‘They spotted this thing. A point of light in the sky, moving steadily. You understand, trierarchus, that if you split open the spectrum of the light from such an object you can learn about its nature and trajectory.’

‘I may not be a druidh but I know that much.’

‘I apologise. Well, the astronomers had thought it was just another teardrop, previously unmapped. Or perhaps a hairy star wandering in from the greater void.’

Kerys prompted, ‘But in fact …’

‘In fact this object is beyond the main belt of Ymir’s teardrops. It is heading nearly directly away from our position – away from the sun, in fact. Its apparent motion across our field of view is quite small, but it is receding swiftly. Not only that, the object is actually decelerating. You can tell that from the shifting shadow bands in the unfolded light—’

‘Yes, druidh, thank you.’

‘I apologise again.’

‘Decelerating. Is this a ship?’

‘Yes, trierarchus. You won’t be surprised to know that the split light shows it to be using a kernel drive, like the ships of all the empires. But it is not a configuration we recognise, not from any of the empires, not ours, not Roman or Xin.’

‘You have challenged it?’

‘We have – or rather our signallers have, following my suggestion.’

‘Hm. Maybe I should have been informed before such a step was taken.’

Ari Guthfrithson sighed, and poured them both some more Roman wine. ‘Would you have paid attention, trierarchus? Your mind has been focused, rightly, on the operations at the teardrop, and our course to the next. The hail was routine. It was thought best not to disturb you until—’

‘All right,’ she said grumpily. ‘I take it no reply was received to our hail.’

‘None. We have in fact heard the rogue being hailed by other vessels, Roman and Xin both; again we have heard no reply.’

Kerys frowned. ‘But if it’s not Brikanti or Roman or Xin, then what? Some kind of pirate?’

‘If so, evidently formidable. That’s the situation, trierarchus. Given the deceleration we can see, we know that this rogue will slow to a halt in three days. We also happen to know that the Ukelwydd is the closest Brikanti vessel to the object. And we have the chance to be first to intercept.’

Kerys eyed the druidh. ‘I think you’re telling me a decision point is approaching.’

‘At which you will need to report back to the fleet headquarters at Dumnona, trierarchus. If we were to abandon our mission here and intercept the rogue—’

‘When will it come to a halt?’

‘Two more days. By which time –’ Ari grabbed a bit of parchment and quickly sketched positions. ‘Ymir, the god who built the cosmos, made a single stride from the sun to the place where he built Midgard,’ he said, a bit of rote taught to all students of interplanetary navigation at the college at Dumnona – and it amused Kerys that he used the old Brikanti word for the world, rather than the Roman ‘Terra’ long incorporated into his people’s everyday language. ‘Here we are about three Ymir-strides from the sun. The rogue is here, more than half a stride further out, but along a different radius from our own. We calculate that if it keeps decelerating as it is – we’ve no guarantee about that, of course – it will come to a halt here, in about three days, further out along that radius, about five strides from the sun.’

‘Hm.’ Kerys spanned the distance between Ukelwydd and the rogue with her hand. ‘If you’ve drawn this roughly accurately, then we are perhaps two Ymir-strides from the rogue’s final position. And we have three days to get there? Could we do that?’

‘The engineers say that we could do it with a double-weight acceleration load all the way – a day and a half out, a day and a half to decelerate.’

‘The crew will love that.’

Ari said drily, ‘They will relish the challenge.’

‘Perhaps. You advise me well, Ari …’

It was clear to Kerys that her commanders would order her to intercept this rogue, if she could, to be the first there, beating the Xin, the Romans.

The Brikanti were the weakest of the three great powers of Earth, spread thin along their marginal realm, a vast terrain of mostly unproductive land: the northern coasts of the Eurasian landmass, the Scand countries, Pritanike and Iveriu, and the northern reaches of Valhalla Superior, though that was under constant threat from the Roman legions whose roads and marching camps criss-crossed the great plains to the south of that vast continent. Since the days two millennia past when Queen Kartimandia had used guile to persuade the Romans under Claudius to invade Germania rather than Pritanike, the Brikanti and their allies had relied for their survival not on brute strength, not on numbers and vast armies, but on cunning, on ability and knowledge. And the chance to acquire new knowledge was never to be passed up. That was why the Ukelwydd was out here scouting for treasure amid the Tears of Ymir in the first place.

The rogue ship represented opportunity – an unknown opportunity, but an opportunity even so. It would be Kerys’s duty to grasp that opportunity, she was sure.

She began to roll up her charts of Ymir’s Tears. ‘Well, Ari, if I am to speak to Dumnona I will need a draft mission plan. I don’t think we’ll be allowed to ignore this.’

Ari stood. ‘I took the liberty of getting that process started already, trierarchus.’

‘You know me too well. Get on with it, then, and I’ll make my way to the communicators.’

CHAPTER 7

The Tatania finally drew to a halt five astronomical units from the sun. Halted in emptiness.

This was the orbit of Jupiter, Beth was told, a giant bloated world with a retinue of moons like a miniature solar system in itself, a world that would have dwarfed any planet in the Proxima system – even the Pearl, which had been bright in the permanent daylight of the Per Ardua sky. But this monster among planets was on the far side of the sky just now, invisibly remote, and the ship hung in a void, star-scattered, where even the mighty local sun was a mere speck of fire, a source of sharp rectilinear shadows. If only Jupiter had been closer, Beth thought, there might not be this sense of abandonment, of isolation.

But they were not alone. The foreign ship had already been waiting for them here, even as, after three days of burning the kernel drive, the Tatania’s velocity relative to the sun was reduced to zero.

The Tatania had been repeatedly hailed, over radio frequencies Marconi could have exploited, and Earthshine had at last been able to put together a rough translation. This was a vessel called the Ukelwydd, which was a word similar to the Welsh for ‘mistletoe’. It was part of a fleet commanded from a place called Dumnona, which Earthshine speculated might be in Britain, on Earth. That fleet was a military arm of a nation, or federation, called something like the ‘Brikanti’. As the Tatania was not recognised as a vessel either of the Brikanti, or of the Latin-speakers, or the ‘Xin’, and as it refused to respond to any hails, it would be regarded as a pirate and treated as such.

The Ukelwydd was evidently a kernel-drive ship like the Tatania, and its basic hull was a cylindrical shape, like the Tatania’s, the most obvious design choice in response to the high thrust levels of the kernel drive – and, according to McGregor, it had blasted out here at multiple gravities to overhaul the Tatania. Even from the first glimpse, Stef thought, the Ukelwydd had the look of a fighting ship, with an evidently massive hull, heavy armour around the kernel-drive units in the base of the ship, and what looked like scarring, the result of weapons fire, in the insulation that swathed the main body.