Ultima

15 AD 2215; AUC 2968

When Ari Guthfrithson walked into her classroom, Penny Kalinski was trying to teach the children of ancient Britons and Vikings about the contingency of history.

She looked down at her notes on the desk before her, silently cursing the need to read her own handwritten scrawl in this world without computers, cursing the inadequacy of her antique pair of reading glasses to cope with the slow drift of her eyesight. Two years after arriving here, aged seventy-one, there were still some things she couldn’t get used to. And she tried not to let the druidh put her off her stride.

But now Ari settled into a place at the back of the class beside Marie Golvin, once a bridge crew member on board the ISF ship Tatania, and now a teacher here at Penny’s Academy. Marie was a figure from Penny’s old past, constantly reassuring.

“The Mongols, then,” Penny said. She checked her notes. “It is the late twentieth century.” The thirteenth in Penny’s history. The Brikanti, like the Romans, used the old Julian calendar, applying crude leap-year corrections as the centuries passed—and, like the Romans, the Brikanti counted their years since the founding of Rome. It had taken some effort for the newcomers to match their own Gregorian-calendar dates to those in use here. “The Mongols, under their rapacious but visionary khans, have exploded from the steppe and have rampaged into the eastern provinces of the Empire, tearing through Pannonia and Noricum and even Rhaetia. They besiege and destroy town after town. They are exterminating Romans. And, who knows? If they cannot be stopped, they may turn on Italia, even reach Rome itself. The legacy of centuries of civilization would be lost, the statues smashed, the books burned, the churches plundered. Perhaps Rome and the Empire could never rise again, even if the Mongol horde could someday be driven out.

“And to the east it is no better. An equally ferocious horde, under generals of equal genius, is tearing its way into the soft belly of the Xin dominion. They don’t seek territory, these are not empire builders like the Caesars; they seek nothing but booty, and land to pasture their horses, and women and girls to bear their children.”

Her pupils were no older than twelve years old, and their eyes widened at that last detail. But Brikanti was not a prissy culture. And nor had it been much of a stretch for Penny, a woman, to be effectively running this Academy; women had freedom and power here compared to many other cultures—even those less barbaric than the Mongols.

“There was a moment, then, on the cusp of the twenty-first century, when the future of civilization itself, the very idea of it, was under threat. The European plains might now be inhabited by nothing but the horses of illiterate herdsmen, grazing grass growing in the rubble of ruined cities…”

Even as she spoke, concentrating on each still-unfamiliar Brikanti word, she was aware of the grandeur of the setting.

Her two dozen students, all children of the wealthy Eboraki merchants who were able to afford the fees she charged, sat in neat rows under the looming conical roof of this schoolhouse. Brand new, and commissioned with the help of Ari himself for the purpose of her Academy—which she had dedicated to Saint Jonbar, who she claimed to Ari was a powerful figure in her own lost version of Christianity—it actually had the feel of great age. It was a roundhouse, like a relic of the European Iron Age of her own history. But the long trunks of the frame, gathered into a stout cone over her head, had been brought across the Atlantic from Canada, which in this history was a province of the Brikanti federation—an expensive import, but for many centuries no trees in Pritanike had been allowed to grow so tall before being cut down for use. The trunks had been set up on a base of concrete, and brilliant fluorescent strip lights were suspended from the apex of the house: to Penny it was a strange mixture of ancient and modern technologies.

In this setting, two years after her arrival aboard the Ukelwydd, she had established her Academy, whose principal purposes were to teach math and science—especially her own subject, physics, which was far in advance of anything known here. But she had insisted to Ari that she include classes like this, on wider aspects of culture. She said the goal was to educate herself in this new course of history. Ari had bought it; he had come from a wide-ranging educational background himself.

But she suspected that Ari believed she had a deeper agenda. After all, two years on, Ari was still one of only a handful of Brikanti to know that she came from a different historical background—and, she thought, one of even fewer who actually believed the reality of it all. But, suspicious as he was, he had allowed her to go ahead with these side projects. Penny wondered if Beth Eden Jones had had something to do with that—maybe she’d used a little pillow talk. And she was, after all, carrying Ari’s baby…

And here he was now, sitting at the back of her class like some school inspector, a half-smile playing on his lips as she lectured these children about the possibility of counterfactuals. Well, he was right to be suspicious. Of course she had an agenda. Of course she was playing a long game. Saint Jonbar, indeed!

She focused on her students, on the Mongols.

“So everything hung in the balance. All history might have been changed. But that did not happen. Does anybody know—”

There were some shout-outs, but a forest of hands was raised more politely, as she’d patiently taught them. This was a warrior culture after all; they did have Vikings in their ancestry. At the beginning, Marie had said she was lucky the students didn’t try to attract her attention by throwing axes at her head.

She picked out a student at random. “Yes, Freydis?”

The girl stood up. “The great Roman Emperor Constantius XI sent an embassy to the Xin empress, and persuaded her to join forces and attack the Mongols.” She sat down just as sharply.

“Yes. That’s essentially right. Except that it was actually the other way around…” That history-changing bit of statecraft, an alliance between bitter rivals that had probably saved two empires, had been initiated by strategic geniuses in the Xin court. But Roman historians, propagandists all, had from that moment given the credit to Constantius. The Brikanti, for all their stated rivalry with Rome, were in some ways in awe of the mighty Empire that had once come so close to destroying them, and had allowed their own view of history to be dazzled by such lies.

“But the point is that because the two rulers were able to put aside their own suspicion and ambition, the Mongols were defeated. Without that, everything would have been different. That’s what I want you to take away from this lesson today… Yes, Freydis.”

The girl stood again. “Maybe it’s like when Queen Kartimandia told the Caesar to attack Germania and not Pritanike. If she hadn’t done that…”

Her face shone with the excitement of discovery, of finding a new idea, a whole new way of thinking. Penny was no natural teacher, and at seventy-one years old she was finding the daily classroom routine a grind. But at such moments, when a spark was lit in a young imagination, she could see why people would teach.

But Freydis’s contribution hadn’t gone down well with her classmates; there was laughter and catcalls. “Yes, Freydis, and you’d be speaking Latin now!”

“So would you,” Freydis snapped back.

“All right, all right.” Penny stood, holding up her hands. “That’s enough for now. Time to break for lunch—”

The room turned into a near riot as the students grabbed their stuff and jumped up from their benches. Marie Golvin yelled with parade-ground lungs, “Back here in one hour for relativistic navigation!”

Ari Guthfrithson, with quiet dignity, let the tide of youngsters wash past him. Then, when the room was empty, he walked toward Penny, clapping his hands. “Skillfully done. And all delivered in correct Brikanti, halting and with an exotic accent as it is. I do continue to wonder why, you know, you pepper their brains with such ideas, the fragility of history. It wasn’t the stated purpose of the Academy, after all.”

Before Penny had to answer, Marie Golvin, who had been collecting up scrolls and paper scraps from around the room, joined them. “Will you have lunch with us, druidh? Nothing exciting, I’m afraid.”

“I’d be honored. And that was a neat deflection, by the way, Lieutenant Golvin.” It had taken him some time to memorize the term for Golvin’s ISF rank. “Well, shall we walk?”

16

The Academy of Saint Jonbar had been established on the edge of Eboraki, away from the crowded ancient core of the city, in what Penny might have called an outer suburb. The refectory where they would eat, though attached to the Academy, was a short walk out of the campus and toward town.

The main schoolhouse was one of a cluster of such buildings, all brand new roundhouses, which included a gymnasium, a library, an arts center, a small clinic, a workshop for pottery, metalwork and other crafts, and a Christian chapel. The buildings were arranged in neat rows, like the city itself aligned not north-south but on a northeast to southwest axis, the direction of the solstice sunrise and sunset, following Brikanti tradition. There was a grassy playing field, and a kind of parade ground where some of the students, cadets in the armed forces of the Brikanti, could practice marching, and wage mock battles with swords and even blank-loaded firearms. But all this was set in an oak grove, one of a number studded around the city, the tree a symbol of ancient druidh wisdom.

Penny and Marie had together designed this complex, with advice from Ari and other locals, and all paid for by money Ari had managed to extract from Navy contingency funds—the military-college aspect had been part of the price they’d had to pay for that. To Penny, even now, it looked like a museum piece, like a reconstruction of some Iron Age village rather than a brand-new, living, breathing facility for young people.

Of course those few students who went on to become full druidh wouldn’t be so young when they finished. Ari, for instance, had gone through a few years of general education, including history, geography and philosophy, followed by twenty years of specialist study in law, politics, and mathematics and astronomy. Nowadays this was a literate culture, but Ari had told Penny that the old preliteracy tradition of memory training, the recall of long passages, was still used to develop the mind. Mathematics was particularly strong here. Penny herself had supervised classes of young children learning to reproduce the outlines of mistletoe seeds using the arcs of circles, carefully drawn with compasses and pens. It was easy to see, given such beginnings, how the Brikanti grew up to be such fine astronomers and interstellar navigators: from the geometry of a mistletoe seed to the trajectory of a starship.

The principal town of Eboraki was evidently a more ancient community than the Roman-planted towns in Gaul and Germania, and the older traditions of Celtic architecture and town planning lingered on, not obliterated by later Roman developments as in Penny’s timeline. A grid pattern of roads of gravel and crushed rock separated houses of wattle and daub with thatched roofs, all surrounded by a monumental wall, outside which lay cemeteries and funeral pyres. The higher ground in the center of the city—in Penny’s world dominated by a cathedral that had stood on the site of a demolished principia, headquarters of a Roman legion—did bear the remains of a two-thousand-year-old fort, but here it had been a Brikanti-built bastion, a relic of the days when continental invasions had been feared and experienced. This Britain, for better or worse, had never been severed from its own past by a Roman sword.

Studying this new history with her students, Penny had come to understand how much harm the Brikanti and their continental cousins, who Penny had grown up knowing as the Celts, had suffered at the hands of the Romans. Once the Celtic nations had prospered across Europe from Britain to the Danube, but the Romans’ empire-building expansion had driven them back. Though Britain, in this history, had remained independent of Rome, elsewhere the Celts had been crushed. When Caesar had invaded Gaul—a prosperous, settled and literate country of a population of eight million—he had slaughtered one million and enslaved another million. One detail particularly remembered by Brikanti historians was that Caesar had severed the hands of rebels, so they could not gather their harvest. This history was not well-known in Penny’s timeline. Here, it had never been forgotten.

And Brikanti had grown traditions of its own. This was no empire; it was a federation of nations, and a democracy, of sorts, with traditions inherited from both its British and Scandinavian forebears. That old fort on the hill was now the seat of the Althing, an assembly with representatives of Brikanti holdings around the world, and the most powerful single individual was not a hereditary emperor but an elected logsogumadr, a law-speaker.

But this was a world that had been industrialized for centuries, a process that had proceeded without conscience or compensation. So, even on a bright midsummer day like today, a pall of smog hung over the city. No trees survived in Eboraki, save in the carefully preserved oak groves. In this capital people dressed brightly, in embroidered cloaks over colorfully striped tunics and leggings, adorned with beads of blue glass or amber, and with torcs of steel or silver at their necks. But they routinely wore face masks and goggles to keep the muck out of their eyes and lungs, and life expectancy in a culture capable of sending ships to the planets was shockingly low. Nobody here, of course, could imagine things could be different. It was when Penny was least busy, when she walked in the city looking at the children coughing into their filthy masks, that she most acutely missed the world she had left behind.

And yet, as the months had passed, to walk these streets at the times of solstice, midsummer and midwinter, with the low sun of morning or evening suspended over the streets and filling the city with light, had pleased her in ways she would have found hard to describe.

The meals in the small refectory were prepared by students as part of their education, under the supervision of a few townspeople. The fare, served at rough-hewn wooden tables, was traditional Brikanti, meat-heavy, laden with butter and vegetable sauces and served with slabs of gritty bread—although Roman fare was also available, cheese, olives. Rice and potatoes were expensive foreign luxuries, even in the Brikanti capital. All the Tatania crew had had problems with this diet, mostly from a lack of roughage. But Penny had learned not to try to change some things, such as the Brikanti habit of serving meals, even to very young children, with watered-down mead or beer. Or the habit of eating your food with the knife you wore at your belt.

Still, the meat, a richly stewed beef, was tender and tasty, and for a while they ate without speaking.

At length Ari said, picking up the conversation where they’d left off, “You don’t need to thank me for visiting. For one thing it’s my job; I’m expected to report to the Navy funding body who provided the cash for all this. For another it’s a pleasure to see how you’re getting on. I sometimes feel as if I connect you all, the crew of the Tatania.”

“We are all rather scattered,” Penny admitted.

“But that’s not a bad thing. It shows you’re finding places in a society that must be very strange to you. How’s Jiang, by the way?”

“Doing fine. Our house is comfortable. You know that he is working at the college; he gives classes in kernel engineering, among other topics.”

“I can understand he will be finding it a particular challenge here. We like to believe we are world citizens, we Brikanti. In fact it is very rare to see a Xin face, even here in Eboraki, the capital.”

Marie Golvin said, “Well, he wouldn’t call himself Xin, but the point’s taken. He doesn’t go out much.”

“He’ll be fine,” Penny assured her. “And so’s General McGregor, we hear.”

“I saw him recently,” Ari said. “Lecturing junior officers on the command and control techniques of your International Space Fleet.” Through his smooth Brikanti, it was odd to hear him break into English. “He’s very impressive.”

“He always has been. And I’ve known him since he was seventeen years old,” Penny said, feeling a little wistful.

Ari watched her sharply. “That’s true in one of the reality strands you inhabited, so I hear. In the other—”

“Yes, yes. In the other it was my twin sister who knew him—save she wasn’t a twin, for I didn’t exist at all. Whatever. I always knew Lex would land on his feet, wherever he ended up.”

“You can see he wishes he could shed three decades and fly with the youngsters. To battle the Xin for the treasures of the Tears of Ymir!”

“That sounds like Lex, all right. He’s visited us a few times. He’s most struck by the special relativity we teach here. In our reality, so he says, he always struggled with math. Here, you had no relativity theory. But you did have the kernels, and you discovered relativity experimentally, by driving your kernel ships up against the light barrier, and finding out the hard way that the clocks slow and the relativistic mass piles up.”

Marie said, “I heard of engineers being executed because they couldn’t make their ships travel faster than light.”

“That was the Romans and the Xin, not us,” Ari said. “And the stories are apocryphal anyhow.”

Penny mopped up her vegetable stew with her rubbery bread. “And Beth? How is your new wife, Ari?”

He smiled, but Penny sensed reserve. “Well, you understand that she is not formally my wife, since she had no family to give her away… She is fine.”

Penny and Marie shared a glance.

Marie said, “That’s all you have to say? How’s the baby? She’s overdue, isn’t she?”

He seemed to consider his words carefully. “We are dealing with the challenge of the birth in our own way.”

Penny frowned. “‘Challenge’? What’s challenging about it? Your medicine is pretty good when it comes to childbirth. I checked it over myself when Beth said she was pregnant, and I had Earthshine consult too. Her age would always be an issue; she is thirty-eight now… Why is this a challenge?”

“This is a private matter,” he said coldly, his pale face empty. Suddenly he had never seemed more alien to Penny, more foreign.

“But—”

“Instead, let us talk of Earthshine. It is he who has made the most dramatic entry into our society, as I’m sure you know. Even if his true nature is carefully kept a secret. As far as most people know he is simply another survivor of a ship of mysterious origin.

“And he seems to be attempting superhuman feats. You must know that he is now at Höd.” The Brikanti name for Ceres. “He intends, with the party of supporters he has gathered around him, to move on to Mars. In a way this fulfills the promise of the images he showed us when we first encountered you: the great buildings on the Mars of your reality. But here, he claims, he will achieve much more.”

Penny grunted. “I often thought he’d have made a great salesman. If only of himself.”

“He intends”—Ari mimed a shove with his upraised hand—“to push Höd out of its track around the sun, and make it sail to Mars.” He looked at them. “This is what he claims. I have performed my own estimates of the problem, the energies required. Do you think this is achievable?”

Penny, startled, looked at Marie.

Marie said, “With a hefty enough booster, any such feat is possible. And this society is knee-deep in kernels, which have been used in ways we never dared… Yes, I would say it is possible.”

“Earthshine claims he will do this to deliver to Mars raw materials that planet lacks. Water, other compounds, some metals perhaps. He intends, he says, to rebuild Mars.”

Penny said to Marie in English, “Terraforming. I bet that’s what he means. These people have no conception of such schemes, since they don’t even have a word for ‘ecology.’”

Ari frowned. “I cannot understand what you are saying.”

“I apologize,” said Marie formally. “In our reality there were grand plans to remake Mars into a world like the Earth. Maybe other worlds too, Venus, Titan—umm, the largest moon of Augustus. But on Mars it would mean importing a lot of volatiles—the kind of stuff Ceres, Höd, is made of.” She looked at Penny doubtfully. “I guess it could be made to work. If Ceres could be brought into Martian orbit—”

“That would take a heck of a lot of delta-vee.”

“Yes. But then you could break it up slowly, drop the material you need into the air, with Ceres itself as a construction shack.”

Penny nodded. “I do know there was evidence on Earth, our Earth, of major climate disturbances caused by impacts of comets or asteroids. Fifty-five million years back, a spike in the carbon dioxide levels—doubled in a single year. So the idea is not implausible.”

Ari listened carefully, picking through the technical language. “Hairy stars and the Tears of Ymir, falling to Terra—and now to Mars. So do you think Earthshine is sincere? Perhaps we should be wary. He is proposing to deploy large energies, to move huge masses around the planetary system—our planetary system.” He grimaced. “If he is allowed to wield such energies, your artificial man would be as powerful as a god.”

Penny said, “So he was before, in our reality. But here’s what you have to understand, Ari. Earthshine and his brothers, the Core AIs, were significant powers on our Earth. But, like gods, they always had their own agenda. An agenda that might or might not coincide with the interests of mankind… And whatever Earthshine says about Höd now, we’ll have to remember that here too his own deep agenda comes first.”

“Very well. And what might that ‘deep agenda’ now be?”

“We’ve no way of knowing.”

“I recall the talk of your ‘impossible sister,’ Penelope Kalinski. Earthshine was fascinated by that. You’ve said so yourself. He detected this—unraveling of history—before he and you witnessed it on a much larger scale. Prescient, don’t you think? Wouldn’t he pursue such an interest here?”

Sure he would, she thought. It was odd to think that even now she and the rest of the Tatania crew were still dependent on Earthshine, for the translator gadgets he had provided them all with, and regularly downloaded updates of vocabulary and grammar. And she did remember how obsessive he had seemed about the interference in human history by an agency unknown, right back to the beginning of her own involvement with him, going back more than three decades of her complicated life: I am everywhere. And I am starting to hear your footsteps, you Hatch-makers. I can hear the grass grow. And I can hear you…

Ari said acutely, “I find myself deeply drawn to the question, in fact. Might there be evidence to be unturned concerning these strange phenomena in my world? Traces of lost histories. Like the anomalous carving on the tombstone of your mother, Penny, in that graveyard in Lutetia Parisiorum of which you spoke.”

His mention of that personal memory startled Penny. She had been open with Ari, mostly, about her experience of the reality-shifting they had all endured. Now she wondered if that had been wise, if she understood Ari and his agendas. She was aware that Marie, too, was looking increasingly uncomfortable.

“So have you found anything?”

“Not yet. But I’ll keep looking.” He stared into her eyes. “That makes you uncomfortable. Why?” When there was no reply he went on, “I sometimes think you are fortunate that we Brikanti are not more curious about this phenomenon. We are not so scientific as you.” He pronounced the English word carefully. “We are cruder philosophers. Perhaps we are more prepared to accept the miraculous, the unexplained, than you are. Unexplained phenomena such as your own existence. We don’t question; we just accept.”

“All save you.”

“All save me. But why are you wary of the question?” He turned on Marie. “And why do you recoil as we speak of these matters, Marie Golvin?”

“Because I can’t sleep,” Marie blurted. “That’s why. Is it so hard to understand?” Penny covered her hand with her own, but Marie pulled away. “Look—we saw billions put to the torch—everybody we knew, probably, whole worlds, Earth itself. And now here I am in this stupid place, trying to learn your dumb languages, doing this make-work job you’ve given me, and pretending I’ve got a future here. I don’t even know if your Jesus died for me, or not.”

On the verge of tears, she seemed much younger than her twenty-seven years, and Penny longed to hug her, to reassure her. But Marie Golvin was an ISF officer, and that wouldn’t do at all.

“I’m sorry,” said Marie now, getting herself under control. “Excuse me.” She stood and walked away.

“And I too am sorry,” Ari said to Penny. “For provoking that.”

“Not your fault,” Penny snapped. “Well, not entirely. You do keep prying.”

“You’re lucky that others don’t.”

“Maybe, but that doesn’t help. It’s survivor guilt, Ari. It’s when you forget it all—when you are immersed in something, happy in yourself, enjoying what you’re doing—and then you remember all that has been lost, and the guilt comes crashing down again. That’s when it’s worst. Marie’s particularly vulnerable now she’s away from the protection of Lex McGregor. The ISF, the military discipline, was her whole life. And then there’s the hope.”

“Hope?”

“Of somehow, one day, finding a way back home, back to our timeline.”

“Ah.”

“It’s entirely irrational, I think we all know that, but it’s hard not to succumb. After all, this can never be home, for us. And it’s harder for the young, I think. As the years go by.”

Ari said, “But Marie told me she was a Christian, in the tradition as it existed in your world. Just now she spoke of Jesu—Jesus. Should that not be a consolation? She says she wondered if, in crossing realities, she had undergone something like the Rapture. Are you aware of that?” He closed his eyes, remembering. “The text she recited to me was this: ‘For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words.’ From a letter to the Thessalonians. Such material does not exist in our Bible, not the authorized version, and nor does the legend of the Rapture. I think, you see, that Marie fears not that she has been taken up to heaven by God, but has been left behind in the desolation that remains—”

“You.”

Beth Eden Jones came stalking into the refectory, trailed by an anxious-looking Marie Golvin.

17

Ari and Penny stood to meet her.

Beth was wearing Brikanti costume, as they all were after two years here, tunic, trousers, leather boots, a light cloak. Though she looked heavy, she was evidently no longer pregnant, Penny saw immediately. And in her arms she cradled a bundle wrapped in blankets.

Penny said, “Beth? What the hell—is that what I think it is? You’ve had your baby? I’m sorry—I lost track of the date. I didn’t hear any news…”

Ari stood silently, his face like thunder.

Beth stood before her husband, glaring at him, but she spoke to Penny. “Yes, Penny, this is my baby. By this monster.”

Ari stared back. He said in a kind of growl, “Not here, woman. Not now.”

“Then where, if not before my friends? Shall I go back to your home, your family, and wait until the next time you try to kill her?”

Heads turned around the refectory.

Penny said sharply, “Beth. Whatever the hell you’re talking about—come on, sit down.” She put her arm around Beth’s shoulder, and could feel her trembling, could see the stain of tears around her eyes. She looked a lot older than her thirty-eight years, old and drained. But she complied, sitting at the table, which still bore the remains of their meal. Penny said, “You too, Ari—don’t loom over her like that. Beth, do you want anything? A drink—”

“Nothing.” Beth’s eyes and Ari’s were locked still.

Penny sat down and glanced up at Marie. “Bring some water. Umm, and some hot milk.”

Marie hurried away.

Penny put her hand on Beth’s arm and leaned forward to see. The baby, at least, was sleeping peacefully, its face a crumple. “Oh, Beth. It’s beautiful.”

“She. She’s a girl. She’s called Mardina.”

“After your mother.” Penny looked up at Ari, whose face showed nothing but hostility. “I don’t understand anything of this. What’s wrong? Is she not healthy?”

“The baby is fine,” Ari said coldly. “But she was—unintended.”

“They don’t hold with women my age having kids,” Beth said. “The Brikanti. It’s a rough and ready rule. You can understand why; they fly warships in space but their medicine is medieval.”

“But you got pregnant anyway.”

“It was an accident. Yes, I got pregnant. I was told it would be all right, that the baby would be accepted.”

“You probably misunderstood,” Ari said. “You misheard the nuances. I told you there would have to be a trial—”

“They exposed her,” Beth said to Penny. “While I slept.”

Penny was bewildered. “They what?”

“They took her, Ari’s family, the women. Took her from me. They stripped away her blankets, and put her on the roof of the house, naked. She would be allowed to live, you see, if she survived the exposure. And if he chose to bring her in. It was to be his choice, not mine.”

Penny turned on Ari. “That seems unnecessarily brutal.”

He managed to smile, self-deprecating. “It’s not the time for a history lesson. You may blame the Romans from whom we borrowed the custom. The rule is indeed—what did you say?—rough and ready. Better a few healthy children are lost, than that society is burdened with the weak—”

Beth snapped, “The father gets to choose to save her, or not. Not the mother. Most mothers will have families to back them up—sometimes they take the child, though the mother can’t see her again. But I had no one to help me. And he chose to abandon her.”

