“Fly lower. I need an Internet signal.”
The officer barked a humorless laugh. “We’re about as low as we can go without slowing down. There’re still drones on our tail.”
“See what you can do.”
His glasses signaled intermittent connection to the net. Thisbe wasn’t set up to provide global high-data coverage while wintering over; typically the repeaters and antennae went into hibernation like everything else. They’d have to get lucky enough to find an industrial unit that was coordinating the slow harvesters. If he could stay in contact with it long enough to issue some commands, the whole mesh could wake itself—and the army.
The trouble was they were being herded past the city outskirts. An occasional bullet or laser shot past, and the officer had to keep them almost at ground level, while bots fought bots in the air above and behind them.
A hill loomed ahead, and they were up and over it in seconds. Spread out before them was the black plain of a wintering world—except that far off near the horizon, other city lights glittered.
“What’s that?” He shook his head and blinked, looked at it again. “I didn’t wake that city.”
“It’s Lockstep 180/1, sir. They share Thisbe with ours.”
“Can we get there?”
He looked shocked. “We can’t involve them in a civil war. The treaties—”
“I didn’t sign any treaties. Besides, they can’t turn away refugees, can they?”
“What are you saying? You want to go in there alone?”
“You were thinking I was going to take our army in there? Defend ourselves with 180 as a shield?” Toby shook his head. “Of course not. So yes, I aim to go in there alone.”
“With respect, sir, for you to stay they’ll demand you winter over on their frequency. All your sister has to do is post a guard to prevent you leaving. Once you’re bottled up and living on a different frequency, you’re no threat to her.”
“… And bottling me up would work great for her—if the rest of Thisbe let her do it. This is how we win or lose: you get me a signal long enough for me to wake the rest of the army, and then we head straight for 180. Got it?”
“Yes, sir!”
They swept in a tight turn around one of the city’s last towers and began to hunt for a repeater tower while bots and aircraft converged on them from every direction.
A WEEK LATER, TOBY stood with the officer, whose name was Ourobon, and the administrators of the city of Equinoct. They watched as a small group of human figures passed through the new checkpoint that 180’s own defense forces had set up on the edge of town.
Lockstep 180 spoke a different language and all its customs and culture were different. Thousands of years separated them from 360, and they had no Guides to make them conform. Toby had used the meager information in his glasses to negotiate with them.
Using Equinoct as a neutral meeting place would never have been a viable option before now. The generals had agreed that involving a different lockstep would have played into Evayne’s hands because it was the McGonigals who had the treaties with all those other civilizations. They wouldn’t have given him the time of day, until he could convince the local city fathers that Evayne was on the run.
Which he could now do.
He still wasn’t sure he could trust them. Nobody stopped him, though, when he strode out to meet them. Their backdrop was fields of green dotted with troop transports and tents: the ragged remnants of a once-great military force. Way off in the sky, speckling the white clouds like a flock of distant birds, a much larger force approached. Everybody involved knew what that meant.
The new arrivals had been disarmed. As soon as they passed the checkpoint they were officially in Lockstep 180, foreign soil for anyone from Thisbe’s dominant culture. Lockstep 180 wasn’t large or extensive, but it had its own army and fleets; it had no intention of getting dragged into a McGonigal family squabble. Anybody carrying weapons across the invisible line at the checkpoint would feel the full force of 180’s wrath—and so would 360. Evayne had to worry about how many other locksteps would join 180 if it decided to punish Peter’s empire.
So it was that Evayne approached Toby weaponless and with her hands out. “Brother!”
He suppressed a sarcastic laugh. So now I’m your brother? Yet he really did want to see her, and so it was with undisguised eagerness that he stepped forward, took her hands, and then threw caution to the winds and hugged her.
Her whole body went rigid, then after a moment she relaxed a bit—just enough for her to gently take his arms and disengage herself. “I don’t deserve that,” she said quietly.
“You’re the only sister I’ve got,” he said. “And we’re kind of in this together, even if you don’t think so.”
She glanced back at the forces massing in the sky. “I do not think so.”
Toby thought of that distant squadron as Halen’s new army, though he was sure Corva’s brother had little power in it. A mixture of Thisbe defense forces, native Toby cultists, and turncoats from Evayne’s forces, it was rapidly taking control of the planet. In doing so it was eating up vast resources; a lockstep like 360 lived lightly on the land and had few stockpiles. The whole planet would be going back to sleep soon, to awake on its normal schedule as Toby had commanded. Big changes would be waiting for those citizens who’d slept through the last few years.
“That,” said Toby, nodding at the approaching force, “doesn’t obey me. It obeys the mythical Emperor of Time, who’s got an agenda.”
Evayne made a skeptical noise, crossing her arms. Right now she looked so much like their mother that Toby was astonished. “You can’t tell me it isn’t your agenda, too,” she said. “Next stop: Destrier. Right?”
“It doesn’t have to be now,” he said.
“But every day you wait, the bigger they become.” She jabbed a thumb at the new army.
Toby shrugged. “What’s your point? Evie, it’s over. You had your run as pope, but now you gotta step aside. I don’t care how we spin it, but one way or another the universe is going to find out that I’m not a god. They’re going to have to deal with it.”
She shook her head. “Toby, I know you think Peter and I have been totally corrupted by power. But it’s not like that. I wasn’t lying when I said the myth took on a life of its own. There’s nothing for me in promoting it—Peter and I are already the most powerful people in history. Hyperrich and immortal—well, it can’t get much better than that, can it? But we’re as trapped by your myth as you are.
“There is no easy way to end this, and you know it. You’re going to arrive on Destrier carrying fourteen thousand years’ worth of baggage. Whatever you do, there’ll be social upheavals on countless worlds.”
“So all you want to do is keep a lid on it?”
“Keep a lid on potentially limitless levels of religious violence, yes.”
He snorted. “As you can see, it’s too late for that. —Not my fault, by the way. I was trying to keep this between you and me. You forced my hand.”
“And you’re about to force mine,” she snapped. “I told you before, this isn’t a game anymore. The stakes are too high to turn back now.”
“Uh, Evie, last I saw I was the one who had your troops surrounded. You had me trapped here for a while, but unless you want to drag 180 into this, too, you can’t touch me. And as soon as my army gets here, you’re my prisoner. Unless you head for orbit and leave Thisbe with your tail between your legs. And in that case, you’re letting me go.”