released? Take Colonel Kalinski with you.”

Michael didn’t look thrilled at the idea of such a journey, Stef thought, but he nodded amiably enough. “Fine. And perhaps you could spare Titus here for our protection.”

Titus looked even more gloomy, but he nodded grimly. “I’ll do it, optio. After thirty years in Legio XC, sir, I’ve probably caught everything I’m going to catch and survived the lot.”

“That’s the spirit,” Michael said. “And it is possible the boy, being of Xin stock, will have been spared the plagues running around the rest of the herd down there.”

Plagues?

“But first things first,” the doctor said, smiling, and he took Stef’s arm. “If you would lend us a room, optio, let’s sort out this tooth.”

Gnaeus led the way, and Stef, reluctantly, followed, with Titus grinning after her.

14

The doctor advised her to wait three hours, in a dark and quiet room, after his brisk and painless treatment, to allow the aftereffects of the drug he rubbed into her gums to wear off.

Titus was waiting for her, with Michael, when she emerged. Titus grinned. “How are you feeling?”

“You were right. The medicus here had to peel me off the ceiling.” In fact she still felt giddy, but she wasn’t about to admit that to Titus.

“Well, when we take the ascension again, prepare to have your head float away once more.” The legionary led them across the parkland to the fireman’s pole. They paused under a complex set of anchors that held cables supporting the various cradles that rode up and down the pole. A couple of legionaries stood by the installation, at ease. “Since Michael is with us we have permission to ride the ascension all the way down to the pen. It’s quite a trip, I can tell you. You’ll feel like Jesu Himself in the End Times, when He will descend on Rome with Augustus and Vespasian on His left and right hands, to establish the final dominion of the Caesars across the stars.”

“Is that what you believe?”

“So all soldiers believe,” Michael said drily. “Jesu the warrior god embraced Rome by leading Constantius I to a famous victory. I, like most Greeks, take a more philosophical view—I’m more interested in what Jesu said rather than what He did. As for the Brikanti, they are Christians too, but they cling to the image of Jesu the ally of the fishermen, rather than the holy warrior who cleansed Jerusalem of corruption at the point of a sword.”

“But it’s all in the Bible,” Titus said briskly. “You can’t deny that, medicus.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“I must read the Bible,” Stef said. “Your Bible, I mean.”

Michael looked at her thoughtfully. “Implying yours may be different? Hm. There is another interesting conversation we must have someday.”

This time the ascension cradle they took was an open cage, built stoutly of steel. Titus showed them seats—padded couches—and handrails, and even a small bar stocked with slim flasks of water, cordials and wine. “Not that the journey is very long, but officers always like to travel in style.” He glanced up and waved. “All right, lads? Let her go.”

With a clatter and groan the pulleys started to turn, and the platform lurched downward, dropping immediately beneath the level of the floor. Stef still felt giddy from Michael’s Valhallan potion; she grabbed a rail.

“There’s an engine up there, powered by steam, kernel heat,” Titus said. “Actually it’s usually human muscle that’s used to operate the pulleys. A slave party, and punishment details from the army units. Honest work and good discipline for a miscreant. But today we’re riding, not Roman muscle, but hot air…”

The floor, itself a thick slab of engineering riddled with pipes, cables and ducts, rose up past Stef’s head. A plaque marked clearly with “VII” above and “VI” below showed her which decks she was passing between. Below her now opened up the sprawling urban landscape of the township where she had her own small house with Yuri. Hearth smoke rose up from some of the buildings, wisps that drifted off toward great wall-mounted extractor fans. It was still morning, she knew, by ship’s time; the big fluorescent lamps were not yet raised to their full noon brilliance, after an eight-hour “night” illuminated only by emergency lanterns. It struck her now that there were few people to be seen, that the neat little community seemed oddly underpopulated. But this township was lacking its slaves, who might number as many head as the citizens and their children themselves.

As their cage descended, dogs barked, and barefoot children ran to see the party pass. Stef smiled at the children, and resisted the temptation to wave.

Down from VI to V, and having passed down through a Roman city, now Stef and her companions descended toward the Roman military camp. It seemed a hive of activity; Stef saw units marching around a track at the perimeter of the deck, heavily laden with packs, while others were building some kind of fortification of sod and dirt—the sod and dirt having been shipped up from the ground for the purpose, Stef supposed.

“We train hard,” Titus said, looking around approvingly. “Suspended as we are in emptiness, we do not forget how to march, with our gear. We do not forget how to build a camp in a few hours at the end of a marching day. We do not forget how to command, how to lead.”

“Or how to complain,” said Michael drily.

“Thank you, medicus.”