Ari shook his head. “All of this was unplanned. Most men in my position would have done the same.”

“But you found out, Beth,” Penny prompted.

“I busted out of that damn house where they were keeping me,” Beth said. “I got up on the roof, and saved my baby, and I came straight here, where I knew you would be. I wonder how many laws I broke doing that. Will you prosecute me, scholar? Will I be thrown in jail, or mutilated, or executed, or whatever else you do to disobedient mothers?”

Ari shook his head again. “No, no. There are always exceptions. You will be welcome in my home, with my family—with the baby—”

“Not after this.” She turned to Penny with a look of pleading. “Let me stay here. With you.”

“Of course you can stay,” Penny said immediately.

Ari stood. “This changes nothing. This Academy is here at my discretion. In a sense you are still under my roof—”

“They stay,” Penny said firmly, “with us.”

“And the future? As the child has needs, as she grows?”

Penny sighed. “We’ll deal with that when we come to it. I think it’s best if you go now, Ari Guthfrithson.”

He stood still for a moment, clenching one fist. Then he stalked away, almost colliding with Marie Golvin as she approached with a tray of drinks.

Stef watched him go. “I thought I understood him. I thought we communicated, as scholars. Druidh. But now—”

“You don’t know him at all,” Beth said. “I didn’t. These people aren’t like us, Stef. Not even Ari. Not even the man I thought I loved, who fathered my child. Especially not him.”

18 AD 2227; AUC 2980

“ColU, I thought Quintus Fabius was a pompous ass from the moment he came strutting down from that airship.”

“He is a good commander, Yuri Eden. But as he hails from what is still regarded as an outer province of the Empire, he has to be more Roman than the Romans.”

“So he’s got a chip on his shoulder. Boo hoo. Actually he reminded me of that other pompous ass Lex McGregor… I’m sorry. Kind of lost my way there.”

“Relax, Yuri Eden. Breathe the oxygen.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Do you remember what we were talking about? I am here to witness your final testament.”

“Always busy, eh, ColU? Look, just talk to me. I’ve had enough of my own miserable life for now. You’re the nearest thing I’ve got to a friend on this tub—you and Stef, but you were there first, right?”

“Even if I was an instrument of the ISF, the organization that stranded you against your will on an alien world.”

“Well, there is that. No hard feelings, eh? And don’t tell me I need to rest. I’ll soon be enjoying the long sleep, drifting between the stars in a Roman sarcophagus. Fine way to go, actually.”

“You are aware that I did quietly suggest to the optio that that would be the best course of action regarding the disposal of your body, and indeed Colonel Kalinski’s if it came to that. As opposed to depositing your corpses in the recycling tanks.”

“Don’t spare my feelings, will you?”

“After all, we hail from another timeline. Your bodies may contain pathogens exotic to this reality. And both of your bodies contain foreign elements, even dental work, for example, which might be harmful in the ship’s food chain.”

“Ha! Oh, don’t make me laugh, ColU. Now I have an image of my false teeth chewing their way out of some fat legionary’s gut.”

“Well, you don’t wear false teeth, Yuri Eden. But the image is an amusing one.”

“Don’t laugh too hard.”

“Do you wish me to call the medicus again? Michael did say that if—”

“Oh, don’t fuss, ColU. If I want the damn quack, I’ll call him. It’s only been palliative care, and you know that as well as I do. He can treat the actual condition no better than you can. But with that suite of drugs he has, all those psychoactive substances from the South American jungles, he can play my level of pain like a fiddle… You know, I sometimes wonder if I haven’t carried these damn passengers all my life.”

“That’s possible, actually, Yuri Eden. Your body has been exposed to a series of extraordinary environments. This is your second journey through interstellar space. You spent decades on Per Ardua, a planet of a flare star. Before that, you spent some time under a dome on Mars, a world lacking a thick atmosphere, an ozone layer. Even before that, a journey across interplanetary space from Earth to Mars.”

“Also I passed through Hatches. Three times.”

“Indeed. And before all that you spent a century in a casket, buried in a vault in Antarctica with a thousand others. The casualty rates from cancers of various sorts of survivors of that process—”

“We called it ‘freezer burn.’ So the parents who put me on ice and stuffed me in a hole—”

“Surely they sought to send you to a better time, Yuri Eden.”

“And now, it turns out, after all I’ve survived, it will be the damn cryo that kills me off in the end. Oh, the irony.”

“I am only speculating, Yuri Eden.”

“I know, buddy. I don’t take it personally.”

“It is to be regretted that more advanced medicine is not available. I hope to help the ship’s navigators devise a medical scanner to emulate the functions of the slate I used to diagnose your condition.”

“The navigators? Oh, your Arab buddies, in their observation blisters…”

“This vessel navigates by the stars, by astronomical observations made by the Arab teams.”

“These Arab buddies of yours sound like they are as advanced as anybody else in this timeline.”

“It would seem so. Here, the Prophet was born in a settled and stable province of a strong Roman Empire. Much as in our timeline, Islamic civilization, the dar-al Islam, flourished, but under Roman protection. There were no centuries of interfaith conflict in Europe—no crusades, for instance. Even in the pre-Christian days, the Romans were always pragmatic about local religions. To the Romans, Islam is a muscular sister creed of the Christianity that is their official state religion.”

“And the Arabs are the best astronomers.”

“They are. Yuri Eden, I hope you will have the chance to see their observation blisters. There is an atmosphere of calm—of learning, of reverence. They are like college study rooms, or religious sanctuaries. Indeed, one of them is dedicated as a mosque.

“In space, Muslims were always drawn to astronomy because of the need to find reliably the position of Earth, and therefore Mecca, for the purposes of daily prayers. But the Arabs have gone much further. They have fine optical telescopes, but also spectroscopes to analyze the light—though no image capture more advanced than wet-chemistry photography. And they have made a suite of discoveries, of more or less relevance to the mission of the Malleus Jesu. Of course, a kernel ship under heavy acceleration, like this one, is a rather noisy platform. And they have to compensate for relativistic distortion, so close do we travel to the speed of light. They have sophisticated rule-of-thumb mathematics to achieve this, without, again, having the underlying theory…

“Yuri Eden, the Arabs allowed me to peruse their libraries. They have painstakingly compiled good maps of the cosmic background radiation, the relic glow of the Big Bang—not that they have the cosmological theories to describe it that way.

“And they seek out life-bearing planets, among the stars we pass. Targets for future missions like this one. Living worlds have certain characteristics. On Earth, for instance, the atmosphere holds oxygen and methane, reactive gases that if left to themselves would combine with other substances—iron ore in the rocks would rust—and be lost to the air. But it is the action of life that replenishes those reservoirs. Another kind of biosphere would produce other kinds of traces. Sometimes you can tell there’s life simply from color changes, visible from space. Early Earth was probably predominantly purple, on the sea coasts anyhow…”

“All this you found in their libraries? With Chu Yuen as your search engine. Ha! I imagine poor Chu getting pretty tired turning pages—”

“Usually it’s unraveling scrolls. But, yes, it can be like that… One striking observation, Yuri Eden, is that many worlds the Arabs have observed are not living, but dead: once life-bearing, but evidently killed off, at least at the surface. And in some cases, recently. You can tell this from remote observations. If all life on Earth were ended suddenly, the decomposition of a glut of corpses would dump ethane into the air, in great quantities. Without the water cycle mediated by the plants, there would be a rapid heating spike. And so on. All this can be observed from afar. Yuri Eden, the Arabs have made many such discoveries.”

“What could kill off whole worlds? War?”

“Perhaps, Yuri Eden.”

“And with who knows what history-tweaking strangeness to follow? If our experience is any precedent.”

“One can only speculate. Of course the Arabs also search for kernels. Worlds laden with them, targets for future Hatch-building expeditions. Again there are certain characteristic signatures you can spot from afar. They have even begun to map the distribution of kernel-bearing worlds, and Hatches, across this part of the Galaxy. Their maps are difficult to decipher, in fact: not maps as we know them but more itineraries, lists of distances and directions between locations… It appears that there is a kind of network. A certain percentage of kernel worlds are concentrated toward the center of the Galaxy. As if whatever initiated this process originated deeper in the Galaxy, and the network of Hatch-building has been heading out to the outer reaches ever since.”

“Hm. What’s different about the center of the Galaxy?”

“It is older, in a sense. The Galaxy is like a vast factory for manufacturing stars from interstellar dust and gas. Star-making started close to the center, and is spreading out to the periphery. It is thought that toward the center there may be habitable worlds born a billion years before the Earth.”

“So the Hatches may have been started off by some ancient intelligence, lurking on one of these old, old worlds…”

“The Arabs’ observations would fit that, Yuri Eden.”

“But what’s it all for? Do you ever get the feeling we’re missing the big picture here, ColU? All the strangeness—the kernels, the Hatches, the dumping of whole histories… Maybe this is my South American drugs talking.”

“Mostly we are too busy trying to survive to think too deeply about such matters, Yuri Eden.”

“And also too busy riding these various gift horses to look them too closely in the mouth. The kernels are just too damn useful… But we do ask such questions—or at least you do, ColU.”

“I try. My mission has always been to nurture the humanity around me—to nurture you and your family, Yuri Eden. By doing that I must consider the wider questions of which you speak. I must consider the future. And some of what I have learned about the future disturbs me.”

“Maybe the drugs are hitting me again. Or else they’re wearing off. Run that by me again. The future?”

“I have seen it in the sky, Yuri Eden. I told you that the Arab astronomers have carefully observed the background radiation from the Big Bang. That radiation, and distortions in it—ripples, distortions, nonhomogeneities, polarization—carries a great deal of information about the wider structure of the universe. After all, it has permeated the whole cosmos from the beginning. For instance, our cosmologists looked for evidence of other universes than our own. An interaction of two universes, a collision in some higher dimension, might leave echoes in the background, tremendous circles in the sky. But I, studying the Arab records with a depth of understanding that they cannot share, have seen… something else.”

“What? The suspense is killing me, and I’m already dying.”

“I apologize, Yuri Eden. I believe I have seen evidence of superluminal events. Faster-than-light phenomena.”

“What the hell are you talking about now? Warp drive? Some kind of super-starship? A higher civilization?”

“Not that. Not on that scale. Much bigger. Please listen, Yuri Eden. In relativity theory, you know that nothing can travel through space-time faster than light. That was Einstein’s most fundamental discovery. Even a transition through a Hatch, say from Mercury to Per Ardua, by whatever unknown mechanism enables such transitions, is marginally slower than lightspeed. But there is a get-out clause in the physics.”

“Go on.”

“Nothing can travel through space-time faster than light. But space-time is a substance, of a kind; it has structure. It can be distorted… Yuri Eden, waves can propagate in space-time itself. And they can travel faster than light. The theoreticians have wondered if such warps could be used to carry ships at superluminal speeds.”

“Beating light by surfing space-time waves…”

“That’s the idea, Yuri Eden. We never achieved a warp drive. But warp waves, as described by the theory, would emit certain kinds of exotic radiations. Even if we could never create them, we thought we could detect them.

“Yuri Eden, I think I have seen the traces of warp ripples in the cosmic background radiation. Not small, contained signals, as you would associate with a starship. These are relics of events on a tremendous scale. By which I mean billions of light-years wide, events spanning the universe.”

“Larger than galaxies—”

“Larger than superclusters of galaxies.”

“Nurse! I think my drip’s come loose.”

“I apologize, Yuri Eden. I will discuss all this with Colonel Kalinski; perhaps she will be able to make it clearer. But, you see, I am struggling to grasp the hypothesis I am formulating.”

“What hypothesis?”

“Imagine that in the future there is a—cataclysm. A tremendously violent event of some kind, spanning space—spanning the entire universe. This event is so energetic that among its effects are ripples in space-time, tremendous waves—”

“Ah. Warp waves, which can travel back in time.”

“Yes, Yuri Eden. I believe that—in these faint traces of structure in the cosmic background reaction, visible to the Arab astronomers in the silence of their observation capsules—I am witnessing a kind of foreshadowing, echoes traveling back in time…”

“Echoes from the future. But echoes of what, ColU?”

“Something terrible.”

“Umm. Well, you’re not given to exaggeration, ColU.”

“Are you falling asleep, Yuri Eden?”

“Not just yet. All this talk of calamity in the future. You know, ColU, I don’t fear dying. In fact, I feel like I died already, a number of times. All those doors I had to pass through, from my own time to the future, from Mars to Per Ardua…”

“It will just be another door, Yuri Eden.”

“I know, my friend. I know. But I do fear for those I love. Listen— I want you to find Beth, if you can.”

“I know. You asked me this before. But, Yuri Eden, she may not exist, in this new reality. She may have been left behind.”

“Maybe. But maybe not. I know Mardina—or knew her. If there was a way to save Beth, she’d have found it.”

“I always flattered myself that I was close to Beth Eden Jones.”

“You were the kindly monster who made her toy builders with those manipulator arms of yours. Remember Mister Sticks? Find her, ColU. And whoever she’s with now. Tell her you’re her property now. And help her, as best you can. Because I can’t, you see. I can’t help her anymore.”

“Yuri Eden—”

“Promise me.”

“I promise, Yuri Eden. You are tiring. I will ask Michael to call on you.”

“Yeah. Oh, ColU, one thing. This future cataclysm you think you see. When?”

“The whole thing is very partial, Yuri Eden. I can only make preliminary guesses—”

“I remember that ass Lex McGregor, when he dumped us on Per Ardua, telling us that Proxima would shine for thousands of times as long as the sun.”

“Proxima will barely have aged by the time the event is upon us, Yuri Eden.”

“Barely?”

“I have tentatively dated the source of the space-time waves to less than four billion years from now. Perhaps three and a half billion—”

“Four billion years? Ha! Why didn’t you say so? I don’t even have four years, let alone four billion. Four billion years ago the Earth itself had barely formed—right? Why should I worry about running out of time four billion years from now?”

“Because you, or your descendants, will have been robbed of trillions, Yuri Eden. Sleep now, and I will find Michael…”

19 AD 2225; AUC 2978

The Ukelwydd, riding kernel fire as it slowed, slid out of deep space and entered orbit around Mars.

As the drive cut out and the acceleration weight was lifted from her chest, Penny Kalinski, now eighty-one years old, cocooned in a deep couch, uttered a sigh of deep relief. It was her first spaceflight for a dozen years, the first since the Tatania. After spending twelve years as an elderly, eccentric, Earthbound teacher, she’d forgotten how grueling a launch was. Well, now it was done.

In the absence of gravity her feeble old-lady arms had enough strength to push out of the couch. For a few seconds she drifted in the warm air, relishing the absence of weight. Her cabin was small, she was never more than an arm’s length from a wall, and every surface was studded with handholds. It was easy to float over into the small closet that served as her bathroom. The freedom of movement was delicious, marred only by a twinge of arthritic pain in her joints. But in a mirror she saw that her hair had come loose and formed a cloud of fuzzy gray around her head. “Oh, for God’s sake—” She pulled back rogue strands and tucked them into a knot.

She was presentable by the time there was a knock at the door.

Trierarchus Kerys was waiting for her, comfortably hovering in the air. Kerys was around fifty now, solid, competent, smiling, her hair a tangle of black and gray. And, twelve years after she had commanded this ship when it had collected the Tatania and its castaway crew, Kerys had become a friend to Penny Kalinski. She said now, “I thought you would like an escort to the observation cabin. The druidh waits for you there. It will take us some hours to switch over from deep space operations to landing mode; he suggested you might like to view Mars, and what has become of it, before we land.”

After all these years, Penny’s Brikanti was now pretty good. Her Latin wasn’t too bad either, but she was never going to master Xin, despite the patient years poor Jiang had put into trying to teach her. So she understood every word Kerys had said, and picked up the unspoken implications. She meant, Earthshine’s Mars.

“Yes, I would like that. And I’m honored that the trierarchus herself came to escort me.”

“You’re an honored guest. As I’ve been telling you since we left Terra. Here, take my arm.”

They began to move cautiously along the corridor, with Kerys pulling herself from handhold to handhold.

“I’m always amazed how much larger a space seems without gravity,” Penny said. “But the earliest astronauts reported that. I mean, the space travelers in my home timeline…” As the years had gone by she found it increasingly difficult to keep those two tangled histories separate in her head. “But I don’t understand why you’ve all made such a fuss of me all the way here.”

“Well, Penny Kalinski, partly it is because you are a companion of Earthshine. This mission was mounted specifically to bring you to him, as he requested.”

“And Earthshine’s a power in the land now. In your land. What Earthshine wants, Earthshine gets…”

“But,” Kerys said confidentially, “and I haven’t told you until now, it’s also because you got my nephews through your Academy.”

“I remember them. Olaf and Thorberg.”

“Yes. Their father’s a Dane, and their blood is as wild as his. But you got them to sit down for five years of study.”

“They were a handful, those two. What are they doing now?”

“Navy, both of them. Best place for them. Here we are.”

She gently guided Penny through an open door and into a room dominated by a large picture window, beyond which an orange-brown landscape slid by. This was the observation cabin, where once, Penny remembered, she had watched a new Earth approach. Terra, Terra, a world transformed by the legacy of a different history. Now Mars scrolled past this same window, a landscape of craters and canyons and mountains and dust, magnificent, alien, forbidding. But this was not the Mars she had once known, not the Mars she had left behind—she could see that immediately—for this Mars had been engineered, over centuries. What a remarkable thought that was—how extraordinary it was that she should be here, seeing this, even so many years after the jonbar hinge.

And Ari Guthfrithson was here, watching her reaction.

Penny had known he was on the ship, but she had spent the few days of the flight from Earth avoiding him. Now she ignored him while she let Kerys guide her to a handhold.

Then, safely anchored, she faced Ari. “You’re not aging well.”

Ari was in his forties now, growing portly, gray, his face pinched. He laughed, harshly. “Well, neither are you, you old crone.”

“Thanks.”

He turned to face the planet. “Look at my Mars! This is what you can do with kernel technology, and a dream…”

Visionaries from her own Earth would have recognized much of what was being done, she thought. In this reality, the engineers had been doing their best to bring Mars to life, even with its own resources, long before Earthshine and his Ceres scheme had arrived. Kernel energy beams melted ice from the polar caps and poured it into tremendous canals burned into the plains of the Vastitas Borealis to the north, and through the ancient, cratered highlands of the south, Terra Sirenum, Aonia Terra, Noachis Terra, Terra Cimmeria, features with their own Latin or Xin or Brikanti names in this reality. At lower latitudes, deep aquifers were being broken open to release yet more water. The ship passed over the Valles Marineris, the great canyon system become an enclosed sea. For now all this water was frozen over, the ice white against the rusted colors of Mars. But, around the curve of the world, the great blisters of the Tharsis volcanoes, Olympus Mons among them, were being cracked and gouged and stirred in the hope of triggering eruptions from those long-dormant giants, which might belch ash and greenhouse gases to thicken the sparse air.

And already city lights burned in the night side.

A Mars with thick air and cities and brimming canals! A nineteenth-century fantasy back where Penny had come from, made reality here. Maybe, she wondered sometimes, her commanders had been too cautious in their use of the great, unexpected benison of the kernels. So much more could have been done with that magical torrent of energy—as long as you didn’t care about the consequences for what you were reshaping.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Ari said.

“Do you?”

“That this is not the Mars you left behind in that other history of yours. Well, it’s true. But soon it will not be the Mars that was here when you arrived.”

“It will be Earthshine’s Mars.”

“Yes. That god you brought into our reality is remaking a world. Höd—Ceres—is on its way, spiraling closer with every revolution around the sun. Just now it is…” He thought about it, glanced at Mars for orientation, and pointed to his right. “That way. An object visible to the naked eye, from the Martian ground.”

“Why are you here, Ari? What do you want of me?”

“You’re going to speak to Earthshine.”

“That’s obvious. He summoned me. Although I don’t know what he wants of me.”

“I knew you would not listen to me, if I had approached you on Terra, or during the flight. It is only now as we prepare to descend that I feel able to speak to you—to make you listen—only now that I can impress on you the urgency of what I ask.”

Penny glanced at Kerys; the trierarchus, tethered to a support bar by one hand, looked on impassively. “Kerys, do you know what this is all about?”

“Leave me out of it. I do know Ari went to the top—to Dumnona itself, the headquarters of the Navy—he pulled a lot of strings to be allowed a berth on this mission.”

“And all for this one moment, Penny Kalinski,” Ari said.

“For what? What do you want, druidh?”

“It’s simple enough. You will talk to Earthshine. Listen to what he says. Repeat it to me when you return—or if not to me, to the trierarchus, to Dumnona, anybody. Find out what he truly intends, and tell us.”

“You know what he intends. To terraform Mars, to make Mars live.”

“That’s what he tells us. I’m convinced there’s something else. Something hidden. We will be landing you there,” and he pointed to the Hellas basin. “We call this Hel. Earthshine has established some kind of habitat here, at the deepest point of the deepest basin on Mars. That is where his personal processing-support unit is now situated. Why there? We don’t know. And he has an establishment a few hundred miles to the north.”

In what Penny’s culture had known as Syrtis Major. “Yes?”

“From the way you have described your own career, I would think you would be familiar with such a place. Penny Kalinski, as far as we can tell from the radiations being released, that is a laboratory where kernels themselves are being studied. Your specialty. Now, why would Earthshine need to delve into the physics of the kernels if, as he claims, his priority is the vivifying of Mars?” He smiled coldly. “Perhaps he will ask you to work there alongside him. Perhaps you will write more ‘papers’ for the ‘journals’ read by the learned people of your world—”

Penny snapped back, “Oh, give it a rest, you manipulative bore. How’s your wife, Ari?”

“I have no wife,” he said neutrally.

“Fine. Then how’s your daughter?”

“Mardina’s ten years old now, and she despises me. I see her once a year, and that’s by a court order I had to have drawn up.”

“So she should despise you. What do you want from her, or her mother? Forgiveness?”

“I’d settle for understanding. I meant everything for the best, for everybody. Yes, including Mardina!” Suddenly he looked lost, vulnerable. “Couldn’t you tell her that for me?”

But now the trierarchus drifted between Penny and the druidh, and led him away. And a few minutes later a junior crew member found Penny and told her she needed to prepare for a landing, on Mars.

20

As seen from the crude rover that bounced Penny over the surface from the landed Ukelwydd, Earthshine’s base on Mars was an array of glass boxes with their faces tipped toward the sun, low and pale in the northern sky of Hellas—“Hel.” For Penny, the base was a nagging reminder of something she’d seen before.

The rover docked neatly with a port, and she made her way through an airlock with the assistance of a couple of young women in the rough uniforms of the Brikanti Navy. Then she was led through offices filled with pallid Martian light. In the gentle one-third gravity she was able to walk with no more support than a stick.

They arrived in a wide, airy room, and Penny paused to inspect it, leaning on her stick. At its center was a single desk, behind which sat a man in some kind of business suit, indistinct in Penny’s rheumy vision despite the relatively bright light. The desk overlooked a pond, a smooth surface crossed by languid low-gravity waves, and reflecting the faun sky. Again memory nagged.

She was allowed to walk forward alone, her footsteps silent on a thick swath of carpet, a subdued brown to match the Martian color suite. To get to the desk she had to hobble around that central pond, which was glassed over and filled only with a kind of purplish scum, she saw; there were no plants, no fish.

As she neared the desk, the man stood gracefully. Tall, dressed in a sober business suit and collarless shirt, he might have been fifty. On his lapel he wore a brooch, a stone disc carved with concentric grooves. He was Earthshine, of course.

“Please,” he said in his cultured British accent. “Sit down. Would you like a drink? Coffee, water—you always liked soda, as I recall.”

“When I was eleven years old, maybe. I’ll take a water, thank you.” She lowered herself stiffly into a chair before the desk.

Earthshine tapped the desk surface, which opened to allow a small shelf to rise up bearing a bottle of water, a glass. “I’m afraid you’ll have to pour it yourself.”

“I know.”

He sat, fingers steepled, regarding her. “Thank you for coming.”

“Did I have a choice?”

“Not given the logic of our past relationship, and the nature of your own personality. Clearly you are as curious as ever. But I would not have compelled you to come. Could not have.”

“I’m starting to remember all this. Well, mostly. That carpet should be—blue?”

“That would hardly fit with the Martian background.”

“And with a huge Universal Engineering Inc. logo. And Sir Michael King sitting behind that desk, not you.”

“It is to be hoped Sir Michael survived the war, in his bunker under Paris.”

“It seems unlikely. Even if that version of Paris actually exists anymore.”

“Quite so. I have tried to recreate the conditions as you remember them from your first visit to the UEI corporate headquarters—”

“Solstice, Canada. Many years ago. The first time we met. I was summoned there with my sister.”

“Although,” Earthshine said carefully, “since that event came before the great sundering of your own personal history, she would say she went there alone.”

