The First Step chapter 5

Gently and with more than a touch of sadness, the Warmaker glanced down. "I am sorry, I could have handled that more delicately. I thought from your chart you might have already worked it out, but yes, it's true. This whole moon is chronium, apart from this-" and they tapped their foot on the white stone floor, "which some of my colleagues have dubbed 'antichronium', and I can assure you it would avail me even less."

"Chart?" Saffa said weakly.

"The… the graph." Dufore pointed to where the map they had salvaged from camp two lay, out in the plaza.

Yarbe seemed less shaken than the others. To the Affenstrin, they said, "It's not our chart, we found it in the camps. We can't read it, but I think I sort of understand the numbers. Can you… explain?"

They started to walk over to the chart. I wanted to stop them, some part of my being still pulsing with a deep and distant fear of the Warmaker and the devastation leashed in their being, but I could think of no reason to put words to. Collectively, we drifted after Yarbe; literally in the case of the Warmaker, who did not walk but floated a centimetre or two off the smooth ground, leg-shapes as unmoving as tree roots.

"This is us, right?" Yarbe said, kneeling down and pointing to the bottom of the 'V' formed by the stepped line that spanned the metres-wide spread of paper. There, a tiny notch was circled, lines spreading from the circle to a square-framed inset showing a schematic of the pit in cross-section.

"Yes," said the Affenstrin. They pointed to the chart, and their finger emitted a laser-pointer dot, smoothly tracing the graph-like curve up and away from where Yarbe had indicated.

"This charts the strength of the bore's spatial distortion."

"The bore?" Looking up at the Affenstrin, Yarbe's face showed something more like resigned horror than surprise, as if they were receiving only confirmation of something they had long dreaded.

"You must have descended it, yes? When you arrived here?" Alien substructures made the Warmaker's expression unreadable for a moment. "Forgive me, I should have asked first; you were not born here?"

"No…" Yarbe said quietly.

Dufore managed a little more clarity. "We arrived here in retreat from the battle, not long after the system was first contested by ourselves, the Commonwealth and your… antecedents." There was a leaden quality to their tone. "Our chronos were a casualty of the timescar, but one… Vittar… says we have been here subjective centuries. They said that on the outside it must have been longer than that"

For a long moment the Affenstrin didn't speak. Then, considerably less assured than they had sounded at first, "You have been here since the outbreak of the Time Wars?"

"What? No!" I said before I realised I was speaking. "That was four- five thousand years ago."

There followed one of those rare conversational impasses where no-one present had sufficient understanding of anyone else's preconceptions of the situation to make a start on bridging the miscommunication. The silence pinned us in place; Yarbe still crouching, myself and Dufore facing the Affenstrin and Saffa to my side. Only the constant but irregular pulsing of the star furnace imparted any motion to the scene at all.

It was Saffa who eventually spoke, giving the date of her deployment – some centuries after our own – and reminding us that she had been deployed against Alliance.

The Warmaker absorbed that motionlessly. "The histories I have read attest to constant fighting in this system since the beginning of the Time Wars. At the scale of ten millenia, I suppose even a few decades or a century of peace seem only a footnote."

Hoarsely, Dufore said, "You fought your way here, then."

"I live in a fortunate age," the Affenstrin answered, affecting a mournful humour. "Please forgive me if I attribute some of that to the disappearance of your Emperor, not long after I took on the sin. It was in response to the collapse of the Lucian Empire that we undertook to lay down our arms – so much as our bodies allow, at least."

I felt cold, and hollow, and nauseous. I felt, in a way that I have seldom ever felt, the physical presence of the roots burrowed into my bones from my cystem, the second-nature weight of the wood down my back and limbs momentarily disorienting. "We did not serve an emperor," I whispered.

The Affenstrin must have taken my strain for anger. This time as they apologised, they actually lowered their frame slightly – not enough to call it a bow, or even a lowering of their head, but a contrite shrinking – in sympathy. "Forgive me, I… to think that I might speak to Luc- to people who predate Lucius' coup…"

Dufore looked from me to the Warmaker and back again. "Do they mean Praetor Lucius?" I could see a flinch run through their figure as they named the Praetor, and realised I had only been braced for that revelation by one quiet conversation with Saffa, a long time past.

"How can you speak our language?" Yarbe said, still not rising, and speaking to a point just in front of the Affenstrin's knees. "We can't read one word in ten of what we've found here."

"Oh, that's simple," the Affenstrin said. "Extensive archaeolinguistics databanks and sophisticated interpretive software. I picked up enough of your conversation as I approached to get within a few centuries of your precise dialect. Forgive my snooping."

In a desperate attempt to fend off thinking about how much of which conversations might have been audible to Affenstrin sensors at a distance of kilometres, a thought thrust its way into my mind. "Your databanks must include writing as well as speech?"

"Of course."