V to IV, and here was another deck Stef was familiar with, the “barracks,” the level where she had first boarded the ship. There were orderly rows of huts here, accommodation for the century of legionaries and the various auxiliary units that made up the ship’s military force. Titus pointed out a group of huts, almost an afterthought in the layout below, where the remiges were quartered when off duty, the ship’s crew, all of them Brikanti—they were mostly Scand, in fact, Stef learned, the descendants of Vikings. Away from the obviously military facilities were blocks of sprawling housing, clustered around squares and courtyards. Here Stef could see women working and walking, a huddle of children engaged in what looked like some open-air lesson. She was reminded that these soldiers had brought their families with them on this interstellar march, their wives and lovers, and children born in and out of wedlock.

There were legionaries stationed at the hole in the floor through which they would descend farther. And this time the breach was actually blocked by a covering of wood and glass.

Michael dug into his satchel and handed Titus and Stef masks of linen soaked in some kind of alcohol. “You may prefer to wear this when we descend.”

Stef apprehensively donned the mask.

The platform slowed as it approached the level of the deck. Titus spoke softly to the guards stationed there, and they laughed at a joke Stef did not hear. Then the guards hauled back the big hatches that covered the portal in the ground, and the platform descended.

IV to III. The slave pen.

It was the stench that hit Stef first, a stench of shit and piss and vomit, of blood and of rotting flesh—a stench of an intensity she hadn’t known since her first experience of zero-gravity emergency drills, in her early days as a raw ISF recruit.

Then she made out the detail of the deck, sixty meters below. Illuminated by bright white light, the entire floor was covered by an array of cubicles, neat rectangular cells, block after block of them lapping to the hull on either side. Above the floor, supported by angular gantry towers and fixed to the hull, was a spiderweb of walkways and rails, a superstructure of steel. Soldiers patrolled the walkways, or were stationed on towers mounted with heavy lights and weapons. All the troops wore masks. The troops carried none of the gunpowder handguns they called ballistae, she saw; instead they were armed with swords, knives, lightweight crossbows. Even the big weapons mounted on the towers were some kind of crossbow. No gunpowder weapons in a pressure hull; it was a good discipline that the ISF had always tried to follow.

It almost looked neat, industrial, a cross between some vast dormitory and a beehive, she thought. Until she looked more closely at the contents of the cells.

What had looked like worms, or maggots perhaps, were people, all dressed in plain grayish tunics of some kind, crammed in many to a cell. She thought she saw bunks—or maybe shelves would be a better word. People stacked, like produce in a store. A party was working its way along a corridor that snaked between the cells, hauling at a kind of cart—a cart laden with bodies, she saw, peering down, bodies loosely covered by a tarpaulin, with skinny limbs dangling from the edges.

Titus seemed moved to explain. “Obviously none of the slaves is allowed above this level because of the ongoing plague. So the security issues are more troublesome than usual.”

“‘Troublesome’?”

“We’ll find your slave boy. There’ll be a record of his cell.” The platform was slowing, and Titus pointed down. “You can see this shaft goes on down to the lower decks, but we’ll stop at the walkways and move out laterally from that point.”

For one second Stef bit her tongue. This isn’t your world, Stef. Keep out of trouble… The hell with it. She turned on Michael, her self-restraint dissolving. “You’re supposed to be a doctor. Do you have the Hippocratic oath in your world? How can you condone this? How can you cooperate?”

Michael looked at her strangely. “You ask me? We Greeks think the Romans are soft on their slaves.”

“Soft?”

“There are ways for slaves to win their freedom, in much of the Empire. But to us, the slaves are barbarians, irredeemable. Once a slave, always a slave.”

“But you’re a doctor… Never mind. I guess my own people don’t have an unblemished record. You say there’s a plague down here?”

“Yes. It is…” The words Michael used were not translated by the ColU’s earpiece.

She dug her slate out of her tunic pocket. “ColU, are you there?”

“Always, Stef.”

Of course he was listening in; she wouldn’t have been translated otherwise. “There’s plague down here, in their slave pen. You have chemical sensors in this thing? Can you tell what it is from up here?”

Michael and Titus both stared as she held the slate high in the air, pointing the screen down into the honeycomb of a deck.

After a pause, the ColU said, “A kind of cholera, I think. Clearly endemic on the ship. I imagine that the appropriate vaccines are unknown to this culture. The disease must flare up when water filtering systems fail—it is possible the Romans don’t even understand the mechanism, why filtering is effective—and the death rate in the conditions you show me below—”

“Am I in danger?”

“No, Colonel Kalinski. The immunization programs the ISF gave you over the years leave you fully protected.”

“And Yuri was surely treated too.”

“By the ISF medics before he was left on Per Ardua, yes.”

She thought quickly. “Could you manufacture a vaccine? You could start from samples of our blood…”

The ColU hesitated. “It is not impossible. With the help of the medicus, perhaps, the assembly of a cultivation lab from local equipment… it might take time, but it could be done.”

