The First Step, chapter 3

I chuckled softly, entrusting the beaker to her hands. It seemed less fragile encircled in her slim fingers. I said, "It's only a start, we will have more for you later. Don't rush it, I don't know how your body will take it."

Her eyes narrowed, and she held the glass a bit further away from her face. "Wait. What is it? You're not trying to implant me, are you?"

"It's just a nutrient solution-"

"Don't put one of those things in me." Her voice was still thready, but she managed to put some heat into it all the same. "If it's that or starve then let me die."

"It takes a full team of botanist-surgeons to implant a cystem," I said, harsher than I realised I intended. "Even if we had them and a spare sapling, we don't have a surgery. Whatever you've been told about us, we cannot do what you suggest."

"You would if you could, I know it."

"You have some very strange ideas about us. You must understand that your leaders lie to you to motivate you." It was not at all the time to be having a philosophical argument, but that is much easier to see in retrospect.

"And yours don't? They tell you – what was it you said? That we treat children as property?"

"You do not force on them the ways of their- their parents?" I stumbled over the foreign word, and in that moment made the connection. My mouth ran ahead of the thought. "Wait, you fear we will implant you because that is what the ones who bore you did to you."

"No, that's not-" She waved a hand in anger, her whole body swaying enough that a few droplets of the drink spilled from the beaker. Both of us watched them land on the white stone by her hip. When they hit they splashed with a crispness that belied their viscosity, almost shattering to form tiny, near-spherical beads of gold on the ground. Saffa glared up at me from under a deep, dark frown. When she spoke her voice was sullen. "If you understood the first thing about parents you'd know that's completely different."

I took a deep breath and forced myself to take the opportunity to disengage. "Now is not the time. I am sorry. I should not have let you draw me into anger." I pushed to my feet. "Drink the rest carefully. Do not rush. You may be assured that we will not impose anything of the Federation on you."

She hunched over the beaker and did not answer.

I left her and walked back to Vittar, who had been hovering a little way away. Close enough to hear the heat in our voices, I was sure, but hopefully not enough to overcome the language barrier and follow the discussion. As I approached, they said, "Is everything alright, sir?"

"It seems to be helping, at least," I nodded. "They were afraid that we would try to implant them."

Vittar let out a little 'hmph', then their attention turned inward for a moment. "If we had the facilities, it probably would be more efficient, but…"

"No, soldier," I said sharply. "Some things should not be said even in jest."

"I'm not… well," they caught themself. "I'm just saying, sir, we might need to think outside the box with our resources if we want to survive long-term. Give me some time, and we could do a lot with those spare cystems."

Even against the backdrop of my culture, which you may not share, I found it strikingly distasteful to refer to the bodies of dead soldiers as 'spare cystems'. "Focus on the task at hand, soldier. Do nothing with those bodies without my personal approval."

"Yes, sir." Vittar looked away and down, obviously unhappy.

"You aren't trained for cystem maintenance, are you?" Our maintenance staff had been lost during planetfall, their dropships among the many shot out of the sky by Commonwealth anti-air. Some of the rank and file had field maintenance experience, but I did not have the records of which at hand.

Vittar's chin dropped further. "No, sir. But I've learned a lot from fixing my own cystem. Having these others to work with, I'm sure I can figure it out-"

"Focus on what I have assigned you to do." I jerked my head in the direction of the Commonwealth pilot. "Once they have a reliable supply of food and water, we will talk about this again."

The soldiers had brought blankets from a cabin near the chasm, and then cushions and even mattresses. I am not sure why they preferred to sleep by the door; if they ever discussed their reasons it was out of my earshot. An easy explanation would be that the lack of chronium outweighed the ominous intensity of the location.

I would have liked a source of light to break up the monotony of the pit's diffuse, constant illumination, but we had nothing to make power. I suppose we could have burned salvage from the camps, but fire is an ugly light source and anyway little of what we had found would have burned cleanly. The camps were largely of plastics and textiles.

The base of operations that came of our efforts was certainly not up to Interstellar Fleet standards and procedures. We had no shelter to speak of, and while we of the Federation are less concerned to sleep under an open sky than most peoples, I worried a little for the effect on Saffa. The mattresses were strewn haphazardly, and the soldiers used them as benches as often as beds, with little territoriality about which was whose.

We spread our time between initial, cautious exploration of the camps and rest periods back in the chasm. There was no precise way to track or manage shifts, and it was difficult to keep the soldiers focussed on the tasks I set them. Often I found them at their story-game, considering their shifts to be finished, when I thought they ought still to have been exploring.

