The First Step chapter 6 (final)

For a moment we all just stared at them. Saffa managed, "You're… you're speaking our language." Indeed, the chrononaut's Commonwealth sounded to my ear a lot more contemporary – that is, of my time – than had the Emperor's Federation.

"Your-?" Some understanding dawned in the chrononaut and they bowed their head, wincing in bitterness. They pressed a hand to their face and swore again, more viciously this time. "Because Lucius playing fuckin' nation-builder wasn't bad enough…" They let out a low growl of frustration, at which I flinched. "How long has it- what year is this?"

Dufore started to answer with the year of our deployment, stopped, looked at Saffa, then me, and started again. "We don't know what year it is outside. Apparently it's been millennia since we came through the Timescar."

The chrononaut glared at them without raising their head again. "Was Lucius with you the whole time?"

"They just appeared." Dufore swallowed, then glanced in my direction. "It's been, what, half an hour?"

I had no idea, even without factoring in the question of the pit's temporal distortion. Certainly it could not have been much longer than that as we had experienced it. The Emperor had arrived, we had walked with them to where they had killed Birleg, and walked back, not hurrying in either direction. We had not spoken for long in the plaza before being interrupted. In the end I just nodded, feeling my nervous fight-readiness in the stiffness of my neck.

"Least I ended up in the right fuckin' place. Lost track of time when I finally picked up his trail again. No, sorry," they interrupted themselves, straightening with a surprising, rueful smile. "Their trail. That was a new development last I actually saw them. I was never quick at adapting."

In that first moment that the threat radiating from them diminished, a wave of chills descended on me. "Did you kill them?"

"I fuckin' wish," the chrononaut said, more with weary disaffection than venom. "Drove 'em off, they're not the only one with some new tricks. This should hold them for a while, too, before you get any ideas." They pointed vaguely upward.

I followed their indication. Where the chasm opened to the wider pit, a wriggling aurora in the colours of tortured time drifted in the air. Whatever the nature of the shield, it did not seem to touch the antichronium of the door and its attendant buttresses, so I judged it must be at least a little way above their tops.

"Look, I don't wanna fight you and you can't hurt me," the Chrononaut said, in a tone that recalled to me occasions on which, under a truce or ceasefire, I have conducted official business with our enemies. "I just wanna stop Lucius opening the damn door. We've got time. Can we at least talk? Name's Temar, by the way. He/him."

Dufore introduced us while I stood there, cythorn still extended, hand closed around the key. Its light leaked out through my fingers almost as though they weren't there at all. Temar apologised for wrecking so much of the furniture, I think in an earnest attempt to break the tension, but I do not believe I would have been willing to share a sofa with him.

"My esteemed colleague Professor Lucius Thoburn," Temar began his explanation sardonically, "came here as part of the metamaterials team, leading the chronium solvents project. But he was – sorry, they were – obsessed with the door from the moment any of us laid eyes on it." He paused. "We knew it was going to be a long project, but he and some of the others kept getting us more funding, extending it.

"We didn't realise what the chronium was doing to us at first, slowing down the aging, preserving us. People kept coming, the expedition kept growing, but nobody really… died. And we were all excited about the place, you know? The entire science of chronics was invented here.

"Then suddenly Lucius and some of the others were talking about time travel. Like real time travel, we were starting to understand about stretching and stuff, but they meant jumping back and forth. Real thought experiment stuff."

He stopped and looked around at us. "I guess this is all history to you guys, right? Probably fuckin' understand it better than I do. Don't even know what the fight was about, just suddenly Lucius and Seiho and Elzha are jumping around throwin' the fuckin' steps at each other and wrecking the place. Lucius had some plan to conquer the entire universe looking for clues about the door, we chased them a bit but lost the trail. Guess they got what they wanted.

"Then we all fell out trying to figure out what to do about it. I ended up coming back here, trying to catch him before he opened it." Temar snorted, then looked at the door. "Just in time."

I looked from his face to the key and back again. "And so you'd have me betray the Federation for you? For that?"

"The Fed- you know what, never mind. What else are you gonna do?" Temar rubbed a hand over his face, fingers up into his hairline. When he met my eyes again it was all I could do not to stumble backward. "Fight me? I'll just hop time again. Little hops don't cost me anything."

"The Emperor-" I began.

"If I have to fight him again the shockwaves alone will pulverise you and probably everything here except the damn door. You do not want to be here if that happens."

I ached head to toe, and from the scratches and cuts on Dufore and Saffa I knew I had to be bleeding too, but I didn't want to concede the point.

Saffa found better courage than mine. "Let's just chill out a second, ok? Maybe you can help us understand what's actually in there." She nodded at the door.

"Fuck if I know," Temar said with a sullen shrug. "Don't think even Lucius actually knows."

"What about the warning? Birleg said it was in your writing."

"What warning?" The time traveller's frown changed and they tilted their head in puzzlement.

"By the door," Saffa said, and pointed to the mangled remains of our camp scrunched up in the corner where the chrononaut message was scratched into the impervious buttress.
It took us a few minutes to untangle the heap and clear it out of the way. Temar didn't help. Under the crumpled steel frame were the remains of our arsenal, most of the rifles snapped or crushed. I stood back, warily out of the way, as Saffa led Temar to the message.