I brought them to the corner by the door where the impossible message lay scratched in the impervious finish of the white stone buttress. Where I had to clamber around some of our collected furniture, the Affenstrin glided without gravity up and over. The writing, two jagged rows of a dozen characters each, all straight lines and hard angles, was as we had first seen it, barely visible at all.

They regarded it for a moment, their face no more readable than the message. "One of the scripts of the chrononauts. I am afraid that even in my time we have made little progress deciphering it." Then they surprised me by the plainly human gesture of lifting an arm and tapping the lower row of characters. "It is impossible, though, or a hoax. This is a date."

"A date? But why… impossible?" I said, even as my mind caught up; if it took a dozen characters to specify the number of days, months and years in anything like the calendar formats I am familiar with, the date thereby specified lay outside the span of human history.

The Affenstrin moved their finger to the first character. "I have seen this form in other places the chrononauts visited out of time. This is the 'date' character, and this," they indicated the next character in line, "past or future, reckoned from the outbreak of the Time Wars. This orientation means past."

That left ten characters, presumably all numbers. "How did they break down their dates?" I asked, voice unsteady. "Did they use months like our calendar?"

"Their ability to travel through time was not nearly precise enough to make such a consideration necessary," said the Warmaker, with something like a delicate chuckle. They tapped the date again. "As I understand it, they enumerated years only. Which means…?"
Ten digits. "A billion years…" I breathed.

"Or more." Again, they made a slight laugh, haunting in its hollowness and the stiffness of their face. "And so it must be fake. In my time we know of several places that are tombs of time travellers who tried to reach even ten thousand years forward, and pastward travel is much harder than futureward."

Everyone knew that. Indeed, that the Time Wars are a relatively contained period within human history shows that the chrononauts could not travel far. I ran my own fingers across the numbers. The scratches were so shallow that I could not feel them. "How can it be fake, to have marked this…"

"Antichronium? That is the deeper puzzle here, true. I have never seen the stuff in reality before, but everything I know of it tells that it cannot be marked or damaged in any way."
"What… is it?"

"It is antichronium." In their tone, I sensed they would have shrugged if their form allowed it. "I have heard the theory that it lies outside time, so that it may have been created in our relative future, by our distant descendants. That, or perhaps a god's hand."

I recalled then my discussion with Saffa about the content of the message, and pointed to the two characters on the first row that we had thought vaguely recognisable. "We thought this might mean something that could not be defeated. This looks like our character for negation, and Saffa took this for a Commonwealth word for victory."

The Affenstrin considered a moment, and I noticed that their eyes did not flicker or twitch at all, directed fixedly at the writing. "You may be right. At least, I see the resemblances." Then they turned to me. "Saffa?"

This prompted us to move back to the others, for a round of introductions, from which we learned their name was Birleg. Dufore brought out the telescope that they had found in camp one and asked if Birleg understood the device that blocked its aperture. The Affenstrin studied it only a few moments before declaring it a filter that would, if tuned correctly, eliminate the chronium glow – which apparently was not light at all, in some technical sense that escaped our understanding – and allow clear sight of the sky whose illumination was normally drowned out by the pit's depth.

With a little inventiveness they were able to power the device, and some subsystem of theirs furnished us the data required for tuning it. The tripod on which the telescope stood did not allow it to point directly upward, and though Yarbe assured us the maximum available angle should have been enough to see past the rim of the pit, what greeted us was not stars, or even daylit sky.

Instead, as I pressed my eye to the eyepiece, I saw a stone wall, cut in regular ridges whose gentle curves were the ribs of a vertical shaft many times deeper than the pit itself. My first reaction was awe beyond the capacity of my body's trembling to express. The magnification of the telescope was exquisite, bringing the nearer parts of the wall into relief so sharp that I could see the texture of the stone itself.

Turning the telescope while looking through it was disorienting and awkward even without the psychological effects of the images it revealed, so that I added nausea and stiff shoulders to the terror by the time I settled the scope on the answer to that particular puzzle. Arrayed along one rib, delicate as toys in the magnification, was a row of construction vehicles, cranes, excavators, and other earth-movers. They looked a little the worse for age, on average, than when we had climbed over them on our descent of the steps, but not so much as the passage of time ought to have cost them.

I could even make out, faintly, the marking of the gamma threshold around the edge of that step.

"But that's impossible," Yarbe said, voice quavering, as they stepped away from their turn at the eyepiece. "If the steps… we were descending for days. Even say that we were moving slow for Vittar, make that fifteen klicks a day, a hundred fifty klicks," their voice rose into babbling as they stumbled towards Birleg, "and you said that it's all chronium, but the pit was half a billion years-"

Sliding backwards out of reach of Yarbe's grasping, imploring hands, Birleg said, "I'm afraid you underestimate the depth by a great deal." Their tone was that of an old veteran trying to evade a painful question from a rookie.

"Slow down," Dufore cut in, voice stiff with forced calm. "I'm not following you. There's some illusion, isn't there? Making it seem as if the steps are… up there?" They pointed straight up.
Yarbe sank to their knees, their arms falling slack to their lap. Like them but less physically, I surrendered to the conclusion. Dully, I said, "The illusion was that we traversed steps at all, is that right?"

