Penny shook her head. “A continent as one vast military training ground.”
“But what else is such a barren continent good for?”
“You’d be surprised,” Penny said fervently.
McGregor said, “So, an endless three-way war, now extended out into the solar system, it seems.”
“It has gone this way for centuries,” Ari said. “It is our way, evidently—”
“Giving away our strategic secrets, are you, druidh?”
Beth turned to see Kerys the trierarchus, the ship’s commander, walking into the cabin through the door at the rear. She was followed by a solid-looking Earthshine, an impressive display of virtual projection from the unit in which the old Core AI was stored.
Ari came to a kind of attention. “That wasn’t my intention, trierarchus. I believe that I have learned as much about the home of Beth Eden Jones and her companions as I have revealed about ours.”
Lex McGregor grinned. “And I bet that’s true, you slippery little rascal.”
Kerys walked to the window, hands clasped behind her back, and peered around, beyond the glowing surface of Earth, into space. “Well, our rivals cluster close. They wait on a decision on how we are to dispose of you, the crew of the Tatania. And, needless to say, my superiors at Dumnona have devolved the decision to me.”
Lex McGregor said evenly, “My heart aches for you.”
Kerys arched an eyebrow. “A fine way to talk to an officer who holds you dangling by the testicles.”
McGregor barked a laugh.
“What am I to do with you yourself, for example, General Lex McGregor? Look at you, old and gray, your prime a distant memory. What possible use are you? I might throw you over to the Romans; you might make them laugh, briefly, if they dump you in the arena with a gladiator or two.”
McGregor grinned, fearless. “I’d like to see them try that. Madam, I would have thought my value is obvious. I come from an entirely different military tradition, an entirely different spacefaring background.” He tapped his grizzled pate. “And now all that experience can be put at your command. But,” he said severely, “I come with strings attached. I want my crew with me, Golvin, Kapur, the others—all five of them. Without them I could not function, and would not try. Conversely, throw even one of them to the Romans or the Xin and I will follow.”
“Your loyalty is commendable,” Kerys said, her face kept carefully blank. “You, Penelope Kalinski: frankly your value is obvious even to me. The philosophies and mathematics you display, the technologies you wield—if you spent your remaining years teaching Brikanti students even a fraction of what you know, you could be of immeasurable value.”
Penny nodded her head. She was composed, Beth thought, unmoved, as if she’d thought her way through this already. Penny said, “I can think of worse ways to spend my life. I would need Jiang with me, of course.”
“We can debate that,” Kerys said neutrally. “As for you, Beth Eden Jones—”
She stared closely at Beth, and Beth found herself touching the tattoo that sprawled over her face, a relic of her childhood on Per Ardua: a mark the Brikanti seemed to regard as savage.
“I can vouch for her,” Ari said quickly, forestalling whatever judgment Kerys was about to pronounce. “Trierarchus, she is in many ways the most interesting of all. She was born and grew up on the planet of another star! Embedded in a system of native life of which we have no knowledge—as you know, our ships found no such life on any planet of the star Proxima. She was brought back to Terra as a young adult, and as an outsider she is probably a better witness to that culture than any of these others. Again I cannot say precisely what I would learn from her, given time, but—”
“All right, druidh,” Kerys said, raising a hand. “You’ve made your point.”
“Which leaves me,” Earthshine said silkily.
“Indeed. And you present the greatest challenge of all. The machinery that sustains you is impossibly far beyond our understanding—I would have no way of knowing if it represented some kind of danger to my country.”
“Nor what its potential might be,” Earthshine said, “if you were able to learn from it.”
“Very well. But what of you?” She walked around him, inspecting him; she passed a hand through his arm, making pixels scatter in the air, and Beth saw Earthshine flinch as his consistency protocols were violated. “What are you? Not a man. Are you any more than a puppet? Is there a mind in there?”
“I have been accused of being insane,” he said, smiling coldly. “Can one be insane without a mind? And let me remind you what I have stored, in my artificial mind, my roomy memory: the secrets of what made the Tatania fly. The hulk you captured is scrap metal. And I have all the records we brought with us of our reality, and everything we achieved there.”
Kerys frowned, but Beth could see she was intrigued. “Such as?”
“Let me show you. Please, do not draw your weapons…” He gestured in the air, cupping his hands.
An image congealed before him, a sphere maybe a half-meter across. The bulk of the surface was gray-white ice glistening in the light of an invisible sun, but the blue and green of life sprawled in great patches under curving lids of glass.
Ari gasped. “It is beautiful.”
“It is a world. An asteroid, what you would call a Tear of Ymir. The largest of all—you must have given it a name; we call it Ceres.”
“To us this is Höd,” Ari said. “After the blind half brother of Baldr, favorite child of the old gods.”
“This is what we built there, these great Halls. And Ceres became the hub from which the exploitation of the asteroids progressed. Here is another world.”
He snapped his fingers, and icy Ceres was replaced by a more familiar world, a burnt-orange ball, its surface scarred by canyons and craters, ice caps like swirls of cream at either pole.
“Mars,” said Kerys.
“Yes—a name we share. Look what we built there.” He pulled his hands apart. The planetary image exploded, becoming misty and faint, but the center, before Earthshine’s chest, zoomed in on a sprawling city, a tower at its heart—a needle-like structure whose height only became apparent when the scale was such that people could be made out individually, in pressure suits at the base of the tower.
“This is the Chinese capital, in a region we called Terra Cimmeria. I know how all this was built, even the great tower. I can help you discover it. And more. Again, do not be alarmed…”
On his upturned hands, a series of animals walked, elephants, bison, lions, horses, each three-dimensional image scaled against a human figure.
The Brikanti stared.
Earthshine said, “I and my brothers were created, some centuries ago, for this, above all else. To save the diversity of living things. The destruction of our natural world was not so advanced as it is here, despite centuries of ardent effort,” he said drily. “These animals are known to you only through fossil remains, from bones you find in the ground. To you, the elephants and the apes and the whales are as remote as the dinosaurs. I store genetic data—that is, the information required to recover these animals, to rebuild them. I can give you back your past.”
The animals melted away; he lowered his hands.