He put his hand up to touch it and bowed his head, silent.

Saffa said, "Birleg said the date had to be fake. If you didn't know it was there, I guess someone made it after the war?"

"It's not fake." Temar's voice creaked with sudden, thick emotion. "We must have… when we dug the pit, when we got down to the last ten metres or so… we stopped using the diggers, we were worried about damaging the… whatever was generating the gravity. The Site. We had the first effective chronium solvents by then. Scoured the door clean with them. Must have got into these cracks so there wasn't even chronium residue to make them show up. How'd she do it?"

He ran his fingers across the lettering again, and I saw moisture glistening on his cheeks. I was struck with the hollow-stomached feeling of watching another grieve. Soldiers grieve a lot, of course, but only lightly; we die too easily, at least in an era where our weapons so far outstrip our protections. Civilian deaths merit greater grief because we hope they will live longer. Perhaps if you live in an era where technological supremacy preserves your soldiers for as long as they preserve your civilians, you have no such distinction.

Grief is proportional, though, to the length of the lives involved. Temar's tears were the grief of an immortal for an immortal comrade, staggering and chilling to witness. Reduced to a whisper, Saffa managed, "What does it say?"

"'Still couldn't figure it out – Syri'. Two billion years ago, basically." He said the last part sardonically, then curled back up around a sob. "Syri…"

Saffa put her hand on his arm. I noticed she was holding her pistol in her other hand. She must have recovered it from the remains of the weapon pile when we were clearing it, though it looked undamaged. She had as good an opportunity then as any human being might ever have to kill a chrononaut, but she did not seem to fear Temar as I did.

Instead, she said, "We have a myth about a chrononaut called Syri. That she tried to make a peace in the early Time Wars, and when her cohorts would not heed her she took herself off into the future in search of a time free of war."

"Back," Temar gasped. "Not forward. She went back. That was her idea. Lucius was the one who wanted the future. Syri-" Another sob wracked him. "I guess her plan worked. Two billion years, and the fuckin'…" He tore away from Saffa and spun, kicking at the door with enough force to throw himself off-balance. Saffa caught him again and steadied him.

For a long moment, Temar was silent. Then he lifted his head, with considerably more composure. He wiped his eyes, sniffled hard, and began, "She thought our best chance was to find whoever had built the door. We'd already found the burnt-out shells of our own pastward probes, going back a couple thousand years, and we knew we only had the juice ourselves for about that. She had the idea to build a… multi-stage time rocket, basically. No idea how she made those scratches, though."

I remembered Yarbe arguing with Birleg about the buildup of chronium around the door that formed most of the body of Nine. As I write this I have still yet had so little time to consider the scale of one billion years, let alone two. I stood then as now on ground unchanged in all that time.

While I marveled, Temar mastered his grief. "That thing in your hand," he said, "Lucius thinks it'll get the door open, right?"

I put my hand behind my back, a gesture so futile it made me feel like a green recruit caught slacking.

"Come on, man, I really don't want this to come down to violence." Weariness filled Temar's voice. "Do you really believe in Lucius so much? All he has to offer you is more war."

The way he used the word 'believe' puzzled me but I could guess from the context what he meant by it. "Are you offering us something else?"

"Fuckin'… I don't know." Temar threw up his hands. "Wouldn't you rather not be fighting, whatever the alternative is?"

"We're soldiers," I said, though I did not look either at Dufore or Saffa as I said it.

"Speak for yourself," Saffa snapped. "I don't want him to open the damn door, if he- if they're going to fucking ritual-sacrifice me to whatever's in there."

"He's going to what?" Temar said, turning sharply to face her.

She shrugged, "That's what they said."

"The Emperor gave us a riddle with the key," Dufore broke in, spreading their hands palms-down in a quieting gesture. "'Open the door and give your testimony. The first step is to turn your hatred against its source.' From that they concluded that a sacrifice would be required. They suggested Saffa."

"You cannot be fuckin' serious." Temar looked first at Dufore, then at me, then at the door, stabbing his hand out in that direction. "You really think whoever built this wants human sacrifices? What kind of reactionary, anachronistic – wait, of course he'd fuckin' think that. Man doesn't know the first thing about xenoarchaeology."

"It did seem like a bit of a leap," Dufore said, hunching their shoulders sullenly.

"From 'turn your hatred against its source' to 'blood sacrifice the nearest woman'? Yeah, just a little bit of a leap, fuck me." Rolling his eyes and shaking his head, Temar walked over to Saffa. She flinched back as he reached for her shoulder, but then let him place his hand there. He looked straight at me and pointed at Saffa's face. "In what way is this the source of your hatred? Do you even hate her?"

I almost answered immediately, but I saw Saffa's hand tighten on the grip of her pistol and caught myself. The distance between us was such that if she drew on me I could not close with her without her getting a shot off. Unless she had specific training with small arms at close range – usually reserved for the special forces I had suspected since our first meeting that she belonged to – I could probably dodge at least the first shot. Of course, all of that assumed, against likelihood, that Temar would do nothing if we attacked one another.