“In time to save a lot of lives?”

“Yes, Colonel Kalinski.”

Titus put his big hand over the slate, gently compelling her to lower it. He said tensely, “You speak to your oracle through your talking glass. It perturbs me that my commanders seem willing to accept you and your miracles without explanation. I would not permit it, were I the centurion—”

“But you are not, Titus Valerius,” Michael said gently.

“No. I am not. But I believe I understood what you have plotted with the oracle.”

“‘Plotted’ doesn’t seem the right word—”

“You intend to damp down the plague, to preserve the lives of slaves who would otherwise die.”

“That’s the idea. What’s wrong with that?”

Titus fumed. “It will break the ship’s budget, and bring us all to starvation long before we cross the orbits of Constantius, Vespasian and Augustus, that’s what!”

Stef frowned. “I don’t understand.”

Michael said gently, “I fear you do not, Stef. You are not used to thinking like a slave-owner. I have mixed with the Brikanti, for example, who use slaves much less sparingly—indeed, mostly for trade with the Empire. But you are a star traveler. You must know that a ship like this has a fixed budget of consumables—water and food and air.”

“Of course.”

“Then you must see that to the centurion—or specifically the optio who manages such things—the slave labor aboard is just another asset, to be used according to a plan. In the first year we have so many slaves, who will eat this much food, who will get this amount of work done—of whom this number will die of various causes, and in the second year we will have a diminished number of slaves, reduced by the deaths, augmented by births, of course, but most of those will be exposed. And that diminished number is in the plan, as is the food they eat, the work they will do, the further deaths during the year—”

“And so it goes on,” said Stef.

“So it goes on,” Titus said grimly. “And as long as there’s one slave left at the end of the journey to wipe the centurion’s arse, the job will be done.”

“We expect disease, you see,” Michael said. “We factor it into the numbers. And if by some miracle you and Collius the oracle were to prevent those deaths—”

“I told you,” Titus said. “We’ll all be chewing the hull plates before we’re halfway home. Why, I remember once on campaign—”

“It won’t be as bad as that,” Michael said. “You do dramatize, Titus. There would be culls; the numbers would be managed one way or another. But it would be severely destabilizing, and not welcome to the command hierarchy.”

“And the alternative,” Stef said slowly, “is to let them all die. Down in that pit.”

“We have no choice,” the ColU murmured from the slate.

“No,” Stef growled. “No! I don’t know why the hell I was brought to this world, but I’m damn sure it wasn’t to stand by and watch hundreds of men, women, children, die a preventable death.” She said desperately to Michael, “What if we could cut a deal?”

Titus snorted.

But Michael frowned, evidently intrigued. “What kind of deal?”

“The ship couldn’t feed all these people, if they stayed alive. Very well. Let them live, and we’ll find ways to feed them. The ColU, Collius, is a pretty resourceful oracle. You saw that already. Why, Titus, it showed you how to make soil down at the colonia, did it not?”

“It did. What are you suggesting?”

“Let me take the ColU through this ship’s systems. With you, Michael, and the remiges.”

The ColU said, “Colonel Kalinski, I would not advise—”

She buried the slate in her tunic so the ColU could not be heard. “We’ll find a way to upgrade. Does that translate? We’ll improve the output of the farms. My God, it can’t be so hard; it’s probably no better than medieval down there. We’ll improve the water filtration and reclamation. Show you how to clean up the air better.”

Michael was frowning, unsure. “You mean you could make the Malleus better able to support a larger population of crew. And that way you would have us spare the slaves.”

“That’s the idea.”

He shook his head. “Romans are suspicious of innovation, Stef.”

“Well, they can’t be that suspicious, or they wouldn’t have put their money into Brikanti starships like this, would they? And that centurion of yours strikes me as an imaginative man.” She was stretching the truth there, but at least Quintus hadn’t gone running and screaming when two strangers and a robot from an alternate history had come wandering through his brand new Hatch. “Suppose the Malleus Jesu were to return, not just with its mission at Romulus completed, but new and improved—a prototype for a new wave of starships to come? What if he were able to present that to his own commanders? Romans might not like innovation. What about opportunity, staring them in the face?”

Titus and Michael looked at her, and at each other.

“We must talk this over,” Michael said. “Before the optio first of all.”

“I agree,” said Titus.

Michael waggled a finger at her. “And don’t start meddling before you’ve got specific approval from the centurion—and the trierarchus, come to that. Or we’ll all be for the Brikanti long jump.”

Which, Stef had already gathered, meant being thrown out of an airlock.

Titus growled, “But first let’s do what we came for and find your slave boy, Stef Kalinski, if he’s still alive.” He leered at her. “And what then? Will you come with me down into the pen, and confront these dying maggots you insist on saving?”

She couldn’t meet his gaze.