"I am not sure 'illusion' is quite the right word," Birleg said, delicately. "You passed through a region of intense spatial distortion. The telescope gives you a different perspective on it, but that is just light. Gravity tells the truer story."

"But when we walked on the steps, gravity held us to them as if they were flat," Dufore protested.

Birleg made a brief, embarrassed chuckle. "Forgive me, I was unclear. I meant that the centre of the shaft, down which I descended, had untrammelled gravity, pointing almost directly to this spot."

"So how deep is the shaft?" Yarbe asked in a voice like an ancient tree-stump, weighty and rain-dark.

"By my reckoning, one thousand, six hundred and forty-four kilometres." Birleg kept their tone so bland that for once it sounded as synthetic as their body looked. "I can give you more precision but I doubt it matters."

Yarbe mumbled something, but I was too absorbed in a wave of crushing claustrophobia to hear it. Chills raced through my body at the thought of the sheer weight of matter towering above us, the seeming impossibility that this shaft – which must reach all the way from the surface to near Nine's centre, I realised – could stay open through the ages entailed by all we had found at its bottom.

When the ringing faded from my ears, Birleg was saying, "You have assumed that chronium forms linearly, at a constant rate over time irrespective of the character or distance from the source of the disturbance."

"Even so," Yarbe said, levering themself to their feet as if reinvigorated by this argument over seeming trivia, "sixteen hundred klicks of chronium, this place must be older than the universe!"

"Not at all," Birleg said, and their lips twitched slightly on the frame of their face, an expression that might have been close to a smile for them. "To my knowledge, there are some absolutes. What should disturb us instead is the intensity of the distortion we find ourselves inside. You have lived here while millennia passed outside, and that is a grievous wound to time, but that alone is insufficient to create such a depth."

While Yarbe struggled with that provocation, Dufore, irritated, said, "What, then?"

Again, Birleg adopted the tone that felt like it accompanied a shrug they could not bodily form. "I do not know. Antichronium must distort time, of course, though clearly, here, it resists chronium formation."

"Gravity, though," Yarbe began, then gathered themself. "If so much of the planet is above us, why is the gravity constant down here?"

"It's not mass. Chronium exerts no gravity." Birleg spoke now as if delivering an introductory class. They pointed toward the door. "What holds you down here must be artificial, from within the vault, I expect."

The thought that some device in the vault – even one as mundane as an artificial gravity generator – might have been working on us throughout our time in the pit disturbed me, though I suppose it was naïve of me to have overlooked the possibility. Dufore seemed less troubled. "The shaft." They pressed a hand to their mouth, more in contemplation than shock. "I must have descended past the side of the vault, that's why the gravity changed."

"Changed?" That at least seemed to shake Birleg's calm a little. "Please, show me."
We began to make our way towards camp two. That first meant leaving the chasm, and when Dufore leapt easily to its lip, Saffa turned to Birleg and said, "How about you carry me up there?"

The rope Dufore had fixed for her still hung down the chronium-slippery white face of the rift, but I did not begrudge her the request. She had become adept at the climb but it was by no means quick, and I think she hated how easy it was for the rest of us to come and go.
Birleg seemed to grasp all this. "I am sorry, you would not welcome my touch," they said, gesturing at the glow of their chest. They looked around. "Wait a moment."

Faster than any conventionally human physics allowed, but not quite as faster-than-blinking fast as Affenstrin can sometimes move, they darted back to the disordered sprawl of our pilfered furniture. Taking hold of one of the smaller, higher-sided armchairs with one hand, they returned, the chair following as weightlessly as if it was illusion only. They placed it before Saffa. "Here, please sit. Try not to put too much of your weight against my fingers."

Carefully and without taking her eyes off Birleg, Saffa lowered herself diagonally into the seat. Her compact, blocky frame gave her little room to lean away from the Warmaker's hand, but she did her best. Then, still with a hand on the chair-back, though the upholstery gave no sign that they were gripping with any strength, Birleg rose into the air. Saffa startled and almost tumbled out of the seat as she was lifted aloft. There was no sign of strain in the Affenstrin's bearing as they ascended to the rim of the chasm and deposited the chair out of sight.

Belatedly I leapt after them, to find Saffa pushing herself unsteadily up from her seat, turning a wide-eyed scowl in Birleg's direction. The expression seemed more a product of shock than anger, though, and again I wondered at her fearlessness. Mild as Birleg's manner was, the orange light that spilled in fits and starts from the exposed veins along their limbs still had me flinching when it fell the wrong way at the corners of my eyes.

Leaving the armchair behind, we set out for the outskirts of camp two. I felt every bit as much on edge as I had scurrying from cover to cover on our ill-fated expedition to find Vittar, even though the Warmaker that had menaced our sky then now drifted along in our midst. One could almost ignore that the soles of their blocky feet never touched the floor, except that they made no pretense of walking.

