‘Damn Martian gravity,’ Stef growled. ‘Neither one thing nor the other.’

Mardina laughed. ‘But, Stef, if you can’t even get out of the testudo without a struggle, how will you manage the great leap between the worlds through – that?’

Stef glanced around to get her bearings, here on the Mars of the Incas, a heavily mined but intact Mars – very unlike the Mars that had been wrecked by Earthshine at the terminus of the lost Roman-Brikanti history. The Malleus had been landed close by, and over they had come in the testudo. Aside from the rover tracks back to the ship, this Mars, in this area anyhow – a copy of the ancient landscape of the Terra Cimmeria – looked pristine, to Stef’s eyes. Pristine and untouched, save for this damn Hatch that shouldn’t be here, and the unmanned emplacement around it. Now, holding Mardina’s arm, Stef walked over to the Hatch itself.

It was just another emplacement, a rectangular plate marked with the circular seam of the Hatch itself, the surface blank and featureless, in another kernel field. Just like the one she’d first been brought to on Mercury long ago, and in a different history entirely. Just another mundane impossibility.

Already the Malleus crew had loaded into the dome a pile of equipment and supplies, anonymous boxes and trunks under woollen blankets, which Stef briefly inspected. Most obviously, there were none of the Romans’ clumsy, brass-laden, Jules Verne-type pressure suits. The feeling among the Romans was that the Hatch builders wouldn’t send you somewhere you couldn’t survive. And besides, none of their supplies would last long in a non-habitable environment. It was all or nothing. There was a stove, however, a compact steel box that would serve as a heater or an oven, a technology the Roman army had developed for campaigns in wintry climes. It was without an obvious fuel source – and Stef was surprised, and somehow appalled, to learn that it was powered by a single kernel, an interstellar miracle of deadly potency stuffed inside a gadget you could dry your socks on.

Stef looked around, at the party gathered here in the dome. The ColU was in its pack on the back of Chu Yuen, of course. The other would-be travellers included herself, Clodia, Titus, Mardina – and Ari Guthfrithson, the druidh from Brikanti – and, to everybody’s surprise, Inguill the quipucamayoc from Yupanquisuyu who had insisted on travelling with them from Hanan Cuzco. Of those who weren’t intending to travel onwards through the Hatch, Gnaeus Junius, acting commander of the Malleus, stood by, with his trierarchus Eilidh, others of his crew – and Jiang Youwei.

They all looked at her expectantly.

Stef said, ‘You all seem to be waiting for me to speak. What, because I’m the oldest? If Quintus Fabius was here, he’d be taking charge, you know, optio.’

Gnaeus Junius shrugged. ‘I am not Quintus. I wish I was. I only wish to complete this mission.’

‘Yes. It still seems impossible that we can have got those girls out of the clutches of the Incas as we did.’

‘But into whose clutches,’ Eilidh said, ‘as you put it, some of us will have to return. After all we have nowhere to go in this system save Yupanquisuyu.’

‘You will be made welcome,’ Inguill said now. ‘You know about the messages I sent to Cuzco, trying to explain all this … The Inca’s advisers won’t understand it all now, but with time, and your help, and the evidence I’ve left behind, it will make sense. I am sure Quintus Fabius and your companions will be pardoned.’

Eilidh said, ‘And we can all become good citizens of the Inca empire.’

‘There are probably worse fates,’ Mardina said. ‘Look on the bright side. At least you’re too old to become a mummy and stuck on a ledge in the vacuum for ever.’

‘Nor am I pretty enough,’ said Eilidh drily.

‘But you, Inguill,’ Stef said. ‘You’re sure you want to come? The rest of us have a personal investment. I have studied Hatches all my adult life. The ColU is – well, it’s on a mission. Besides, we are all already displaced. This history, this Inca Culture, is your home.’

She arched an eyebrow. ‘Perhaps. But you know nothing of the court of Cuzco. The Sapa Inca is a weak boy, and the faction behind him is crumbling. His life expectancy is not long – and nor, as a consequence, is that of his key appointees, such as myself. That’s one reason to try something new.

‘And besides, I have been talking to Ari Guthfrithson. Like him I have become fascinated by the mystery of the Hatches, and whoever it is we build them for. I am seduced, perhaps, by the idea of the power being wielded here. Once I never imagined any entity could be more powerful than the Sapa Inca. Now …’

Stef studied her, and Ari. ‘Mardina goes in search of her mother. Beth was only trying to go home, as she saw it. Whereas you, Ari, have abandoned your home, abandoned everything you know, for the sake of this ambition. And you too, Inguill. I’m not sure these are the healthiest reasons for progressing with this. I think I’ll keep an eye on you two.’

‘But I go in search of Beth too,’ Ari said. ‘Look – I don’t care what you think of me, Mardina. Yes, I’m just as fascinated by the enigma of the jonbar hinges as Inguill here. I was a druidh, a scholar too, remember. Why, if not for me none of you might have had the chance to be here at all. You might all have vanished into nonexistence when Earthshine triggered the hinge—’

‘Very well,’ Mardina said. ‘You’re forgiven, Father. Just shut up, all right?’

‘And you, Jiang,’ Stef said. ‘You’re sure you want to stay?’

He shrugged. ‘There is more for me here, Stef. Though I feel a loyalty to you, as to your departed sister. Just as these people are the last free Romans in an Inca reality, so I am the last free Xin. I want to find my people. I believe there are colonies in the Yupanquisuyu. I would seek them out.’

‘There are worse missions in life,’ the ColU said gently.

Gnaeus glanced around. ‘There’s no reason to delay further.’

Clodia was staring at the Hatch. ‘And I think it’s ready for us.’

Stef turned to see. The Hatch surface, which had been blank and featureless, was now marked at its rim by a string of indentations: the imprints of human hands.

FOUR

CHAPTER 59

After leaving Earthshine, Beth took her time to get back to the substellar.

She made a number of detours, exploring the scenery along the route. It wasn’t as if there was anybody waiting for her. Or so she thought. And it wasn’t as if she could get lost; the substellar was the easiest place to find in the entire hemisphere.

She searched water courses and lakes, looking for traces of builders. She found plenty of stem beds, of the kind that had sustained builder communities before. The little creatures had been modular, and assembled themselves, literally, from the reed-like stems, which were themselves complicated pieces of biological machinery. But here she found no trace of the builders, or their works: the shelters they built for their young, the middens they constructed from the remains of their dead, the elaborate dams and dykes they built to control the water flowing through their landscapes.

She thought she would have all the time in the world to pursue such interests. She was, after all, home – even if home had changed while she’d been away.

She was almost disappointed when she got back to the substellar and found the Hatch wide open.

She unpacked her stuff, and boiled water for tea, and waited for the new arrivals.

Practical matters came first, as ever.

It was immediately obvious, when Stef and the rest of the group came through the Hatch, that Beth’s two-person bubble tent was much too small for the eight of them – or nine, if you counted the ColU. So, just an hour after Titus Valerius had led the way through the Hatch, and as the rain began to fall, Beth organised Clodia and Chu Yuen to take down her tent and fix it up as a kind of improvised roof, stretched across a stand of close-growing stem trees. This arrangement wouldn’t be much use in a storm, Stef could see, of the kind she remembered lashing the substellar of Per Ardua even on a good day. And still less would it offer any shelter if Per Ardua fell into another of its starspot winters. But today, as if in welcome of the new arrivals, the rain fell in gentle verticals from a cloudy sky, and the improvised canopy was enough to keep them dry.