‘My God. You’re talking about Yuri Eden.’
‘His true surname was Braemann. His forename – well, he deserves his privacy.’
‘But that means that Beth Eden Jones—’
‘Is my granddaughter. And Mardina, my great-granddaughter. I told Beth my true name, as we fled from the death of the solar system. I wasn’t even sure if Yuri had ever told her the truth about himself. Well, he had. She understood immediately.’
‘And her reaction …’
‘She recoiled from me. I was already a monster to her, a weird old artificial entity; now she found I had turned my son, her father, into a kind of double exile in time and in space – and indirectly, of course, shaped her own life. The fact that I had been instrumental in saving her from the destruction of Earth—’
‘She’ll probably never forgive you for rescuing her.’
‘No. And she’s never spoken to me from that day on. Can you see why I need your help, Penny Kalinski?’ He faced her. ‘I want it all, you see. I want to find the secret truth of the universe – to confront the Hatch builders. I want to save my granddaughter. And I want her to understand me, even if she can never love me. Can you see that, Penny? Do I want too much? Let me call you, Penny. Let us speak, at least.’
In a ghastly moment he reached out for her, but his hands passed through the substance of her flesh, shattering into blocky pixels. And tears leaked from his eyes, she saw, turning to frost on his cheeks. She wondered if he was even aware of this minor artifice.
Once Earthshine released her from Mars, Penny Kalinski returned home, as she thought of it now, to her Academy at Eboraki, to her friends, the new life she had slowly established.
With Kerys’s help she avoided Ari Guthfrithson on the journey back, and later. She had no idea how to report to him what she’d learned from Earthshine, or even if she should. If he suspected Earthshine of having hidden agendas – well, so did Ari himself, she was becoming sure.
And then, as the years passed, she watched over Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson as she grew, under the faintly obsessive care of her mother Beth. Grew at last into a young woman in her own right, with dreams and ambitions of her own – all of them, naturally enough, rooted in this reality, the world of Romans and the descendants of Norse and Britons into which she had been born.
And still, as Mardina began to make her own plans for her future, and as Ceres steadily approached Mars as asteroid and planet circled the sun, the call from Earthshine did not come.
CHAPTER 22
AD 2233; AUC 2986
The command base of the Brikanti Navy was in a city called Dumnona, on the south coast of Pritanike.
The Navy was all over this city, as eighteen-year-old Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson already knew very well, with training establishments and administrative facilities, a deep old harbour that had accommodated ocean-going ships for centuries – and, on the higher ground inland, a vast modern spaceport from which a new generation of Brikanti-Scand ships sailed into the sky itself. But the old city was still a human place, crammed with barracks and a host of hostels and inns – and brothels, and gambling palaces – to cater for the huge resident population of support staff, as well as for the steady flow through the port of elderly officials and healthy young serving personnel. To Mardina, who had been fascinated by the Navy since she’d been a small child growing up in the austere newness of the Saint Jonbar Academy, Dumnonia was a place thick with history – even though, she knew, it had been repeatedly flattened to rubble in the wars with Rome, and even Xin, that had rolled over this countryside in the course of centuries past.
And of all the city’s buildings, more tradition was attached to the great Hall of the Navy than to any other single site.
The Hall was a sculpture of wood and glass and concrete whose form suggested the hull of a Scand longboat, of the kind that had first landed on the shores of north-eastern Pritanike to begin the engagement of two peoples. Now Mardina, in her new cadet uniform, walking into the Hall for the first time with her mother on one side and nauarchus Kerys as her sponsor on the other, looked up as she passed beneath the tremendous sculpted dragon’s head at the faux boat’s prow, as had thousands of Navy recruits before.
Beth stared up at the dragon, shading her eyes from a watery spring sun. ‘Good grief,’ she said in her native English, before lapsing back into Brikanti. ‘That thing looks dangerous.’
‘As if it will bend down and gobble us up, Mother?’ Mardina asked.
‘No, as if that silly lump of concrete is going to break off and land on our heads.’
Kerys laughed. ‘Highly unlikely. The concrete sculpting is reinforced by a massive steel frame which is designed to withstand—’
‘Unlikely, is it?’ Beth was fifty-six years old now, and was always sceptical, always impatient – always vaguely unhappy, Mardina was now old enough to realise, and with a temper that was not improving with age. When she frowned, the vivid tattoo on her face stretched and puckered. ‘I couldn’t list the unlikely events that I’ve had to survive in the course of my long life. That lot dropping on me wouldn’t come near the top.’
‘Now, Mother, you mustn’t show me up,’ Mardina said, faintly embarrassed, trying to hurry her on. ‘Not today.’ She glanced at Kerys, who was a pretty significant figure in Mardina’s universe. The ship’s commander who had once plucked Mardina’s mother from a hulk ship of unknown origins was no longer a trierarchus. Now she was a nauarchus, another hierarchical title borrowed from the Latin, a language replete with such words as Brikanti was not – a commander of a squadron of ten ships, and, it was said, overdue for further promotion, which she had refused so far because of her love of life in her own command, out in Ymir’s Skull.
But Beth said, ‘Oh, don’t worry. Your father will be embarrassment enough. Does he have to be here, Kerys?’
‘A recruit for officer school has to be sponsored by both sides of her family, Beth. Yes, I’m afraid he does.’
‘Well, just stop making silly remarks about the architecture then,’ Mardina said.
‘Actually your mother is being perfectly sensible,’ Kerys put in diplomatically. ‘One thing you’ll learn as an officer, Mardina, is that you don’t take unnecessary risks. A good survival strategy.’
‘There,’ said Beth, satisfied. ‘I remember very well my mother, your grandmother, Mardina, saying the same thing. She was a space officer, you know, Kerys.’
‘As you’ve told me once or twice since I picked you up in the Ukelwydd. Now, follow me.’ She led them to the Hall’s huge doors, and waved security credentials at the guards to gain admittance.
Inside the Hall, Mardina found herself facing a long corridor walled by rows of doors on two levels, the upper accessible by iron gantries and walkways. Clerks and other officials carrying bundles of parchment hurried along the central hall and the upper walkways, and strip lamps suspended from the ceiling cast a light that seemed to turn everything grey. Mardina felt oddly disappointed.
Kerys grinned back at her. ‘Not the romance you were expecting? This is where we administer the largest single organisation controlled by the Brikanti government – a Navy that now spans the planets and beyond, as well as its traditional seafaring arm. Mardina, it’s not some kind of temple, or museum – and nor does everything revolve around you, I’m afraid.’ She winked. ‘But don’t worry. I felt just as small and insignificant when I was in your position. The Navy does notice you, I promise …’
Beth grunted. ‘It’s like a hive. I grew up on an empty planet. You couldn’t get a place more unlike that, than this.’