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 the 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 forty-ish – 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 towards 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.’

CHAPTER 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, 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 Eilidh 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 military 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 unchanging 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. Away from the ColU, 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 far side 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 some day. 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.’

‘You are Brikanti,’ Stef said carefully. ‘I understand that Brikanti is a distinct nation. Independent of the Romans and their Empire.’

Eilidh looked at her sideways. ‘You really do know nothing of us. Yes, Brikanti is an independent nation. The heartland is Pritanike, an island separated from the mainland of Europa, and therefore from the Romans’ ancient holdings.’

Stef hazarded, ‘An island the Romans called Britannia?’

‘Well, they still do, in their arrogance. For most of our history we’ve traded with Rome peaceably enough. The Romans are the better soldiers, we are the better sailors. We build on the expertise of our Scand cousins, who have always been expert shipbuilders, back to the days of longships with their wooden hulls and woollen sails. When the Scand first burst from their northern fastnesses – they had run out of land to parcel out to too many sons – they were pirates and raiders, and the Brikanti and the Romans made a rare show of unity to beat them back. But it was the Brikanti in the end who forged alliances with the Scand. We had far-seeing leaders in those days – unlike the current lot – who were able to see the potential of this new nation of warriors and traders. There was a kind of revolution of the heart. With Scand ships and their expansive spirit, Brikanti stopped being a rather defensive ally of the Empire and began to forge its own global ambitions.

‘Now our own northern empire stretches across the reaches of Europa, and also Asia where we have a long frontier with the Xin. We are one of the three great powers, I suppose you might say, who dominate Europa, Asia, Africa between us. And we battle over the spoils of the Valhallan continents to the west, much to the chagrin of the native inhabitants.’ She tapped her heavy soldier’s belt. ‘But Valhalla is an arena useful for developing military capabilities.’

Stef said, ‘And you are able to work with the Romans.’

‘Yes. At this time we are officially at peace; the two of us are closer to each other than either of us is to the Xin  … In other ages the pattern changes, though the underlying relationships endure.’

‘Your culture is different from the Romans in other ways,’ Stef said. ‘Women are stronger.’

Eilidh grinned. ‘Well, the Romans have strong women too but they are powers behind the throne – the wives and mothers and sisters of emperors and generals. Our culture has a history of strong women, going back to Kartimandia, who saved us from the Romans.’ She looked at Stef. ‘Is this a story you know? It is two thousand years old; every Brikanti child could tell it.’