Carefully, I said, "She's Commonwealth. Of course we hate them."

Again, Saffa's fingers twitched on her gun, and her face stiffened. Temar squeezed her shoulder and said, "You've been here with her for fuckin' years, man. If you hated her that much wouldn't you have killed her already?"

"She did," Dufore began slowly, "introduce herself by opening fire and killing six of our comrades."

"And how many of my people did-" Saffa cut off as Temar tightened his grip on her.

The chrononaut took a deep breath and rolled his eyes again. "Look I'm not saying there's no bad blood, or that there shouldn't be. I just think this answer to the riddle sucks harder than a black hole. The source of your hatred? One enemy soldier? And not, like, her fuckin' commander or something? Whichever of my wretched fuckin' colleagues started this 'Commonwealth' thing?" He paused, then added, "Horrible choice of name, by the way, whoever it was should've known better."

A problem I have wrestled with in composing my testimony is confabulation; memory fits itself to what we later come to know or believe about what happened. If this has distorted my telling, I am sorry. I have done my best to check myself, though this device gives me little grace for editing. Confabulation, of course, typically operates powerfully only when the gap between the rememberer and the event is long. What I have to tell next, however, happened only minutes before I began my testimony, and yet what I remember cannot be what I actually saw.

As if the motion were slow and effortless, utterly without urgency, I saw Temar pluck the bullet out of the air just above Saffa's head. He took it delicately between thumb and forefinger like the glinting berry of some new and curious bush. It was only after that, as it seems in my recollection, that the sound of the shot and the ice-rush of battle-readiness struck me.

I spun in the direction from which the shot had issued – up at the edge of the cliff opposite the door, where Temar's shield ought to have protected us. Up there, I saw a huddle of figures with the hairless, round-headed, high-eared silhouettes of my soldiers. I could not be sure at that distance that I made out their faces but it would have been absurd coincidence for some other group of Federation personnel to appear at that moment.
Dufore and I were without ranged weaponry. Saffa stood under Temar's hand, frozen halfway through the act of raising her pistol, surely realising she was helplessly exposed but for Temar's protection. The chrononaut's armaments were as unknown as his intentions. We lived if he chose, died if he chose otherwise.

I discovered myself furious with shame. "What are you doing?!" I shouted up at the mutineers. "Hold fire!" I felt foolish as I said it, falling back on the attempt to command soldiers who had made very clear they no longer held any respect for my authority, though in retrospect I was judging them at least somewhat unfairly in that.

There followed a strange and somewhat sheepish moment, as the soldiers dropped from their perch to the plaza. Vittar staggered on landing and almost fell over, but Nireba steadied them. The three rifles we had left with them after the mutiny at Vittar's lab were borne by Jieruk, Gogi and Ermsan, who seemed to be the one who had fired.

They came up to us, stopping perhaps five metres away. None of them raised their rifles, but they held them at half-ready. Enough that there would be no point trying to rush them; the rifles were unwieldy weapons at this range, but by the time I could close around their lines of fire, Nireba and Vittar would have their cythorns ready, and I still had the key occupying one hand.

Ermsan said, "The Emperor said you'd been captured by a Commonwealth chrononaut, sir." Their tone was exactly as usual for their reports to me, as if the mutiny had never happened. They glanced at Saffa and Temar, frowning sidelong.

The report at least confirmed Temar's statement that he had not killed the Emperor. Understanding as I did, my Lord, that you operated to some design predicated on a report that I would later deliver, I knew better than to get caught up in the question of your motivation for sending the mutineers to us. Human brains are not made to untangle such knots, and given what has transpired since, the picture is only the more complicated.

"I'm not taking any captives," Temar said heatedly. His aggression and his hand on Saffa's shoulder perhaps undercut his assertion a little, but what he said was not untrue.
I lifted my hand and opened it, revealing the key. I still could not feel its presence there, and the light from it did not get much brighter as my fingers spread, but I could see its effect on the soldiers immediately. I said, "Did the Emperor tell you they gave me the key to the door?"

"What… is it?" Gogi said, while Ermsan simply nodded.

"I have no idea," I answered. "My hand might as well be empty, except…" I waved my arm, and the light stayed neatly in place above my palm.

"Great, what are we waiting for?" Vittar stepped closer. Their voice was still harsh-edged, so that it was impossible to forget the pain of their dialysis machine. "Let's get it open and get out of here."

"No!" Temar snapped, thrusting himself into the space between us.

"What, why not?" Vittar said with the irritated tone of reflex. "Why should we listen to anything you say?"

Temar ran his hand through his hair again. It had been scruffy when he first arrived; now it was outright unruly, sticking out at every conceivable angle. He screwed up his face and said, "Please? What Lucius has done… whatever's behind that door… he shouldn't get it."

"What, then?" Vittar came another step closer, and I felt fresh tension spilling through my connection to my cystem. "We just live here in this hole until we die? If we even can anymore?"

"You think opening the door will change that?" Folding his arms, Temar slouched slightly where he stood. "You don't know any more than I do about what's in there."

"The Emperor promised us a home." Vittar spoke with the clear, crisp tone of conviction.

