McGregor grunted. “And everybody is armed to the teeth.”
“That’s the idea. The fact that there is a native Xin among you, or so we would classify Jiang Youwei, makes the situation that much more complex; all sides feel they have a claim. At some point the trierarchus, as the command authority on the spot, will need to decide whether it is worth the risk of trying to transport you to Brikanti territory on the ground, or else to give you up to either Rome or Xin—or even to cast you adrift in your Tatania and let them fight it out over you. For we Brikanti, you see, are a small and nimble power who strive to stay safe by not being trodden on by either of our world’s lumbering giants…”
Penny Kalinski joined them now, entering through the door at the back of the cabin. Swimming easily in the absence of gravity, she looked comfortable in a loose-fitting Brikanti costume of tunic and trousers. She was carrying a slate, and sipping something from a covered pottery mug. “Watered-down mead,” she said to Beth. “Pleasant stuff.”
Beth had to smile. “You look as if you fit in here, Penny.”
“Well, what can you do but make the best of it? I doubt we’re going home any time soon. Even if ‘home’ still exists, in any meaningful sense. So what’s going on? I heard we were due to pass over Britain; I wanted to come see.”
Lex McGregor did a double take, turned to the panorama of the world below, and frowned at what he saw. “Really? That’s Britain? What the hell?”
Beth, a stranger to Earth, had comparatively little preconception about what she expected to see, looking down on Britain / Pritanike. She saw a kind of archipelago, a scatter of islands off the shore of a greater continent to the east. There was a grayish urban tangle laid over the green-brown of the countryside on the eastern coast of the larger of the islands, nearest the continent; she saw the glitter of glass and metal, arrow-straight roads. And in the mountainous country of an island to the far north she saw tremendous rectangular workings that looked as if they might rival the minefields of the lunar maria.
Lex said grimly, “I was born in England. The southern counties, Angleterre. I have seen my home country from space many times. But I do not recognize that. Half of it’s missing altogether.”
Penny touched his shoulder. “History’s been different here, Lex. Rome in the west never fell, apparently. Here, they industrialized centuries before we did. With the consequences you’d expect.”
“Greenhouse gases. Deforestation. Sea level rises?”
“That’s it. It will all have gone a lot farther and a lot earlier than in our timeline. We had the great twenty-first century crisis of the climate Jolts, the heavy-handed repair work of the Heroic Generation. Maybe here, as it unfolded more slowly, they understood it all less—maybe they cared less—and just adapted to it. I think we can expect to see the coastlines transformed all around the world. Lowlands lost, like south and east England here.”
McGregor squinted. “That big sprawl in northern England looks like it’s centered on York.”
“That is Eboraki,” said Ari. “The capital of an independent Pritanike since the days of Queen Kartimandia herself, she who defied Rome. It has always been a city of war. Later, in the early days of contact between my own ancestral people and the Brikanti, for some years Eboraki was held by us. It was a Scand city, not a Brikanti one.”
Penny grinned. “But all that’s a long time ago. Forgive and forget?”
“At least we Brikanti and Scand loathe each other less than we loathe the Romans and the Xin. Now Eboraki is the capital of a world empire—though we have no emperors.”
Lex said, “The development on the scraps of high ground to the south of the Thames, beyond the Isle of Dogs. That might be some version of London.”
“That is Lund,” Ari said. “The most obvious gateway to Europa, and the Roman provinces. The town was a petty community before contact with the Romans; there was no particular purpose for it. After Kartimandia it became a trading hub with the Empire, and the nearest to a Roman city in Pritanike. But it was always dwarfed by Eboraki.”
McGregor pointed. “And what the hell did you do to Scotland?”
Ari frowned. “We know it as Kaledon. An arena of heroic engineering.”
“It looks like you demolished mountains,” McGregor said. “Some areas look like they’ve been melted.”
“Some have been,” Ari said. “A kernel-drive spacecraft, landing or taking off, generates rather a lot of heat.”
“My God,” Penny said. “They really have brought kernel technology down to the face of the Earth. All that heat energy dumped into the ground, the air. It’s a wonder they haven’t flipped the whole damn planet into some catastrophic greenhouse-warming event, into a Venus.”
“Maybe,” Lex said, “they were lucky. They got away with it. Just. Perhaps there are other timelines where precisely that happened. Does that make sense, Kalinski? If there are two timelines, why not many?”
“Or an infinite number.” She grinned, lopsided. “That had occurred to me too. You’re thinking like a scientist, McGregor.”
“I’ll cut that out immediately.”
Ari followed this exchange closely.
Now the island cluster was passing away to the northwest, and the ship was sailing over the near continent—Gaul to the Romans and the Brikanti, France to the crew of the Tatania. The countryside, where it was spared by the sea-level rise, glowed with urbanization. But on the track of a broad river Beth made out a neat circular feature, a set of rays spanning out from it, a lunar crater partially overgrown by the green. She pointed. “What’s that?”
Ari said, “Once a major city of the Roman province. Destroyed in a war some centuries back, by a Xin missile that got through the local defenses.”
Penny said, “The missile—kernel-tipped? It was, wasn’t it? So it’s true. You people don’t just use kernels as sources of power on Earth. You actually use them in weapons, to fight your Iron Age wars.”
Ari Guthfrithson frowned. “Would you have me apologize for my whole history? And is your history so laudable?”
McGregor murmured, “We’re missing the point here, Penny. Forget your judgments. We need to learn as much about this world as we can while we’ve got the chance.”
Penny nodded. “You’re right, of course, since it looks like we’re going to be stuck here.” She thought it over. “The Ukelwydd is following a high-inclination orbit around the Earth—around Terra. That is, the orbit is tipped up at an angle to the equator—”
“That is intentional, of course,” Ari said, “so that our track takes us over Pritanike and the landing grounds of Kaledon.”
“But that means we get to fly over a good span of latitudes. And as the planet turns beneath us, with time we get to look down on a swath of longitudes too. Give me a few hours with a slate, and I’ll capture what I can. Then with some educated guesswork maybe we can figure out the story of this world…”
11
Twelve hours later Penny called her companions, with Ari, back to the observation lounge. She’d found a way to project slate images onto a blank wall, and had prepared a digest of her observations of the turning world beneath.
She showed them landscapes of dense urbanization, the cities glowing nodes in a wider network of roads and urban sprawl. “Welcome to Terra,” she said drily.