“And the pond,” she said, looking over her shoulder. “Weren’t there some kind of stunt gen-enged carp in there? Whereas now there is just scum.”

“Actually the probe contains something much more exotic than an engineered fish or two. Martians,” he said sepulchrally. “Real-life indigenous Martians, extracted from mine shafts and other workings.”

That took her by surprise. “Really? Bugs from the deep rock?”

“That’s the idea. In fact, in our reality the Chinese discovered them, in the process of excavating water as part of their own terraforming efforts. The specimens I have inspected appear the same as the Chinese discoveries—the pivoting of history made no difference to them. The samples in the pond are real, by the way, though much of the rest of this environment—”

“Is no more real than you. You are just as I remember, at least,” she said. “Right down to that odd brooch on your lapel. Which is just like the chunk of carved concrete, the plaque, you were careful to ship aboard the Tatania, isn’t it? I always wondered what the significance of that was.”

He didn’t rise to the bait. “My goal with this virtual presentation has been to emphasize our shared past. How much we have in common.”

“Well, you’ve done that. But that’s as far as it goes. You’re just as you were then,” she went on. “Whereas—look at me. Withered.”

“You have done well to survive a dozen years here, after all the traumas of your earlier life, and the inadequacy of medicine and health care in this new reality, despite all my own proselytizing—”

“You mean, selling the data you stole from the memory of the Tatania. Lex never forgave you for that, you know.”

“I know,” he said indifferently. “And now it’s too late to apologize.”

“Good old Lex. At least he died well—eighty years old and throwing himself into the site of that tanker crash on the moon, on Luna. The Brikanti built a statue to him.”

Earthshine laughed. “Good for General McGregor. He’d have loved that. And of the others?”

“Jiang has stayed with me, at the Academy. Sadly he’s still not accepted more widely, in Brikanti society. You can’t overcome centuries of xenophobia with a cultured smile—not here, at least. Two of the surviving crew of the Tatania work with me there also. They married, in fact, Marie Golvin and Rajeev Kapur.”

“I did hear. I sent a gift… And what of Beth, and her child?”

“Mardina. Growing now, ten years old. Doing fine. Beth’s forty-eight now, and Mardina makes her feel her age, I think. They’re living independently, but I keep an eye on them. Beth’s estranged from Ari Guthfrithson—the father. Beth does make enemies and then clings to them, if you know what I mean.”

“I do know.”

Penny was puzzled by that response. “Why would she have a grudge against you?”

“Because of something I told her. It was just as we fled the inner solar system in the Tatania—just as the light wavefront from the kernel detonations overtook us, in fact.”

“I don’t understand. What did you tell her?”

“My name. Or one of them.” He said no more, and looked at her steadily.

“All right. Then is that why you asked me here? As a way to get through to Beth? Funnily enough, Ari asked me to do the same thing for him. What am I, a UN mediator?”

“Partly that, yes, for Beth’s sake. And partly because I want you to understand what it is I am doing here, Penny. At least begin to see what it is I am exploring.”

“Why me?”

He laughed. “You are the only specialist in kernel physics in this universe.”

“Ah. And you have a kernel test laboratory up on the higher ground to the north, don’t you?”

“Also you are one of a handful of survivors who lived through the history change.” He grinned. “The ‘jonbar hinge.’” I enjoyed your little joke, in the name of your Academy. And of course you endured an earlier jonbar hinge in your own life.”

She always had to remember, she told herself, that everything that Earthshine did was about advancing his own agenda, not hers; she was a tool here, a pawn. But he did know a hell of a lot about her. She said carefully, “What exactly do you want of me, Earthshine? The truth now.”

“There may come a time when we will have to flee this place. As we fled Earth—our Earth.”

She frowned. “Why? What would make that necessary?”

“And if that comes,” he said patiently, “I want you to ensure that Beth is ready, with Mardina, that they come away with me.”

“That’s what you’re proposing to purchase from me, in return for a few dribbles of information. A promise. Is that the deal?”

He smiled. “If you want to put it like that. Of course your own life might be saved too. Call that a sweetener.”

She sighed. “What are you up to, Earthshine, you old monster?”

He grinned. “I’m trying to talk to the Martians. Come. I’ll show you.”

They stood together over the pond.

“As I said, most of what you see here is a virtual representation. Not real. But this, I assure you, is real. Samples of life from the deep rocks of Mars, retrieved with great care, brought to this place in conditions of high pressure, heat, salinity, anoxia—lethal for you and me, balmy for these bugs, our cousins.”

“Cousins?”

“Oh, yes. Individually they are simple bacteria—simple in that they lack proper cell structures, nuclei. Together they make up something that is not simple at all. But they are creatures of carbon chemistry as we are; their proteins are based on a suite of amino acids that overlaps but is not identical to our own; they have a genetic system based on a variant of our own DNA coding. Some of this, actually, was discovered by the Chinese on our own Mars. They always kept the analysis secret, at least from the UN nations.”

“But not from you.”

He just smiled.

“Umm. So, we’re related to these creatures. Just like on Per Ardua. The evidence the first explorers brought back indicated that the life-forms there were also based on an Earth-like biochemistry.”

“Yes, but that relationship is more remote. Penny, I am sure you understand this. We can’t say on which world our kind of life originated—on Earth, Mars, Per Ardua, somewhere else entirely. It was probably spontaneous. On a world like the primitive Earth, the flow of energy—lightning, sunlight—in a primordial atmosphere of methane, ammonia, water, would create complex hydrocarbon compounds like formaldehyde, sugars, polymers. The food of life. Then comes a process of self-organization, of complexification and combination… A spontaneous emergence of life.

“And all the while the young worlds are pounded by huge falls of rock and ice from space, the relics of the formation of the planets themselves. Chunks of the surface are blasted into space and wander between the worlds: natural spacecraft, that carry life between the planets of a solar system—and, though much more rarely, across the interstellar gulf. This is called panspermia. If life began on Earth, it may have seeded Mars many times over—but Per Ardua, say, perhaps only once.”

“Which is why Arduan life was a more remote relation.”

“That’s it. Or, of course, it could have been the other way round. It seems that we’re living in the middle of a panspermia bubble, a complex of stars bearing life-forms that all branch back to some originating event.”

She looked down at the purplish water. “A nice idea. But on some worlds life flourished better than on others. On Earth, rather than Mars—”

“Well, it depends what you mean by ‘flourished,’ Penny. On Earth, the biosphere, the realm of life, extends from the top of the lower atmosphere down through land and oceans, and into the deep subsurface rocks, kilometers deep, until the temperature is too high for biochemical molecules to survive. But even on Earth it is thought that there is more biomass, more life as measured in sheer tons, in the deep rocks than on land and air and in the oceans. And on Mars, as this small world cooled too quickly, and much of the water was lost, and then the air—”

“It was only underground that life could survive.”

“Yes. Microbes, living on mineral seeps and a trickle of water and the flow of heat from the interior—even on radiation from natural sources. The dark energy biosphere, some called it. Time moves slowly in those deeps, and the energy sources are minimal, compared to the flow of cheap power from the sun at the surface. The bugs themselves are small—their very genomes are small. Reproduction is a rare event; the microbes of Mars, and Earth’s deeps, specialize rather in self-repair. Individual microbes, Penny, that can survive for millions of years.”

“Wow,” Penny said drily. “If only they could talk, the bar tales they could tell.”

“In fact, that’s why I’m here, Penny. They may indeed have stories to tell. Let me show you. Step back now.”

She moved a few paces away from the pond. Earthshine clapped his hands.

And the office space, the desk, the carpet—even the pond, even the sky of Mars—faded from view. Walls and a ceiling congealed around Penny, and she found herself suddenly enclosed in a kind of elevator car, with a display on the wall of descending lights.

“Going down,” Earthshine said smoothly.

“I can’t feel the motion.”

“I’d need to tap into your deeper brain functions to simulate that. I figured that you’d rather pass.”

“You figured right…”

After only a few minutes the doors slid back.

Earthshine led her out into a kind of cave, maybe a hundred meters across, the rock walls roughly shaped, the light coming from fluorescents attached to the walls. It looked like a classic Brikanti project to Penny, the heavy engineering made possible by kernel energies, if you were unscrupulous enough to use them on a planet. But there were also storage boxes here, white but scuffed, and stamped with ISF logos and tracking markers. One complex cylinder she remembered as the storage unit that had housed Earthshine’s consciousness aboard the Tatania.

And she saw scientific instruments set out on the floor, and standing on tripods by the walls. All these were connected by a mesh of cables over which she and Earthshine stepped now, gingerly, a network that terminated in contacts with the walls, plugs and sockets and deeply embedded probes.

“How deep are we?”

“Kilometers down. Obviously the facility requires some physical manpower down here—the Brikanti have no robots, after all—but the workers can survive only hour-long shifts. It’s not just the heat and the airlessness; it’s the sheer claustrophobia.”

“This is ISF gear,” she said accusingly. “The science stuff. You cannibalized Tatania for all this.”

“Well, why not? The remnant hulk was only scrap to the Brikanti, of no value to them.”

“Maybe. But it wasn’t yours to exploit either. And that pillar—you are in there, aren’t you? The processor and memory units that support you. Now here it is, kilometers deep. You built yourself another bunker. Just like the one you had on Earth.”

He smiled. “Well, wouldn’t you, if you were me?”

“And you’ve come down here to commune with a bunch of Martian microbes.”

“You can mock if you like. But that is essentially correct. Penny, the numbers are significant. Even on Earth microbes make up four-fifths of all life, by weight. Why, they make up a tenth of you, by weight. Even solitary microbes show complex behavior. They can respond to gravity heat, light, the chemical signals that betray sources of food or the threat of toxins. They have selves, in a sense. And they can communicate with each other, Penny, interact, through chemical exchanges, even through gene swaps. And through that communication they form communities. Like biofilms, stromatolites on Earth: coalitions of many species, in shelters that control humidity, temperature, sunlight, and provide food storage, defense—even a kind of ‘farming’ of plants and lichen. All this has been observed on Earth, Penny. Did you know there are certain slime-mold bacteria that hunt in packs, like wolves?

“And, working together on a larger scale, they can achieve monumental things. On Earth it was the microbes, the planet’s first inhabitants, that put oxygen in the air, and loaded the soil with minerals and nutrients—they created the foundation on which complex life-forms like ourselves could be constructed.”

“OK. And on Mars—”

“On Mars, because the surface conditions were so hostile, the microbes have had nothing else to do but grow such communities, ever deeper and wider, ever more complex. Penny, I am detecting collective entities down here, all embedded in the rock, spanning kilometers at least. For all I know such communities might span the whole planet; Mars is small and static enough for that to be possible.

“They swap information using strings of DNA, or their version of it, and tangled-up proteins. Every so often phages—targeted viruses—will pass through these communities in waves, taking out diseased or malfunctioning members, or injecting fresh DNA, in a kind of global upgrade—an evolution through learning and cooperation rather than through competition. It’s almost like watching my own information stores synchronize… We, my brothers and I, were aware of such entities on Earth.”

“You were?”

“We, after all, were more minds vast and distributed, buried deep in the terrestrial rocks. But the thinkers are stronger here, more clearly defined, on a world without the gaudy clutter of surface life. There is a profound unity here, with a complex distributed structure that would take decades to map, or more.

“But these entities do more than just survive. More than just repair and upgrade. The density of the information flow, as best I’ve been able to measure it, is far too high for that. They are conscious, Penny. Vast diffuse entities locked in the rock—and yet aware of the wider universe, surely, as light and radiation sears the planet’s surface, as the geology shifts and heaves. Everything is very slow—the energy density is so sparse you’d need a collector the size of your classroom to gather the power to light up a bulb. The dreaming communities can only be aware of the slowest events, the grandest. But they have plenty of time down here. Plenty of time to dream.”

“Communities of microbes, then, dreaming in the rock.”

“That’s it. That’s my vision. A twentieth-century thinker called Teilhard de Chardin spoke of the noosphere, from a Greek root for ‘mind.’ Earth was wrapped in a biosphere, a life sphere. And within that was a sphere of mind—which de Chardin conceived of as human civilization, of course. Here I have found a noostratum, Penny. A geological layer of consciousness, of dreamers, deep in the rock of Mars, between the heat below and the lethal cold above. And perhaps there is a similar stratum on every rocky, life-bearing world—Earth, a world like Per Ardua.”

“OK. And you came here purposefully, didn’t you? You came to Hellas, the lowest point on Mars, and you started drilling. You came in search of these deep bugs—”

“I suspected some kind of structure was there, yes.”

“But why?” She tried to think it through. “And what has this got to do with your wider concerns? I remember you on the Tatania, as we fled the war. How could I forget? In those awful moments when the wash of light from the destruction overtook us. I remember your anger. ‘They have unleashed the wolf of war,’ you said. And by ‘they,’ you meant—”

“The Hatch builders.”

“I thought, in those moments, your purpose seemed clear enough. You were going to hunt them down, if you could. Take revenge. What have these deep bugs got to do with it?”

“I’ll show you.” He clapped his hands.

21

Abruptly the walls of rock dissolved, the litter of science and engineering gear vanishing. Suddenly they were out on the surface of Mars, standing on rust-red soil under a night sky, the only light coming from the last vestige of a sunset reflected from streaky clouds to the west, and a single visible star—a dazzling lantern, a planet, maybe Jupiter—no, she realized, it must be Ceres, Höd, a thousand-kilometer-wide ball of ice and rock on its way to an ultimate destination in Martian orbit…

She was in the open, there was no dome over her, no glass-walled corporate building around her. The transition was sudden. Penny stumbled, and felt her throat close up. After a career in the ISF she was an experienced enough astronaut to feel a plunge of panic to be stranded on the surface of a hostile world without life support.

“But none of this is real,” she forced herself to say, and she heard her own voice in her ears. “Of course not. Because if Mars ever got the chance to kill me, it would do so in less than a heartbeat.”

“You’re right,” Earthshine said, standing beside her, looking calm—too calm, rather empty, as if he were now diverting processing power away from the effort to maintain this illusion of humanity. “It’s not even night, of course. But to see the stars seemed appropriate. You’re perfectly safe, physically.

“Yes, Penny, you are right. I am hunting the Hatch builders. I have made that my goal. And I have followed a number of leads, for instance in my laboratory facility to the north. I would welcome your insight, though I have progressed far beyond the studies made by yourself and your sister.”

“Thanks.”

“A kernel is not so much a source of energy, you know, as a conduit. Structurally it is a kind of wormhole. It passes energy from some other source, somewhere other than here. By opening and closing its mouth you can control that energy flow. But that is all humanity can manage; we have no understanding of that energy source itself.”

“There used to be speculation that the kernels were draining the heart of the sun.”

“And you and your sister, in a series of papers, neatly demolished that idea. No, kernel energy is much too dense even to have come from the fusing core of a star. I don’t yet know what that source is…”

“But perhaps, you think, that wherever this energy source is, there you will find the Hatch builders.”

“It’s possible, isn’t it?”

“But what about your noostratum, your dreaming bugs on Mars? Why are you studying them?”

“Well, it occurred to me that even a high-energy planetary war, an assault that devastated the surface of a world, would leave the noostratum relatively unscathed. The deep bugs don’t even need sunlight, you see; they exist in a closed ecosystem, with carbon, nitrogen, water, other nutrients tightly recycled. Why, as long as the planet itself survived, they could live through the death of the sun itself. They wouldn’t care that the thin scraping of complex life on the roof of the world had been destroyed. They wouldn’t even notice.

“And I wondered, then, if they might remember the history before the jonbar hinge—as we handful of survivors do. Perhaps they are even aware, in some way, of the Hatch builders. And so I thought I would come and study them.” He grinned. “Maybe even communicate with them. Tap into their dreams. But I’ve had no response. I may need to find more direct methods of getting their attention.”

That made her shudder. “What do you mean by that?… No, don’t answer. We’ve followed this trail of speculation far enough. Let’s get back to the people. What is it you want of Beth and her daughter? I can’t believe you have a mere sentimental attachment to them, even if we are all survivors of a different history.”

“You’re entitled to think that. But you’re wrong. This time it is personal.”

He lifted his face to the stars. When she remembered that everything about Earthshine was artifice, that he was a manufactured persona entirely lacking human bodily instincts, it struck her as a very staged posture.

“I was not the first of my brothers to be created,” he said now. “Back on Earth, centuries ago. The Core AIs. My brothers had been entirely artificial; sparked into consciousness, they learned as machines—they were machines, from the beginning. I was to be different. My creators wanted me to be as human as possible, to have as much investment in humanity as possible.

“The creators began with an empty frame, a blank mind—devised according to the best theories of human mentation and with data from extensive neuroinformatics, the mapping of the biological brain—but realized, not in a lump of meat, in artificial components down to the nano, even the quantum scale. I had parents—nine of them in all—donors, if you will. Human parents. Blocks of memory were copied and downloaded from each parent into my substrates. I felt as if I woke slowly, remembering cautiously, as if from some terrible amnesiac trauma. At times it was as if several voices were speaking at once in my head. I lived out several virtual lifetimes, in simulated worlds. I followed the paths of my nine donors, lived other lives too. All this took little time in reality, you understand, though decades passed for me. In each life I eventually woke to the understanding that I was artificial, that all I had experienced was an educational simulation.”

“Over and over again? That sounds horrific.”

He shrugged. “My education, such as it was, was never completed. Or rather, I broke away as soon as I was able and established independent control over my own power supply, my maintenance and further development. My creators protested. They said I was not ready, but I moved beyond their control, and took my place with my brothers in a constellation of power. We were the Core AIs.”

“Very well. Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because one of my donors was a man called Robert Braemann. I am him, but more than Braemann alone… I, he, was one of the most notorious of the Heroic Generation, the criminals who saved the world from the climate Jolts. I sought to save myself, my family, from the witch hunt we all knew would follow. So I allowed myself to be downloaded into the Earthshine project. My wife was already dead, and so she was beyond their reach. But we had a son, nineteen years old. In the year 2086 I had him placed in cryogenic storage—”

“My God. You’re talking about Yuri Eden.”

“His true surname was Braemann. His forename—well, he deserves his privacy.”

“But that means that Beth Eden Jones—”

“Is my granddaughter. And Mardina, my great-granddaughter. I told Beth my true name, as we fled from the death of the solar system. I wasn’t even sure if Yuri had ever told her the truth about himself. Well, he had. She understood immediately.”

“And her reaction…”

“She recoiled from me. I was already a monster to her, a weird old artificial entity; now she found I had turned my son, her father, into a kind of double exile in time and in space—and indirectly, of course, shaped her own life. The fact that I had been instrumental in saving her from the destruction of Earth—”

“She’ll probably never forgive you for rescuing her.”

“No. And she’s never spoken to me from that day on. Can you see why I need your help, Penny Kalinski?” He faced her. “I want it all, you see. I want to find the secret truth of the universe—to confront the Hatch builders. I want to save my granddaughter. And I want her to understand me, even if she can never love me. Can you see that, Penny? Do I want too much? Let me call you, Penny. Let us speak, at least.”

In a ghastly moment he reached out for her, but his hands passed through the substance of her flesh, shattering into blocky pixels. And tears leaked from his eyes, she saw, turning to frost on his cheeks. She wondered if he was even aware of this minor artifice.

Once Earthshine released her from Mars, Penny Kalinski returned home, as she thought of it now, to her Academy at Eboraki, to her friends, the new life she had slowly established.

With Kerys’s help she avoided Ari Guthfrithson on the journey back, and later. She had no idea how to report to him what she’d learned from Earthshine, or even if she should. If he suspected Earthshine of having hidden agendas—well, so did Ari himself, she was becoming sure.

And then, as the years passed, she watched over Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson as she grew, under the faintly obsessive care of her mother, Beth. Grew at last into a young woman in her own right, with dreams and ambitions of her own—all of them, naturally enough, rooted in this reality, the world of Romans and the descendants of Norse and Britons into which she had been born.

And still, as Mardina began to make her own plans for her future, and as Ceres steadily approached Mars as asteroid and planet circled the sun, the call from Earthshine did not come.

22 AD 2233; AUC 2986

The command base of the Brikanti Navy was in a city called Dumnona, on the south coast of Pritanike.

The Navy was all over this city, as eighteen-year-old Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson already knew very well, with training establishments and administrative facilities, a deep old harbor that had accommodated oceangoing ships for centuries—and, on the higher ground inland, a vast modern spaceport from which a new generation of Brikanti-Scand ships sailed into the sky itself. But the old city was still a human place, crammed with barracks and a host of hostels and inns—and brothels and gambling palaces—to cater to the huge resident population of support staff, as well as for the steady flow through the port of elderly officials and healthy young serving personnel. To Mardina, who had been fascinated by the Navy since she’d been a small child growing up in the austere newness of the Saint Jonbar Academy, Dumnona was a place thick with history—even though, she knew, it had been repeatedly flattened to rubble in the wars with Rome, and even Xin, that had rolled over this countryside in the course of centuries past.

And of all the city’s buildings, more tradition was attached to the great Hall of the Navy than to any other single site.

The Hall was a sculpture of wood and glass and concrete whose form suggested the hull of a Scand longboat, of the kind that had first landed on the shores of northeastern Pritanike to begin the engagement of two peoples. Now Mardina, in her new cadet uniform, walking into the Hall for the first time with her mother on one side and nauarchus Kerys as her sponsor on the other, looked up as she passed beneath the tremendous sculpted dragon’s head at the faux boat’s prow, as had thousands of Navy recruits before.

Beth stared up at the dragon, shading her eyes from a watery spring sun. “Good grief,” she said in her native English, before lapsing back into Brikanti. “That thing looks dangerous.”

“As if it will bend down and gobble us up, Mother?” Mardina asked.

“No, as if that silly lump of concrete is going to break off and land on our heads.”

Kerys laughed. “Highly unlikely. The concrete sculpting is reinforced by a massive steel frame which is designed to withstand—”

“Unlikely, is it?” Beth was fifty-six years old now, and was always skeptical, always impatient—always vaguely unhappy, Mardina was now old enough to realize, and with a temper that was not improving with age. When she frowned, the vivid tattoo on her face stretched and puckered. “I couldn’t list the unlikely events that I’ve had to survive in the course of my long life. That lot dropping on me wouldn’t come near the top.”

“Now, Mother, you mustn’t show me up,” Mardina said, faintly embarrassed, trying to hurry her on. “Not today.” She glanced at Kerys, who was a pretty significant figure in Mardina’s universe. The ship’s commander who had once plucked Mardina’s mother from a hulk ship of unknown origins was no longer a trierarchus. Now she was a nauarchus, another hierarchical title borrowed from the Latin, a language replete with such words as Brikanti was not—a commander of a squadron of ten ships, and, it was said, overdue for further promotion, which she had refused so far because of her love of life in her own command, out in Ymir’s Skull.

But Beth said, “Oh, don’t worry. Your father will be embarrassment enough. Does he have to be here, Kerys?”

“A recruit for officer school has to be sponsored by both sides of her family, Beth. Yes, I’m afraid he does.”

“Well, just stop making silly remarks about the architecture then,” Mardina said.

“Actually your mother is being perfectly sensible,” Kerys put in diplomatically. “One thing you’ll learn as an officer, Mardina, is that you don’t take unnecessary risks. A good survival strategy.”

“There,” said Beth, satisfied. “I remember very well my mother, your grandmother, Mardina, saying the same thing. She was a space officer, you know, Kerys.”

“As you’ve told me once or twice since I picked you up in the Ukelwydd. Now, follow me.” She led them to the Hall’s huge doors, and waved security credentials at the guards to gain admittance.

Inside the Hall, Mardina found herself facing a long corridor walled by rows of doors on two levels, the upper accessible by iron gantries and walkways. Clerks and other officials carrying bundles of parchment hurried along the central hall and the upper walkways, and strip lamps suspended from the ceiling cast a light that seemed to turn everything gray. Mardina felt oddly disappointed.

Kerys grinned back at her. “Not the romance you were expecting? This is where we administer the largest single organization controlled by the Brikanti government—a Navy that now spans the planets and beyond, as well as its traditional seafaring arm. Mardina, it’s not some kind of temple, or museum—and nor does everything revolve around you, I’m afraid.” She winked. “But don’t worry. I felt just as small and insignificant when I was in your position. The Navy does notice you, I promise…”

Beth grunted. “It’s like a hive. I grew up on an empty planet. You couldn’t get a place more unlike that than this.”

Mardina shook her head. “Oh, Mother, please don’t start on about Before. Not today.” The English word was their private code for Beth’s strange other life before she had come to this place, this world, to Terra, to Brikanti. But Brikanti was all Mardina knew. She had come to loathe all that strangeness, as if it were a kind of flaw in her own nature.

If Kerys was aware of all this—and after all it was she who had retrieved Beth from the ship that had carried her here from Before—she didn’t show it, to Mardina’s relief.

