Mardina squeezed her arm. “We’re in another history. She was probably never here at all.”
“Maybe not,” Stef said with a bitterness that surprised her. “Just another story, erased by the Dreamers’ meddling.”
“No, not erased. Not as long as you remember her.”
Stef felt unreasonably touched. She patted Mardina’s hand. “You’re a good person, Mardina.”
Mardina laughed. “Despite my great-grandfather being a criminal mastermind downloaded into a box of metal and glass?”
“Yes. That’s quite a legacy, isn’t it? But Yuri at least was a good man too, your grandfather—I can tell you that much. And you’re going to make a fine young mother.”
But that was the wrong thing to say. Stef could feel Mardina stiffen.
“Well, there’s not going to be the time to find out, is there? Not if the ColU is right that all this,” and she gestured at the starry sky, “is about to roll up like a closing scroll.”
Stef could think of nothing to say.
She was relieved when Titus, in the van of the party, reached the translucent wall of the dome.
69
The dome was perhaps fifty meters across, Stef estimated as they walked around it, maybe ten meters tall at its midpoint, the highest point. Its skin was reasonably clear, translucent, and she saw no signs of support, no framework, no ribbing.
Titus glared in through the wall, as if he were scouting out the war camp of a bunch of unruly barbarians. Well, perhaps that wasn’t so far from the truth. He pointed out structures within the dome, piles of matériel. “That looks like what might have brought Ari and Inguill here.” A sled, much smaller and cruder than theirs, with heaps of garments and blankets roughly dumped around it—heavy coats, thick boots.
“And that object in the center, a kind of pillar in the middle of a mesh framework—”
“I believe that is Earthshine,” the ColU murmured. “His support unit anyhow. But evidently heavily modified, for some purpose. And, over there…”
They could all see what it meant. At one side of the dome was a Hatch emplacement, set into the rocky floor.
Stef cupped her hands around her eyes and peered in through the wall, trying to see better, cursing the vapor that rose up from her breath. A Hatch like any other Hatch. Just like the one she’d been brought to on Mercury, the first she’d seen—like the one Dexter Cole had found here on Per Ardua, right here at the antistellar— just like the Hatches she’d seen on worlds of other stars. All of them were alike, just a rectangular panel a few meters across set in the ground, the fine circular seam that marked the position of the lid. Crude functional simplicity.
Yet these simple gadgets were responsible for altering history itself, for adjusting the destinies of billions of souls. Stef was a physicist, and she’d been studying Hatches most of her adult life. Still, they made her shudder.
And on this particular Hatch that lid gaped open.
“So,” the legionary snapped. “Now what? Do we cut our way in?”
Clodia pointed. “Either that, Father, or follow the arrow on the wall.”
They came to a doorway, a blister that protruded from the smooth dome wall.
Titus said, “This door has a handle; that’s simple enough.” He squinted through the wall. “And a second door within.”
“I think it’s a kind of airlock,” Stef said, surveying the dome again. “This structure has no internal skeleton. Has to be air pressure holding it up. Se we need to go through these double doors to avoid letting out all the inner air, and the warmth.”
Titus said sourly, “I have served on starships, you know; I do know what an airlock is. Not that I was expecting to find one here. The practicalities concern me more. Such as, I doubt if this lock could take more than three of us at a time. Two, if laden with baggage. We’ll have to be separated to enter.”
“I sincerely doubt there will be any threat,” Stef said briskly. “Legionary, you can see through the wall. There is only Earthshine… Even Ari and Inguill are nowhere in sight. I think we can take the risk, don’t you?”
“And I for one,” said Beth, “am keen to get out of this cold, for the first time in weeks.”
“Lead us, Titus Valerius,” Stef said.
It proved simple enough for Titus and Clodia to cycle through the airlock. Experimenting, Titus found there was a simple fail-safe. “The inner door won’t open unless the outer one is firmly shut,” he boomed, his voice muffled by the thick dome wall. “The air within is warm and moist.” Still inside the airlock, he pressed his hand against the material of the dome. “This is pliant, yielding a little, but evidently thick and strong. It will be interesting to see how it withstands the blade of my pugio—”
“Not now, Father,” Clodia said. “Come on.” She led the way through the airlock’s inner door and into the interior of the dome, pulling open her heavy clothing as she walked.
Stef took Mardina’s hand, and they both stepped into the airlock together, leaving Chu and Beth unloading stuff from the sled. Mardina closed the outer door, and Titus opened the inner for them—and, just as Titus had described, warm, moist air gushed over them. Stef took deep, shuddering breaths, already feeling warmer than she’d been since crossing the terminator.
She walked out of the lock and stood by Titus. Mardina followed, more uncertainly. The dome itself was a silvery, translucent roof that excluded the sky, lit by small hanging lamps. Even Andromeda was reduced to a washed-out crimson glow. The ground was bare rock, blackish like some kind of basalt, scraped and grooved—presumably by the action of ice across millions of years. Stef looked over at the central clutter of gear. There was Earthshine’s support unit, clearly identifiable, embedded in a nest of other equipment. There was no sign of Earthshine’s avatar projection.
Titus said, “The air smells—funny. Like a ship. Or a factory.”
Stef’s senses were dulled by age, but she agreed. “I smell ozone. No scent of people, or not much—”
Mardina wrinkled her nose. “Maybe my nose is sharper. I can smell a hint of sewage. Yuck. Not unlike what we smell like in the mornings, after a night under the canopy. They are here, then. My father and Inguill.”
Titus snapped, “Well, we can’t hover by the door all day. Clodia! With me. We will organize the work of moving our equipment in. Beth and Chu have made a start.”
“Bring in the ColU first,” Stef suggested. “It will help us make sense of all this…”
Soon the ColU was set on a heap of grubby blankets just inside the lock, and Mardina had hung its sensor unit around her own neck.
Then, as the pile of their belongings gradually accumulated inside the lock, a puddle forming at its base as residual ice melted in the warmth, Stef and Mardina approached the Earthshine unit.
The processor pillar stood at the center of what looked like a sculpture of a spider, itself a few meters tall, with angled rods hinging from the central unit and plunging into the rocky ground. The rods seemed to Stef to be made of some kind of ceramic, milky and smooth. The pillar itself had long lost the wheels Beth had described, on which it had rolled around the planet. Stef could see that the casing of the support unit had been broken open, much of its innards removed or redeployed.
Because of the framework of rods, they could get no closer than a few meters from the central unit. Beyond the support unit Stef made out what looked like a manufacturing area of some kind, with various devices littering the ground—devices of an uncertain function, but an oddly smoothed-out appearance. The materials used seemed to be similar to the ceramic-like substance of the spider legs.