‘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 realised, 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 which 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 travelled 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 enquiring. 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 ageing 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 spacetime 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.

CHAPTER 9

When Stef returned to the colonia she learned that Yuri had been taken to the legionaries’ small hospital. She hurried that way, concerned.

When she got to the hospital she was directed to a kind of operating theatre. She’d glimpsed this place before; it looked to her more like a butcher’s shop, with alarming-looking surgical instruments suspended on the wall. But, she was told, it was hygienic enough; Michael and his Greek-trained medics and their Arab advisers knew enough about antisepsis and the risk of infection to keep the place reasonably clean.

Here she found Yuri, slumped in a chair, and the ColU – or rather its processing unit, a baroque tangle of metal and ceramic – sitting on a tabletop. Titus Valerius stood by, the big veteran soldier who had caused Quintus Fabius so much trouble with his small rebellion on the day Stef and the others had walked out of the Hatch.

And, standing in the centre of the room, looking scared and uncomfortable, was a boy, dark, Asiatic, slim, aged perhaps thirteen or fourteen – but he was so skinny it was hard for Stef to be sure. He wore a grubby tunic and no shoes; his feet were filthy. Medicus Michael hovered by the boy, looking abstracted, fascinated.

Stef made her way towards Yuri, nodding at Titus. The big man was picking at the nails of his one good hand with the top of a full-scale sword, a gladio, propped in his opposing armpit. He nodded back to Stef, and his gaze raked over her elderly body in the way of all legionaries. But she felt as safe with Titus as she did with any of the Romans; she had met his young daughter Clodia, who he had brought on this space mission as a small child, after the death of her mother.

Yuri looked up; he was very pale, but he smiled. ‘Good trip?’

‘Eye-opening. Are you OK? What’s going on here?’

‘It’s not about me, for once. In fact you’re just in time.’ He gestured at the boy. ‘This is something new. Introduce yourself again, son.’

In decent Latin, the boy said in a wavering voice, ‘My name is Chu Yuan. I am fourteen years old. My family are scholars and merchants in Shanghai. My father is a soldier with the Twenty-fourth Division of the Imperial Army of Light. He was stationed in Valhalla Inferior. He took his family there, including myself, the eldest son …’

Yuri winked at Stef. ‘Valhalla Inferior – South America. For centuries you’ve had tension between the Chinese coming in from the west, basically holding the coastal plain and the Andes, and the Romans coming in from the east through Amazonia, as well as south from their holdings in Mesoamerica.’

‘And the native people caught in the crossfire.’

The ColU said drily, ‘At least they were not exterminated by crowd plagues, as in our history. The Vikings – the “Scand” allies of the Brikanti – had already been travelling to the Americas for centuries, allowing immunity a chance to build up. But the war fronts ebb and flow.’

‘Our fort was overrun,’ Chu said now. ‘My father was killed. My mother ran away. I was captured, enslaved by the glorious soldiers of Rome.’

That made Stef pause. ‘He’s a slave?’

Yuri shrugged. ‘His parents were grooming him to be a scholar, I think, or a clerk. But the Romans caught him, and he ended up a slave on this tub.’

Stef stared at this boy, trapped in a category of humanity she never thought she would have to deal with. She’d found it almost impossible to function in the colonia, for the slaves were everywhere, if invisible to a Roman eye. And it wasn’t just the subjugation of human beings that distressed her but the level of daily, almost casual brutality. Even for routine punishments there were blood-stained stakes, lead-tipped whips. She’d always rather admired the Romans, for their literacy, their order, their engineering, their respect for the law. Now, she was finding, she’d never fully imagined this side of their civilisation.