Although fear must have made me hesitant, and I found myself at the back of the group, Dufore's eager lead and the open ground along the edge of the chasm kept our pace quick, and it was not long before we again stood on the lip of the bottomless shaft that Dufore had explored so briefly. I still had not allowed them to make another descent.

I thought they might ask the Affenstrin to carry them down, but Birleg's warnings to Saffa had clearly made an impression. Instead, Dufore just described what they had experienced and waited for Birleg's response. For a long moment there was silence.

Then, with quiet wistfulness, Birleg said, "It is said that our gravitics technologies were developed not for the purpose of flight but for descending. Looking at this place, I believe it."

"You think the Affenstrin were created here?" Dufore blurted out.

"That is what I came here seeking," Birleg said, their tone bland before the enormity of the history in their claim. Then they made a stiff gesture with their arms, indicating their body. "Not the whole affair, and not the sin, those came together over centuries. But the gravitics… they had to get all this materiel down here somehow. And carve these reliefs."

They turned in place, and despite their limited flexibility, my attention was drawn – as it had not been in a long time – to the vast carvings in the chronium walls of the pit. Tapering pillars of scaffold obscured much of them like lumpen brown stalagmites, but in the upper half where that was less of a problem there were unmistakably human figures, heads and shoulders hundreds of metres tall. The crevices that defined those figures, I knew, were high and deep enough for a person to sit in with something like comfort.

"Do you know what they are?" Saffa said, folding her arms as she spoke.

"Yes. Well, I have some idea. We have carved designs like these throughout our history, to make myths of our origins." Birleg let out a breathy imitation of a chuckle. "No different than any other culture, I suppose, but our own rings hollow to us. At least your Lucian trees give you a material, biological link to Fertile Soil."

For a moment their choice of words perplexed me – of course it is true that a tree can only grow in soil that will nourish it, but what had that to do with myth? – and then I realised that they must have used a word in our language furnished by their translator's best effort at naming the lost human homeworld. Our homeworld, and perhaps it felt more readily ours to me and my soldiers than to Birleg in their astronomic horror of a body.

Some other thought struck them at that moment, and though they did not – because their body apparently did not allow it – become more animated, their demeanour nevertheless changed, their voice tight with agitation, their eyes narrowing. "Wait. Tell me. All these buildings that have been sealed to time. You found no chronium inside?"

Dufore met their changed tone with tension of their own. "Except where there was damage to the walls to let it in, yes. Why do you ask?"

"Were there any exceptions? Any places where you found sources of chronium inside a building?"

There had been one, of course, the large central building in camp three where we had confronted the Alliance chaplain. Dufore, myself and Yarbe, who had also been there, exchanged glances, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Saffa studying us, lips pressed thin together. I gave Dufore the subtlest nod I could, although I did not truly think I could hide the gesture from Birleg.

Whether the Warmaker read us, or guessed from the way Dufore drew breath to speak, they reacted before anyone answered. "Did you go inside? Were you touched by that place?" The blocky statue of their body tilted towards us, and metal flanges which we had watched roll themselves away unfurled a little along their limbs like tight-packed thorns.

I shrank back, blood running cold. "Only the anteroom. Only- when we saw the chronium inside, we went no further."

"We would have gotten to it eventually," Dufore said, their voice stiff. "But we were working through camp two first. This camp, I mean."

"Show me. Please, show me where it is." Birleg was already moving, and I stumbled back to let them pass.

In their haste, they did not notice, as I had, that the edge in Dufore's voice had covered another concern. Dufore was staring at Yarbe, and with the Affenstrin's back to us I finally felt able to follow their gaze. Yarbe in turn hunched in a posture of obvious and desperate avoidance of anyone's eyes, and I remembered Vittar saying they had returned to the chaplain's grave in the square at the centre of camp three. Of course Vittar would have gone into the building while they were there.

Dread racing like ice in my veins, I followed as Dufore shook themself to a clear head and scuttled ahead of Birleg to get in the lead. I could not imagine – and indeed up to this moment I still cannot – what 'touch' that building or its contents might have left on Yarbe or Vittar. In retrospect I am surprised I did not attribute it with Vittar's mutiny, though it would have been immature of me to do so.

Indeed, as we pressed on into camp three I should have felt tension at the concern that we might encounter the mutineers again – I had certainly not recovered from our previous encounter. The fear of what Birleg might do at our destination, or what secret they might reveal that we had been so terrifyingly close to, swept all such concerns aside. Saffa walked beside me, head down, occasionally glancing at me out of the corner of her eye.

She had no problem keeping pace, though we certainly did not give her much consideration in that regard. My stewing sped my perception of time and all too soon we were emerging from an alley between two half-cylinder-roofed storage units into the open space of the square, the large building with the smashed-open corner to our left. I noticed dimly that the smaller units opposite had been opened.

