Wylott began nodding slowly. "Ye-es. Of course."
"Advisor Estordu, commence arrangements at once for a survey of their moon," Broghuilio ordered. "I want a report of any visible surface installations and communications activity."
"Yes, Excellency."
"Captain, send orders to all craft to maintain orientation with minimum radar profile toward Minerva in the meantime. General Wylott, we need an inventory of the weapons complement we are carrying, along with a personnel count and breakdown by skill rating and specialty category. Also a schedule of equipment to be readied for a surface base."
"Sir."
As the seniors relayed orders and the bridge area began bustling into life, Broghuilio felt himself slipping back into his familiar role. So those amateurs down on the planet thought they knew something about war preparations, eh? Maybe he could introduce a few concepts they hadn't thought of yet. And who knew? It seemed that the ambition he had nursed to become the warrior overlord of Jevlen had been frustrated. If there was no going back, then there was nothing to be done about that. But, maybe, a different world instead, perhaps? His face was to the future. What was past was past. He surveyed the scene around him with satisfaction.
"Evaluation completed," the bridge deck computer announced proudly. "We are at the system of Sol, positioned eight hundred thousand miles from the planet Minerva, time-shifted negative fifty thousand years."
"Turn that idiot thing off," Broghuilio snarled.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The Gate controller recited the by now familiar line.
"Sequencing out… Transferring."
But this time it was the real thing. The huge disks of the Gate projection bells went to blue, from blue to blue-indigo, and then were gone. A different starfield surrounded the ship.
Hunt's first time aboard the Shapieron had been shortly after it made its appearance at Ganymede. He and Danchekker had been at an exploration base there, set up to investigate the wreck of an old Ganymean spacecraft discovered beneath the ice. A signal from a a piece of equipment reactivated by UNSA engineers had been picked up by the Shapieron and brought it to that location. The Shapieron then had been virtually a self-contained small town, crammed with Ganymeans of all ages, from those numbered among its original mission, down to the youngest of the children born in the course of its strange exile. Its interior then had shown the wear and tiredness of serving as the only abode its occupants had known for twenty years. When Hunt walked around the familiar corridors and galleries some days previously, all gleaming and new after the ship's refit, it had seemed like a deserted cathedral. Just Garuth, his senior officers, and a skeleton crew were manning the half-mile-long starship. It was being used for its ability to operate autonomously, not because of its size.
The Terran contingent comprised the original group with the exception of Mildred, back on Earth writing her book, and Sonnebrandt, whose affairs had detained him in Europe. They followed the event from the vessel's Command Deck, which at least had almost the normal complement of crew at their stations and felt something like old times. This was Hunt's first time back aboard since the expedition to Jevlen, when they had mounted the Pseudowar. It was strange how events had led to this circle. The revelation that Broghuilio's ships had somehow been thrown back to ancient Minerva was what had inspired the whole project of Multiverse research, which now culminated in their going back to that same place and time.
Well, not quite the same. The hope of the mission was to create a new reality from which would spring an entire family of futures in the Multiverse that so far didn't exist. The new world view challenged the formerly held belief, which had been derived purely from physical considerations, that everything which could happen did happen "somewhere." The newer line that Danchekker was developing with the Thurien philosophers held that consciousness was able to alter quantum probabilities. With consciousness now intervening to initiate changes across universes, the suggestion that new realities could be created was gaining currency. It had certainly provided the main inspiration for the mission.
The hope was to bring into being a variation of the past in which Minerva was saved: a new twig amid the immensity of the Multiverse's diverging branches that would grow and bear fruit as all the histories of humans and Ganymeans that might follow. Some still insisted that this was impossible. Others argued that, on the contrary, it was the very reason for the Multiverse's existence; that surely, being able to bring about morally meaningful change was what consciousness was for. But two things could be said with certainty. First, nobody knew. And second, now that their vision and sense of a purpose had been inspired, the likes of Calazar, Showm, Caldwell, and just about everyone else involved in the project, were not going to wait for the philosophers to come to a consensus. In any case, philosophers of both races had done that too many times on innumerable occasions before, and then changed their minds.
The object, then, was to appear at Minerva before the calamitous war had ever happened. Yet, despite all the effort expended on discussions and planning, exactly what was supposed to happen then was far from resolved. It wasn't that the Thuriens and Terrans were unable to agree on goals or a strategy for attaining them. It was simply that surprisingly little was known about the war and its times, and even less about events over the years leading up to it.
Practically all of Minerva's libraries and records had been destroyed with the planet. Probably influenced by the guilt they still felt aeons later over their disastrous attempts to depopulate the Earth of predators, the Thuriens had adopted a policy of staying out of Lunarian affairs and developing their own part of the Galaxy centered on Gistar. Only in the war's final days, when monitors that they had left on the fringes of the Solar System registered the explosion that signaled Minerva's end, did they throw together a hasty mission to investigate-so hasty that they ignored their normal rule of not projecting gravitationally disruptive transfer ports into planetary systems. The upheaval caused by the port created for the rescue mission launched Minerva's orphaned moon on the trajectory that eventually brought it to Earth. It also impelled the largest intact piece of Minerva outward to become Pluto.
Miraculously, some Lunarians survived on pieces of what had been Minerva; but unsurprisingly, there had been very few. They were recovered from niches they had found in proto-Pluto and other fragments; as bands scattered across the lunar surface-itself a devastated waste from the conflict; and from assorted craft and orbiting stations left adrift amid all the wreckage. Preserving political texts and historical records had not been high among the priorities the survivors had been concerned with at the time. It was only much later that accounts were obtained from the Lambians brought back to Thurien, who would later give rise to the Jevlenese. Those accounts had been almost entirely verbal and reproduced from memory. The people they came from were disproportionately from such groups as soldiers, space crew, mining and construction workers, farmers, hunters, villagers, and other from areas remote from the war zones, rather than urban dwellers, scholars, or professionals likely to have studied such matters.
The tactic adopted for the Minerva mission, therefore, was the straightforward one of aiming somewhere "downstream"-i.e., a time following the war-as best as could be gauged, and working back "up" in a series of reconnaissance from which it was hoped to glean enough information to determine a more propitious intervention point.
VISAR had sent the beacons into the appropriate region accordingly-two beacons was now the norm, although there had been no failures. Preliminary readings indicated the time period to be about right. The astronomical fixes had located Jupiter and Saturn but not Minerva, but that didn't mean a lot, since it could have been on the far side of the Sun. There was some electronic chatter, but it couldn't be interpreted because the Lunarian communications procedures of the period were unknown. The only way to find out more would be for the Shapieron to go there and have a look around.