"What home?" Saffa said sharply. "Out there it's been thousands of years since you were born. Even the Lucian Empire is gone, if what Birleg said is true. There's nothing out there for us to go home to!"

"Out there," Vittar snarled, "I can get my guts fixed."

Saffa's face slackened, and she subsided. Temar stepped back up to the challenge. "Why do you believe Lucius will help you? That man has done nothing for another human being in thousands of years."

"Praetor Lucius was one of the architects of the Federation!" Gogi piped up, coming forward to stand at Vittar's shoulder.

"And you think that's a good thing?" Saffa rounded on them, and Gogi flinched. "Do you know what your Empire does to my people?"

"You do the same to us," Vittar shot back. "You can't even look at us without thinking of your men and women and children."

"That's not murdering you!" I could see Saffa's arm trembling with tension above her grip on her pistol. "That's not shovelling our corpses into unmarked graves to rot! It's not kidnapping us to plant your fucking trees in!"

"That's a lie," Gogi bit off, high voice squeaking, and they, too, were visibly fighting with themself about raising their weapon. "Lies and propaganda. We don't-"

"I've seen it with my own eyes!" With her free hand, Saffa gestured at her face, violence in the stiffness of her fingers. "Maybe you never did it, but the people you fought for do."

"And you never seduce our people into your filth?" Vittar's voice was coarse as a saw.

"Seduce?" Saffa spluttered, and Temar turned to frown at her. The Chrononaut looked somewhat lost, and some quiet, detached part of me wondered how much he actually knew of the nation Lucius had built. Saffa pressed back, "If one of your soldiers chooses humanity over, over…" she waved her free hand in Vittar's direction, and I could almost see the conscious self-check that kept her from raising the gun instead, "over this, why should we deny them?"

"You speak of choice?" Vittar sneered. Then they stabbed their finger in my direction, "Why don't we ask the Captain whether they choose you?"

I blinked, confused. I had been lost in the race of my own mind, trying to find a way into the argument, a way to settle tempers. With the key in my hand I felt only confusion as to my ultimate loyalties. I did not believe Saffa's Commonwealth propaganda, of course; I am too well- and too long-trained for that. On the other hand, I remembered the scorn in the Emperor's face and tone when they spoke of Saffa, and their effortless dismissal of Birleg, who had seemed so apologetically pacifistic.

So I had not spoken, and now at the moment I was spoken to I found myself stammering for words to answer with. "Choose?" I managed eventually.

"Choose!" Now Vittar turned to me, and my muscles jerked involuntarily halfway to a combat-ready stance as if their finger, pointed at my face, was a weapon. "Them, or us. Commonwealth or Federation. The Emperor, home and freedom, or eternity in this pit with her."

"That's not-"

"Not what? She's seduced you! Why else would you hesitate?" The expression on Vittar's face was twisted more like pain than anger, though the hatred beneath it was clear.

While I spluttered to deny any such effect, Saffa growled, "Seduce him? What kind of sick joke-"

"Isn't that what you call it?" Vittar's question was rhetorical, their tone pure viciousness. "That power you use to make traitors of us, lure us into your regression?"

Even Saffa was stalled speechless a moment at that. There was a sort of hang time to the conversation, a timeless pause in which I studied Temar's face. I give no credit to the soldiers' myth that Commonwealth captors work a supernatural power on those of our soldiers they take, to convert them to the Commonwealth reproductive culture. If Temar knew little of the Commonwealth, though, I could not imagine what he might make of our argument. His expression certainly suggested he did not understand.

"You think… I would seduce… him?" Saffa said in a sequence of strangled shrieks. She managed a breath, and with it recovered a little composure. "You're so fucking ignorant, you don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about. Seduce him? He's like a hundred years old!"

"What's that got to do with anything?" I said, reflexively grabbing for anything to deflect the conflict onto.

She looked at me, shocked. "Gross. You didn't think I was-"

"No!" I cut her off. I could not understand her disgust at the idea but I certainly felt disgust of my own, coupled with rising bile for Vittar's belief that I might have fallen for any such ploy. I swallowed, reaching to keep the distraction going, "I just didn't realise age made a difference to your culture's… traditions…"

Temar might not have understood what we were talking about, but he picked up on my floundering attempt at deflation. "Let's just settle down, okay?" He said, scrubbing at his hair again. "We can talk about this without throwing accusations and assumptions around-"

"You shut up," Vittar snapped. "You're here to kill the Emperor! What is there to talk about?"

"I'm here to stop him. Stop him, stop his warmongering, stop his fuckin' empire, stop him getting his hands on whatever's on the other side of that door." It seemed to me that Temar could not imagine our loyalty to the Emperor, or rather that our loyalty to the Federation might vest in the living personage of one of our myths.

"So what are we supposed to do, then?" Vittar was not getting any less angry. "Why should we let you stop the Emperor when they've promised to take us home? You don't give a shit about us."

"You can't stop me fighting your Emperor," Temar said, and again his tone was suffused to the bone with weariness. "There's nothing you can do to stop me, if it comes down to it. You can't hurt me. I don't even know if Lucius could kill me anymore. But I don't want it to come to a fight, okay? If we end up fighting, you'll all die. It might be so fast you don't notice. It might be a horrible mess. I don't want that either way." They punctuated that last sentence with unfocussed jerks of their arm and finger.