We faltered, then, all of us. Even Birleg slowed their pace, drifting slowly towards the big building. I heard them mutter a long phrase in their own language, breathless with an awe that chilled me. Then, for the first time, I saw them move as I have seen other Affenstrin move, spinning in place so fast that had I not felt the rush of disturbed air it would have seemed that they flipped in an instant.

They rose perhaps half a metre into the air, their sensor-weapon wings sliding unfurled. "This is the Fenstir," they said, and I have no idea what the word they used meant, though I think I might have heard it in the sentence they muttered in their own tongue; here I render it as best I can phonetically, as I have with the name 'Affenstrin'.

Whether they expected us to understand the term, they explained, a harsh edge on their tone. "Whatever you think of our sin, know that it is dwarfed by what was done here, what was unleashed from this place. All my people have done has been to deny any further exploitation of what was created in that building." By now their wings spread a dozen metres wide, pulsing balefire orange that we shrank away from.

There was no hint of their earlier apologetic gentleness. "Leave this place. Go back to your camp, leave the pit, do whatever you must. But never step within a hundred metres of this building again." They began to rise further, floating away from us without turning their back, but their voice did not grow any fainter as they receded towards the building they had named Fenstir. "All that I have ever been, I give now to the cause of my people. I will stand guard here until the end of time itself if I must."

"What will you do…?" I am not sure what sense Dufore meant by the question, and I suspect that they did not want to face the end of the sentence either.

Birleg's wings were still unfolding, now as wide as the square and even as they grew smaller with distance, yet more intricate foils unfurled to swell their span. "Warn your estranged comrades. Any human I sense within that radius I will obliterate without hesitation. If the worm-weapons of the time warriors were not a myth, I would deploy them now and rip this place out of history. My weapons cannot expunge the power that lingers here. All I can do is kill you if you try to reach it."

Dufore looked as if they might speak again. I tensed to interrupt them, but Birleg beat me to it with a shout of "Begone!" that must have had some weaponised subsonics in, for it staggered us all back, and without further consultation we broke into flight.

By the time we slowed, the Warmaker hung in the air, out of space and gravity, above the building, their wings fully unfurled, wide enough almost to describe the full diameter of the exclusion zone they had declared. From their breast spread the dire glow of their star furnace, a miniaturised sun in truth, not quite dazzling to look at but fearful nevertheless. I had never known that glow except in moments of the most extreme desperation.

Yarbe chose to risk the roundabout route to pass Birleg's warning on to Vittar and the others, and left us. Dufore and Saffa led me back towards the door while successive waves of dizziness and nausea assaulted me. When we reached the open area where the chronium grew thin underfoot, they stopped and I stumbled into them from behind.

The armchair Birleg had used to lift Saffa up out of the chasm stood where we had left it, and in it sat a figure. While I gathered myself, they rose to their feet and turned to face us. For a moment I thought it was one of the mutineers, come to bring us some sort of ultimatum or threat. They wore our silver-blue elbow-to-knee uniform, with the lumpy shapes of a cystem running along their limbs.

The sense of familiarity disappeared the moment they spoke; their Federation accent was antiquated, of a sort I have only heard in ancient training recordings. "Captain," they said, meeting my eyes from fifty metres away. "I thank you for the report you will soon compose."

Here I confess my meagre skill in telling this story fails me. You must surely understand immediately that the person we met there is among those I have had in mind as audience for this telling, and I understood that to be the implication of the Emperor's gratitude immediately. Such things are commonplaces of our myths. In that moment of the Emperor's greeting, though, I could not have imagined the other readers I now know to attend on this text.

For my part, I am given to understand that some of you may live your lives in the earliest days of dynamic text, reading this by the earliest technological means to which this device may transmit. The cultural gap between us is vast and I know little of your time; our strongest myth about you is your belief in a thing called 'temporal paradox', which I gather may come to mind for you now.

The ancient sages are said to have believed that time is merely a feature of cognition, in order to preserve their belief that the cosmos is fully knowable. In this they stripped the rose and kept the thorns. Temporality is the fundamental condition of encounters with the universe, and reason an infant's toy to placate us until we are ready to face the enormity of the possible.

If the Emperor used my report of their arrival to judge the exact moment at which to present themself to us, though it offends reason to think it so, this poses no problem for reality at all. The universe does not bow to the limitations of our understanding. Nor does the causal question offer fertile soil; did my report bring the Emperor there, or did their presence produce my report? The question is meaningless. The Emperor arrived. I reported.

I did not immediately realise it was the Emperor, but I caught on quicker than you might think. As they walked towards us, I saw that their ears were larger and lower on their head than is typical for Federation soldiers I have known, and where the head support branches of my cystem run from the crown of my head down my cheekbones, theirs came up in front of their ears and then hooked down to reach the same spot.

A fine wreath of slender golden-yellow leaves spread from their cystem around the top of their head, but to me this was not the most distinctive indication of their rank. In the middle of their chest was a diamond-shaped rank badge just like the one I wear, except that where mine bears six small white seeds in a layout like the petals of a flower, theirs held an actual flower, twelve thin white petals around a yellow cluster of carpels.