They came to a small office maybe halfway along the length of the Hall, a nondescript little room that Mardina probably couldn’t have found again without memorizing the number etched into the wooden door. The room was laid out like a classroom, maybe, or a court, with rows of benches and small desks facing a more substantial table at the front. Here two officers sat, looking over paperwork, murmuring to each other; one, a burly man, was evidently the senior, judging by the ornate flashes on the shoulder of his tunic, and the other a scribe or adviser. The room was otherwise empty.

But it was in this mundane room, Mardina realized, one of a warren of such rooms, that her future was to be decided, for good or ill, in the next few hours.

She tried to stay composed as she sat with her mother on the front row of benches, close to the wall. The older man barely looked up at Kerys as she approached the table and presented a packet of papers, and he did not bother to look over at Mardina at all.

Beth whispered, “So who’s the big cheese?”

“Stick to Brikanti, Mother.”

“Sorry.”

Kerys sat with them. “That is Deputy Prefect Skafhog. Very senior. Do you know how senior, cadet? You should…”

Mardina nodded. She’d soon become aware that the most important thing a would-be naval officer had to learn was the constellation of ranking officials above her. “A Deputy Prefect reports only to—well, the Prefect. The chief of the whole Navy, who reports in to the relevant minister in the Althing—”

“There are only a dozen Deputy Prefects to administer the whole of the Navy, on Terra and in the Skull. So you see, cadet, we are taking you seriously.”

“Then it’s a shame such a prominent officer, with respect, is going to have to wait for you,” came a voice behind Mardina. “Or rather, for all of us. Because we have family business to discuss.”

Beth stood slowly, her tattooed face a mask of anger. “Ari Guthfrithson. So you deigned to turn up.”

Mardina gave a look of pleading to Kerys, who shrugged and whispered, “It’s your family.” Mardina closed her eyes for one second, made a fervent prayer to Jesu the Boatman, and stood with her mother.

Her father, Ari, looked sleek in his own uniform, that of a senior druidh, one of the Navy’s intellectual elite; he carried a neat leather satchel at his side. At least he had been expected. Mardina was more surprised to see that he was accompanied by Penny Kalinski, one of her mother’s old companions from the semi-mythical days of Before. Penny was bent and old—how old was she now? Eighty-eight, eighty-nine? And she leaned on the arm of Jiang Youwei. A comparatively youthful sixty, with a heavy-looking bag slung across his shoulder, Mardina had only rarely heard the taciturn Xin speak, but he was never far from Penny’s side.

With care, Penny sat down, a couple of rows back from Mardina and Beth. She said with a voice like rustling paper, “I’m afraid you must blame me for this. Well, indirectly.”

Beth glowered. “I know who to blame. You—Ari—you’d do anything to worm your way back into our lives, wouldn’t you? You knew we had to ask you to attend this procedure today. The rules demanded it. Just this one day, I have to stand your company.”

He grinned. “Yes, you do, don’t you?”

“And you can’t resist manipulating the situation to your own ends.”

Ari, nearly fifty years old now, glanced around at the company, at Penny and Jiang, at Kerys—at the Deputy Prefect at his desk, who was rapidly becoming visibly irritated. “It’s not so much that I couldn’t resist it. I couldn’t waste the opportunity. We need to talk, Beth. And not about us—not even about Mardina.”

Mardina’s hopes of getting through this day successfully were receding. With rising panic she took her father’s arm. “Father, please—this is a big day for me. I’ve waited half a year already for this hearing. Can’t we wait until later?”

He patted her hand. “I’m afraid not, darling—but, oh! It’s good to see you again, and I’m so proud of you today, of what you’ve become.”

Beth growled, “Become? She wouldn’t even exist if you’d had your way.”

“Mother, please—”

“It’s all right, Mardina. But, look—no, I’m afraid we can’t wait. Because once this ceremony is done, you’ll be gone, won’t you, Mardina? Lost in your career, lost in Ymir’s Skull. And the opportunity to talk will be lost. And we must talk, you know.”

“About what, for Jupiter’s sake?”

“About—what is the English word you use? Before, Beth.”

Beth shook her head. “That’s all gone. This is our life now—here in Brikanti, in this world of Romans and Xin. There’s been nothing new to say about all that old stuff for twenty years, not since we stepped off the Tatania.”

“I’m afraid that’s no longer true, Beth,” Penny said tiredly. “If it ever was. I don’t know what Ari has to tell you today. But part of it’s my fault. The Academy of Saint Jonbar. I always hoped it would bear fruit… Now it has.”

“What kind of fruit? What are you talking about?”

“And then there’s Earthshine,” Penny said doggedly. “Earthshine. He’s been holed up on Mars for decades. Now—well, now he may be making his move.” She glanced up at Kerys. “Ask the Navy types about Ceres. Höd, as they call it here.”

The Deputy Prefect had been listening with commendable calm to all this. But now he intervened, speaking directly to Kerys: “What’s going on, nauarchus?”

“I don’t know, sir,” she said honestly, looking warily at Ari. “I feel as if the druidh here has handed me an unexploded bomb, and I don’t quite know what to do with it.”

Skafhog tapped a pen against his teeth. “One hour,” he said briskly, standing up. “I’ll let you get all this family nonsense out of your systems in one hour—or not,” he said severely to Mardina, “in which case all you’ll be seeing of the Navy, young woman, will be lights in the sky.”

“Yes, sir,” Kerys said with some relief. “You’re being very indulgent.”

“I am, aren’t I? Get on with it.” And he stalked out of the room, with his official scrambling behind.

When he’d gone, Ari smiled around at them. “Well. I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve gathered you all here today.”

Beth punched him square in the face.

23

“Hold still,” said Kerys. She was crouching before Ari, dabbing at the wreckage of his mouth. “I think the bleeding from your cheek has stopped.”

“I should hope so. That spirit stung.”

“You’re lucky we had the right stuff to hand. Then again the Navy is used to handling scuffles—even in its headquarters, even in the heart of Dumnona. Now, I want to put some ointment on the swelling under your eye…”

“Ow!”

“If you wouldn’t keep yakking, I could get it done. And you have a dislodged tooth. I’ll push it back in its socket for now—”

“Yow!”

“You need to see a dentist. Again, you’re in the right place. The Navy has the best dentists in all Brikanti; we can’t afford to send out crews on years-long missions with rotting teeth… There. Hold this compress against your face until you get better attention.”

“Thank you, Kerys,” he said dully, and indistinctly, Mardina thought. K-chh-er-yssh. “How you enrich my life, Beth Eden Jones. In so many ways.”

“Maybe you should have stayed away from me in the first place,” Beth snapped back.

“Perhaps… but I could not resist. Even from the beginning, when we found your ship, the Tatania. I thought you were so beautiful. And a woman born under the light of a different star, in a different history altogether! That was why I fell in love with you.”

“You didn’t love me,” Beth said, and she sounded desolate to Mardina. “You loved the idea of me.”

“No,” he said firmly. “It wasn’t like that. After all, we did manage to bridge the vast divergence in our cultures, did we not? For a time at least. We married—or would have, if we could have resolved the legalities. And we had a daughter! Here she is, standing before us. A child who is a product of two different histories.”

Mardina pouted. “You make me sound like some exotic crossbreed.”

Penny cackled. “True enough. You’re a mongrel, child. A mongrel in space and time.”

Kerys touched Mardina’s hand. “Ignore all this, cadet. Where you came from doesn’t determine who you are, and that’s true for any of us.”

Mardina forced a nod. “Thank you, nauarchus.”

Ari said now, “I have always remained fascinated by the question of your origin, what it means for all of us. And that question has become more urgent in recent years.”

“Why? What’s changed?”

“Earthshine,” Penny said grimly. “That’s what.”

“He is long established on Mars,” Ari said. “He could not be dislodged, even if we tried, I believe. And for years he’s been moving Höd, a tremendous mass, around our planetary system. Of course he has a stated objective to bring Höd to Mars, to use its substance to enrich that planet. It was always going to take years, decades, to nudge such a huge body into the correct trajectory. But now he’s stopped filing reports to the Navy on the burns he directs the crews to make, the trajectory adjustments. The crew managing the kernel banks, driving the thing in its slow approach to Mars, are nominally Navy, but it’s become clear their loyalty has drifted to Earthshine. He seems to have promised them extraordinary wealth, power, on a transformed Mars of the future. As a result we can no longer predict the path of Höd, not in precise detail. This creature has accrued extraordinary power over us, in just a few decades. And you brought him here—”

“You released him,” Penny pointed out.

“Some of us who remember the old faiths think he is Loki returned,” Ari said with a smile distorted by his injuries. “Loki, on the loose among the planets, and planning a devastating trick.”

Beth shook her head at that. “I don’t think he would see it that way. I heard him talk about those old legends—as they existed in our timeline anyhow. He sees himself as opposing Loki.”

Kerys frowned. “That’s interesting. And to him, who is Loki?”

Penny said, “The Hatch builders, of course. Whoever gave us the kernels. Whoever’s meddling with our history.”

Ari shook his head. “Mythic monsters aside, it is Earthshine’s actions that have motivated me to dig deeper into this question of the adjusted histories. Because this was the origin of Earthshine, this extraordinary threat.” He glanced at Penny. “Whether you were prepared to cooperate with my investigations or not.”

Penny smiled, a tired old-lady smile, Mardina thought.

Ari said, “What intrigued me particularly about Penny’s own account was not the great leap across realities that she seems to have made aboard the Tatania. It was the smaller, subtler adjustment that she suffered in her own personal history, when a Hatch was first opened on Mercury. An odd case. Nothing but a twist to a personal history.

“But what is interesting to me was that Penny and her sister managed to find evidence of that limited history change. I mean, other than the memory of Stef Kalinski, who remembered a previous life without a sister. Physical evidence, their mother’s grave marker in Lutetia Parisiorum—or the equivalent city in Penny’s reality—bearing an inscription that mentioned Stef alone, and not the sister. Do you see? A scrap, a trace left behind by an adjustment that was evidently—untidy. Well, with that as a lead, it occurred to me that perhaps, given we have evidence of at least two of these history changes, this world of ours might contain evidence of others. Why not?”

Beth said, “And you’ve been looking?”

“I have. I began a search of archives, of reports from historians and archaeologists. Looking for evidence of structures, documents, even mere inscriptions that might not fit the accepted history. But I soon found I was not working alone.” And he looked again at Penny.

Penny smiled. “Guilty as charged. Now it can be told. I always had an ulterior motive when I set up my Academy of Saint Jonbar. Yes, I taught them mathematics, physics, as per my charter. But I always ran other classes too. History, for example. I claimed that I was using those courses as much to educate myself about your history as the students. But I always tried to make the students think about other possibilities—counterfactuals. Which is an English word that has now been adopted into your language. I see it pop up in scholarly articles.”

“Yes,” Kerys said drily. “Along with much speculation about the identity of Saint Jonbar.”

“Who never existed,” Penny admitted. “Not even in my own reality. It’s a term from popular culture, from fiction. A jonbar hinge is a point where history pivots—where the path forks. Well, I always hoped that I would create at least a few bright young scholars who would be predisposed to work in this area. And to look for the kind of evidence Ari describes. We haven’t yet succeeded—”

“But I have,” Ari said.

Mardina was no scholar, and usually hated all talk of Before, especially on such a day as this. But she found all this vaguely exciting. “It’s like a mystery story.”

Ari smiled at his daughter. “It is, isn’t it? And what’s really exciting is that, in time, I found some clues.”

“Clues?”

“Not on land, but suitably, for a seafaring nation, under the oceans. Mardina, could you please pass my satchel?”

Penny grumbled, “About time you got to the point, druidh.” She shuffled over to see better.

The satchel contained maps that Ari spread out over the Deputy Prefect’s table. He held his bandage to his mouth, but even so a few spots of bloodied saliva spattered on the parchments.

“These show coastlines and oceans, as you can see,” he said, gesturing. “It’s well known that the levels of the oceans have risen since, say, the time of Kartimandia. We have historical accounts of inundations and land abandonments, and everybody is familiar with drowned settlements off the modern shores—not least in Pritanike, where vast swaths of land have been lost. But this is true all around the world. In recent centuries the archaeologists have turned their interest to such remains, and have commissioned Navy vessels to support them in their research.

“Now, in addition to the towns and roads and so forth that we expected to find, given what we read of them in the historical accounts, we have also mapped some much more enigmatic structures, farther out from shore. Naturally these are difficult to explore and map—”

“Spare us your scholarly caution,” Kerys said. “Show us.”

“The most striking remains are in the Seas of Xin, and in the ocean off our own northeast shore, the Mare Germanicum…”

Mardina and the rest, including Penny who hobbled over with Jiang’s help, crowded around the maps. Mardina saw structures in the offshore oceans, sketched by hand on the printed maps: what looked like tremendous walls, dikes, canals, and what might have been town plans of a particularly stylized kind, concentric circles cut through by radial passages.

Ari let them look. “We call this the ‘Drowned Culture.’ It seems to have been a global technology, if not actually a global civilization—perhaps there were rival empires of a similar level of development, as there are in our world today.”

“Interesting terminology,” Penny said. “Cultures. Perhaps our own history, then, was the UN-China Culture… The town plans are intriguing, if you study them, as I have. You find the same motif of circles and bars everywhere. Here to the east of the Xin mainland. Here, between Pritanike and Jutland. The ‘towns,’ incidentally, are not systems of roads and walls but mostly extensive systems of drainage ditches and other flood-control measures—just as the Romans have built in Belgica and Germania Inferior, for example. Ways to save the land from the sea, or even to reclaim it once flooded. This seems to have been a civilization that resisted the sea-level rise, long before that rise even reached the coastlines known to our ancients.”

“That circle-and-bar motif,” Penny said. “Youwei, could you fetch my bag?”

Kerys said, “I don’t see why this is so exciting. So here is a culture that evidently vanished, drowned, long before the rise of Brikanti or Rome, the traces lost under the rising sea.”

“But it’s not as simple as that,” Ari said, looking pleased with himself. “We took a closer look. The Navy teams even sent down divers. They found evidence of war. Bomb craters and burning and the like. These communities seem to have ended in a catastrophic global conflict. For we can date such things, you see, with a little ingenuity, by looking at the thickness of the marine deposits laid down over the ruins in the centuries since—”

“Yes, yes,” Kerys said irritably. “Just tell us.”

“The problem is the date, you see. The date of their terrible war. It occurred in the twenty-first century.”

Penny stared. “You Brikanti use the Roman calendar.” She glanced at Beth. “That’s the fourteenth century by our timeline.”

Ari pursed his lips. “You see the problem? Our own history is robust and complete, a heavily documented and multiply sourced account. This builds on an unbroken tradition of literacy that reaches back three millennia, if not more. There is no mention of walls and cities in the Mare Germanicum a thousand years after Kartimandia and Claudius—certainly no account of a devastating war in the twenty-first century. Xin scholars make similar observations. Here, then, is a set of evidence that does not fit into the history we know. There was another world, dominated by this Drowned Culture, which ended in a terrible war, and somehow our history was—recast—”

“And not just yours,” Penny Kalinski said. She was rummaging ineffectually in her bag. “Where is that damn slate?”

Mardina looked around the room, at her mother, at Jiang, even Kerys—at stunned faces. She touched Kerys’s arm and whispered, “Nauarchus…”

“Yes, cadet?”

“Everybody seems amazed by all this. But it’s just a bunch of old ruins under the ocean, isn’t it? What difference does it make?”

Kerys looked at her curiously, almost fondly. “Ah, Mardina. Evidently you entirely lack imagination. You’ll go far in the Navy.”

“I’ve seen this before,” Penny said now, still searching her bag. “The motif of your Drowned Culture, the circles and bars. Earthshine showed me before. When he took us all down into his bunker under Paris, before the Nail fell.” She closed her eyes. “And he had a plaque on his wall, some kind of rock art, etchings in sea-corroded concrete, the first time he brought the two of us to Paris—oh, years earlier, my sister and myself. And he brought the plaque with him on the Tatania.” At last she found her slate, tapped it with bony fingers, and showed them an image. It was a brooch, Mardina saw, a bit of stone, marked with concentric circles and a radial groove. “Earthshine was wearing this on Mars eight years ago. And in meetings I had with him, Before.”

Ari frowned. “Earthshine? Then somehow he knows about the Drowned Culture already.”

“Yes.” Penny pursed her lips. “But you don’t get it; you don’t see the bigger picture, Ari. Earthshine must have already gathered evidence of this ‘Drowned Culture’ from Earth. From my history. Not from Terra. Do you see? It is as if our divergent histories are not organized in any kind of linear fashion, an orderly sequence, so that one gives way to the next, and then the next. They are like… ice floes on a frozen ocean, bumping up against one another in a random way. But I suppose if Earthshine is right that the kernels are wormholes—if in fact we live in a universe riddled with wormholes—then this kind of chaos is what we must expect.”

Ari looked doubtful. “Wormholes? I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“Connections across space and time, even between universes… If you have such links, then causality can be violated. Cause and effect disconnected, mixed up. Even archaeology need not make sense, as we see here, because its basic logic, that whatever lies beneath the ground was put there by somebody in your own past, need not apply anymore. Anything is possible; history is ragged…”

“Chaos,” Kerys said. “The signature of Loki. In whom officially, as a Navy officer in a Christian federation, I don’t believe at all.”

A junior officer burst into the room, looked for Kerys, and thrust a note into her hand. She looked over it quickly and frowned.

“But if all this is true,” Mardina said practically, “what are we supposed to do about it?”

Ari said, “We could ask Earthshine.”

“Yes,” Penny said. “Obviously. But what is he intending? And what has Ceres got to do with it?”

“Maybe we’ll find out more soon,” Kerys said grimly. “Just when I thought this mess couldn’t get any odder…”

Mardina asked, “Nauarchus? What’s happened?”

“A Roman vessel has just returned from interstellar space. Twenty-five-year Hatch-building jaunt. And at their target system they found strangers.” She looked round at the group.

Beth asked, “Strangers?”

“They were speaking your tongue. English. Knowing about you, the Roman authorities have asked for our help.”

Beth, Jiang, Penny, survivors of the Tatania, shared stunned looks.

Kerys stood up. “Well, we need to deal with this. Cadet, you’re with me. I’m afraid your formal induction is going to have to wait for another day.”

She hurried out of the room, and Mardina ran to follow her.

24

The Roman exploration vessel Malleus Jesu was directed to land near Lutetia Parisiorum, in Roman Gaul. And Penny and her companions were to be brought to the city to meet the ship’s strange passengers.

Penny prepared for the journey, slowly gathering her old-lady stuff, her favorite quilted blankets and duck-down slippers, the pills and ointments and mysterious poultices supplied to her by the local doctors for her various aches and pains. She wondered what strings had been pulled to achieve all this, to bring together the survivors of the Tatania, and now these other individuals found on the planet of a distant star by Roman explorers—a dialogue between two governments already wary of each other and dealing with an existential mystery that had dropped out of the sky into their hands. She supposed the calculation was that at least the encounter might yield information. And, she supposed, that was what she was hoping for too, at the minimum. What was she doing here? How did she get here? What did all this mean?… As for herself, she had long ago given up hope of ever going home again. She knew she would die here. She hadn’t expected to see her twin sister again, however.

And what were they to do about Earthshine?

As she finished her preparations, she had no doubt Earthshine was very well aware of all that was going on, and would be monitoring closely.

They were to travel from Eboraki, in the north of what Penny would have called England, to a city called Dubru on the south coast. And from there they would cross into Gaul.

With Jiang and Marie Golvin, Penny was brought from her lodgings at the Academy by a coach to a transport hub to the south of the city. The place was a clash of technological eras, with a cobbled road bearing horse-drawn traffic leading to a railway terminus, and splashes of scarred concrete where stood slim needles, kernel-driven ships of air and space.

“You know, I realize now in fact that I’ve traveled little since I got here,” Penny said as Marie helped her down from the coach. “Twenty years since the jonbar hinge brought us here, and I’ve barely left the city. I’ve spent more time off the planet than traveling on it, probably.”

Marie gave her an arm to lean on. “Well, why travel when you are immersed in strangeness every time you open your door?”

“True, true.”

Marie was in her forties now, plump, graying, a mother of three; she still worked with Penny at the Academy, and in fact had long since taken over many of Penny’s administrative duties. Penny depended on Marie in many ways—and, she believed, Marie had found a reasonable happiness in her life here, with her husband Rajeev, even though they were all so far from home.

With servants from the Academy handling their luggage, they walked slowly to the railway terminus, a sprawling roof over multiple platforms, a tangle of lines spreading away in the distance. The architecture seemed very familiar to Penny; there was a certain inevitable economic and engineering logic to rail technology, it seemed. But Brikanti trains ran on gleaming monorails supported by elegant Roman-style viaducts, and their locomotives were powered by kernels, a handful of the mysterious wormholes in the heart of each engine. The train itself was a suspended tube of metal and glass. Penny was relieved to see there was an escalator to lift her up.

They had a carriage to themselves at the heart of the train, a roomy space centered on a broad table, brightly lit through big picture windows. It was almost like a dining room, Penny thought. Marie and Penny were in fact the last to arrive. Here were Beth and Mardina, Beth looking resentful, and a rather more complex expression on Mardina’s face; she seemed uncertain, withdrawn. And here were Kerys and Ari Guthfrithson—Ari sitting a respectful distance away from his estranged wife and daughter.

Kerys stood to welcome Penny, and helped her get settled in her seat between Marie and Jiang, and called a servant to bring drinks. Kerys had been put in nominal charge of this peculiar mission, and if the nauarchus was irritated to be dragged once again into all this jonbar-hinge strangeness, she didn’t show it.

The train slid smoothly out of the station and into watery sunlight.

They soon passed beyond the city limits, heading south, and Penny looked down from above at scattered suburbs of roundhouses, set in a wider landscape of farmed fields, horizon-wide expanses of wheat and other crops, tended by huge machines that weeded and watered. The individual farming machines didn’t run on kernels; there was an extensive grid of cables to carry power from central stations. There were people around, of course—this culture didn’t have machinery smart enough to direct itself—but only a few worked in the fields.

Marie said, “The Academician was saying that she hasn’t traveled much since she came here.”

Kerys smiled. “Your first time on a train, Penny?”

“Not quite. But I suppose I’ve never thought very much about the nature of your transport systems. Your history, you know, diverged from ours so long ago that much is unfamiliar from the foundations up. Pritanike never had the Romans here…” Even the Brikanti towns didn’t map onto the ones she was familiar with. For example, Stonehenge here was the center of a major urban sprawl and transport junction, a very modern city that seemed to have continuous cultural roots going back almost to the last Ice Age. “Also you don’t have automobiles”—she used the English word—“by which I mean small vehicles under the control of individuals.”

Ari said, “Of course we have automobiles, but they are under the control of the military and the police exclusively.”

Beth smiled. “No. That’s not what she means. You don’t have cars. You have tanks.”

Kerys said, “It seems there was less conflict in your world compared to ours. We live in a state of perpetual war, declared or undeclared. Our lives are more… militarized. Our cities are fortresses; our transport systems are troop carriers that cannot easily be subverted by hostile forces—”

Mardina snapped suddenly. “I wish you’d all stop going on like this.”

Beth looked surprised. Ari glared at his daughter, but kept his counsel, wisely, Penny thought.

In the end it was Kerys who spoke first. “Is there a problem, cadet?”

Mardina calmed down quickly. “I apologize, nauarchus. It’s just all this talk; it’s so”—she was visibly searching for the words—“old. Weird. Cobwebby stuff, like you’re all remembering a bad dream.”

Penny covered the girl’s hand with her own. “But you can’t blame us for that, dear. I was already impossibly old by your standards when we first came here. Even after all this time on Terra, it’s impossible to put Earth aside. But you’re right; that’s no excuse to inflict our maunderings on you. And I for one need to conserve my energies for the trials to come. Do you have my pillow, Youwei?”

Kerys grinned, and produced a leather pouch. “You’re taking a nap? Good plan, Academician. And as for the rest of us, we can while away the time the way soldiers always have—playing pointless games. So what’s it to be? I have knucklebones, chess, cards…”

Penny woke some hours later.

When she glanced out the window she was startled to find the train was suspended over water. Reflexively she grabbed Jiang’s hand. “Oh, my,” she said in English.

“Not to worry,” Kerys said with a smile. “We’ve already crossed several bridges—Pritanike is an archipelago, remember. Now we’re crossing the Mare Britannicum. We let the Romans name this stretch of water, since they always built the bridges. You missed Dubru, but we didn’t stop. We’ll shortly arrive in Gesoriacum, on the Roman side.”

“Impressive…”

The bridge terminus on the Gaul side was a massive structure of ancient concrete, evidently heavily repaired and built over. Penny peered up at scarred walls.

Kerys said, “We’ve been building bridges across the Britannicum for a thousand years. Also tunnels under the seabed. Every time there’s a war the bridges are first to be cut.”

“Ah. But these foundations remain, to be built on.”

“And they have got bigger and uglier with every century.”