There was a somber truth in the Chrononaut's threat. Even though Vittar and the rest had not directly witnessed the brief action between Temar and the Emperor that had flattened us, it was attested by the wreckage of our camp, and the injuries we bore. In the pause that created, Ermsan handed their rifle to Nireba and came forward. They placed a hand on Vittar's shoulder briefly, unspeaking, then walked past them to place themself in the middle of the argument.

Temar regarded them quizzically; they frowned back. When they turned to me it was with a depth of scrutiny I have seldom been on the receiving end of, especially from a junior officer. Whatever they sought in my face, they must have found it, but it was not to me they spoke first; instead, they faced Temar again, jerking their head in the direction of the door. "You don't know what's in there either?"

"No idea," Temar replied, gruff. Although they spoke in different languages, there was something common in the clipped drawl they spoke with.

"You just want to make sure the Emperor doesn't get it?" I had heard Ermsan take that tone over the back of the sofa when the soldiers were playing their story game and they thought the players were missing some hint the game's leader had been trying to drop.

Temar caught the inflection. "You have something in mind?"

"We want to get out of here," Ermsan said. "Vittar needs to get out of here, they need medical treatment. You can't offer us that. Our only hope is the Emperor… or that there's something behind the door that we can use."

"What are you suggesting?" Temar shifted his weight, slouching and folding his arms.

"We open the door before the Emperor comes back." Ermsan looked around our ragged grouping. "See what's in there. Maybe get out of here without their help. Maybe just close the door again."

"And if Lucius comes back while we're still here and the door's still open?"

"Then you get to fight them off again." Ermsan shrugged. "Or play it by ear, depending what's in there."

Temar looked about to speak, but Gogi beat him to it. "Wait, sir, are you serious? About opening the door?"

"Do you have a problem with that, soldier?" Ermsan's tone stiffened, more in accord with their rank.

"Well, I just thought, I mean, whatever's in there, isn't it going to be dangerous?" Gogi's youth accentuated the fear in their voice. "If someone went to so much effort to keep it locked up?"

"Doors can be to keep people out as well as things in," Ermsan said. They looked around at the rest of us in a tacit 'any questions?' gesture.

Saffa started to lift her arms as if to fold them, and I could see the exact moment she remembered the gun in her hand and halted the motion. In Federation, she said, "Are we sure about this? I'm not… I don't think I'm against the idea, but isn't it a pretty big risk? We do not know what's in there."

Shrugging again, Ermsan said, "Either we take some kind of risk or we stay here in deadlock forever. Or wait for the risk to come to us."

"I can't believe you're serious about this, sir," Vittar said, voice part-hiss. Their stance showed anger, but with the limber tension that is the first edge of combat readiness. "You're talking about betraying the Emperor! Betraying the Federation!"

The irony was not lost on me, that the Federation had no Emperor, that the thing the Emperor ruled was not any longer called a Federation. I knew the trick of holding my cystem in readiness without betraying my first stroke to an enemy, and checked that my posture still held that secret, as best I could with the key still in hand, at least. I did not dare try to tuck it into a pouch, both because that might alert Vittar and because I could not be sure doing so would leave the pouch undamaged.

Ermsan turned to Vittar. "I don't know about that. We only have their word they're the Emperor."

"It's him. Them." Temar said. "At least, it's Lucius, I guess your Emperor could be an impostor."

"We have less grounds to trust you," Ermsan shot back with a glare.

Temar made a disaffected gesture of acceptance.

"I believe they're the Emperor," Vittar said truculently.

"So what?" Heat rose in Ermsan's tone. "You don't know. You've never seen the First Praetor before in your life. You never cared about them before."

"They saved me from the priest."

It made sense that the Emperor might be the Chrononaut who had intervened in our confrontation with the Alliance chaplain. They had access to this report, after all, to help them find the right moment to arrive. Or they could have lied about it to earn Vittar's trust.

"That's what they said they were going to do," Ermsan said. Something I could not entirely understand was bothering them about Vittar's anger. I could only watch, frozen, in the hope that they would spell it out. Instead, they pressed, "That's not why you built the farm, and everything else you've done for the rest of us."

"I did my part as a soldier of the Federation." Vittar spoke as if they felt they were losing the argument, but they stood a little straighter as they did do.

Gently, Ermsan took two steps towards Vittar and placed their hand on their shoulder. Looking them squarely in the eyes, Ermsan said, "You have gone far above the call of duty, soldier. You're a credit to our uniform."

Surprise stalled Vittar. "Sir?"

"We're all deeply indebted to you for your service, Vittar." As Ermsan spoke, I could only marvel. This was the kind of touch I had long relied on Aranani for, until Saffa had shredded them with her autocannon. In that moment I wondered how differently things might have gone if it had been me she gunned down. Ermsan continued, "Your loyalty to the Federation is not in question. I simply mean that it is we, your comrades, who are the Federation, not an Emperor we have never known."