More context is necessary. Admiral Esta, who commands the 24th Battlegroup and chairs the top-level briefings I attend at the beginning of any new deployment, wears a badge of twelve seeds. I have heard from other captains of my rank who by distinction or fellowship are more in the confidence of their seniors that those officers to whom Grand Admiral Dervun, the commander of the 7847th Armada, reports denote their ranks with leaves on a green stem.

Until that moment I had never known even a myth about officers of the Interstellar Fleet whose ranks were marked by flowers. But for the flower and the wreath, the person who stood before us was absurdly normal. They were considerably shorter than my soldiers, though still a little taller than Saffa, and paler of complexion. They appeared entirely untroubled by age, and stood before us unarmed.

The only other hint of strangeness about them was at their feet. As they walked from the edge of the chasm where the chronium was thinnest to where we stood on a thin layer of silver-purple powder, whisps of smoke rose from their footsteps. Behind them they left a trail of clear white prints.

I drew myself up to attention and snapped my hand up in salute, upper arm level along from my shoulder, elbow a right-angle to vertical, palm flat and fingers straight, pressed together as a leaf. Dufore looked to me and did likewise, while Saffa shrank back behind me. A flicker of uncertainty must have shown on my face as the Emperor reached us, for they regarded me with a beneficent smile.

"At ease, Captain," they said. Their voice was deep and smooth, their intonation expressive under the ancient accent. My Lord, I know you read here that I was concerned whether I ought kneel than salute; I thank you for your grace in laying my anxiety to rest. "When you enlisted, my official rank was First Praetor, and had you been brought into my presence, you would have been instructed to address me simply as 'my Lord'. I prefer minimal formality; that will do for us here."

"As you wish, my Lord," I said, crisply and with a slight bob of my head.

"Good." The Emperor nodded in return, and said, "Now, you shall be my escort, both of you. Before we attend the reason for my presence, there is something I must confirm with my own eyes. The building where you parted ways with the Affenstrin – take me there. Bring the woman." I did not recognise the last word they used, though from context, and the cold edge their voice took on, I understood it to refer to Saffa.

Reminded by that of the immense and terrible power in the personage who now stood before me, I moved to take up an honour guard's station behind the Emperor's left shoulder. Awkwardly, reaching behind myself without looking, I tried to usher Saffa to take the same position behind me. It was a pathetic effort to interpose my body between the two, and I know it would have made no difference, but an instinct I did not fully understand was irresistible in me.

The Emperor did not, of course, need our guidance to find their way to the square. Birleg floated motionless in the air above it, commanding the sky. That they had not already attacked suggested to me that the Emperor could not have arrived simply by descending the pit as all the rest of us had; I was sure even then that Birleg's recognition of the Emperor would be followed immediately with the most monstrous violence of which they were capable.

We made our way through the camp. I could not match the Emperor's step as I should have, because their gait quickly lost its martial precision. They wandered, head up, looking around the pit in what I first took for wonder. At one point they took a couple of long strides out ahead of us and spun around, arms raised from their sides. "So much has changed," they said, "but the atmosphere is the same."

"My Lord?" I asked, inferring they wished to reminisce.

They smiled and took a long moment to answer. "I wish we had never allowed the wretched Luddites to carve those murals. Hideous things, and bad practice."

"'Luddites', my Lord?" I was unfamiliar with the word.

"The Affenstrin." Then, my Lord, I suppose you must have remembered reading here of my ignorance. "The Luddites were an insurgent sect in the earliest days of the technological age. They sought to hold back progress by smashing the devices of their future, and were rightly put down."

Again, their genial manner chilled with disdain as they finished. Still not understanding, and feeling that I trod on treacherous ground, I said, "The Affenstrin, my Lord? But their technology is so far in advance of ours…"

The Emperor's expression hardened, and I heard an uneasy intake of breath from Saffa. For a moment I braced for death, but then the Emperor looked away, eyes downcast. Their voice was almost sullen as they said, "Nevertheless, they chose the lesser future over the greater."

After that we proceeded in silence and martial step, covering ground quickly until we were almost within the spread of Birleg's wings. The moment of the Warmaker's notice happened all at once. The air convulsed and they were right above us, looking down into the alley we occupied. Their menacing glow overwhelmed the chronium glimmer, their chest already hot.

Voice tense with a fury that their stiff face could not express, they said, "I told you not to- Lucius."

I spun, clumsily tackling Saffa, feeling the burst of heat from Birleg's weaponry wash over my back, and hearing a low, ugly hissing that wrenched up memories of smoking fractures in the Timescar. The near-instant vaporisation that should have attended the unleashing of Birleg's armoury did not follow. Lying across Saffa, I twisted to look back at what had happened.