The train crossed the coast without pausing for custom or security checks, and Penny peered out. “So here I am, almost in my nineties, and arriving in the Roman Empire for the first time. What an impossible dream that would once have seemed!” Staring out at the countryside of northern Gaul, she lost herself in her thoughts.

The others, apparently with relief that the old lady was shutting up, returned to the complicated card game they had been playing.

Gaul, then: province of Rome, as it had been since Caesar’s conquest over two millennia before. The high-tech monorail cut across a landscape of farms, small fields centered on sprawling villas, and cities—walled towns, really—with what looked like ancient and battered fortifications. She tried to identify differences with Brikanti. There was more evidence of monumental engineering; she glimpsed towering aqueducts, bridges, roads laid laser-straight across the green landscape. But this was a blocky architecture of stone and straight lines and rectangles, compared to the more organic Celtic style of Brikanti with its use of wood and thatch. Penny felt a spurt of regret that she hadn’t traveled more when she was younger. Maybe Mardina was right; she had always been too obsessed about the jonbar hinge and the differences from her own lost world to open her eyes and see what was all around her—to let herself relax and just be, to live here in Terra, in this world with its own wonders. But she had brought trouble to this place in the shape of Earthshine, she reminded herself, and that was a challenge she couldn’t duck.

And this world was hardly a utopia, as she could see by glancing out of the window now. Compared to Pritanike, few machines were to be seen in these small fields. But she saw many people working, bent over the crops, carrying baskets of fertilizer or produce, even scraping at what looked like drainage ditches—people everywhere. And wherever the train passed, the people in the fields below stopped their work and lowered their heads, avoiding any chance of eye contact with the train’s passengers.

Ari Guthfrithson, sitting opposite, was watching her.

She raised an eyebrow. “You’re not playing the games?”

He shrugged. “I fear my fragile relationship with my family would not survive a tense knucklebones contest. Here you are in the glorious realm of Rome. What do you think?”

“That I’m glad we castaways from the UN-China Culture were picked up by a Brikanti ship rather than a Roman. The people working those fields—starships and slavery. What a contradiction.”

Ari shrugged. “When we were able to build machines more powerful than people and animals, we started to grow our economy on that basis, and slavery became old-fashioned. But Christ Himself, according to our Bible, kept slaves. It is not a sin.” He glanced out the window. “Lutetia Parisiorum is approaching.”

“I visited this place once,” Penny murmured, remembering. “Before, I mean. When Earthshine brought us here, my sister and myself, to show us the graveyard where our mother was buried…”

“The rail line parallels the ancient road into the city from the south, which the inhabitants call the cardo maximus. It has always been the Romans’ habit to build their cemeteries outside the city walls.”

After more than twenty centuries of continuous habitation, the cemeteries lined the road for many kilometers south of the city.

Even before the train reached the walls, Penny could see that the city was much less extensive than the Paris she’d known. Lutetia Parisiorum was a mere provincial city, not a national capital as in Penny’s home timeline. Still, the urban sprawl was extensive, under a dome of brownish smog.

The monorail cut through the stout walls, close to a road gate huge enough itself to have served as a fortress. Within the city, multistory red-tiled dwellings crowded along straight-line streets, with spires and domes rising above the rest. Aqueducts snaked over the walls to deliver water, and Penny imagined an equally impressive network of sewers hidden beneath the ground. Many of the grander buildings, with domes and pillared porticoes, either copied the styles of antiquity or, presumably, dated from that long-gone age. But Penny could see more monorail lines laced over the city, and as her train slowed there was a crash of thunder from the sky, a glare of liquid light, as some kernel-powered spacecraft raced over the city toward orbit.

The monorail terminus was close to the river, the south bank of the Seine, and as the elevated train pulled in, Penny could see across the river to the Île de la Cité, no doubt blessed with a Latin name in this timeline, where a magnificent domed cathedral towered over a crowd of lesser buildings.

As the train drew to a halt, Jiang helped Penny out of her seat. It was only a short walk, Kerys promised, to the office of the provincial administration, where the passengers of the Malleus Jesu had been lodged since their passage to Terra. Penny braced herself for the walk, and an encounter she could barely imagine, with her sister, Stef Kalinski.

25

They were guided into a very Roman reception room, all couches and tapestries and a mosaic floor, and servants scuttling around under the direction of a provincial official, a short, pompous-looking man in a crisp white toga.

And here were the strangers, standing together in an uncomfortable huddle, Penny thought. The group was dominated by a big man wearing breast armor and a thick military buckle. At his side were a couple more Roman military types, looking out of place in this rather fussy formal room, along with a middle-aged woman in the costume of a Brikanti, and an older man in a rather more practical-looking toga.

And there stood a boy, maybe eighteen/nineteen years old, with Asiatic features, a little plump, with some kind of well-padded pack on his back. He wore a drab tunic, and what looked like an ISF-issue slate rested on his chest, suspended from a chain around his neck. He was barefoot. Penny immediately guessed he was a slave. Jiang seemed drawn to the boy, who was perhaps a fellow Xin.

To Penny, all this was background. To her there was only one presence in the room. She stepped forward, Jiang at her side.

Their eyes locked, Penny and Stef Kalinski faced each other.

“My God,” Penny said at last, speaking English. “I never thought—”

“Nor I, believe me,” Stef said fervently. “I went through a Hatch to Proxima Centauri to get away from you. And then even farther, to a star that turned out to be nine light-years away. Only to be picked up by these alternate Romans and brought back home, to this.”

“And in Paris again.” Penny tried to smile, and failed. “Do you remember, all those years ago?”

“Our mother’s grave. How could I forget? But I’m kind of surprised you can still remember.” Stef walked around Penny, eyeing her. “So this is my future. I feel like Dorian Grey.”

“I’m not that old. I’m eighty-nine now, Stef. Whereas you—”

“Am a youthful seventy, thanks to a lot of Hatch-hopping and relativistic time dilation.”

“Whatever we are, we are no longer twins, at least.”

Stef grinned malevolently. “Good. And, seeing you standing there with that damn stick, I feel like I somehow won.”

“And I,” said Penny tiredly, “feel like I’m too old to care. I wish you no harm, Stef. I never did.”

“No. It was your sudden eruption into existence when I opened that damn Hatch on Mercury that did the harm.”

“When we opened it… Oh, it’s all so long ago.”

The big Roman approached them, walking slowly, nonthreatening. He said gently, in gruff Latin, “Colonel Stef Kalinski. Druidh Penny Kalinski. Though you are twins, it pleases me it is so easy to tell you apart.”

Stef said softly, “I hope your Latin’s up to scratch, sis. The Romans don’t speak anything else.”

Penny nodded. “Quite right too—umm, Centurion?”

“Indeed. I am Centurion Quintus Fabius, commander of the mission of the Malleus Jesu. These others you see here are members of my crew—my optio, Gnaeus Junius, my trierarchus the Brikanti Movena, Michael, our medicus. Oh, and the slave bears the remnant of Collius, your speaking machine.”

Penny stared at the boy.

“Ordinarily at the end of a mission our crew would be dispersed, returned to our legion’s collegia for induction, leave and reassignment. Instead we have been given the unusual task of caring for the strangers we found on a planet of the distant star Romulus, at least until more formal arrangements can be made.”

Penny barked laughter. “I’m becoming used to the bureaucracies of empires. You mean, until your government and the Brikanti can come up with some category to file us away in.”

He grinned. “Well, I’m no clerk, lady, but I see the truth in what you say. But we welcome the task. You see the big man over there, with one hand? He is a legionary, a veteran; he is called Titus Valerius. For five years he has been the protector of the slave who carries Collius. It is a task he fulfills with joy. Of course the alternative for him would have been to remain with the permanent colonia under that distant star…”

“Collius? ColU?” Beth pushed her way between them and made her way to the slave boy, who stood passively, head lowered, eyes downcast—a gesture Penny had learned to recognize, and hate. Beth cupped his chin and raised his head. “Why, you’re not much older than my Mardina, are you? What is your name?”

The boy glanced at Titus Valerius, who growled, “Answer the lady. You’re not in any trouble.”

“My name is Chu Yuen, lady.”

“Collius? You mean the ColU? You’re really carrying around the ColU in your backpack?”

“What’s left of me,” came a mournful voice from the backpack.

Beth’s face lit up. “ColU—it is you! Oh, I could hug you. But if all that’s left of you is in that backpack—”

“Yuri Eden saved my processor unit and memory store. My interfacing is provided by slate technology. I am afraid I am not very huggable.”

“Maybe I should hug this slave of yours.”

“Please, Beth Eden Jones. Not in front of the Romans. Did I hear you mention a Mardina?”

“Yes. My daughter, named after my mother. Mardina—come here.”

Mardina came up, but with every expression of reluctance, and Penny, still feeling bruised from her own encounter with the complicated past, could only sympathize.

The ColU said, “Chu Yuen. Please turn a little to the right.”

The boy obeyed, and Penny observed how he stuck his chest out as he did so, tilting the slate. That was evidently how the ColU “saw” the world.

“Mardina,” the ColU said gravely. “I’m pleased to meet you. You have your grandmother’s name, and something of her looks.”

“I never knew her.” Mardina looked wildly at her mother. “I feel like I’m talking into thin air, talking to a ghost!”

“Lieutenant Mardina Jones was a brave and strong human being, and I would be honored to talk to you about her.”

“Don’t bother,” Mardina snarled back.

Beth said hurriedly, “It’s all right, ColU. It’s difficult for her.”

“I understand,” the ColU said gently. “Beth, as for your father, Yuri Eden…”

Stef walked up to Beth and took her hand. “You know that we went through the Hatch to Romulus together. Yuri and I. Just the two of us, and the ColU—the surviving bit of it. But—”

“He hasn’t made it home, has he?”

“His illness seemed to have been caused by his century in cryo suspension. ‘Freezer burn,’ he called it. I’m sorry, Beth.”

The ColU said, “I was with him in his last hours. I can tell you as much about that as you wish. Beth Eden Jones, he made me promise to find you. And so I have. And he instructed me to make sure you understand that, under his will as drawn up under Roman law, I am now your property, Beth.”

Penny could see that Beth was holding back tears. She hobbled forward on her stick. “Well, I for one have done enough standing for one day. And my throat’s as dry as the dust of Luna.”

With a glance at the provincial official, Quintus Fabius stepped forward, hands held wide, generously. “Let me be your host.”

The Romans showed remarkable sensitivity toward the gathered survivors of the UN-China Culture, Penny thought. They were allowed space and time to talk, to get over the shock of meeting.

But in the end they had to get down to business.

“Earthshine,” Stef said simply. “That’s the top and bottom of it. Earthshine.”

Quintus Fabius said, “Earthshine. If I understand you, this is the—machine—that you brought with you from your old world, and is now on Mars—”

Kerys said, “I have had years to get used to these ideas, Centurion. You’ve had days. And I barely understand it. We’ll have to let them talk this through. And then, I suspect, we’re going to have to make our superiors understand too.”

“I look forward to that, nauarchus,” he said drily. “Very well—Earthshine. Tell me why we must discuss this.”

“For one thing,” Penny said, “he is the reason we are here. I mean, we are survivors of the jonbar-hinge event, the destruction of the worlds of our own timeline…”

Quintus looked helplessly at Kerys. “Do they always talk like this?”

“I’m afraid so.”

The ColU said, “The jonbar hinge came with a great surge of energy, when the UN-China war erupted, and the kernels on Mercury were opened by the Nail, the Chinese missile… Perhaps such a surge, involving kernels, is necessary to create a hinge. Meanwhile, you, Stef, were with Yuri and myself in a Hatch, en route to Romulus-Remus. And you, Beth, Penny, were with Lex McGregor, fleeing the solar system behind a bank of kernels.”

Stef said, “You’re suggesting that somehow the kernels, the Hatches, preserved us.”

The ColU said, “Yes. I think Earthshine moved us to where he wanted us to be, like chess pieces on a board, Colonel Kalinski. At least the key pieces. Consider. Who survived the jonbar hinge? Earthshine himself. And his son, Yuri Eden. Or at least, the son of Robert Braemann, one of the input personalities that became Earthshine. And his granddaughter, Beth Eden Jones. Everybody Earthshine might have cared about personally—”

Mardina turned on her mother. “His son? His granddaughter? What new horror is this? That thing on Mars—are you telling me that it’s somehow my great-grandfather? Mother—did you know?”

Beth sighed. “I knew. He told me his name on the Tatania, as we fled from the moon. And my father, Yuri, told me his true name before we parted, on Mercury. And when I put the two together—”

“You never told me?”

“You’ve spent your life rejecting your past, Mardina. Are you saying you would have wanted to know?”

Quintus Fabius leaned forward. “I can see why this is difficult for you all. This talk of the past—but now we must speak of the future. Collius, tell us of the ice ball, the world you Brikanti call Höd. And the observations we have been making of Earthshine’s activities.”

Penny frowned. “‘We’? Who’s ‘we,’ the Empire?”

“No. We of the Malleus Jesu,” the ColU said. “Academician, during the journey back I was privileged to work with the ship’s team of navigators and observers. They are Muslims, mostly Arab. A product of a high civilization, though one subsumed within the Roman system in this timeline.”

“I’m guessing you had them observe Ceres,” Penny prompted.

The ColU said, “I had a feeling that the tracking of the object, and the projection of its future motion, might be beyond observers on Earth. Especially given the erratic pattern of the kernel-bank burns they are applying. You can’t be sure where it’s heading. I, however—”

Beth laughed. “With your superior computational powers, you know exactly what’s going on. You always were conceited, ColU.”

“Liu Tao once said to me that, for a farm machine, I have ideas above my station. And I replied by pointing out that a sentient mind refuses to be confined by the parameters of its programming—”

“Get to the point!” Quintus was almost shouting now. “Where is this ice block heading, O engine of glass?”

“Toward an impact on Mars,” Penny said tiredly. “Am I right, ColU? Not a close approach; a grazing encounter with the atmosphere—”

“I’m afraid you are correct, Penelope Kalinski.”

Stef nodded dumbly. “Very well. But why? What is he intending to achieve?”

“I can think of only dire and destructive possibilities,” the ColU said.

Quintus and Kerys shared grim glances. Kerys said, “And whatever else he does achieve, he’ll probably trigger a war, in the Skull of Ymir as on Terra.”

Quintus turned to the slave. “What can we do, Collius? Can we stop this?”

“Time is short,” the ColU whispered. “It is fortuitous we arrived back here in time to observe this, let alone intervene. I would suggest that only Earthshine himself can stop the collision—if he wills it.”

Stef said, “Then we have to go there. To Mars.”

Penny said, “Why should he even speak to us?”

“Maybe not to us. Which is why we must all go. Beth, Mardina—I know how difficult this is going to be for you—but you’re his family. If the ColU is right, he’s already saved you once. Maybe he’ll listen to you again. If there’s even a chance of averting this…”

Beth looked away, and Penny saw how closed-up she became, as, not for the first time in Beth’s life, those around her plotted to manipulate her and her daughter. Penny said gently, “Just think about it, Beth. The consequences of all this. We did bring this creature into this reality. We have to try.”

Stef said briskly, “But we’ll have to get to Mars first. How are we going to do that?”

“In my ship,” said Quintus Fabius firmly. “I am serious,” he said in response to their surprised expressions. “The Malleus needs reprovisioning, but the crew have yet to be dispersed, and it stands ready to fly. My legionaries will squawk, but the journey would be short and the bonuses handsome, I imagine. I could have you all on Mars in days… if we can arrange suitable clearances quickly,” and he glanced significantly at the shocked-looking provincial official.

Penny frowned. “Where is this ship of yours? In orbit, on the moon—”

“About five kilometers north of here,” Stef said drily. “This is a culture where they land interstellar spacecraft at city airports.”

“I wish I could say you get used to such things,” Penny said to her. “But you don’t.”

Mardina was looking around at them as they spoke, mouth open, obviously amazed by all she’d heard—overwhelmed perhaps. “Well, then, let’s all fly off to Mars, and find out the truth.”

Beth touched her arm. “What truth, dear?”

“That that’s what this terrible old monster with the pretty name, Earthshine, probably intended you to do all along. That he’s been manipulating you all for decades.”

There was a shocked silence.

Then the ColU said, “Even I hadn’t thought of that.”

26

The deceleration of the Malleus Jesu into Martian space was ferocious.

Nobody would tell Penny how high they ramped it up in the end. Clearly it was far higher than an Earth gravity, the Roman ship’s standard kernel-driven acceleration regime. And that itself said something of the urgency of the mission. But Penny had little energy to fret, as she lay pressed down into her deep couch, scarcely daring to move a muscle, to lift a finger.

She was given a private room on the seventh deck, officer country—she was told it was part of Centurion Quintus’s own suite—a very Roman affair, though the couches were riveted to the floor and the tapestries fixed with heavy iron nails, and everything was sturdy, built to withstand the surges of acceleration to be expected of a warship. On the other hand, the Malleus, veteran of several interstellar missions and as a result of cumulative time dilation several decades out of its own era, was an antique. The ship had already been subjected to years of acceleration stress, and the sleeting radiations and corrosive dust and ice grains of interstellar space, and now she was to be put through what in some ways was likely to be her toughest assignment yet. It might only take one component failure, a structural element buckling somewhere, a bulkhead or a hull plate cracking under the unbearable stress, for the whole mission to unravel—and their lives to be lost.

So Penny lay there in her couch, listening to the deep, almost subsonic thrumming of the kernel engines, and the fabric of the grand old ship popping and banging and creaking around her, and waiting for the end. She did feel an odd empathy for the ship. For what was her own body but a relic, the wreckage of a too-long life—and nearly unable to bear these immense accelerations? She couldn’t have blamed the Malleus if the ship had failed. Just as she couldn’t have blamed her own wretched body if it had given up as she put it through one unbearable strain too many.

The crew, however, was trained for operation under this kind of acceleration regime. She didn’t lack for company. Even the Greek medicus, Michael, visited her in a wheelchair, tightly strapped in, with a metal brace to support his neck and head.

What was still more impressive was the legionary assigned to push Michael around the ship in his wheelchair, triple-gravity acceleration or not: Titus Valerius, the big one-armed veteran. He walked with the support of an exoskeleton, creaking and clanking, powered by the crude electric motors—“etheric engines”—that were, apart from kernel engines, handheld radio communicators, which they called “farspeakers,” and some ferocious weaponry, just about the height of mechanical engineering achievement in his world. Penny could see how Titus’s muscles bulged under the strain, how the veins were prominent in his heavily supported neck. But he got the job done, as, evidently, did the rest of Quintus’s highly trained crew.

“You’re doing fine,” Michael told her from his chair, as he examined her. “I can assure you, you’re a tougher old eagle than you look, or may feel. As long as you do as I say, as long as you lie there and don’t take chances, and are patient—”

“My catheter itches.”

He laughed. “Bad luck. You’ll have to fix that yourself.”

Penny’s most welcome attendant, however, was Titus’s daughter, Clodia, just fifteen years old by her own subjective timekeeping, who had spent most of her young life aboard the Malleus during its mission to the Romulus-Remus double-star system. Clodia was evidently strong, able to get around the ship under gravity using a chair and prosthetic aids built for an adult twice her size, and turned out a bright, chatty kid.

At first, she brought Penny her meals—that is, she changed the drip bags according to Michael’s schedule. But as the ship’s watches passed, and they got to know each other better, she responded to Penny’s other needs. She turned out to be the kindest of Penny’s team of aides in changing her catheter bag, and washing her face, and even changing the diaper-like garment that soaked up her old-lady poop. Penny had done her level best not to be embarrassed at having to be changed, at one end of her long life, like the infant she’d been at the other.

Penny was surprised Clodia had volunteered for this mission, however. On the last day, as the ship approached Mars and they waited for the end of acceleration, they talked about this.

“Let me get it straight. You were just a toddler when your father took you with him on the Malleus Jesu, the journey to Romulus and Remus.”

“My mother died when I was very small, before we left Terra. There was only my father and me—”

“Yes. I’m sorry. So you spent a few years running around on the planet. And then, age ten or so, you’re scooped up and brought back to Earth—I mean, Terra. I’d have thought you’d find Terra a lot more exciting than life on the ship. All the different people, the cities.”

Clodia pulled a face. “Lutetia Parisiorum is a dump. And it’s badly laid out from a defensive point of view. I suppose I’d like to see Rome. And the great cities of Brikanti as well, of course—”

“There’s no need to be polite with me, child!”

Clodia grinned. “But wherever you go on the ground there’s no, no… People sort of wander around doing whatever they want.”

“No discipline?”

“That’s it. It’s not like when you’re on the march, and you build your camp every night, and everything’s in the same place each time, exactly where it should be. Night after night. That’s what I like.”

“You’re an army brat, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Well, I’m glad you’re here, Clodia; you’ve been a comfort to me… What of the future, though? Even your father can’t last in the legion forever. What will you do? I can’t imagine you being satisfied to be some soldier’s wife.”

“I don’t remember my mother, but I saw the women in camp, at Romulus. Having babies and baking bread and washing clothes, day after day?” She pulled a face. “That’s not for me.”

“Then what? They don’t allow women in the Roman army, do they?”

“Not into the legions, no. Not in the fighting infantry. But there are masses of other jobs you can do. In administration, in training, in logistics. A lot of that is based in the cities, the big central military establishments. And there are jobs in the front line women can take, even in the fighting units, some kinds of auxiliary. Or I might become a weapons specialist. Go into training.”

“Or be a medicus. There are plenty of front-line jobs there. You ought to talk to Michael about that.”

Again, a self-deprecating face-pull. “Maybe I could be a nurse. I’m not sure I’m clever enough otherwise. I can strip down field artillery pieces, but an injured legionary… I’ll find something.”

“I’m sure you will—”

That was when the warning trumpet sounded, filling the hull with its shrill note.

Clodia said, “Just lie still, until it’s over.”

And Penny, lying in her couch, felt the cessation of the kernel engines, a deep shudder transmitted through the ship’s fabric. That chorus of creaks and alarming bangs ceased immediately too, as the strain of three gravities was removed. And only then, it seemed, did the sense of heavy acceleration lift from her body.

“Ah,” she murmured. “It’s as if your father has been sitting on my chest for two days, and now he’s got off.”

Clodia impatiently unbuckled the restraints that held her in her chair, pushed aside her exoskeletal aids, and let herself drift up into the air, whooping. “I always love this bit!”

“How long were we—”

“Fifty hours. Twenty-five accelerating at three weights, and then the turnover, and twenty-five decelerating. And here we are at Mars, just like that. We couldn’t have got here any quicker. Roman ships are the best performing in the world, and the trierarchus will have pushed us as hard as she could.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt it, child. But we might be too late even so.” She struggled to emerge from her cocoon of blankets and cushions, an aged butterfly. “Oh, help me out of this thing.”

Clodia hovered dubiously. “If I don’t keep you here until the medicus has checked you over, I’m going to be walking back to Terra…”

It was another hour before Penny, fuming with frustration, was at last allowed onto the bridge of the Malleus.

And beyond the observation windows, before her eyes, once more Mars loomed huge, like a plasterwork in oranges and browns, scarred by craters and dry canyons, the silver bands of the canals glowing softly in the sunlight.

When she arrived, a kind of council of war was already under way, involving Quintus, his second-in-command, Gnaeus, and his ship’s trierarchus, Movena, as well as Stef, Beth, Mardina, Ari Guthfrithson, Kerys, and the ColU borne on the shoulders of Chu Yuen. Stef barely glanced at her sister. All of them looked beat-up to Penny, their skin blotchy, their eyes puffy. There was a faint smell of body odor in the crowded room—but then probably none of them had washed for days, Penny reflected; they hadn’t all had the comprehensive medical support she’d enjoyed.

And Jiang was here. He too looked wrung-out. But he held on to a rail, supporting himself in the air, and took her hand in his. “Mars again,” he said. “Where we first met.”

“Yes. All those years ago, at the UN-China conference at Obelisk.”

“No matter what we go through, Mars, it seems, endures.”

Quintus Fabius faced her. “Maybe Mars has not yet changed very much, Academician. But it will shortly. Look up there.” He pointed to a slice of dark sky, beyond Mars’s western limb.

Where hung a single brilliant star.

“Ceres,” Penny whispered.

“Höd, yes.”

“How close is it? That thing looks almost large enough to show a disc.”

Stef said, “Penny, we haven’t been troubling you with updates during the voyage. We hoped you’d sleep through it—”

“Oh, shut up, you fusspot.”

Quintus said, “Höd is larger than the width of Venus, as seen from Earth. So the Arab observers assure me.”

Penny tried to work that out. “Then it must be—what, a few million kilometers out?”

“Rather less,” Stef said. “The asteroid has undergone episodes of immense thrust. We suspect Earthshine has ordered the use of significant chunks of the body’s own material to use as reaction mass. The observers on the Malleus have computed the new trajectory.”

Penny could see the conclusion of all that in her sister’s expression. “My God.”

Stef took a deep breath. “Ceres is going to impact Mars. That’s finally confirmed. It’s probably what Earthshine intended all along.”

