“We don’t belong here,” Penny said. “Earthshine’s right. Any more than I belonged in Stef’s reality, after the Mercury Hatch. My God, Lex, these characters make you look like a UN diplomat—”
Now the lights started to go out all over the bridge, Beth saw. Even the screens went dark, displays fritzing to emptiness. The bridge crew hammered their touchpads and keyboards and slates, and yelled instructions into microphones, without success.
“It’s all shutting down,” Golvin said. “We’re losing everything.”
McGregor demanded, “Is it the Brikanti?”
Jiang said, “They communicate by crude radio. I would be surprised if they could hack into our sophisticated information systems to do this.”
And Beth turned to look at Earthshine. While the rest of the bridge shut down—even the main lights were flickering now—he seemed to be glowing, oddly, from within, as if transfigured. A golden light.
“You,” she said. “It’s not the Brikanti doing this—this isn’t part of their attack. It’s you, Earthshine.”
McGregor turned on him. “What the hell are you doing to my ship, you old monster?”
Earthshine stood up from his couch, his virtual body passing through the harness. “Saving you all. General, the only asset we have in this reality is the knowledge we bring from—where we came from. I have taken that knowledge into myself, for safekeeping. Even the ship’s physical systems are being destroyed, now they are drained of data. The Brikanti have captured a useless hulk. I will use the knowledge I have stored in myself to bargain for our lives.”
McGregor roared, “And who the hell put you in charge?”
“I just did. And now, I think—”
The door slid open.
A party of figures floated into the bridge without ceremony, in clunky pressure suits of what looked like leather and steel ribbing, each bearing a stylized rifle with bayonet fixed. They all had their faceplates open, and they stared around at what was evidently a very unfamiliar environment. At a quiet word from a central figure, they spread out quickly into the bridge, one standing over each crew or passenger.
Beth found herself facing a short, squat, heavily built man; she had to raise her hand to shield her eyes from a flashlight attached to his weapon that he shone in her face.
“Nobody resist,” McGregor murmured. “We’re in their hands now.”
The leader of the invading party lowered her rifle—she was a woman, pale complexion, perhaps fortyish—and she made straight for Lex McGregor, the obvious command figure. She spoke, softly but firmly, and Beth heard a simultaneous translation come from a speaker on a console.
“My name is Kerys. I command the vessel Ukelwydd—”
“I know who you are.” Earthshine stepped toward her.
The warriors tried to block his way and waved their weapons at him, but the golden figure simply walked through them. A couple of men broke away, evidently panicked by this eerie display.
The commander, however, stood her ground.
“Trierarchus Kerys, my name is Earthshine. And we need to talk.”
8
AD 2222; AUC 2975
It took a month after Stef and Yuri emerged from the Hatch before the Malleus Jesu was ready to depart from the double-star system of Romulus and Remus for Earth—or Terra, as the Romans and Brikanti called it. The setting up of the permanent colonia continued apace, even as ferry craft blasted up to the orbiting starship carrying away personnel, equipment and supplies for the return journey. Stef was bemused to observe that the ferries themselves were driven by small clusters of kernels—“vulcans” as the Romans called the energetic wormhole-like anomalies—even in the atmosphere of an inhabited planet, like this one. No such craft had ever been allowed anywhere near the surface of the Earth, her Earth, not before the final war of 2213 anyhow.
Early one morning, with six days left to departure, Stef Kalinski was approached by a Brikanti who introduced herself only as Eilidh. Tall and spare, Eilidh was dressed much as trierarchus Movena was in a hooded woollen poncho, trousers, boots. But unlike Movena, Eilidh wore a heavy belt as the Romans wore, with a gaudy brass buckle and loops for weapons, though empty.
Stef, as had become her habit, had been spending her free time at the Hatch site with her slate, trying ineffectually to learn a little more of the physics of the enigmatic emplacement. Now Eilidh asked Stef if she would care to join her in a final aerial tour by cetus of the area around the colonia site.
Stef guessed she was maybe fifty, a little older than Movena, but a good deal younger than Stef herself. “I might have taken you for a Roman with that belt.”
“The trierarchus, Movena, remains independent of the Roman military command. I on the other hand am officially a tribune, an officer subordinate to the centurion. I am a kind of liaison between the two command structures. Complicated, I know, but it seems to work… As to the tour, we seek to complete our mappings of this place. And we have photographers, artists, to capture the likenesses of the structures left behind by the indigenes. We want to leave with some record of this world as it exists before the children of these Roman soldiers breed like rabbits and dismantle the fortress-mountains for building materials for their roads. I myself am a command officer but serve the trierarchus as a druidh, a scholar, hence my own interest. I have undergone some of the training… Will you come?”
“I’d bite your hand off.”
Eilidh pulled a face. “A vivid expression and oddly Roman. This was Movena’s idea; we would be fascinated by your response. We’ll be gone a couple of days. Bring what you need. We leave in an hour.”
So, in the unvarying light of Romulus, and as trumpet blasts roused the Roman colonia from its slumber for the first watch of a new day, Stef stood side by side with Eilidh before the big observation window of one of the expedition’s two cetus airships, as the ground fell away beneath them. Stef looked for the small barracks block where Yuri was resting, with the ColU for company; Stef would be supported in her translation by the buds in her ears, themselves smart little gadgets.
Eilidh gestured to the west, where mountains strode across the landscape. The sky was clear, and Romulus cast a pearly light that spun shadows across the mountain chain, sharp and unvarying. “Most of the interesting structures are to be found in the mountains. So that’s where we’ll make our way. This expedition is only a final reconnaissance. The Arab navigation team with their farwatchers, working from orbit, have mapped much of the planet. And with our two cetus craft, we’ve completed two circumnavigations, one equatorial from substellar to antistellar, and the other pole to pole. The farside is, of course, masked by ice, as are the shadow faces of all worlds like these, huddling close to their suns. But the air remains breathable, and there is life, and some structure.” She smiled. “I have spent happy hours with Centurion Quintus Fabius and his staff studying these maps, plotting the routes of roads yet to be built, ports and transport nodes to be founded at river confluences and estuaries—sketching the provinces to be carved out of these silent landscapes someday. There have even been war games, military exercises, as Quintus and his boys have imagined how to counter new Hannibals marching through those sculpted mountains.”