Dazzling fire writhed across a sky brought terribly close by its glare. There is a sense of immense and distant burning that one encounters at the shielded portholes of a starship in parking orbit by a star; this was the same, except that the star was ten metres away at most, and the distance a fold of twisted space that seemed doomed to rupture at any moment.

My eyes made their best, inadequate attempt to adapt to the light, and I made out the figure of the Emperor, standing at ease looking up at Birleg, one arm gently raised. Their shadow was cut almost tangible in the air. I could not see Dufore.

If Birleg's wings remained spread outside the firestorm, the glare obscured them. There were glimpses of something that might have been their body, twisting in black torment as it burned. Though my face was beginning to feel sunburnt and my eyes were streaming, I could not turn aside; my body was rigid with the knowledge that when the Affenstrin's star furnace finally burst we would all – and the pit itself – be scoured away.

Instead, the Emperor twisted their upheld wrist as if picking an apple, wrapping their fingers closed to their palm as they did so. I saw this last part with stark clarity as the star above us went out like an electric light. There was silence – and I realised there had been little sound, beyond a faint hissing – and a scent of burnt air, and Birleg was gone.

I levered myself to my feet and helped Saffa up. She was winded from my impact but mustered a gasping "Thank you." Dufore had thrown themself the opposite direction, and was able to rise on their own.

The Emperor turned to us, face sombre. "A terrible waste. His kind always are. I forget, had we learned in your time that they collapse into black holes eventually, when they have lived too long and eaten too much?"

We gaped at them. At least some part of my confusion was for the pronoun they had used to refer to Birleg, which I could recognise as a pronoun at all only by grammatical context. I assume it was an archaism; perhaps this translator can make something of it. That puzzle was considerably more comfortable to contemplate than the rest of the Emperor's bland statement.

They seemed indifferent to our confusion. "The worst possible death. Absolutely no possibility of redemption or reclamation. Come."

Dazed, my skin prickling with the aftereffects of Birleg's demise, I followed the Emperor – my Emperor – out into the open space of the square before the building the Affenstrin had named Fenstir. A spring came into the Emperor's step as they hurried ahead of us, spinning again as they did so.

"This is the place?" They said, voice bright.

"Yes, my Lord."

"It is as I thought. Exactly as I thought. I was right!" They turned again to face the large building at the far end, and then back to me. "This is where it all began, you know. Yes, finding the place and digging this hole and so on came first, but this, this was the beginning."

I have served a wide enough variety of senior officers to know when to play my role. "The beginning, sir? Of what?"

"The- I suppose you'd call it the Time Wars, is that right?"

Forgive me, my Lord, if my surprise in that moment was feigned; a chill descended on me and I could find no words, but I had long suspected that revelation. I wonder now that you spoke as if to shock me – or perhaps my companions? – despite having already read these words. Forgive me again, it is not my place to speculate on your motivations.

I wrestled with that crux a moment, looking back behind me to find a fixity of fear on Saffa's face. Dufore, who must have harboured the same suspicions as me, looked less impressed but kept their discipline. I decided I would have to take the lead in gathering our wits back together.

You – the Emperor, I should say for the sake of my other readers – pre-empted me with a clap of your hands. "Come, let us return to the door so that we can be about the business of the day."

"My Lord? You don't want to explore the building?" At that, at least, my surprise was genuine.

"Explore?" The Emperor laughed. "It was my laboratory for decades. I know every inch of the place, there is nothing left there worth revisiting."

"Birleg…" I flinched, very slightly, at the still-fresh thought of their demise. "The Affenstrin swore to obliterate any who were touched by the place."

"Superstition." The Emperor walked up to me and placed their hand warmly on my shoulder. Shocked stiff in formality, I managed to keep my composure. They said, "There, consider yourself touched, as if any in my Fleet could ever be aught else. Now will you follow me?"
"Yes, my Lord," I said, bowing as best I was able under their grip.

Back we went, then, to the door. Saffa looked as if she might bolt at any point, but some inner strength prevailed and she stayed with us. The Emperor jumped down from the chasm lip to the plaza as easily as if they had been doing it as long as we had. Standing beside them and facing the door, I flushed with shame for the mess we had made of that ancient space. The Emperor forbore comment, leading us over the white antichronium, as impervious to his tread as it had been to everything else, to the door even before Saffa had finished descending her rope.

For a long moment, they pressed their hand against the door and bowed their head. In that setting they seemed diminished, truly humbled. I did not know as much then of the door as they did, so I took their pose for reverence. Now, I am not so sure.

Then they turned to us. "Shall we have it open?"

It was at once the most and least bewildering moment of all the time I spent in the pit. Of course, my Lord, you could not have come here for any other reason. And yet I believe I have already said that the thought that I might see the door opened had never really occurred to me, that we who had lived before it for so long had always skirted the thought of what it might contain.

It was Dufore who managed to speak. "How…?"

"It is true that the vault's builders went to every effort to keep it sealed," the Emperor said, calmly and with something approaching cheer. "But I believe that we will not be the first to reopen it. On a handful of scattered worlds, as far from this place in distance as we are from the builders in time, I have found hints. I believe, at last, I have been able to synthesise the key."