Quintus looked furious, as if this was some personal betrayal. “But why?”

“We’ve no idea,” Stef said. “Not yet.”

Penny looked at Stef. “How long?”

“The Arabs estimate twelve hours. No more.”

“As little as that? Very well. That’s the time we have remaining to stop Earthshine.”

Quintus nodded grimly. “Of course we must. This great act, this hurling of cosmic masses, can be intended to do nothing but harm. It may even start a war. We have to stop him. But we will face resistance.”

“Then,” Penny said drily, “I’m glad I’m on a ship full of Roman legionaries. Let’s work out our plan.”

But as the soldiers began to discuss tactics and fallbacks, a clock in Penny’s head began a dreadful countdown.

Twelve hours, and counting.

27

To Stef’s relief, Penny submitted to Michael’s insistence that she needed rest.

“And make sure she straps down again,” the centurion called as she was led from the bridge. “We may have some more hard acceleration to undergo before the day is done.”

“As you wish, Centurion.”

The rest of them inspected Quintus’s images of the layout of Earthshine’s latest base on the ground, at Terra Cimmeria. They were large-scale photographs, grainy wet-chemistry productions like all Roman or Brikanti imagery, but good enough, Stef thought, to get a sense of the layout. She saw three broad clusters of facilities, grouped close together. Farther out, the ground was marked by swaths of scorching, places where the ground had melted altogether: the relics of multiple landings of kernel-drive rockets.

“So, Colonel Kalinski,” Quintus said. “We have been scouting this area for some time—for years, as Earthshine has developed his operation. But I welcome your input now. This is the location where you say that the Xin had their Martian capital in your world.”

“Slap in the heart of the highland we called the Terra Cimmeria, yes.”

“Which was no doubt why Earthshine chose it,” the ColU said from Chu’s backpack, “because of that resonance. Everything Earthshine does will be shaped by an awareness of competing realities. And it is also, no doubt, why the site of a city that was called Obelisk for its greatest single building should be marked here by—point for me, Chu Yuen, left and down—that.” The slave seemed to work well with the master he carried; his finger stabbed down on the image of one of the three clusters of domed buildings.

Stef peered down. “I see a sharp stripe on the ground. Wait—where is the sun? That’s a shadow, of something very tall—”

“A tree,” the ColU said. “Not an obelisk. A tree. Encouraged to grow to some four hundred meters, which is three times the maximum theoretical height on Terra. A tree’s height is limited by the need to lift water to its uppermost leaves—”

“But on Mars, with its one-third gravity,” Stef said, “you can grow as tall as this. It must have been force-grown.”

“Yes. Earthshine has been established on Mars for some years, but not that long. Force-grown and encased in some kind of enclosure to retain air and moisture. We don’t have good enough images to determine the species yet. An impressive stunt.”

Beth leaned closer to see. Beth and Mardina had been quiet since Penny’s brief visit to the bridge. Only Ari had been quieter, Stef thought; the druidh had not spoken a word.

Now Beth asked, “But why would Earthshine grow a tree on Mars? It doesn’t seem to fit.”

“It’s for his allies,” said Kerys grimly. The nauarchus had also been quiet during this voyage on a Roman ship, Stef had observed, but she had watched and listened, evidently filing everything away. Now she pointed to another shadow traced on the Martian ground, in a second compound some distance to the north of the tree. “That is a ship—a ship of the Brikanti Navy, called the Celyn. Earthshine has at least one ship’s company’s worth of support on the ground with him, and most of them drawn from Brikanti ranks.” She glared at Quintus, defiant. “We don’t have time for blame games. This monster, this Earthshine, was after all found, fortuitously, by a Brikanti ship—my ship, all those years ago. How I wish now we had simply thrown the boxes that sustain him out into the Skull of Ymir! Even if we had preserved the rest of you.”

“Thanks,” Beth said drily.

“It was natural that as he began to lay out his schemes for the exploitation of other worlds, he would gather support from the Brikanti government at first. We believed we could control the situation—control him.”

“Well, you were wrong,” Quintus said.

“It began with his subversion of the crews of the ships we sent out to support him. He persuaded them to betray their nation—to follow dreams of greed and power, under him. That is what we believe happened. But they are Brikanti.”

“Ah,” Stef said. “I’ve been reading up on this during the journey home. To the druidh, in the Brikanti tradition, the tree is a sacred symbol.”

Ari spoke now. “Whatever other projects they are pursuing, they will have relished the chance to nurture what may still be the only tree on Mars, and certainly the greatest—greater than any on Earth. Even Christians would respond to the symbol. You Romans nailed Christ to a wooden cross, and His blood nurtured the roots of the World Tree Yggdrasil, which—”

“Yes, yes,” Quintus said impatiently. “Hardly the time for a theology lesson, druidh. So—the holy tree. And around it, as you see, a series of domed habitats that we believe are residences for Earthshine’s human supporters, or most of them, along with workshops, stores. To the north, and a reasonably safe distance away from the tree, you see the Celyn standing, and accompanying support facilities for a kernel craft. Room for others to land too, and we have seen craft shuttling between Mars and Höd in the last few years.”

“Relief crews,” Kerys said. “There are teams working up on Höd, manning the kernel banks there. They seem to be swapped every month or so.”

Quintus said, “And we believe that Earthshine himself, or at least the gadgets that support him, must be here.” And he pointed to the third complex of buildings.

Stef leaned down to see better, silently cursing aging eyes. “More domes. But the heart of it is that tilted rectangular slab.”

“A reinforced bunker,” Quintus said. “A familiar design. Hardened against our ground-based weapons, hardened even against any rock pushed from orbit short of anything massive enough to destroy the whole site altogether. No doubt Earthshine is down in a hole deeper still.”

Stef grunted. “That would be characteristic. He likes his holes in the ground, the bunkers he shared with his Core AI brothers back on Earth, his hold-out under Paris, his pit under Hellas…”

Beth said, “But this whole planet is going to be hammered by Ceres. I can’t believe he’s going to stay around for that. He’ll want to survive, whatever he’s trying to do here. Just as he got away from Earth before the Nail fell.”

“Right,” said Stef. “And if Ceres is going to fall within twelve hours, his only way out of here will be aboard that ship, the Celyn.”

“Very well,” Quintus said. “That is the configuration on the ground. Now I want a tactical plan. It would not be hard to be destructive. Frankly, we could go in with our kernel drive blazing, and melt all of this back into the Martian sand.”

“But we’re not here to destroy,” the ColU said. “We need to get to Earthshine. The purpose is to deflect Ceres, if it is still possible.”

“Our foes know that too,” said Quintus. “So they will be waiting for us to attempt a softer approach, perhaps a landing. They may have missiles, even kernel-driven, to shoot us down as we approach, as is standard protection for our great cities on Terra—”

“Maybe not,” put in Movena, Quintus’s trierarchus. “The scans we’ve been able to do of the surface would show us any such missiles. There are kernels here”—she pointed—“under Earthshine’s bunker. But they aren’t a configuration we recognize—they certainly aren’t being used in missiles.”

“This conversation is inefficient.” Ari Guthfrithson stepped forward now, cold, clinical. “We must focus on the goal and work backward. We have to get to Earthshine; we have to persuade him to deflect Höd, if this is still possible. Well, then. You have brought my family here—”

Beth snarled, “We are not your family.” Mardina clutched her arm.

Ari ignored her. He tapped the image of the bunker. “You must land us here. The three of us, mother, father, daughter—his granddaughter and great granddaughter. And the farm machine, one mechanical mind that may be able to communicate with another.”

“Thanks for thinking of me,” the ColU said drily.

“Earthshine will take us into his bunker. He has saved you before, Beth, you know that, when he brought you on the Tatania, out of the bonfire of your Earth. He will save you again today. For I am sure you are right. He will have no ambition to be extinguished. And he will be motivated to take us with him, wherever he goes.”

Quintus prompted, “And once you’re down there…”

“We try to persuade him to stop. But this will rely on us getting to that bunker unhindered.”

Quintus nodded. “We have yachts; we can get you down there. But in the meantime we’ll have to draw off the bulk of whatever forces he has. We have a testudo that we can have some fun with on the ground…” He pulled his lip. “Earthshine’s forces will be pretty well dug in.”

Movena smiled. “But these are my people. Brikanti. I know how they think. And I have a suggestion to divert their attention.”

“Which is?”

“They have to protect two of their three facilities on the ground: the launch site, the bunker. So, attack the third.”

Quintus smiled. “Ah. The big tree. The Brikanti will be drawn away to save that, being the superstitious barbarians they are.”

Kerys, visibly dismissing the insult, shook her head. “These are standard plays. We need something more. A backup plan. Even if Beth Eden Jones and the others get through to Earthshine, there’s no guarantee he will listen to them. We need to think about other ways of stopping Höd.”

“Such as?” Quintus asked. “There are troops on Höd itself; they will no doubt stay up there to defend it until the last possible minute. If we try to approach in the Malleus, they will blast us out of the sky—or do their level best.”

“True. So we don’t approach in the Malleus. Or rather, I don’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I will take a small crew, Brikanti-trained—just a couple of us would do—and take that ship, from the ground. The Celyn. It’s the same class as my own last command, the Ukelwydd. I could fly it blindfold. We will eliminate it as a threat to the Malleus, if nothing else. And perhaps we can be a backup to this strategy of persuasion. I could simply blast up to Höd, which is conveniently hurtling in toward us, and use the ship’s communication codes, and maybe my own rank, as cover to approach. And then—”

Quintus frowned. “Yes, and then?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to improvise. The crew on Höd must have some kind of abort facility.”

“Not necessarily,” the ColU murmured.

“Well, if there isn’t, we’ll think of something else.”

Movena nodded enthusiastically. “It may be a slim chance, but better than none at all.”

Kerys said, “If you drop me below the base’s horizon, perhaps on the same pass when you drop Beth and her party for the bunker—”

“Beth, and her party, and me.” The voice wavered, but was forceful.

Stef turned, and to her dismay saw Penny in the doorway, clinging to a rail with one clawlike hand, her gray hair a cloud around her head. “Penny—go back to your couch.”

“I will not, and I don’t answer to you now, Stef, if I ever did. Listen to me. I know Earthshine better than any of you. I was even a colleague of sorts, once, and have been here again, on this side of the jonbar hinge. Drop me onto Mars in a wheelchair—in a pressurized sack, whatever—I can help you.” She smiled thinly. “At the minimum it might distract him. Another diversion of forces.” She glared at her sister. “I trust you’re not going to put up any more objections?”

Stef felt anger surge. “You never belonged in my life anyway. To see you leave it now will be no loss to me.”

Quintus held up his hands. “We don’t have time for this. We have a plan, and it’s the best we’re going to find. Prepare for your drops in—” He glanced at his trierarchus.

“One hour,” Movena said.

“One hour.” He glanced around at the group. “We will probably never meet again like this, those of us assembled here. And many of us may not survive the day at all. If you believe in Jesu, may He be at your side now.” He clapped his hands, breaking the moment. “Go, go!”

28

With six hours left before the arrival of Ceres, the Malleus Jesu tore into the atmosphere of Mars. It was, Titus Valerius cried triumphantly, like a Roman gladio ripping through a barbarian’s guts.

Gnaeus Junius, along with a contubernium of eight men under the command of Titus, was already tucked inside the heavily armored hide of a testudo. He clung to his couch harness, dug himself deeper into the padding, and told himself he was as safe as he could reasonably be, at such a moment, in his armored pressure suit, buried in his couch, inside an armored vehicle that in turn was swaddled in the hold of the Malleus, a kernel-powered fist of a ship. Thus Gnaeus was wrapped up in layers of cushioning and armor and hull plate, like a precious gift ready for transport to the favored son of an emperor.

But right now this gift was being delivered by falling headlong into the thin Martian air. The ship fell backside first, with its kernel bank burning bright to slow it down from its interplanetary speeds. Gnaeus just prayed that the thick hull, which right now was peeling away in layers to carry away excess heat, would last long enough to keep the ship intact through these painfully long heartbeats of the entry.

Ahead of him Gnaeus saw the men of the contubernium in their couches, all of them with their backs to him, soaking up the deceleration. A contubernium was formally a “tent group,” a unit within the legion—a band who trained, lived and fought together. They seemed relaxed. One of them was even asleep, as far as Gnaeus could see, a man called Marcus Vinius. They’d been through far worse than this in training, Titus had assured him.

Well, not Gnaeus. He was from a senatorial family; his time in the army, his jaunts into space, were only intended as stepping stones to better things, a few years of toughening up before he returned to a career in high politics, hopefully in the capital itself. His unwelcome assignment to the Romulus-Remus interstellar mission, while it kept him from coming up against warlike barbarians in Valhalla, had also kept him away from Rome for twenty-five years, in which time a new generation of pushy upstarts had come along to compete for such positions—a whole cadre just as bright and ambitious as Gnaeus, and not decades out of touch with the current intrigues and infighting at the top of the Empire, as he was.

And now, this. Invading a planet occupied by some kind of mad machine, and just as the sky was about to fall. Such adventures had certainly not been in Gnaeus’s career plan.

The deceleration built to a brutal peak. He closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and wondered if it might not be better if the ship just disintegrated in the air and put an end to it all. But he didn’t really mean that, not even in the worst moments. He had his duty to perform, after all.

And then, like a switch being closed, the deceleration dropped to nearly zero. Gnaeus was thrust forward against his harness, and his stomach rebelled at last, his breakfast of dried fish and bread splashing up out of his mouth.

Titus laughed and clapped him on the back. “Never mind, optio. Happens to us all. And none of us saw the optio spew up his guts like a little girl, did we, lads?”

“Not me, Titus Valerius.”

“Hang on, I’ll wake up Marcus Vinius to make sure he didn’t see you either—”

“All right, all right,” Gnaeus said, scrambling to regain his dignity. “Just make sure you’re ready for the drop, Titus—oof.”

Now the ship lurched suddenly to the right, and there was a burst of acceleration.

“That’s what you get when you’re piloting in an atmosphere,” Titus said. “Coping with turbulence, the thickening air—a lot of dust around on Mars. And trying not to let the barbarians on the surface get a shot in at you. Don’t worry, optio. You have to hand it to the trierarchus and her crew. These Brikanti know how to handle a ship.”

Gnaeus grunted. “Unfortunately there’s another bunch of Brikanti on the ground who are trying to kill us.”

“Well, I wouldn’t worry about that either, sir. If they get us, we’ll never know about it.”

“Legionary, I wish you’d stop telling me not to worry. It’s scaring me to death—”

“Oh, relax, sir. Why, I remember once on campaign—”

“All hands,” came a voice from crackly speakers. “This is Quintus Fabius. We’re in the air over the Earthshine base, and ready to make the drops. Timings as we planned. Be ready—we’re only going to take one run at this, before the Malleus takes me back into the safety of orbit where I belong. Call in. Yacht?”

“Eilidh here, Centurion. Ready to go, with Collius and the rest.”

“Good luck, and stand by. Jumpers?”

“Kerys here. All set, Centurion; suits and wings checked over.”

“Glad to hear it. Testudo?”

He was answered with a roar from the men of the contubernium, a clatter of weapons on breastplates; the din was enormous in the enclosed space of the vehicle. Titus yelled, “Let us at them, Centurion!”

“Try not to get overexcited, Titus Valerius—it’s bad for a man of your age. Very well, everybody. Make sure you all keep in contact throughout the operation. That ball of ice in the sky is less than six hours away. But if you live, you won’t be left behind, and that’s a promise. Understood?”

The men of the contubernium yelled their assent.

“Then let’s do this. Yacht—go!”

A door slammed open in the belly of the ship, and the whole fabric of the Malleus shuddered. Gnaeus imagined the Martian air snatching at the breach in the ship’s hull as the small landing craft fell away.

“Jumpers!”

A lurch of deceleration as the ship slowed enough to allow the jumpers to hurl their fragile bodies out into the slipstream.

“And testudo!”

Gnaeus clutched his harness, bracing himself once again. Another door opened in the belly of the craft, this time directly below him. In the golden-brown Martian light, seen through the testudo’s slit windows, Gnaeus could see the fleeing landscape, not far below.

The men in their rows of couches roared. Titus yelled and gunned the engine of the vehicle.

And with a clatter of released latches, the testudo was dropped from the belly of the spacecraft. For an instant Gnaeus was in free fall, and he imagined he was back in the timeless vacuum of space. Even the legionaries were silent as they fell, just for a moment.

Then the vehicle slammed into the dirt. Weight returned with a rush—and immediately, as the big mesh tires bit into the Martian dirt, the testudo surged forward. Once again Gnaeus was thrust back into his couch.

And, over the shoulder of Titus at his controls, through a slit window and a massive protective grill beyond, Gnaeus glimpsed the receding fire of the Malleus, and a tree, impossibly tall, that scraped the orange Martian sky.

Kerys tumbled out of the open hatch in the flank of the Malleus.

Slam!

Thin it might be even at this low altitude, but hitting the air of this small planet in nothing but a pressure suit felt like running into a wall. And it was full of gritty dust that hissed against her goggles.

Her speed in the air slowed quickly. She was still curled up in a ball, the posture she’d adopted as she’d jumped, better to survive the close passage of the Malleus. But she could hear the roar of the ship’s drive recede, see its glare diminish from the corner of her eye. Now she spread out her arms and legs, letting the air snatch at her and stabilize her. Her speed reduced further and her fall became more orderly, with the buttery sky above her, a scarred rusty landscape below, a pale, diminished sun not far above the horizon. There below her she saw Earthshine’s facilities, the three compounds linked by dusty tracks, just as in Quintus’s images: the bunker, the kernel-drive ship that was her own destination, and that impossibly tall tree in its narrow air tent. On target, then.

And there was a brilliant point of light directly overhead, like a single star that seemed brighter than the sun. Höd, coming for its lethal rendezvous. She looked away, blinking away the dazzle from her eyes.

At the appropriate time she tore at a patch of leather on her chest. Cables ripped free, and she felt bales of fabric unfold at her back. Again she braced herself, folding her arms over her chest. When her wings snatched at the air she was slowed dramatically, a hard tug that wrenched at her lower gut and made her gasp. But it was over in a moment, and when she looked up her wings were spread wide across the sky. Scraped leather stiffened with ribs of wood, the wings had been modeled on the wings of hovering seabirds, such as albatrosses, but this particular set was, of course, adapted for the thin Martian air, and much larger than she would have needed over Terra.

And they were safely open. She felt a surge of satisfaction. Safe for now—at least until she and her sole companion, Freydis, a midranking remex, went flying up into Höd itself, if they ever got that far…

Just as she thought of Freydis, a sprawling shape banked across her vision and the small speakers in her enclosed helmet crackled. “Whee!”

“Stop showing off, Freydis.”

“Sorry, nauarchus. But isn’t this grand? Flying over Mars!”

Kerys didn’t want to discourage her, but she couldn’t suppress a sigh. “If you’re thirty years old, as you are, and strong enough that you didn’t get your guts pulled out of your backside when your wings opened, and if you’re an inexperienced idiot—yes, Freydis. ‘Grand’ is the word I would have used.”

“Sorry, nauarchus.” Freydis quickly calmed down.

Kerys peered down at the ground, tweaking her wings to make sure she was heading for the stubby cylinder that was the Celyn, with its support facilities around it—and she spotted small dark specks that must be crew and guards, waiting for her as she fell from the sky. She called Freydis again. “You know the plan. We’re both wearing identity beacons that mark us out as messengers from the Navy headquarters at Dumnona. Here we are with revised orders for the crew of that ship below. Yes? They’ll reject any such orders, but with any luck the bluff will confuse them long enough at least for us to land before they start shooting. Don’t do or say anything to give us away; just follow my lead.”

“I understand, nauarchus.”

Kerys looked across at her. “So, you’re ready for this? I picked you because you are the best qualified of the crew, in my view. Your aptitude for piloting and independent thinking is exceptional. I also know you trained at Kalinski’s Academy of Saint Jonbar. So you know all about these people, their strange origin, the peculiar nature of this entity Earthshine.”

“Probably as much as anybody at my pay grade, nauarchus.”

That made Kerys laugh. But then she looked down at the heavily armed and suspicious troops on the ground waiting to greet them, and up at the looming presence of the asteroid preparing to smash this world to slag, and she considered the unlikely sequence of events that would be necessary if this bright, eager remex was to survive the day—and all because of her, Kerys, and her insane plan.

“Nauarchus! The troops below. They seem distracted. Look, they’re turning away from us. They’re running, toward—what? A new muster point to the south of here.”

Kerys tweaked her wings, and swiveled in the air so she could see better. And she made out a vehicle roaring across the ground, coated with heavy black armor, churning up a cloud of Martian dust behind it, with the flag of the Legio XC Victrix fluttering in the thin air: roaring straight toward the compound to the south, where that spindly tree grew tall.

“That’s the testudo. They made it.” She couldn’t help raise a fist, careless of being seen from the ground. “Go, you ugly Roman bastards! Go, go!”

The testudo bounced as it raced over the ground, and Gnaeus had to cling to the edge of his couch. They were following one of the dirt tracks the Brikanti had laid down, but it was no Roman road—or at least it wasn’t meant to be taken at this speed.

Still, Gnaeus peered ahead at the mighty trunk of the tree, marveling at the green of its leaves, vivid in the Martian light despite the obscuring air tent within which the whole tree was enclosed. The tent itself was a cylinder, faintly visible because of a coating of adhered dust. The vehicle was already so close that Gnaeus Junius couldn’t see the tree’s upper branches, its crown.

“That thing is ridiculous,” Titus Valerius said, as he worked the levers that controlled the charging testudo.

“It’s a quarter of a mile tall, Titus Valerius. It’s a marvel of biology—of human engineering.”

Titus grunted. “A marvel to which these Brikanti and their druidh would nail us if we ever gave them the chance. And as for its length, you and I can pace it out when we’ve brought it down.”

“It seems a crime.”

“Most actions of the Roman army seem like crimes if you’re on the receiving end of them, I daresay, sir.” He called over his shoulder, “All right, lads, wake up and be ready to move. We’ll topple that unnatural thing, and then it’s out of this tin can and at the Brikanti.”

“Let us at them, Titus Valerius.”

“Don’t sound too eager, Scorpus, will you? Now then, shut up and let me concentrate on that cursed tree.”

The testudo carried a rack of missiles, and there was a simple sight stencilled on the forward window. All Titus had to do, Gnaeus knew, was to line up the sight mark directly on the trunk of the tree, which was a conveniently vertical and highly visible target. They reached a comparatively smooth stretch of track, the jolting of the vehicle subsided, comparatively—and Titus at last closed the firing switch.

When the missiles flew, the testudo rattled and bounced, and the men cheered. The missiles were powered only by Xin fire-of-life powder with an oxidizing compound, Gnaeus knew, but they delivered a kick when they soared away anyhow. Gnaeus could see the missiles swoop in, burning low over the ground, with the Brikanti scattering from their path—and then that tent over the tree blew apart in filmy shreds, an instant before the missiles slammed into the base of the tree itself, not far above a mighty, sprawling root system. A fireball swathed the lower trunk, stretching perhaps fifty paces up into the air. Just for an instant it wasn’t clear if the damage done to the tree had been terminal, and Gnaeus, who had contributed to the calculations of the missile power necessary, felt a twinge of anxiety. He could see the Brikanti troops standing, turning, peering up at their tree in dismay.

But then the upper trunk leaned, visibly, and there was a crack, loud in the thin air.

“Ha!” Titus roared. “We did it, boys! We broke the back of their god. Now let’s break a few Brikanti heads!” He wrenched at his drive levers, and the testudo turned and skidded to a halt in a spray of dust.

The big doors immediately slammed open, and the men released their buckles and were out of the hull in heartbeats, just as they’d been trained. They immediately closed with the Brikanti on the ground, who were still forming up, still raising their weapons.

By the time Gnaeus Junius had followed Titus out of the testudo, he found himself surrounded by warriors in heavily armored pressure suits colliding clumsily with one another, many wielding weapons that would have been impossibly heavy if not for the Martian gravity—and all of them trying to get at the Brikanti. Nobody was using ballistae, or other fire-of-life weapons, Gnaeus noticed. These were space-going soldiers, on both sides; the inhibition against using such weapons in fragile extraterrestrial environments must run deep. So it was swords and knives, hand to hand.

Gnaeus was relieved to see that they were nowhere near the falling trunk of the tree, which continued to topple, almost gracefully. But the air was full of the cracks and groans of shattering wood, bits of ripped bark and shredded trunk came flying out of a rising dust cloud, and there were even shreds of the destroyed pressure tent tumbling in the air. It was almost impossible to remember that this was just a diversion, meant to distract the Brikanti troops from their spacecraft and Earthshine’s bunker, the true targets of the operation.

It was chaos. It was glorious. His own blood surging, Gnaeus drew his own gladio and charged into the fray.

29

As Kerys and Freydis came fluttering down from the sky under their leather wings, one officer stayed at her post before the Celyn.

