“He said she suffered from something called Earthsickness, and had to go into biosuspension?”

“We in the inner circle know the Nobilissimus both loves and fears her.”

“Wait. This magic Princess of yours, the one who wrote your Constitution and unified the planet. Are you saying she was the one who fixed my nerve damage? What is she, some sort of Jack of Trades, a female Tom Jefferson? A Renaissance Man Lady? Because if she is—I, hey, I … Doc! I think I dreamed about her when she was small…”

Montrose was so surprised that he dropped the chessboard.

“… When she was a little girl. I think I saw her on the ship. But how could I? I was in a coffin the whole time!”

Then he yowled in pain, because the heavy chessboard struck his foot. The doctor insisted on giving him a second medical scan, and no other discussion was allowed after that.

3. The Decorated Hall

In theory, if the tunnel followed a Brachistochrone curve, then any spot on the globe could have been reached in forty-two minutes, traveling the whole way in freefall straight through the core. Practically, Montrose was pretty sure the tunnels did not go that deep, and the trains did not travel so fast. They had not been in freefall: the wineglasses in the wall cabinet had not even rattled. At a guess, he estimated a magnetic levitation train passing through an evacuated tunnel could reach speeds of 5000 miles per hour, topping Mach 6.

This meant that when the carriage stopped and the door hissed open, and he stepped down a short corridor into the atrium of the Presence Chamber, he was sure he was nowhere near Florida: He could be anywhere from Alaska to Argentina, from Iceland to Europe to North Africa, or some island anywhere between Catalina to the Caribbean to Corsica. He did not even know which hemisphere he was in.

The doctor would not step out of the rail car when it finally came to a silent halt.

Montrose decided that he hated the buried railway system of the Twenty-Fourth Century. He wondered about the psychology of people who made superhighspeed trains without windows, and so smooth that there was well-nigh no sensation of motion. So far he had seen nothing like a platform. The experience was one of walking from one room to another, waiting a bit, and walking out.

He had no sense of relative locations. It was like being in a sprawling mansion stretched out over the planet: the whole world was indoors.

So far he had been nowhere but in Del Azarchel’s buried palace, his research campus, and here—and if this small sample was illustrative, that sprawling mansion that stretched over the world had darn few windows. Montrose wondered if everyone in the this century lived far underground, like gnomes.

He walked alone. His footfalls echoed up and down the hallway. The corridor was adorned in a gaudy Old World fashion, with war trophies of flags and shields, busts of Minerva and Mars, beneath a vaulted ceiling of thrones and crowns.

Montrose walked more and more slowly down this corridor, for he was studying the pictures here. Like the chamber he had first woken up in, this was decorated with pictures and portraits of the Space War, and the glorious return of the Hermetic.

Unlike the chamber walls, where he had to guess which pictures went with which events, this seemed laid out like a drama. The images were in chronological order.

Montrose’s footsteps grew slower. There was no image he had not seen before, but this artist had a more realistic style, and some of the images were photographs or stereophotographs rather than pigments.

An image of the Hermetic approaching Earth, her sails spread to catch the light from the orbital braking laser was followed by an image of the ship approaching Jupiter.

Hmm. That struck Montrose as odd. It looked like the great ship had left the deceleration beam before reaching Earth, and deliberately overshot the target. Why Jupiter? Montrose assumed the Captain was performing a gravity-sling, to let the giant planet’s gravity well curve the ship’s freefall into some new vector … no, wait. Not the Captain. Someone else was in charge of the ship during all this.

And where were the warships that had been fighting? Had there not been a space war going on when the great ship returned? Those pictures were next down the corridor: canister-shaped craft lifting off from Earth, bulky with strap-on tanks in the first picture, and open frameworks of missile platforms in the later pictures.

Then the pictures were of fire. This artist had drawn them correctly, as globes of blue-white expanding in zero-gee in all directions, following streams of oxygen issuing from cracked double-hulls.

But Earth vessels were not fighting each other.

One picture he thought was merely a symmetrical image of blazing light. But, no, he realized that it was a picture of the orbital braking laser opening fire on the Hermetic, and the great ship’s sails reflecting the energy back to the source, burning the laser and the crew in a frozen moment the artist had depicted as a field of white in which mere traces of skeletons and latticework from burning machinery could be glimpsed.

Next, occupying both walls of the corridor, was an image of a burnt city under a mushroom cloud. The artist had painted streaks and streams of odd color, green and indigo, issuing like a lighting bolt high in the air. The bolt was wider at the top than at the bottom, which was unlike a detonation or mass-driver strike. There was a tiny silver dot high up in the corner of the image.

Montrose stopped walking.

It was an orbital antimatter bombardment.

The magnetic launch-bottle could accelerate the particle to relativistic velocities, but the explosion, the total conversion, would happen at the outermost fringes of atmosphere, wherever contraterrene met terrene matter. The Hermetic’s mining aura, fired simultaneously, could focus a beam of magnetic influence to drive the resulting particle spray downward rather than in all directions, but it would spread. Only a fraction of the energy would touch the ground.

As a weapon, it was absurdly wasteful. As an act of conspicuous consumption, meant to awe the enemy into surrender, it was not wasteful at all.

Then came other images of cities dying in fire beneath the heavy canopies of mushroom-shaped clouds.

Once when he was young and in the service, Montrose had been kicked by a mule. It was an old beast, and he had been wearing a heavy jacket, so the blow did not kill him, but it sent him to the infirmary with his ribs taped up. The sensation he felt then was like that.

Back when he had first seen these pictures of mushroom clouds on the walls of the bedchamber where he woke, of course he assumed he was looking at a nuclear war. Of course he had not imagined the Hermetic at fault, because she carried no nuclear warheads.

Stupid. Stupid, because he knew enough high-school physics to know what causes clouds of that shape. Heat, not radioactivity. The characteristic mushroom cloud shape was a byproduct of energy expenditure. You would get the same thing above a large-scale meteor strike, or …

The next image showed the Hermetic and the open-framework cylinder-ships from Earth. It looked like the cylinders were making reentry. But no. The Hermetic had accepted the surrender of the crews (a string of suited figures was shown being drawn in the airlock) and was using the empty hulls as drop-energy weapons. A mass of metal that large, made of substances designed not to melt on re-entry, landing in a city, or atop a dam, would release as much kinetic energy as an atom bomb, but without the messy radioactivity.

There had been no war for the Hermetic to stop. Why had he assumed that? Because that was what he wanted to assume, maybe?