“We noticed this the minute we stepped out of the Hatch,” Stef said, wondering. “I never dreamed the whole world was like this. But—who built all this? And where are they now?”
“That’s the puzzle. These vast mountain-fortresses are all pristine, save for some evidence of erosion and rock fall—natural breakdowns. There’s no evidence they were ever inhabited, let alone fought over. Meanwhile, across the planet, we have found no trace of life more complex than those orange chimney-stacks of bugs you see piled up on the plains. Nothing moved here, not until the legionaries arrived, and they don’t move much either. Ha! I do have a theory, for what it’s worth. I may be limited as a druidh but I’ve seen as much of this world as anybody.”
“Tell me.”
“The farside, the dark side, is—damaged. I’ve seen vast craters, their rims protruding above the ice. And there is a very odd range of mountains running virtually north to south down the rim of one of the continents there, buried though it is under the ice.”
“Like the Andes.”
“The what?”
“A mountain range in, umm, Valhalla Inferior, I think you call it.”
“Like that—yes. Now, these mountains had been modified, but not as fortresses. We saw evidence of vast installations, like cannon muzzles, all along the western faces of the mountains. My colleagues, especially the Romans, thought these must be weapons, but they didn’t look like very effective weapons to me. The only purpose I could think of…”
“Yes?”
“Perhaps these were, not weapons, engines. Rockets intended to fire together, powered by kernels presumably, blasting all along this great seam along the belly of the planet—”
“My God. You think they were trying to spin up the planet?”
“It’s possible. Maybe there was some great project to make this world more hospitable. The approaches to the second sun, you know, do make life difficult here, for the native life as for the Roman colonists.”
The ColU had worked out that this was a double-star system in which both partners were red dwarfs—small, miserly stars, like Proxima, so small and dim they hadn’t even been detected from Earth. The ColU had said the nearest such system to Earth must be at least seven, eight, nine light-years out.
“Of course,” Eilidh said, “most of this world’s life, like every living world, is comprised of bugs that inhabit the deep rocks, miles deep, feeding off seeps of water and heat and minerals. We found them here when we were running deep mining trials—as one always finds them, on every world. They won’t care if there is one or two suns in the sky, or more. So long as the world itself lasts, they will too.”
“I take it the great spin-up never happened.”
“It appears there was a war to stop it. Evidently not everybody agreed with the visionary engineers behind the scheme. The big spin-mountain engines were attacked—we have seen the damage.”
“If this is all so, then what happened to the natives after that?”
“I can only guess. Perhaps they were appalled by the damage done by their kernel war. The building of their mountain refuges might have been a last burst of sanity before the madness—or possibly the other way around.”
“But despite all that they are gone.”
“Perhaps there was something like a plague, or…” She eyed Stef. “You have more sophisticated machines than us, as evidenced by Collius. There may have been other weapons that were used to eradicate all higher forms of life from this world, before they wrecked it altogether.”
“Leaving it to the deep bugs to start again, I suppose.”
Eilidh sighed. “That, and a world like a dead emperor’s folly.”
It was yet another planetary tragedy, Stef realized, caused by the availability of the kernels. “I think I envy those deep bugs, you know. Resting in their gloomy chambers, far below all the commotion of the surface. Life must seem so simple, and so safe.”
Eilidh grunted. “But not for the likes of us.”
“So,” Stef said, trying to understand, “you come out into interstellar space in kernel-driven hulks. We got as far as Proxima.”
Eilidh frowned, evidently struggling to understand, but she nodded.
“You’re exploring,” continued Stef, “maybe scouting is a better word, and you’re planting colonies, colonia, on any habitable world, in advance of the other guy getting here first.”
“That’s the idea.”
“But when you find a world seeded with kernels, you create a Hatch. Is that right?”
“This is my own second such expedition. It begins with the vicarius blessing the seeded ground…”
“You create the Hatch—presumably it connects itself to some higher-dimensional network—but then you never try to use it.”
“Well, the Mercury Hatch led nowhere, as far as we know. Whatever the Hatches really are, wherever they go, they aren’t for us.”
“Then why build them?”
Eilidh smiled with a touch of cynicism. “Perhaps you aren’t as spiritual a people as we are, Stef Kalinski. One thing that unites us Brikanti with the Romans is a worship of Jesu, of the Cross on which He died and the Hammer that He wielded against His foes… To us the kernels are a great gift. Look how much we have been able to do: we have transformed our own world, we have traveled to the stars—”
“You smite your foes.”
“Quite so. Some believe the kernels are a gift from God, Father of Jesu—though older superstitions persist; some of the country Romans still speak of old gods like Vulcan, and some Scand believe a kernel is a gateway to Ragnarok. And in return for this gift, we do what is evidently asked of us, which is to cause fields of kernels to blossom into Hatches. What are the Hatches for? Perhaps some future generation will be able to answer that. In the meantime, we travel, we harvest the kernels, we build the Hatches. For such seems to be the scheme of things; such is what we are required to do.”
“Just as my own ancestors once built cathedrals, perhaps. Some dumb legionary might be content to follow orders, mindlessly, without inquiring. You can’t be happy with that.”
“I’m Brikanti. My ship is my true purpose. And besides, there’s very little I can do to change the trajectory of my society. Could you? But speaking of changing trajectories…”
The great ship turned in the air, and Stef saw its shadow swim across the sculpted mountains below.
Eilidh said, “Our adventure is over already. Well, there is much to do, a five-year star flight to plan. I hope you have found the day instructive. More tea, my friend? Shall I call for a fresh pot?”
But Stef was receding into her own thoughts. Too slowly, in her aging mind, new problems were occurring to her. The Hatch on this world had evidently only existed for a year or two, since these Brikanti and Romans had come here and built it. But she and Yuri had walked into the Hatch on Per Ardua long before that—seven or eight or nine years ago—they had walked into one end of a space-time tunnel years before the far end had even existed… So where had they been, for all that time?
She started shivering, uncontrollably. Eilidh draped her thin shoulders in a blanket.
9
When Stef returned to the colonia she learned that Yuri had been taken to the legionaries’ small hospital. She hurried that way, concerned.