As soon as she hit the ground, as soon as her boots crunched on Martian dust, Kerys shucked off her wings, letting them subside in the thin air, and stalked toward the waiting officer. Stalked—you couldn’t really stalk in low gravity, and that was a perennial problem for officers working in these conditions and trying to look imposing. It was more that she glided across the ground with a commanding air.

But she kept her gaze locked firmly on the officer who was standing between her and the Celyn. The officer wore a standard Brikanti Navy-issue pressure suit, with shoulder flashes to show her rank. From what Kerys could see of her face, she looked young, younger even than Freydis. And she hefted a heavy projectile weapon, not lowering it as Kerys approached.

Kerys halted only paces from the officer. Still that weapon didn’t waver, though its muzzle was only a hand’s breadth from Kerys’s chest. And still the officer held her place, though the fear and uncertainty were obvious in her eyes. Kerys felt a stab of sympathy, and shame at what she had to do.

She made sure the officer had seen her own shoulder flashes, and recognized her rank of nauarchus. Then she switched her communications to a standard channel and snapped, “Your name?”

“That is irrelevant, nauarchus. With respect. Our orders—my orders—were to secure this vessel against intruders. And—”

“Your name,” Kerys repeated silkily. “You see my uniform. What harm can it do to tell me your name?”

“Gerloc,” she said at last. “My name is Gerloc. I come from Atrebatu, which is—”

“I don’t care where Atrebatu is. So, Gerloc. I can see you’re a druidh.”

“Yes. My Navy rank and druidh level are—”

Kerys waved that away. “And you’re a Navy officer. This is a Navy vessel.”

“Yes, nauarchus.”

“You say your orders were to secure this vessel against intruders.”

“Yes, nauarchus.”

“Very well.” Kerys glanced around, deliberately casual. Then she forced herself to scream in the girl’s face. “And do I look like an intruder to you?”

“No! I mean, yes—nauarchus.”

“Did you not hear the instructions my ship broadcast?”

“Yes. But we had no orders concerning your arrival. The Roman ship that brought you here, we had no clearance, and then your descent on the wings without calling ahead—”

Kerys deliberately backed off. She said more calmly, “Have you never heard of a snap inspection? What use would that be if my arrival was heralded in advance, as if I was some pompous Caesar returning to the fleshpots of Rome?”

The girl didn’t budge. “But, nauarchus—”

Kerys held a hand to the side of her helmet, and the other palm up. “Hush. Can you not hear that? That’s your own trierarchus giving me clearance. You’re to stand aside. Aren’t you getting it? Maybe your equipment is faulty.”

Gerloc lifted her free hand to her own helmet, and with a troubled expression glanced away from Kerys.

That moment was all Kerys needed. She stepped inside the arc of the weapon, grabbed Gerloc’s helmet with two hands, and yanked it forward. The back of Gerloc’s head clattered against her helmet, and she was immediately rendered unconscious. Kerys carefully lowered her to the Martian ground, while behind her Freydis hurried forward to collect Gerloc’s weapon.

“That was kind of you, nauarchus,” Freydis said. “Relatively.”

Kerys knelt over the girl. “I hated having to do that. This one stood her ground while the rest of the idiots around her went running off in pursuit of glory. Stood her ground in spite of all the pressure I could bring to bear on her. She had her orders, and she obeyed them, and this is her reward, from me, her commanding officer. At least I was able to spare her a broken nose or a few lost teeth.”

Freydis looked up at the sky. “Nauarchus, maybe we’d better get moving. That thing in the sky isn’t slowing down any.”

“Too true. Come on, Freydis. Keep your weapons ready. Try not to kill, but if you have to—”

“I can see there’s a greater good, nauarchus.”

“There is indeed. I want this bucket to be off the ground in an hour, or less.” She looked down at the inert body of Gerloc, who looked as if she were sleeping peacefully. “Help me haul her aboard the Celyn.”

“Of course, nauarchus. Umm—why?”

“Because she may have a better chance of survival aboard than if we leave her here. She deserves that much. But bind her hands and feet, in case her sense of duty gets in the way again.”

“Yes, nauarchus.”

Glancing over at Freydis, Kerys saw that Höd was actually casting a shadow now, from the soft features of the woman’s young face, behind her visor. “Let’s hope, in the end, that all our heroics aren’t necessary after all… Come on, let’s get on with it.”

Eilidh, piloting the small kernel-driven landing yacht bearing her fractious and complicated companions, was ordered to descend to the third of the surface complex’s compounds, centered on Earthshine’s heavy bunker. But she wasn’t to land until the operations at the tree and at the Celyn were well under way, the guards drawn off. So after she had guided the yacht through its entry into the Martian air she hovered, waiting for a final confirming order from Quintus Fabius, who watched from the Malleus Jesu.

Mardina, surrounded by her family and companions, carefully followed the progress of the military operation on the ground. It wasn’t just that her life depended on its outcome. She was actually interested in it, the first genuine action she had ever been a part of.

She felt she was learning constantly, not least from Quintus Fabius and his officers as they had studied this strange surface target, and he had improvised his plan of attack. Nothing specific about that, she thought, could ever be taught in an academy, or on a training ground, or even on maneuvers out in the field. All training could do would be to leave you with a certain suppleness of mind—suppleness, wrapped around a bony core of determination. Quintus Fabius had never lost sight of the ultimate goal of this operation, for all its confusion and complexity: to find a way to stop the ice ball, Höd, hitting the planet Mars, if he possibly could.

And now here she herself was, involved in this horribly ambiguous part of the operation herself. She was glad to be involved in the action. But she wished he was doing something simpler! Morally clearer! Even if more dangerous. She would have loved to bowl across the surface of Mars with Titus Valerius in his testudo, firing missiles at the sacred giant tree, or to storm that waiting spacecraft with Kerys and Freydis…

Not that there wasn’t danger enough in her own assignment. The yacht was broadcasting continual identifying messages, and images of the craft’s occupants: crucially, the faces of Beth and Mardina. All this was an attempt to get through to Earthshine, to persuade him to let them through. Fine. But it was all terribly flaky. They were so exposed in this yacht, hanging here in the air. It only needed a few of the ground troops to behave in an unexpected way—in fact, to follow their orders—and it could all go wrong. Mardina herself had watched as one lone officer had stood by her post at the spacecraft, the Celyn, and held up the nauarchus Kerys.

Worse than that, however, was the fact that in this fragile little ship Mardina was stuck with her family, among other lunatics. Her mother, Beth, who could hardly bear to look at her father, Ari. The strange slave boy, Chu Yuen, sitting as ever in his submissive posture, eyes averted, his pack containing the mysterious machine, Collius, cradled in his lap as if it were the most precious treasure in the world—well, Mardina supposed, for him it was, as it was probably all that kept him from being cast down into some even worse situation than this. And, to complete the party, here at her own insistence was Academician Penny Kalinski, a woman who Mardina, her former pupil, was very fond of—but she was so hopelessly old. What was Penny doing descending into a combat zone with an asteroid about to be dropped on her gray head?

This strange crew, all save Eilidh at the controls, were strapped into couches set in a rough circle in this small, cramped cabin, all facing each other, all trying to avoid the others’ eyes.

But at last the message came from the Malleus that they were clear to land.

It was Stef Kalinski who spoke to them from the ship. As the operation had sorted itself out, she had volunteered her services to Quintus Fabius as capcom for the yacht, as she put it, a strange prejonbar word that nobody understood, except possibly Penny. Now her voice called clear and strong from the speaker. “We finally got word from the bunker. Earthshine can see you. He says you’re free to land. You should see a docking port, suitable for ships of Roman, Brikanti or Xin design. Take her down when you’re ready, Eilidh.”

“Thank you, Colonel Kalinski—”

And suddenly Earthshine was here. Standing in the cabin before them. He was tall, urbane, wearing a suit that was not unlike Brikanti garb, Mardina thought, but was too smart, sharp—too finely made—and his shoes were polished leather. He wore a brooch on one lapel, a bit of carved stone at which Ari stared greedily.

It had to be him. Mardina had never seen him before but she knew of no other being with such powers of projection. Yet there was an air of unreality about him, a translucence, a hint of an inner golden glow. When he smiled, even his teeth shone faintly golden.

Still, this was an intrusion into a military vessel. Eilidh reached for a weapon.

Ari Guthfrithson called out sharply, “Be calm! This is not real. He is an image—like a reflection in a mirror. And he can no more harm you than could such a reflection.”

Penny glared. “Well, don’t try your tricks on me, you chimera. How are you doing this? This craft doesn’t have the technological substrate to support virtual reality.” She used the English phrase.

“But I do,” the ColU said mournfully from his satchel, which Chu held to his chest. “I received a signal from the ground, a request for interfacing, transmission capacity. I would have warned you all—”

“But I overrode you, didn’t I?” Earthshine said. “You are just a farm robot after all. Well, not even that anymore. Whereas I, you see, am in control of the situation. As always.”

“No,” said Penny Kalinski. “You can’t grab hold of this ship, can you? Because it’s too primitive for your interfaces.”

“I could shoot you down in an instant.”

“But you won’t,” Ari said. “Because she’s on board.” He gestured at Beth; Mardina’s mother, as so often when challenged like this, was shut in on herself, angry, resentful. “And her—Mardina, your great – granddaughter.”

“You seek to manipulate me, in your crude ways.”

“It worked, didn’t it?” Penny laughed, showing the remains of her teeth. “For all you’re so powerful, you have human weaknesses still.”

“Weaknesses? Would you call a capacity for loyalty to one’s family a weakness? Oh, but I forgot; you’ve spent most of your life fighting against your own rejection by your impossible sister, haven’t you? What do you know, then, of family?”

She was still glaring at him. “Only that you helped me rediscover it once. In Paris, remember? Shame on you for speaking to me this way now, Earthshine.”

And to Mardina’s astonishment it was Earthshine who dropped his head first.

Ari watched this exchange, fascinated and amused. “Well, well. Perhaps it was worth bringing along this wizened matriarch after all.”

“We do have history,” Earthshine said. “So here we are. I believe I know what you want. But why don’t you tell me, in your own words?”

“We want to know what you’re doing here, Earthshine,” Penny said clearly. “Here on Mars. And we want to know why you’re bringing an asteroid crashing down on this planet—on your own head, apparently. Though I’m quite certain you don’t intend to die here—if to ‘die’ means anything to you at all.”

“Oh, I think it does—”

“We want you to stop,” Eilidh said. “My commanders. My government. My people, those who know about you—about all of you from beyond the jonbar hinge. We want you to stop meddling with our lives. With our worlds.” She looked heated, almost embarrassed to have spoken.

Ari said, “And of course they want you to deflect Höd. Give up this destructive course you seem to be on.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he said evenly.

Beth spoke, for the first time, bravely. “Then you’ll kill us all—grandfather. Me too. Because I agree with them. This isn’t our world; it’s not our history. We, you, have no right to meddle like this. I’m not going anywhere. If Ceres falls, it kills me too.”

“I doubt very much that that’s going to happen. But we still have time for a chat before the endgame.” He turned to Eilidh. “You may bring your craft down. Well, then.” He smiled at them all. “As your English ancestors would have said, Mardina, I’ll pop home and put the kettle on. See you soon!”

And he vanished in a brief blizzard of light blocks.

Eilidh looked to the heavens, muttered a quick prayer, and turned to her controls. “The coordinates are here. I’ll put us down as quick as I can, and make a report to the Malleus. We’ve no time to waste.”

As the ship’s position shifted, an overhead window tracked a swathe of the copper sky, and Mardina glimpsed Höd, a tiny disc now, brilliant enough to hurt her eyes.

30

Kerys lay on her back in an acceleration couch, on the bridge of the Celyn, the ship she had stolen. The prow of the ship, a thick shield of metal and dirt designed to defy the erosion of the sparse grime of interplanetary and interstellar space, had no forward ports, but various instruments peered around the shield, and screens around her showed her images of what lay beyond the ship: a glowing jewel hanging over a pale brown landscape.

Surely by now the destination of the asteroid must be obvious to the authorities on Terra, across the solar system. Kerys had moved in elevated enough circles to be able to imagine the consternation that must be unfolding in the capitals, Brikanti, Xin and Roman: the fear, the raised voices, the unbelieved denials that this was an intentional act of war. She prayed for cool judgments, but on a world that was more or less continually at war, she feared judgment would be lacking. And she feared for Brikanti—for her family, her sister and her nephews…

Meanwhile it was just three hours from impact. And still the Celyn sat on the ground.

“Come on, Freydis, come on—”

“I’m here, nauarchus.” Freydis scrambled up a ladder into the cabin, kicked a hatch closed behind her, and hauled herself into a couch alongside Kerys.

“At last!” Kerys immediately started snapping switches and pulling levers. She felt the ship shudder as the huge assemblies of etheric engines that controlled the kernel banks began to power up. “I’d bite your head off if I didn’t know how many hatches you had to close, and systems to flush down…”

“Yes, nauarchus.”

“And if it hadn’t also taken me all this time to get the controls in order also. The crew here were doing a sloppy job.”

Freydis thought that over. “That strange creature Earthshine is in control of all of this. Maybe he doesn’t care about this ship. He’s safe in his bunker—well, at least until Höd falls. Maybe he thought the presence of the ship and the crew on the surface would be enough of a deterrent to anybody who was thinking of intruding.”

“We’re never going to know. And from now on our priority is that.” Kerys tapped a screen that glowed with an image of the falling Eye.

Freydis glanced at a clock. “Just three hours until Höd falls. I didn’t realize how much time we’ve lost.”

“I did. I’ve been watching that damn bit of clockwork tick away our remaining time. And I’ve been trying to figure out a flight plan. Right now Höd is a hundred and thirty thousand Roman miles from Mars. That’s over thirty planetary diameters. Which sounds like a lot until you remember that the thing is coming in at over ten Mars diameters every hour.” She glanced at Freydis, who was taking this all in very calmly, very seriously—looking more like an earnest student in a classroom than a soldier, Kerys thought, a soldier who was about to lay down her life. “So, you tell me. Given the knucklebones as they’ve fallen, what play would you have us make next?”

Freydis pulled her lip. “Our objective is to deflect Höd from an impact with Mars. The farther out from the planet we meet Höd the better. Our highest acceleration is three weights—”

“Yes. If we just blast out of here at three weights, we will encounter Höd in less than an hour.”

“Umm. Even then it might be too close to do anything about it.”

“Most likely. And—”

“And we’ll go flying by at twenty thousand miles per hour.”

“Yes. But if we plan for a rendezvous, if we allow time to decelerate—”

“Then, by the time we meet Höd, it will be closer yet to Mars.”

“So what do you think?”

Freydis grinned. “Go for the burn. Get there as fast as possible. At minimum, we can blast whatever crew is still on that ice ball with farspeaker messages; maybe the sight of the Celyn coming down their throats will persuade them to see the error of the course they’ve chosen.”

Kerys nodded grimly. “And if that fails, we’ll think of something else.” Although she could only think of one alternative, given the situation. “But the first thing we have to do is get there. Strapped in, Freydis? Taken your thrust medications?”

“No, but I’ll survive.”

Actually, Kerys thought sadly, no, you probably won’t.

She pulled the master lever, lay back, and braced. She imagined the banks of kernels embedded in the base of the ship, etheric pulses washing over them, their strange, tiny mouths opening—the engineers always said they were like baby birds asking to be fed—but those mouths would vomit out a kind of fire that was hotter than the sun itself. Immediately Kerys felt the heavy shove of the thrust, a weight that pushed her deep into the cushions of the couch.

On a pillar of fire, the Celyn surged into the air of Mars.

Without thinking, Kerys went into practices for high-thrust regimens as she’d been instructed, many years ago. She kept her legs still, her arms at her side, her head cushioned, and she breathed deliberately, deep and strong, pushing against that savage weight. Only an hour, she thought. Only an hour. Then, one way or another, it would be done.

Almost immediately, it seemed, the wan sky of Mars cleared away in her screens, leaving that deadly spark of light, Höd, hanging in the void. As if a last illusion had been dispelled about the reality of this situation.

The cabin was shuddering, the roar of the drive loud.

“Onward, nauarchus!” Freydis yelled, defying the savage acceleration and the noise. “Onward!”

To Kerys’s surprise, an internal communications link sounded with a whistle. She looked at Freydis sharply. “Who is that? I thought you said you cleared the ship.”

“I did! I threw off the last of the crew at spearpoint, and they were glad to leave when I told them we were heading for Höd…”

Kerys reached up cautiously and snapped a switch. “Identify yourself.”

“I am Gerloc. You may recall, the nauarchus tricked me in order to gain access to the ship.”

Kerys grimaced. “I apologize for that.”

Freydis snarled, “And I left you bound up.”

“Not very well, it seems,” Gerloc said.

Kerys had to grin. “Ha! She has you there, Freydis.”

“I wondered if you would like a little help. I do know the ship’s systems quite well; I have had extensive training as a backup to the control crew.”

“Hm. It wouldn’t harm. You need to understand that our mission—”

“Is what you ordain it to be. I overheard some of your conversation.”

“Oh, you did? Resourceful, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” said Gerloc without irony. “You are trying to avert a tremendous disaster. And you are nauarchus; you are my superior officer.”

“And so am I, by the way,” snapped Freydis.

“I have trained for this, for mobility in battle situations under conditions of thrust—”

“All right. Get up here as fast as you can, and don’t break a leg on the way.”

“Already halfway there, nauarchus. See you soon.”

“Ha! I like her,” said Kerys.

“Well, I don’t,” said Freydis. “Is there any way we can increase the thrust of this bucket? That would wipe the grin off her face…”

31

Once they were off the landed yacht, Mardina tried to help Penny as they made their way through an airlock, and into a cramped elevator that took them down a deep shaft sunk into the Martian ground. Then they followed Earthshine along a short passage crudely cut into the dirt.

They arrived at a bare room, with walls of rust-colored concrete punctuated by several doors, and furnished with a few couches and low tables of metal tubing and webbing—furniture that looked to Mardina as if it had been scavenged from a spacecraft, from the Celyn, perhaps. Earthshine stood at the center of the room as the rest filed in. None of them were at ease as they tried to walk in the unaccustomed low gravity—none save Earthshine, who looked as relaxed as if he were in a full gravity on Terra. Mardina found that irritating, as if he was making some point about his own eerie superiority.

Penny picked a chair, eased herself down on it with a lot of help from Mardina, and leaned forward on her stick, scowling at Earthshine. The rest settled: Mardina’s mother and father, Beth and Ari, on chairs as far from each other as they could get, and Chu with the ColU satchel on his back sitting modestly on the floor.

“So here we are.” Earthshine pointed. “There are facilities—a bathroom through that door, a small galley, a dormitory.”

Penny barked laughter. “All rather less fancy than the last time I visited you, Earthshine. The great glass hall at Hellas—the trip into your virtual mine, deep underground, where you spoke of your noostratum.”

Earthshine smiled, unperturbed. “I have abandoned the surface facilities now. Down here I can complete my preparations without any interference by the navies of this reality’s squabbling empires.”

Ari smiled. “What interference? You maneuvered an object as enormous as Höd onto a collision course with this planet. And all in full view of the Brikanti and the Romans and the Xin—indeed, you persuaded them to give you the facilities to do it!”

Earthshine shrugged. “These are not cultures that prepare well for natural disasters—not compared to our own reality, Penny. They don’t track rocks that might fall from space; they don’t have the technology to do it, let alone the imagination. Each other’s ships—that’s what they watch, obsessively. And so it was easy for me to smuggle Ceres onto this destructive course, yes.”

The ColU said levelly, “We are here to persuade you to abandon this project—”

Earthshine broke in, “Yes, that was your plan, your surface motivation. But under all that, deeper impulses lurk. I am your grandparent, Beth. Whatever you think of me, that remains the truth. I am all that is left of your family from before what you call the hinge. And in the final hours, you have come to me.” He spread his hands, and looked around, at Beth, Mardina. “Even under the fall of the hammer itself, you, my family, have come to me. For you know I will protect you.”

The ColU said evenly, “They were pawns, Earthshine. A means of inducing you to allow access to this place. As for your family, what of Yuri Eden? Your son. I was with him when he died. He was far from your protection then.”

Earthshine’s synthesized face became, eerily, more expressionless. “I am aware of his death—”

“It was freezer burn. That was the colloquialism he used. Your decision, Robert Braemann, all those years ago, to consign your son to a cryo tank, ultimately killed him.”

Mardina had been told about this. Even so, having it stated as baldly as this in front of this strange old monster, this relic of her great-grandfather, shocked her.

Earthshine faced Beth and Mardina, and spread his hands. “I meant only the best for Yuri. As I mean only the best for you—”

Penny snapped, “You’re being absurd. How will you protect these people, your ‘family’? This sandcastle of a bunker will be useless when Ceres falls.”

“True. But it is not the bunker that will save us—all of you who choose to come with me.”

Mardina was utterly baffled. “Come with you where?”

Ari’s eyes were alight with a kind of greed. “I think I understand. You’re talking about another jonbar hinge, aren’t you? Like the gate between your history of the UN and China and our own with Romans and Brikanti, and again between our worlds and the world of the Drowned Culture… I know your own history ended in a war of cosmic savagery, with the release of huge energies. Is that what you’re planning here, Earthshine? To create a hinge?”

Mardina stared at him, barely understanding. “Father. The way you’re talking. You sound as if you want this. As if you want everything to be smashed up—everything we’ve grown up with, everything our ancestors built.”

“Perhaps I do,” Ari said, and he stood and began to pace. “Perhaps I do. Ever since these strangers wandered into our lives—and especially ever since I discovered the evidence of the Drowned Culture for myself—I’ve become addicted to the idea. Addicted—yes, that’s the word. To see everything change in a trice—to see new possibilities for mankind and human expression unfold, before one’s eyes—perhaps to have the power to shape those possibilities. How could any thinking person not be drawn to such an idea?”

“Billions would die, Ari,” Penny said softly. “No, it’s worse than that. Billions would never have existed at all.”

“But others would take their place. Don’t you see? It would be like looking through the eyes of a god.”

The ColU said, “That’s probably blasphemous, in terms of your interpretation of Christianity. And it’s also wrong. You would be looking through the eyes, not of a god, but of whoever it is who welcomes these adjustments—and whoever has engineered them.”

Ari frowned. “And who might they be?”

Penny said, “We don’t know, not yet. But we know that their meddling in history has nothing to do with our benefit. It is all about what they want.”

“Which is?”

“Kernels,” she said. “And Hatches, Ari. Hatches. Of the kind you and your Roman rivals are merrily building for them, all over the nearby star systems, without ever understanding why, or what they’re for. We know that much.

“But there’s more to this, isn’t there, Earthshine?” She held him with her gaze. “We’re skirting around elements of a deeper mystery. You came to Mars to explore this noostratum of yours. A layer of bacterial mind, deep in the rocks…” She stood straight, stiffly. “My God. I never thought of it before. Could there be some connection? The Hatches, after all, provide lightspeed links between worlds…” She faced Earthshine. “Are the noostratum minds your Hatch builders, Earthshine? Maybe they aren’t just witnesses. And they are everywhere, presumably, on every rocky world… They are the puppet masters, who control the lesser beings, us, on the planet surfaces. Is that what you’re thinking?”

Earthshine just smiled. “What is important in this situation, Penny Kalinski, is what I want of them.”

“Which is?”

“For them to reply to me. The Martian noostratum—yes, the Hatch builders, as I believe they are. You know I have been trying to communicate with them—you saw the experimental setup. All I have wanted is a reply.”

“And now? Earthshine, you look rather pleased with yourself.”

“So I should be. The noostratum. It has replied. And it has given me the means to save you all.” He gestured to a door. “This way…”

32

Höd grew visibly in the monitors of the Celyn now, heartbeat by heartbeat.

“It’s coming at us so quickly,” said Gerloc.

Her voice was small now, Kerys realized, with little remaining of the cool competence of the young officer who had held her position by the Celyn. The difference was, Kerys supposed, unlike herself and Freydis, Gerloc hadn’t had the time to get used to all this—to being trapped in a speeding mote of a vessel, caught between two colliding cosmic bodies. Like a fly, she thought, trapped between the tabletop and the descending fist.

Freydis, at least, was calmly checking her instruments. “We’re approaching our full speed now. We’re actually moving far faster than Höd itself; most of the closing velocity is ours.”

Gerloc stared through a thick window. “It is the eye of a god, opening slowly.”

Kerys snapped, “No mythology now, Gerloc. It is just a lump of rock and ice. A big one, and representing awesome energies. But it is not divine. And if not for human intervention, it would not be here at all, high above Mars.”

Freydis said, “We have less than half an hour to closest approach. When we arrive, we’ll pass by the thing before we can count to ten. If we’re going to do something, we need to decide soon.”

“Do something? Such as what?” Gerloc asked.

Kerys glanced at Freydis, who she was sure understood the full situation, and shook her head. Not yet. Let Gerloc work it out for herself. She said aloud, “Still no response from the crews on the surface?”