Vittar frowned, deeply, their eyes on an indistinct point just in front of their nose. For a long moment none of us spoke. The feeling was as of watching the beginning of a duel, or those rare instances in a soldier's life where a deployment begins according to plan, with a clear and unambiguous signal for the whole formation to advance.

Eventually, Vittar lifted their head and said, quietly, "You really believe there's no way for us to go home?"

Ermsan squeezed their shoulder. "I'm sure the Emperor could give us a home. But it wouldn't be our home. They can't send us back then, it's too far even if they made us into chrononauts."

Vittar placed their hand on their stomach, right where the root of their terrifying dialysis plant had connected. I almost felt I could see it writhing still under their skin. They whispered something I couldn't hear.

"I can't make you any promises," Ermsan replied. "I'm offering you a gamble that what's on the other side of the door is better than life in the pit."

After another long pause, Vittar nodded. Ermsan looked over at Saffa and Temar briefly, then turned to me and drew themself up to attention. "We're ready, sir. Go ahead."

I found myself suddenly self-conscious, the kind of tense, unsteady feeling I remember from my earliest commands, when the soldiers under me would look to me in a crisis. I should have been long since past any such nerves, but the weightless burden of the key in my hand was a novelty beyond time. Trying to put the nine eager, anxious, exhausted people who watched me from my mind, I turned on my heel and walked back to the door.

How was I to use the key? I had, of course, no idea whatsoever. The Emperor's riddle was no help; Open the door and give your testimony. The first step is to turn your hatred against its source. The only assurance it offered was the implication that opening the door came first, before the solution. My step dragged as I stalled for time, hoping to avoid the inevitable delay of my cluelessness.

I need not have worried. As I approached the door, the absent sensation of the key's light somehow led my hand to rise. Either the glow brightened or I imagined that it did. Second-guessing even as I watched my hand move, I let the key roll up along my straightened fingers to touch the white antichronium of the door.

It disappeared into the surface like a raindrop into a pool, my eyes insisting that the fading glow was a ripple. There was no sound. A moment of breathless stillness followed, and then the wall began to move. I say wall because when a door is a fifty-metre square of impervious stone, the moment when it starts to swing towards you is far too ponderous and monumental to compare to even the carrier launch bay doors that might match it for size.

As the panel cleared its frame, there was the briefest flicker of what I now know must have been uncolour light, though I cannot say for sure that in the moment I recognised it as such. I stepped hurriedly backwards as the door started to sweep the detritus of our camp before it. The wrecked furniture and blankets made a muffled, clanky rustling; I am not sure the door itself made any noise at all. It slid so close over the plaza that no splinter or loose corner of fabric caught under it.

Behind me, the others gathered just outside where the door would swing. I looked back to check on them just in time to see Temar, pallid even by the standards of Commonwealth humans, sink to his knees, a hand pressed to his chest. Saffa went back to his side, and we hurried to gather round him.

There were tears trailing down his upraised face. "My chronocore," he whispered. "I am released." Then he pointed upward, past our circle. "Leave me. Run!"

The sheen of his protective shield no longer covered the opening of the chasm. Dead centre in the circle of sky framed by the opening of the pit was a dark speck, reminiscent of when we had first noticed Birleg's approach. In any soldier of long service there is an instinct for approaching danger; this, I knew beyond knowledge, was the Emperor returning, at speed.

I should perhaps have guessed in advance. I knew the Emperor had already read whatever report I would give of the door's opening; if, as seems to be the case, the door's opening was attended by a security device which disabled Temar's chronocore, Lucius must have allowed themself to be driven off to get out of range of its effect. This explained, too, their insistence on entrusting me with the key. And we would surely not have hatched our plan to open the door under Temar's protection if it had not seemed to those of us who had witnessed it that Temar drove the Emperor off so easily.

"Go!" Temar hissed again, drawing our attention back to the ground on which we stood. The door was still steadily opening, and I could begin to see into the darkness beyond.

I exchanged grim glances with Ermsan and Saffa around the circle, and then we all did as bidden by the fallen chrononaut. We raced into the widening aperture of the doorway, stumbling where our feet tangled in wreckage or the door's motion shifted it under them. What happened next took place in the space of only seconds, but in the interests of completeness I will attempt to describe it all, as if we had rather longer to take it in; I will explain how I am able to do so presently.

The anteroom into which we fled was a dark box matched in size with its door, with a single light floating in its centre at about our head height. The light was like the key, but significantly larger, its halo probably a little broader than I could have spanned with my arms at full spread. Although it seemed star-bright when one looked at its heart, it was also contained and distant, so that we could look at it without so much as squinting.

Beyond the light, the anteroom opened into a much larger space, half-seen, dropping away beyond an incongruously plain balcony railing. Somewhere down there was a larger and more diffuse source of light, the promise of treasures and technologies beyond imagining for which I could at that point spare not even a thought. The Emperor, I was sure, would be on us in mere moments at most; I could see nothing which might protect us.

As we crossed the threshold, the air came alive with sound from hidden speakers. It was cacophonous, an interleaved speaking of many voices at once, pressing hard on our ears although it was not truly loud in an uncomfortable way. The voices seemed to speak in a multitude of unfamiliar languages, and yet from their interferences emerged a distorted and straining approximation of Federation.

