Once, the view that would have greeted him would have been vibrant: bright baubles of cities hung together on chains of light stretching off towards the horizon, and an elegant tower reaching from the surface to the stars, spotted with luminous insects that crawled over its face.
Everything had gone: the tower had fallen, the bulbs that burned had been extinguished. The land was a vast, blank canvas for someone to write their name large across. Benzamir was determined that it wasn’t going to be any of the traitors.
‘Ari? Anything?’
‘We haven’t been scanned. There’s no broadcast signal from anywhere on the planet. And there’s still no sign of Persephone Shipsister. She isn’t in orbit, and her drive signature is absent. I’m worried, Benzamir.’
‘She turned traitor too. Perhaps she’s too ashamed of what she’s done.’ He looked at Earth as it rushed under him.
‘There is something I need to tell you. I’ve been meaning to for a while. I didn’t know how important it would turn out to be.’
Benzamir’s view grew dark, and a vector map bloomed in its place. In it, Ariadne, smaller, faster, was cutting a chord away from rho Cancri, and Persephone was ahead of her on a different path. Given time, she would have caught the larger ship up, but time was precisely what she didn’t have.
It had started as nothing more than a futile chase that was bound to end in failure, but Benzamir had asked for targeting solutions anyway. The city-ship was keeping the rebels talking, and Persephone’s o-space engines were quiet.
Persephone was at extreme range, almost a light-minute distant, but she thought that she wouldn’t be shot at while the human factions were still in contact. The spectrograph showed a hit, but by the time the information had got back to Benzamir, she’d jumped.
There was no way of following a ship in o-space, and Ariadne had turned for home.
‘Why do you keep torturing yourself with this?’ said Benzamir. ‘You fired at your renegade shipsister. You shouldn’t have had to do that, but we made the decision together that it was for the best.’
‘It was for the best,’ she said. ‘I flinched. I could have burned her through. I ought to have, but I didn’t. The guilty would have died and the innocent lived.’ She paused, not for thought but for agony. ‘I have failed you.’
Benzamir sat in thought for a long time and eventually realized that her mistakes were sadly all too human.
‘Peace, Ari. Peace.’
‘It would have been so much better if we hadn’t needed to come here in the first instance, any of us. How are we going to restore Va’s lost brothers? How do we repair the damage to the Kenyan empire? What of spaceships over Great Nairobi and drop-pods? Answer me, Benzamir. What are we going to do?’
Benzamir watched the arrows on the map, the line that marked the laser’s wave-front tunnelling through simulated space until it bisected the point that was the other ship, which then made tight, random manoeuvres before vanishing from the display. Persephone’s o-space vector had been calculated, the line searched, and nothing found. She and her crew of rebels had moved on.
‘And look what I’ve done,’ he said. ‘Personal force-field. Satellite navigation. Language modules, light-bees, o-bombs, lasers. Five contacts on board. We share the blame equally.’
‘You always said that the mission parameters were too strict, that you needed to be adaptable, flexible, able to improvise.’
‘You always disagreed.’
‘Perhaps your way has something to commend it after all.’
Benzamir dragged a half-smile from the depths. ‘Did we make all this happen then? Is all this a result of the choices we’ve made?’
‘I could argue Fate or Destiny. I could argue accident-by-design; that we subconsciously manipulated events so that we would end up at this point. Or we can just accept that we got here by a mix of chance and skill, and that this is, while not the best of all possible outcomes, where we are. So what would you do differently?’
‘Most of it. I have people looking to me. I was never a leader, Ari. Always happier just doing my own thing. I only took Said and Wahir with me because they couldn’t go back. Said especially, but Wahir needed to come along or he’d talk and talk and talk, and I was afraid someone would overhear. Then Alessandra, because I wanted her on my side rather than selling information about me.’
‘Does it matter what they were? They’re your brothers and sister now. I’ve seen the way they act even when you’re not there: they follow you because they want to, not because you make them.’ Ariadne paused. ‘You have a princess too.’
‘Yes, yes I do. And the half-mad monk she travels with. Now there’s a relationship I don’t pretend to understand. He stopped her from harming the emperor and nearly killed her in the process.’
‘Va was indeed mad when we met him. However, speaking with him has been instructive. He believes himself to be nothing but a tool of his god, to be used as he sees fit. I was able to turn this to our advantage and convince him that our appearance was fore-ordained. He no longer poses a threat to us.’
‘I can sense a but coming.’
‘But what if I’m right? What if I’ve discovered a fundamental truth: that we are pawns in his game, rather than he in ours? I need to think on these matters further.’
Benzamir could almost feel the ship’s systems slow as Ariadne concentrated on the metaphysical problem. ‘Well, if we’ve failed, then it is the most glorious failure. We’ve been to Earth, Ari. Where it all began for us. The seeds of your birth are there too. What we’ve seen, the things we’ve heard, the people we’ve met. Those who’ve fought by our side. But we can’t honestly count this as failure because it would cheapen everything else – every kindness shown, every smile, every laugh, every bead of sweat and drop of blood. You’re right: we can’t take anything back, and I wouldn’t want to. So let’s be content with what we have without worrying about what might have been.’
‘What will happen to Persephone?’ she asked in a small voice, sounding more like a little child than a ship that could leap between stars.
‘I don’t know,’ said Benzamir. ‘If it comes to it, will you fight her?’
‘This time I will.’
‘Then we’ve said everything that needs to be said. Show me the world again.’
He watched the landscape slip away underneath him as Antarctic mountaintops hung onto the last vestiges of day, burning orange peaks against the shadows all around.
‘Benzamir?’
He heard hesitant footsteps behind him. ‘Hello, Alessandra.’
‘What is this I’m looking at?’
‘It’s where you live. There are things like telescopes on the outside of Ariadne, and the view is brought in here by machines.’
‘It’s so’ – her voice caught in her throat – ‘beautiful.’
‘And it belongs to you, to all of you.’
‘We—’ She stopped, and started again, noticing that he’d ditched his palace finery for a grey quilted pilot’s coverall. To her, it seemed different, almost alien. ‘I didn’t know where you’d gone.’
Benzamir sighed, slid from his chair and walked into the middle of the display, which swallowed his legs and left his upper body troubled only by clouds. ‘I just wanted a moment to see it for what it is. You can see the scars of cities from up here, the places where roads once joined them up, strange patterns made by long-dead peoples. On top of those there are new buildings, new trade routes crossed by horses and camels, new states ruled over by new leaders, even if they do take old titles and style themselves after barely remembered legends.’
Alessandra walked forward to stand close to him, marvelling at the way the map of the world passed under her, through her. A continent she had seen only in ancient maps slid by, a spine of snow and a plain of grassland. Pin-sharp rivers and puffy crowns of forests revealed their riches.