Silence endured for a while in the communications room at the Agracon after the screen showing the transmission relayed from tracking stations had cut out. Troops of the Prince's Own Regiment who had secured the building stood at their posts by the doors. Perasmon's staff had all been removed. Freskel-Gar's people manned the consoles and monitor panels.
"Are we done?" the communications major who had taken temporary charge checked.
"Link down. We're off the air," a technician confirmed. Freskel-Gar relaxed and looked inquiringly toward the screen showing Broghuilio and his staff on the bridge of the Jevlenese ship on lunar Farside.
"Splendid!" Broghuilio acknowledged. "An impressive performance, Your Highness. I could almost have believed it too. But I do you a disservice; it is 'Your Majesty' now… Or very soon to be, anyway."
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Freskel-Gar advised that the aircraft carrying the two national leaders was on its way to a safe landing ground, and he had received a message of compliments and respects from them to pass on to the Shapieron. They would receive a deputation from the ship jointly, possibly in Cerios, as soon as their own revised itinerary was put in order. In the meantime, a preparatory meeting at Melthis would facilitate arrangements greatly, and the landing there should proceed as he had suggested. It was neither Calazar's nor Caldwell's style to insist on being involved in every stage of every decision. The strategy for the mission had been set, and it was up to the people on the spot to determine the best way of implementing it. Frenua Showm sent a report to Control at Thurien via the primary beacon on the latest happenings, and turned her attention to preparing for the meeting with Freskel-Gar.
They made the descent in one of the Shapieron's general utility shuttles-a craft larger than the reconnaissance probe that had rescued Jissek, but smaller than a surface lander, which would have been too large for the helipad area inside the Agracon complex, where the Lambians had directed them. Eesyan and Showm were the principal Thuriens, accompanied by a small staff; Hunt and Danchekker represented Earth; Monchar and two of the ship's officers went too, on behalf of Garuth. The Shapieron moved closer in to launch the shuttle but remained within the Moon's cone of visual eclipse from Minerva. It seemed fitting to let the planet's governments announce the vessel's presence to the population in their own time, rather than have it revealed prematurely by an outbreak of pandemonium among the astronomical community.
Hunt was quiet as he sat in the cabin of the shuttle, watching the orb of Minerva enlarging on one screen, while the Moon, which they had passed close by, slowly shrank on another. His mind went back five years to the discovery of "Charlie"-the spacesuited corpse on the Moon that had been the first trace of the Lunarians to come to light. The subsequent investigation, orchestrated mainly by Gregg Caldwell while the rest of the UNSA chiefs were trying to draw lines between who should do what, was what had first brought Hunt and Danchekker together. One of their first major achievements had been the reconstruction of Charlie's world from information contained in documents found on his person and other evidence that had shown up later. That was when they had christened it Minerva. Hunt's group had built a six-foot-diameter model of it in his laboratory at Houston, from where the UNSA investigations had been coordinated. He remembered spending long hours gazing at that model, trying to bring to life in his mind the picture of a lost world that had existed fifty thousand years ago. He had gotten to know every island and coastal outline, the mountain ranges and the equatorial forests, the inhabited areas and major cities sandwiched between the advancing ice sheets. What he was seeing on the screen now looked entirely familiar. But this wasn't a model in a lab or a computer's reconstruction. It was real, and it was out there. They were on their way down to its surface.
The Moon, on the other hand, presented an unfamiliar countenance-one that was smoother and with less features than the pictures he had known from science books and encyclopedias since childhood. The Moon that looked down on the unfolding saga of human history, the emergence of its various races, the struggles of their earliest ancestors to survive, had carried the scars of the ferocious battle fought across its surface in the final days of the war before it was obliterated by billions of tons of debris when Minerva broke up. But those events were twenty years in the future yet. The Moon that attended Minerva was still unsullied and serene.
"A strange, circular course of events, don't you think?" Danchekker's voice said from nearby. Hunt looked away from the screens. "Long ago, Minerva's orphaned Moon traced its solitary course to Earth, bringing the ancestors of our kind. Now here we are, the descendants of fifty thousand years later, returning to where it all started. Rather in the manner of paying homage to our place of origins; a pilgrimage, as it were." Danchekker had evidently been entertaining similar thoughts of his own.
"A bit like salmon," Hunt said.
Danchekket clicked his tongue. "You really can be quite Philistine at times, you know, Vic."
Hunt grinned. "Probably a touch of New Cross coming through," he said. That was the area of south London where he had grown up. "'Every inch a working man, an' proud of it,' my dad used to say. He didn't have a lot of time for high-falutin fancy stuff. 'The 'igher a monkey climbs, the more of an arse 'e looks to the rest of us,' was another one. He could never fathom the kinds of things I got into. Said the only thing I'd be good for was going off into other worlds. I suppose he was right enough about that." Danchekker blinked through his spectacles, not quite sure how to reply.
Monchar and the two crew officers from the Shapieron were silent. They alone among all those in the descent party had actually seen Minerva before. They were not Thuriens. For them it was the lost home they had departed from millions of years ago-somewhere over twenty years by their own reckoning-magically restored once again.
The shuttle broke through a high layer of cirrostratus. Below, Hunt recognized part of the southern Lambian coastline showing intermittently against the gray ocean between patches of lower cloud. "You've got company coming up," ZORAC observed, speaking from the Shapieron but reading the shuttle's radar via a probe positioned off to one side of the Moon. The screens showed interceptor jets rising and spreading out into an escort formation around the descending craft-whether as an honor guard or to keep a wary eye on it was impossible to say. They were swept deltas design mounting side-by-side engines in a flattened fuselage beneath twin tail fins-uncannily like some of the Terran designs of the turbulent period around the late twentieth century. As with things like sharks and dolphins, shapes that worked were probably restricted within quite narrow limits and likely to be found universally, Hunt guessed.
"You're on course and looking fine," the Lambian ground controller who was seeing them down reported. "The landing area is clear."
"We have your approach beam," the Ganymean copilot acknowledged. "It's looking like just over three minutes."
"Check."
"Does it look familiar?" Eesyan asked Monchar and the two Shapieron crew officers.
"No," Monchar replied, staring at the images. "Everything has changed."
The city of Melthis took shape and resolved into progressively finer detail until a cluster of buildings that the descent radar identified as the Agracon steadied in the center of the view. They opened out and grew, transformed slowly into profiles of roofs and windowed facades sliding slowly upward on the screens showing the side views as the shuttle came down between them, and then were stationary. The mild humming that was all the shuttle produced to mark its exertions, died.