It was, I think, an auditory equivalent of chronoscript; where chronoscript uses visuotemporal trickery to lead our eyes to the shapes of familiar characters, this effect must have done something similar with the spoken word, though given the context involved the technology must have been infinitely more complex.

The first words I made out were "Disabling field has been activated for all weapons-" and indeed as I heard it I saw the pistol in Saffa's hand dissolve into glowing motes in the air. I lost the clear thread of the announcement as Saffa snarled, in Commonwealth, "Now you warn us about matrichrons?" The clash between her voice and the alien message of the vault's builders stung a place in my brain just inside my ears in much the way that seeing only part of a chronoscript message can give one a headache.

Though I had slowed and stumbled at the voice, I had not stopped, and I plunged on towards the light in desperation. My limbs dragged. Behind me I think I heard the Emperor land, then a visceral noise as they slew Temar. I did not look back. I staggered into the light.

There was a brief sensation of warmth, then the anaesthetic of zero gravity, and then a bifurcation of my consciousness so that while I was never unconscious of being held in the radiance of an alien technology, I seemed also to be in a relatively ordinary, if unusually well-appointed and comfortable, office.

I believe the impression must have been constructed from my own memories, though it was no room I have ever been in. No emblems or banners of the Interstellar Fleet adorned it, but the furnishings were of styles and manufactures familiar to me. Potted plants, well-tended and lush, adorned spare space on shelves and sideboards. One wall was wide floor-to-ceiling windows, from which I could look across a small green to a grove of crowntrees that made my heart ache for younger days.

On the desk were a keyboard and screen that were an exact match for the workstation I had left behind in my quarters before deployment to Nine. The screen displayed a single line of text at the top, in plain white print on a dark grey background: 'Open the door and give your testimony. The first step is to turn your hatred against its source.'

No further instruction was given, but I found I understood certain basic things about the task before me. In that simulation of an office, I was to give an account of myself. It would seem to me as if I had whatever time I needed in which to do so, although mere fractions of a second would pass in the vault for Saffa and my soldiers.

I did not seem to be fully in command of my own will. I went to the desk, sat down, and began to write. Words poured out of me, more verbose and detailed than I would ever normally be in a report. I quickly learned that I could not lie, and that it was difficult, once I had thought of a detail, to omit it from my account; adding to my telling with reflections that went beyond mere factual recall was much easier. I apologise if I have been a little overenthusiastic in that department. What I choose to describe has largely been compelled, but my choice of wording has generally been free.

The aim of this carefully-crafted exercise seems to be to extract a sufficient body of text from which an evaluation of our civilisation may be derived. I assume this is a test of our worthiness for whatever other secrets the vault contains. Certainly the builders either transcend time as we experience it or are so ancient that they possessed all the technologies to create the vault sometime before Temar's colleague Syri made her two-billion-year-old graffiti scrawl on its outside; the form of their life is epochs beyond our comprehension.

When I wrote of having two audiences in mind for my testimony, they were the second - or perhaps the first. I report to the Emperor, and their decisions based on my report have already shaped my life, true. The Emperor may even order my death for my collaboration with Temar. But I believe the builders may extinguish all human life in the universe if my testimony alarms them; what little I know of them suggests they may be capable of doing so more or less instantly, though our people are spread across countless galaxies.

If you are reading this and you are not either the Emperor or one of the builders, you too are, in your own small way, included in this terrifying crux. The same device of light that records my words also translates and disseminates them through our history; you may receive them in any era of sufficiently dynamic text. Dynamic text, as I understand it, means text whose appearance is underwritten by an active process – light emitted by a screen or hologram projector, for example, or the elaborate chemistry of chronoscript, but not ink on a page or physical shapes inscribed in stone, metal or wood. Dynamicity is a precondition of the translation process, which must autonomously discern your language in the moment it transmits text into your receiving sensory organs.

I cannot say whether your responses to what you have read are monitored as my writing of it has been. Doing so may be trivial for the builders, or they may regard it as immoral or beneath them to take so close an interest in your life. If my testimony has doomed us to future extinction, at least you have the text to make your own judgements about. I hope I have given you enough context to understand why I have acted as I have.

It is to all these competing pressures that I have addressed myself as, held for an instant in the light, I have seemed to sit at this desk, or walk around this office, for weeks or perhaps even months. This is not chronics – not time travel or distortion, which I gather the builders find generally distasteful – but a trick accomplished by half-connecting my consciousness to vastly greater simulational substrates.

And now that task is done. My Lord Emperor, I throw myself on your mercy for my attempted betrayal; I have at least done as you bid and opened the door. My readers throughout our history, I can only ask for the kindness of your regard. To the builders of the vault, I hope I have done enough to ensure the continuation of my species.

This concludes the recognised text of the Captain's testimony. What follows is a transcript of an audio recording of a dramatization of events that may have occurred in the Vault immediately following that testimony's completion. No proven original copy of the Captain's testimony includes the recording, but its circulation is widespread across the human sphere, and this transcript is often included with static-text publications of the testimony. Analysts remain divided about its provenance.

