‘We expect disease, you see,’ Michael said. ‘We factor it into the numbers. And if by some miracle you and Collius the oracle were to prevent those deaths—’

‘I told you,’ Titus said. ‘We’ll all be chewing the hull plates before we’re halfway home. Why, I remember once on campaign—’

‘It won’t be as bad as that,’ Michael said. ‘You do dramatise, Titus. There would be culls; the numbers would be managed one way or another. But it would be severely destabilising, and not welcome to the command hierarchy.’

‘And the alternative,’ Stef said slowly, ‘is to let them all die. Down in that pit.’

‘We have no choice,’ the ColU murmured from the slate.

‘No,’ Stef growled. ‘No! I don’t know why the hell I was brought to this world, but I’m damn sure it wasn’t to stand by and watch hundreds of men, women, children, die a preventable death.’ She said desperately to Michael, ‘What if we could cut a deal?’

Titus snorted.

But Michael frowned, evidently intrigued. ‘What kind of deal?’

‘The ship couldn’t feed all these people, if they stayed alive. Very well. Let them live, and we’ll find ways to feed them. The ColU, Collius, is a pretty resourceful oracle. You saw that already. Why, Titus, it showed you how to make soil down at the colonia, did it not?’

‘It did. What are you suggesting?’

‘Let me take the ColU through this ship’s systems. With you, Michael, and the remiges.’

The ColU said, ‘Colonel Kalinski, I would not advise—’

She buried the slate in her tunic so the ColU could not be heard. ‘We’ll find a way to upgrade. Does that translate? We’ll improve the output of the farms. My God, it can’t be so hard, it’s probably no better than medieval down there. We’ll improve the water filtration and reclamation. Show you how to clean up the air better.’

Michael was frowning, unsure. ‘You mean you could make the Malleus better able to support a larger population of crew. And that way you would have us spare the slaves.’

‘That’s the idea.’

He shook his head. ‘Romans are suspicious of innovation, Stef.’

‘Well, they can’t be that suspicious, or they wouldn’t have put their money into Brikanti starships like this, would they? And that centurion of yours strikes me as an imaginative man.’ She was stretching the truth there, but at least Quintus hadn’t gone running and screaming when two strangers and a robot from an alternate history had come wandering through his brand new Hatch. ‘Suppose the Malleus Jesu were to return, not just with its mission at Romulus completed, but new and improved – a prototype for a new wave of starships to come? What if he were able to present that to his own commanders? Romans might not like innovation. What about opportunity, staring them in the face?’

Titus and Michael looked at her, and at each other.

‘We must talk this over,’ Michael said. ‘Before the optio first of all.’

‘I agree,’ said Titus.

Michael waggled a finger at her. ‘And don’t start meddling before you’ve got specific approval from the centurion – and the trierarchus, come to that. Or we’ll all be for the Brikanti long jump.’

Which, Stef had already gathered, meant being thrown out of an airlock.

Titus growled, ‘But first let’s do what we came for and find your slave boy, Stef Kalinski, if he’s still alive.’ He leered at her. ‘And what then? Will you come with me down into the pen, and confront these dying maggots you insist on saving?’

She couldn’t meet his gaze.

TWO

CHAPTER 15

AD 2215; AUC 2968

When Ari Guthfrithson walked into her classroom, Penny Kalinski was trying to teach the descendants of ancient Britons and Vikings about the contingency of history.

She looked down at her notes on the desk before her, silently cursing the need to read her own handwritten scrawl in this world without computers, cursing the inadequacy of her antique pair of reading glasses to cope with the slow drift of her eyesight. Two years after arriving here, aged seventy-one, there were still some things she couldn’t get used to. And she tried not to let the druidh put her off her stride.

But Ari settled into a place at the back of the class beside Marie Golvin, once a bridge crew member on board the ISF ship Tatania, and now a teacher here at Penny’s Academy. Marie was a figure from Penny’s old past, constantly reassuring.

‘The Mongols, then,’ Penny said. She checked her notes. ‘It is the late twentieth century.’ The thirteenth in Penny’s history. The Brikanti, like the Romans, used the old Julian calendar, applying crude leap-year corrections as the centuries passed – and, like the Romans, the Brikanti counted their years since the founding of Rome. It had taken some effort for the newcomers to match their own Gregorian-calendar dates to those in use here. ‘The Mongols, under their rapacious but visionary khans, have exploded from the steppe and have rampaged into the eastern provinces of the Empire, tearing through Pannonia and Noricum and even Rhaetia. They besiege and destroy town after town. They are exterminating Romans. And, who knows? If they cannot be stopped they may turn on Italia, even reach Rome itself. The legacy of centuries of civilisation would be lost, the statues smashed, the books burned, the churches plundered. Perhaps Rome and the Empire could never rise again, even if the Mongol horde could some day be driven out.

‘And to the east it is no better. An equally ferocious horde, under generals of equal genius, is tearing its way into the soft belly of the Xin dominion. They don’t seek territory, these are not empire builders like the Caesars; they seek nothing but booty, and land to pasture their horses, and women and girls to bear their children.’

Her pupils were no older than twelve years old, and their eyes widened at that last detail. But Brikanti was not a prissy culture. And nor had it been much of a stretch for Penny, a woman, to be effectively running this Academy; women had freedom and power here compared to many other cultures – even those less barbaric than the Mongols.

‘There was a moment, then, on the cusp of the twenty-first century, when the future of civilisation itself, the very idea of it, was under threat. The European plains might now be inhabited by nothing but the horses of illiterate herdsmen, grazing grass growing in the rubble of ruined cities …’

Even as she spoke, concentrating on each still-unfamiliar Brikanti word, she was aware of the grandeur of the setting.

Her two dozen students, all children of the wealthy Eboraki merchants who were able to afford the fees she charged, sat in neat rows under the looming conical roof of this schoolhouse. Brand new, and commissioned with the help of Ari himself for the purpose of her Academy – which she had dedicated to Saint Jonbar, who she claimed to Ari was a powerful figure in her own lost version of Christianity – it actually had the feel of great age. It was a roundhouse, like a relic of the European Iron Age of her own history. But the long trunks of the frame, gathered into a stout cone over her head, had been brought across the Atlantic from Canada, which in this history was a province of the Brikanti federation – an expensive import, but for many centuries no trees in Pritanike had been allowed to grow so tall before being cut down for use. The trunks had been set up on a base of concrete, and brilliant fluorescent strip lights were suspended from the apex of the house: to Penny it was a strange mixture of ancient and modern technologies.

In this setting, two years after her arrival aboard the Ukelwydd, she had established her Academy, whose principal purposes were to teach maths and science – especially her own subject, physics, which was far in advance of anything known here. But she had insisted to Ari that she include classes like this, on wider aspects of culture. She said the goal was to educate herself in this new course of history. Ari had bought it; he had come from a wide-ranging educational background himself.