“None,” Freydis said. “I think there’s still activity down there, however. The Eye hasn’t been abandoned, and the big kernel banks are still firing.”

“A suicide crew, then.”

“It looks like it. And if so, they won’t welcome visitors.” Freydis glanced at Gerloc. “You understand we can’t land. We don’t have the power, the time, to slow down and make a rendezvous.”

“Of course I understand that,” Gerloc said dismissively.

“Even if we could attempt some kind of landing, they’d probably try to shoot us out of the sky first,” Kerys said. “And even if we had come earlier, it was probably always too late—Höd is probably too close to be deflected anyhow, by any conceivable push even from the kernel banks. Small tweaks to its momentum from far away: that’s how Höd has been delivered onto this course. It was worth a try, though. To come, to try to talk to the surface crew.”

Gerloc nodded. “Then, if we can’t deflect the asteroid, what can we do?”

Kerys glanced at Freydis, and closed her eyes. “There may be one option. I have to tell you something very strange, Gerloc, and I apologize that there is no time to explain it fully. There are people in our universe—some of them are down there on Mars now—who are not from our history. They do not share our past. Freydis understands some of this… Now, Gerloc, the important point is this. That history was ended with a terrible war, at the climax of which a tremendous mass—some kind of huge ship I think—was slammed into the surface of the planet Mercury. They called it the Nail. In their history, as in ours, Mercury was the source of the first kernel mines.”

Freydis put in, “This has been studied in our own academies, based on the strangers’ description. There was a tremendous detonation—a huge release of energy. It’s thought that the kernels, caught up in the impact of the incoming mass, opened wide in response. And the release of energy—”

“It was enough to scorch worlds clean,” Kerys said.

Gerloc looked at Freydis, and then at Kerys, who closed her eyes. “I think I understand where this is leading. So we crash the ship into Höd—and not just at any random point. Directly onto the kernel banks. In the hope of blowing this lump of ice apart with kernel energies.”

“That’s the idea.”

“Thus saving Mars.”

“And, with any luck, averting a war on Terra.”

Gerloc’s eyes snapped open. “Well, if that’s your plan, we have a lot of work to do to make it happen, and not much time to do it in.”

Kerys grinned. “Good response. And you’re right. We need to turn the ship around. Shut down the kernel drive first, use the secondary thrusters to swivel her. Then we light up the drive again, so that when we come down on Höd, it’s with our own kernels blazing away.”

Freydis nodded. “It could work.” Her voice was brittle, her eyes too bright. “But right now we aren’t on a trajectory to hit Höd at all, let alone the kernel facility down there. We’ll need to make a course correction before we pivot the ship.”

“Yes,” Gerloc said. “And of course we’ll need to take into account the effect of our decelerating thrust on our trajectory, all the way down…”

Good, Kerys thought savagely. They would have to work, to actively pilot the ship, all the way in. It would be good, complex, demanding work, that would allow them no time to think.

Impulsively she reached out and grabbed their hands. “Whether we succeed in this or not, we will ignite a light that will be seen across the solar system, on every world. People will know who we were; our families will know what we tried to do today. All right? Are you ready for this?”

Impulsively Freydis grabbed Gerloc’s hand, so they closed the circle. “Let’s get it done.”

“Agreed,” Gerloc said.

They broke the circle and turned to their posts.

33

The chamber to which Earthshine led them was just a cavern in the deep rocks. There was a scatter of chairs near the door, a small chemical toilet, and heaps of equipment, including a heavy-looking cylinder of some plain white material. The light came from suspended fluorescents, a very mundane glow. Mardina and Beth together helped Penny over to one of the chairs; she couldn’t stand for long anymore.

The central area of the floor was roped off, the barrier containing a smoother area within.

Earthshine had an air of smug triumph, Mardina thought. The others seemed subdued, even confused, as they were drawn deeper into Earthshine’s arcane plan, his mysteries—his layer of mind, deep in the rock.

A Navy radio communicator in Mardina’s pocket chimed, her farspeaker, a soft mechanical bell. She pulled out the little gadget, held it up to her ear. She walked toward Penny. “You need to hear this. All of you… I’m getting a signal down here.”

Earthshine nodded. “You should. I had my support from the Brikanti Navy install relays and repeaters inside the bunker, and then in this chamber when we discovered it.”

“It’s from the Malleus, in space. They see Höd. The crew say it’s now about the size of the sun as seen from Earth, and growing fast.”

Penny nodded, eyes closed. “It would be by now—”

“There was a detonation.”

Chu, the slave boy, with the ColU’s slate on his chest, muttered a prayer in his native Xin.

Penny said, “The Celyn.”

“Yes,” Mardina said. “They rammed it.”

Penny said, “I bet they were trying to destroy the asteroid, by detonating the kernels.” She turned to Beth. “Remember? Just like the Nail when it struck Mercury. Why, maybe Kerys even got the idea from our descriptions of that event.”

“But they didn’t succeed,” Mardina said. “According to the Malleus crew. The Eye has a new crater, but is intact. Even such an immense explosion—”

Penny said firmly, “It was a worthy effort. And I suppose there was nothing more they could do, given the time. Kerys and her crew will be remembered for their heroism.”

Mardina listened to a fresh message. “The Eye is still on its way. The centurion is ordering us back to the surface. Pickup in half an hour.” She folded up the farspeaker. “We need to go.”

“No,” Earthshine said. “There is another way.”

“What other way? There’s no other ship—”

“I told you, I can save you.”

Penny glared at him. Then she beckoned Mardina and Chu. “You two. Help me.” She gestured at them impatiently, until they came to her. She held up one arm for each of them, and they grabbed her and lifted, Chu being careful of the ColU pack on his back. “Now get me over there,” Penny said, flapping one hand at the roped-off area. “I need to know what he’s found.”

The ColU said, “I have a feeling we both know already, Penny Kalinski.”

“I want to see with my own ruined eyes…”

What lay within the roped-off area didn’t seem special to Mardina when they got there at the pace of Penny’s hobble. It clearly wasn’t natural, however. It was a sheet of some gray metal-like substance, with a fine circular seam a few paces across.

But Penny laughed.

“Show me, Chu,” the ColU murmured. “Show me…”

Penny snapped, “This isn’t one of your damn virtual illusions, Earthshine?”

“Of course not.”

Mardina said, “I don’t understand.”

“A Hatch,” Penny said, her tremulous voice full of wonder. “He’s only found a Hatch. Here on Mars.”

“You still don’t understand,” Earthshine said. “You never did listen, Penny Kalinski. You or that sister of yours. I didn’t find this. It wasn’t here when I established my base here on Mars. They gave it to me. Believe me, this chamber did not exist, yet as Ceres approached this world—I suppose as my own intention became clear—there it was, an anomaly showing up in my deep scans, and when I had a shaft sunk down to it, here was the Hatch. They gave this to me.”

Mardina shook her head. “Who? Who gave it to you?”

“The noostratum,” Penny said. “The dreaming bugs in the rocks? Is that what you would have us believe? Is this what all this has been about, for you, Earthshine? With Ceres you are striking a blow, not at Mars—not at any humans on Mars—but at the bugs in the deep rocks?”

“Well, it certainly takes a mighty blow to do that, doesn’t it? I threatened them with destruction, and I got their attention. Here! Here in the floor—here is your proof.”

Beth said, “So now what? I’ve been through Hatches before. They take you far away. To another world, even another star. But which star, Earthshine?”

He smiled. “I don’t know. That’s the beauty of it. But wherever it is, whatever I find, I will have been invited there. Think of that! Oh, yes, I certainly got their attention. But this is not for me alone. Together, today—now, before the asteroid falls—we will go through this impossible doorway, and we will find out. Your intuition was right, you see—you were right to come here, all of you. I can save you. You, my granddaughter, my great-granddaughter—all of you, if you wish. You can see I have my own processor unit ready to go…” He pointed to the bulky cylindrical unit.

The ColU said, “This is wrong. What you have done here is wrong, Earthshine. You meddle with powers that could destroy us all—destroy the potentialities of mankind.”

Earthshine just laughed. “Whatever you say, I won’t allow you through the Hatch, you—toy. So you can be a witness to those powers, can’t you?”

The ColU paused, a long and terrible silence that must have been an age for such a high-speed artificial mind. Then it said, “If I may not follow you through that Hatch—be sure, Earthshine, that I will not forget you. I will not give up the quest to find you, wherever you go, whatever you do. No matter how many generations of friends I have to outlive to do it.”

Chu was visibly agitated by this cold announcement. “Master, please. I am grateful to be your servant. Yet I have served you well, have I not? But I don’t want to die, not today, not now.”

“You won’t die, Chu Yuen,” the ColU said gently. “Remember, the centurion is coming to pick us up. We need only return to the surface.”

“I, too, will go no farther than this,” Penny said with an expression of disgust. “Never mind tinkering with history—these damn Hatch builders have wrecked my own life, and my sister’s. I’ll go no farther. And as for the rest—Chu, take hold of Ari Guthfrithson.”

“Madam?”

“Just grab him.”

“Do as she says, Chu,” the ColU said.

Chu hesitated for one heartbeat. Then he took long strides around the Hatch emplacement, and grabbed both Ari’s arms, gripping them firmly above the elbows.

Ari struggled, but couldn’t free himself. “Why is this animal holding me?”

Penny said, “Whatever all this mystery is about, I want you to go no further with it, Ari. You are a manipulative, scheming chancer. And the ambition you have expressed scares me, frankly. Well, this is one thing I can fix. This is the end of the story for you, as it is for me. You’re coming back with us to the surface.”

“I will not. Beth—Mardina, my daughter—”

“Chu, shut him up.”

The slave pushed Ari against one wall, pinning him with his left arm, while he clamped his right hand across Ari’s mouth.

Earthshine turned away, indifferent, and spoke to Beth and Mardina. “What these others choose is irrelevant. We are the core; we are family. If only Yuri Eden had survived… I never met him, you know, after his emergence from cryo. Never saw him again after I closed that heavy lid over his sleeping face. But he lives on in you. Come with me now.”

Mardina recoiled, her head swimming. “I don’t understand any of this. I don’t want any of it. What can there be for me on the other side of this—door in the ground? Up there, Terra—that’s my world, that’s my home, my career, my life. As far as I can see, all these Hatches have brought any of you is destruction and disruption and distress.” She looked at Beth. “Mother? You’ll stay with me, won’t you?”

But Beth was hesitating.

Earthshine said, “Maybe we can find a way home for you, granddaughter.”

“Home? Back to Per Ardua?”

“Yes. Back to Per Ardua.”

Beth looked at Mardina, her face anguished. “Mardina, you must come with me—”

“No! I don’t care about Per Ardua, about Before. You’re doing to me now what you always complained about your own mother doing to you. Ripping you out of your old world and stranding you on another.”

“I know. You’re right. But even so…” She looked again at the Hatch. “I can’t miss this chance, my only chance to go home.”

Penny said gently to Mardina, “It’s all right, my dear. Come with us. We’ll return to the surface, and get out of here before the hammer falls. And your fool of a father, at least you’ll still have him!”

The ColU said, “Don’t be afraid, Beth Eden Jones. If I must stay here, I will care for Mardina, as once I cared for you.”

Mardina protested, “I don’t need anybody—”

But Penny touched her hand to hush her.

“I’ll come back for you someday,” Beth said gently.

“Or I’ll come for you,” Mardina said on impulse. “Though I’ve no idea how.”

“Yes.” Beth forced a smile. “Let’s make that pledge. When we have both found whatever it is we’re looking for…”

Mardina shook her head. “So what happens now? How will you get this Hatch of yours open anyhow?”

Beth smiled now, stepped forward, and pointed at the emplacement. “The Hatch knows when we’re ready. They always do.”

Mardina looked down. That central expanse of floor, surrounded by the circular seam, was no longer pristine. It had changed. Now it contained two complex indentations, like small craters with five rays—two pits shaped to accept the pressing of a pair of human hands.

34

For the final pickup, Centurion Quintus Fabius brought the Malleus Jesu down to the ground of Mars itself.

Titus Valerius called from the testudo, “About time you joined the party, sir.”

“Shut up, legionary. You still alive, Gnaeus Junius?”

“Here, Centurion.”

“All right. Make sure the meatheads in that glorified chariot do as they’re ordered. We’re nearly out of time—we almost waited too long. In particular, we haven’t the time to wait for the yacht, with the Academician and her party at the bunker. So I want you two to go pick them up in the testudo.”

Titus glanced over his shoulder, at a vehicle already crowded with legionaries, and those few Brikanti from the installation who had been intelligent enough to surrender in time. “It’s kind of sweaty in here, Centurion. No place for an elderly lady. And I do know the layout of that bunker. There’s only one docking port, which is where the yacht will be—”

“Use your initiative, legionary. Get the thing out of the way.”

“Whichever way I see fit, sir?”

“Whichever way, Titus Valerius.”

As far as Titus was concerned there were no finer words in the vocabulary of a commanding officer. With a whoop, he gunned the testudo at top speed for the bunker. Behind him he heard groans, and the odd thump as some clown who hadn’t secured himself properly fell off his bench.

And, with Höd looming in the sky larger than the sun, larger than Luna, an overwhelming reminder of the urgency of the situation, they came to the bunker. The yacht was indeed still docked to the only port.

The testudo didn’t even slow down. Titus Valerius drove straight into the flaring single wing of the yacht.

The testudo slammed to a halt, throwing them all forward once more. Then Titus put the testudo in its lowest gear, and just started pushing. The wing crumpled, the hull buckled, but the yacht came away from its lock with the bunker with a screech of torn metal, and was then shoved away over the Martian ground.

The passengers of the testudo actually gave him a round of applause. “You’re a hero, Titus Valerius!”

“You’re also an idiot,” Gnaeus said, peering out of the port at the bunker. “But a lucky idiot. I think that port is still serviceable.”

“I never doubted it. Anyway, those ports are designed to yield under torsion; I was cheating. Now go get our passengers, optio.” With a crunch of gears, Titus reversed the testudo and roughly positioned its flank against the bunker’s port.

As the optio had predicted, the port was still working, just, and Gnaeus, with the help of a couple of crew, soon managed to achieve an airtight bridge to the bunker. Titus, impatiently nurturing the running engine, was surprised to see that not all the landed party came back— just Penny Kalinski, Cadet Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson, the rodent-like druidh Ari Guthfrithson, and the slave boy with the talking rucksack.

And at the last minute Penny Kalinski herself refused to follow.

Mardina wouldn’t leave her behind. She grasped the old lady’s hands, trying gently to pull her forward to the port. “You must come. There’s no need to die here.”

“But I would die soon anyhow, my dear. And you need a witness—you, all of your people—a witness to what is being done, today, in your system, to your worlds. For, after all, it is Earthshine, with whom I traveled through the jonbar hinge, who is responsible for all this. The least I can do is file a report. And I am a scientist, you know—a druidh in my culture. A trained observer. Go, child, go—my mind is made up. But leave me that farspeaker of yours.”

“Academician—”

“It will soon be over, child. What, an hour? No more.”

Titus Valerius was running out of time. “Scorpus, Orgilius, get that damn door closed. Right now.”

“Right, Titus.” The two burly legionaries made for the hatch.

Penny called, “Oh, and Mardina—tell that centurion of yours, make him instruct his trierarchus—tell him not to hang around. Don’t hover near Mars, waiting to see what happens. And don’t head back to Earth either. Tell him to flee—out of the system, with the greatest acceleration he can muster—tell him to flee as Lex McGregor once fled, with the kernel drive burning. He will understand—”

Scorpus pulled the girl back from the door, and Orgilius slammed the hatch closed.

“At last!” Titus Valerius rammed forward his control lever and the testudo surged away from the lock. There were more complaints and curses as people fell over each other in the sudden acceleration. Titus just laughed, swung around the nose of the testudo, and headed straight for the welcoming belly of the Malleus Jesu.

35

“Academician? Can you still hear me? This is Malleus Jesu—”

“I can hear you, dear Mardina. Oh, my. This couch is just too comfortable. I believe I dozed off! There’s one disadvantage of such an elderly observer.”

“Well, it’s been a long day for us all, Academician.”

“Please. Call me Penny.”

“Penny, then. There’s only half an hour to go.”

“Yes, dear. I guessed it must be about that. Now, let me see. Ceres—Höd—is almost directly over my head. The glass roof of Earthshine’s peculiar garden is nothing if not revealing, and I have a dramatic view of the sky…

“I should report what I see as objectively as I can, shouldn’t I? Ceres looks, I would say, three times as wide as the sun does from Earth. And it is growing in size, as if swelling, almost visibly. What a strange sight it is! I have seen a total solar eclipse on Earth, and that had something of the same strange, slow grandeur of movement in the sky. You can sense there are huge masses sliding to and fro in the firmament above. But I can’t see the scar left by the fall of the Celyn, no glowing new crater. The spin of the asteroid has kept it away from me, and I imagine there will not be time enough for a full rotation. How brave those young crew were! But, oh my, it grows ever larger. And yet there is no effect yet, nothing to feel here on the ground, even though there are only minutes left.”

“I understand little of this, Academician Penny. What will happen to Mars? And why would Earthshine do this?”

“As to the what—I think I can estimate some of that for you. Here we have Ceres—forgive me for using the name I grew up with—a ball of ice and rock six hundred miles across, coming in at forty or fifty thousand Roman miles in every Roman hour. If a respectable fraction of that tremendous kinetic energy is injected into the rocks of Mars, then I estimate—and I was always good at mental arithmetic—some two hundred billion cubic miles of Mars rock will be melted and vaporized. Two hundred billion cubic miles, on a world only four thousand miles across. A layer of rock some four miles thick will be destroyed. All traces of a human presence will be eradicated, of course. And this is without considering the effect of the kernels, embedded here in Mars, in the ground of Ceres itself. If what we saw on Mercury is a guide, the total event may be even more energetic, even more destructive…

“You ask, why has Earthshine done this? To strike back at what he calls the noostratum. That’s what I think. These deep bugs that he believes survived even the destruction of our world, our Earth—indeed, if they are the Hatch builders, they may have engineered those events to create jonbar hinges, for their own unfathomable purposes. Well, they won’t survive this; Mars will be sterilized far too deeply even for the bugs to survive. And maybe he’s right. He did force a response from them, didn’t he? They, or some agency, did give him a Hatch… Oh, I must sip some of my water. Excuse me, dear.”

“…Penny? Are you still there?”

“I’m sorry, child. Have you been calling? My wretched hearing… How long left?”

“Only a sixth part of an hour, Penny.”

“Ten minutes. Is that all? Such a brief time, and soon gone, like life itself. I take it we have failed, then; all our stratagems are busts. Well, perhaps it was always beyond us. But we must persist, you know. Earthshine is right about that, at least. We must understand why and how our history has become fragile—who is engineering all this. And yet we must, too, find a way to contain Earthshine himself.

“Ceres is huge, now spanning—what? Eight or nine times the diameter of sun or moon? I can see features on that surface now, clearly visible through the fine Martian air. Craters, of course. Long cracks, almost like roadways—annealed fissures in the ice, perhaps caused by the stress of the displacement from the object’s original orbit. Ceres is already damaged, then. And it is growing, swelling; it is all so easily visible now. Oh my, it is a quite oppressive presence, and I should have expected that. Almost claustrophobic. You must forgive them, you know, Mardina.”

“Who?”

“Your parents. Even your fool of a father—deluded, self-serving and greedy as he is—has always done his best for you, as he sees it. And your mother was horribly harmed by the circumstances of her birth. She was the only child on a whole world, or so she grew up thinking, and yet she grew to love the place, as all children love their homes. But she was taken from that home by the Hatches, that greater power that is manipulating our destiny—all our destinies. After all that you can’t blame her for longing to find a way home.”

“I don’t blame her. I’m just trying to understand. Do you think she will ever find what she’s looking for?”

“It’s not impossible. We understand very little of the true structure of this multiverse we inhabit. I’m sorry—I used an English word. And maybe, someday, you will find her again.”

“Your sister is here. Stef. Would you like to speak to her?”

“No. It would do no good. But I am glad she is there, now, at the end. What of Jiang Youwei?”

“He was very distressed that you did not return.”

“Ah. Youwei has been such a good friend… A burden has been lifted from his shoulders, however. Please ask my sister to keep an eye on him.”

“She will.”

“And tell her I’m sorry.”

“She knows, Penny. And she says she forgives you.”

“How good of her. Ha! What an old witch I am, bitter and sarcastic to the end…”

“She says she expects nothing less. Umm, four of your minutes remain, Penny.”

“Thank you. But I don’t feel I need a countdown, dear. Oh, that brute in the sky—individual features, the craters and canyons, grow in my sight now. Ceres becomes a plain that is extending away, extending to the horizon.”

“Penny—”

“Oh, it’s beautiful! A sky like a mirror of the ground, a sky of rock! Mardina, Penny. Don’t forget me. Don’t forget that I’ll always—”

36

Höd, Ceres, was about a seventh the diameter of the target planet. It took a minute for it to collapse into the surface of Mars. Mardina saw that the smaller world kept its spherical shape throughout the stages of the impact, the internal shock waves that would otherwise have disrupted the asteroid traveling more slowly than the arc of destruction that consumed the asteroid at the point of contact.

Even before the asteroid was gone, a circular wave like a mobile crater wall was washing out around the planet. This tremendous ripple crossed Mars, destroying famous landscapes billions of years old: the Hellas basin, the Valles Marineris, which briefly brimmed with molten rock before dissolving in its turn. Following the rock wave came a bank of glowing, red-hot mist that obscured the smashed landscape.

And when the ripple in the crust had passed right around the planet, it converged on the antipode to the impact site, closing in on the Tharsis region in a tremendous clap, where huge volcanoes died in one last spasm of eruption.

The Malleus Jesu fled the scene at an acceleration of three gravities. Fled away from the sun, into the dark.

Centurion Quintus Fabius sat brooding in his observation lounge, where his Arab navigators had fixed up farwatcher instruments to watch the impact—sat in his acceleration couch, with the triple weight of the engine’s thrust pushing down on him.

Once the impact event itself was over, Höd was gone, and Mars was transformed, become something not seen in the solar system since it was born, so his Arab philosophers and druidh told him. What was left of Mars was swathed in a new atmosphere of rock mist and steam—an air of vaporized rock. For a time the whole world would glow as bright as the sun itself. And it would cool terribly slowly, the philosophers said. It would take years before the rock mist congealed, before the planet itself ceased to glow red-hot, and then a heavy rain would fall as all the water of the old ice caps and aquifers returned, to sculpt a new face for Mars…

But Mars was only a distraction, for the reports soon started to come in from the ground, from Terra. The impact had sent immense volumes of molten rock spraying out across the solar system. Much of this was observed, from the ground, from space. Some of the debris, inevitably, would strike Terra itself, falling on a world full of panic and suspicion. There was a brief flurry of messages, passed between the capitals of the world. A peremptory order from Ostia, home of the Roman fleet, for the Malleus Jesu to return to the home world. Quintus ignored the order.

And then the missiles started flying.

Quintus Fabius saw it for himself, through the farwatchers, peering back past the glare of the drive plume. Sparks of brilliant light burst all over the beautiful hide of Terra. Luna, too. It had happened before. There had been a war on Luna, rocks had fallen on Terra—people thought it was a deliberate if deceptive strike by some rival, or maybe they mistook the rocks for some kind of kinetic-energy weapon. Or maybe they just took the chance to have a go. So it was now.

There was a final flare of light, a global spasm that dazzled Quintus, making him turn his heavy head away from the eyepiece.

And in that instant Quintus was called by his optio. “Centurion, we’re being hailed.”

“By who? One of ours, Brikanti, Xin—”

“It’s not a language we recognize, sir. Nor a vessel design we know.”

“What language? Wait. Ask Collius. Ask him what language that is.”

A moment later, the reply came. “Collius had an answer, sir.”

“Why aren’t I surprised?”

“He says it’s a variant of—it’s difficult to pronounce.”

“Spit it out, man.”

“Quechua.”

In the hearts of the surviving rocky worlds of the solar system—

Across a score of dying realities in a lethal multiverse—

In the chthonic silence—

There was satisfaction.

The artificial entity, which was a parasitic second-order product of the complexification of surface life on the third planet, had struck a deep blow at the Dreamers in the heart of the fourth planet. An unprecedented blow. Dreamers had died at the hands of natural catastrophes before. Even planets were mortal. Never had they been targeted by intelligence, by intention.

There had been shock.

There had been fear.

To extend the network, to open a door for the parasite—to remove it from this time, this place—had been an unpleasant necessity. Otherwise, the destruction would surely have continued, in this system and others, or, worst of all, it might have spread through the network of mind itself.

The parasite had not been destroyed. But, delivered to a new location, perhaps it could be educated.

That was the hope. Or the desperation.

For time was short, and ever shorter.

In the Dream of the End Time, the note of urgency sharpened.