They lifted their hand, palm up, in the space between us. A sliver of the world rotated aside in the air above it, its edges the uncolour inverse of prismatic glass. Contained within that fold of space was a small light – not a torch or bulb or flame, nor a luminous object of any kind, but a point of clean white light, intense at its heart and spreading a rippling pearl corona to a radius of a few centimetres.

"Take it," the Emperor said. "Of all my soldiers, you were the one to lead the mission that reached this place. It should fall to you to complete it."

I began to reach for the light and stopped. "Surely the honour should be yours, my Lord?"

"Please, Captain. I have said I hate such formality. I cede you the moment."

My fingers trembled as they drifted towards the key. Its light played across my skin, but I felt no heat. I hesitated again, this time because I was not sure what it would be to actually pick the thing up. Was it a small scintilla, hidden amidst its own radiance, that I might clumsily snuff out if I gripped too hard? Or if it lacked physical substance at all, how was I to pick it up?

I need not have worried. Some attraction a little like magnetism, or perhaps the delicate adhesion of soap bubbles, pulled the light to my hand as I came within touching distance, and it rolled from the Emperor's palm to mine. I felt neither pressure nor weight from it, and yet there was some indistinct physical sensation to its touch.

"Keep it safe," the Emperor said. "You will know the moment to use it. But I must tell you one other thing. A riddle, of sorts."

"A riddle, my Lord?"

"I found it in my researches. Indeed, it accompanied the final discovery needed for that key. There was a monument, sculpted of graphene and buried in thick chronium in a deep timescar, bearing a star chart, a design, and a single line of text characters. The star chart pointed to this moon. My linguists spent almost as long deciphering the text as the schematics."

"What did it say?"

"'Open the door and give your testimony. The first step is to turn your hatred against its source.'"

My hand felt heavy with light. Mouth dry, I said, "What does it mean, my Lord?"

They shrugged with a rueful smile. "The first part seems obvious enough. The second I believe you will discover for me once the door is open."

I hope you will forgive my weakness, my Lord, but when you paused there I quailed. The prospect of hatred in that moment terrified me. Had you asked me, there on the spot, my account of the essence of soldiering, I would not have said hatred, as I have throughout this, my testimony. I think I might have said it was duty, or perhaps discipline – for after all, this is what separates a soldier from a mutineer.

I know better now.

For the benefit of my readers who are insulated by time from the consequences of our choices here: you must have realised immediately that the testimony the riddle called for is what you now read. Forgive my circumspection in playing out the remainder of my tale; my task is to give an accurate account of my experience, in due deference to its linear sequence. I do not know the consequences attendant on a transgression, but I believe they could be dire on an astronomical scale.

Standing on the plaza with the key floating above my hand, I asked, "What about the last part?"

"You know as much as I do, Captain. We shall have to come to some judgement once we cross the threshold." The Emperor's gaze fell on Saffa. "I suspect some form of sacrifice will be required. There is an atavism to this place, don't you think? The woman will make a good stand-in for the source of our hatred."

The last was said so matter-of-factly, and the Emperor's meaning so ghoulishly obvious, that I did not trouble over the archaic noun, 'woman'. I began to turn to face Saffa, feeling my cystem rise in readiness, the blades of my cythorns sliding millimetres along my bones. I would have to favour my free hand, the one not holding the key, but we were all in such quick proximity, and I trusted my ability as a duellist.

I was interrupted by a flash of light and a voice screaming, with a fury I could not have believed to issue from a human throat, "Lucius!"

A storm of jagged motion erupted around us. Heavy furnishings shattered and flew. One of the large scaffold frames we had dragged down into the pit crumpled as if struck by a giant's fist. Dufore, Saffa and I dropped flat, and I tried to land such that my body would shield the key. Sprays of chronium dust erupted in air crisscrossed by uncolour contrails. The noise was like a bomb going off in a gong factory.

Almost as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. I lifted myself onto my side and began to rise, discovering as I did a spread of strange new pains that must have been pressure-wave injuries. On hands and knees, Saffa cursed viciously. Dufore was slower to begin moving, but I could see their shoulders rise with breath at least.

Standing not far from where the Emperor had was a human figure even less remarkable. They had the look of a Commonwealth citizen, broader-shouldered and taller than Saffa, with hair cut short and sticking out messily at several angles. Like the Emperor they appeared unarmed, but they wore neither rank insignia nor a cystem, only a loose-fitting brown jacket over a black t-shirt and matching trousers.

When they spoke, it was in Commonwealth. "Don't suppose I can convince you to give that thing up, can I?" they said, nodding in the direction of the key.

One more chapter to go! No idea how long that one will take, life is very busy again x.x

Update: it took a month, next chapter is here

Alice Over Zero

@AliceOverZero

Rogue Trans Void Witch

The First Step chapter 5

5. The Emperor

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