"Welcome to the vault, my lord. Please forgive my not turning to present myself to you. Our hosts did not seem to realise immediately that our cystems were weapons, or perhaps they were careful to disable them in such a way as to preserve the non-martial functions. Either way, my lord, I doubt you can move any more than I can now, or I'd be dead."

"Sir, what's-"

"Happening? I have only a vague idea, Ermsan. The announcement said they'd disable all our weapons. Either the vault has automatic security or there's one or more of the Builders here to do it for themselves."

"In here? You mean, with us?"

"I would be unwilling to rule it out. They are billions of years more advanced than us, we can't begin to imagine what form they take now. We might each be held in a giant invisible alien fist right now. Saffa, can you move?"

"Sure. You really can't?"

"No more than fingers and face. Even my jaw is restricted. Is the Emperor actually back there?"

"Yeah, he's- I'm sorry, they are like ten metres behind you."

"Still alive? They haven't said anything."

"Looks like they're in shock. Jaw might be locked, is that your fucking trees?"

"Yes."

"Bit of a design flaw, that, isn't it?"

"I feel reasonably confident that this is the first time any soldier of our army has encountered a power that could completely immobilise a cystem without any discernible warning."

"How come he's not doing, like, time-travel shit?"

"I hope the Emperor's chronocore has been disabled the same way Temar's was."

"I thought that was just when the door opened. There was a flash…"

"I thought so. That that was you thought, I mean. Tell me, what did you hear in the warning? When you shouted about Temar's… matrichron, is that your word for it?"

"Yeah, it was like, 'We're disabling your weapons and matrichrons'."

"That makes sense. It came across a little different in Federation."

"How- I mean, why does that matter?"

"Well, I have to thank you. It was your outburst that made my plan possible."

"Plan?! Wait, what are you… what have you done?"

"Lured the Emperor in here, where their chronocore and cystem are now completely disabled."

"I don't understand."

"The Emperor made their plans on the basis of my report. My testimony. The one I just gave to this, to the light."

"But what I said… what does that-?"

"I was able to make it sound as if the disabling field was only a one-time effect, on the door's opening. That's why the Emperor backed off when Temar arrived. They wanted to use the vault to kill Temar's chronocore, then claim its contents after the pulse dissipated."

"Okay. You pulled that off, I guess. What do we do now?"

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

"So you've given your testimony… what about the last part?"

"That falls to you, it would seem. You're the only one here who can do anything right now."

"But what should I do?"

"Turn your hatred against its source."

"What does that mean?"

"Come on, Saffa, is there no-one here who might be considered the source of your hatred?"

"Sir, you can't mean- You want her to kill us?"

"Not us, Ermsan. Think."

"You're just going to let her kill the Emperor, captain? Our Emperor?"

"I don't think any of us are in a position to stop her if she so chooses, soldier."

"But… why would I? I don't…"

"Saffa, you remember what Temar said. They started the Time Wars. Created the Federation – the Empire."

"I get that! I just… what does it mean by 'turn your hatred against its source'?"

"It's a test, I think, a final test. First, can we, as a species, find the key? Are we wide-ranging enough in our spacefaring? Second, can we give an account of ourselves that shows we're worthy of the builders? I hope I've taken care of that. We're still here, at least. They're giving us a chance."

"A chance to what? Kill the Emperor?"

"I think it's to prove that we can… perhaps I'm not sure how they want me to explain this. Identify the worst parts of our nature and control them."

"By murdering our Emperor? Captain, this is treason!"

"I don't believe I am obliged to take that from a mutineer, Vittar."

"I am loyal-"

"Enough, soldier! None of us would get out of here without a court-martial at this point."

"Thank you, Ermsan. Saffa?"

"It comes down to a ritual sacrifice after all, huh?"

"It might be enough to demonstrate the intent, I don't know."

"I'm not getting cold feet. Just noting the irony."

"Sorry, it's a little hard to tell from here."

"My bad. Any last words for your boss?"

"I… not really. I won't apologise, my lord. Ultimately you are the source of all my hatred, too. If it were the leaders of the Commonwealth or Alliance here instead, I would do the same, if I could."

"I can't honestly say I'd stop you. Hey, Emperor Asshole. Yeah, look me in the eyes. Look at me. Hey! Look at me. This is for every one of my people your soldiers have killed. Every body you wouldn't let us grieve. Every world of ours you've planted over. And the robefuckers and the planet-eaters, too, I guess. And your own soldiers. Don't look away. Die thinking of everything you've done, and knowing it's all been for nothing-"

"Sir, the light-!"

I never know what to write when I finish a project like this. But hey, I finished it! First time I've finished a novel-length original fiction project in almost a decade. Thank you for reading, and for sharing and/or commenting if you've done so. If you've enjoyed this and you'd like to read another story by me about obnoxious doors and the people who struggle with opening them, might I suggest The Second Realm?

Special thanks to the girlies @themissileknowswhereitis and @etcetega for beta reading and, of course, to @caffeinatedotter, whose Quid Pro Quo inadvertantly inspired all this

Alice Over Zero

@AliceOverZero

Rogue Trans Void Witch

The First Step chapter 6 (final)

6. The First Step

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