It is perhaps useful to describe the game in more detail. There was little formality to it, they would not first discuss whether or not to play, nor establish initial rules or premises, and since there were no cards or dice or game-pieces, there was no setup. Into a lull in the conversation, one player would volunteer a prompt, others would respond, and the game would begin.

Here is a typical example. Once, after a work period spent inventorying the contents of a permatemp whose labels and signs were tantalisingly close to Alliance script and which seemed to have been a storehouse for what might have been food, the soldiers had pulled three of the mattresses together in a triangle and settled to peaceful repose.

Ermsan and Nireba faced the door, opposite Dufore, Yarbe and Gogi, with Jieruk alone on the third. Vittar was away decanting more syrup for Saffa, who sat quietly unmonitored on a sofa cushion in the corner by where we stacked the weaponry. We had become lax about guarding her, and she had rewarded our trust with at least compliance. There was, after all, little point in her attempting escape, especially as we controlled her only food supply.

After a silence that had stretched for a few comfortable moments, Jieruk said, "You're out in the city, and you look up at the wall and there are Alliance scouts rappelling down it. What do you do?" They spoke a little louder and more stiffly than they would in general conversation, almost like an enlisted soldier after a first promotion, though Jieruk had been lance-corporal for some years before our deployment to Nine. This was, I am sure, their best attempt to mimic Sujib, who would deepen their voice to a rich baritone when leading the game.

Sujib's descriptions were always more vivid, too. Their take on the same opening might have gone something like this: "You make your way between cabins, searching for doors to pry open. Something catches your eye, and you look up, to the wall towering above you in the distance. There's something moving up there – one, two, three, more. The figures are tiny, but if you squint, you can see they're descending. Dark capes flutter from their backs. What will you do?"

Jieruk's more prosaic approach was nevertheless sufficient to capture the others' attention. Gogi sat forward, hugging their knees. "I go to the corner of the nearest building where I can take cover and still keep them in sight. I check my rifle is loaded and take the safety off."

"Rifles are in the stockpile by the door," Jieruk said.

"Let the kid have it, Jieruk," said Nireba, leaning back. This sort of haggling was common at the start of games; even though the soldiers had largely been going unarmed, they tended to assume they'd be carrying their weapons when enemies appeared. If the game was intended as some kind of training exercise, this leniency undercut its utility, but that certainly wasn't the spirit in which the soldiers played.

Jieruk's nose twitched in the beginning of a sneer, but they shrugged. "Fine, cover. Who's next?" They looked around.

"What's Gogi's cover like?" Ermsan asked. This was enough to indicate their participation in the game, where Nireba's remark had placed them outside it. Typically less than half the soldiers would play, with the others hovering rhetorically just beyond its boundary, commenting on the action, offering suggestions or heckling. Nireba, by speaking directly to Jieruk, was an outsider this round, while Ermsan, by asking Jieruk to fill out more of the scenario, submitted to their leadership.

Jieruk took a moment with their eyes closed to think through their answer. "It's an alley, one storey on one side, the side where Gogi's crouching. The other side is higher. It's a four-way intersection so there's an alley on that side too but you wouldn't be able to see the zealots from there."

"I hunker down on that side, rifle low and ready but with the safety still on. I'm watching Gogi, waiting for them to signal what they saw."

No-one else leaned forward to contribute, even though the patrol should have been three – ideally I would have arranged the soldiers into our usual squads of four but there simply weren't enough of us to cover all tasks at that strength. Jieruk turned back to Gogi. "They're descending fast. You only have a minute or so at most before they're on the ground."

"I lift my rifle and take- no, wait." Gogi paused. Sujib had operated the convention that if a player specified they were spending an extra moment on aiming, they were more likely to be accurate when firing, and I thought Gogi might be reconsidering their action on that basis. Instead, they bowed their head quickly in Ermsan's direction and said, "Alliance, sir, coming down the wall." Then, to Jieruk, "I lift my rifle and take aim, to show Ermsan where they're coming from."

"Well done," said Yarbe quietly, nudging Gogi with an elbow.

Jieruk looked to Ermsan, who said, "We're not under fire, so I poke my head out round the corner. Can I see them?"

"You're going to be almost right out in the middle of the alley to get a clear line of sight." Jieruk's tone was terse. "Thirty seconds."

"Sir, they're close. Up there." Gogi's voice went up a tone or two with urgency, and they mimed gesturing with their weapon. I watched a reflexive flinch pass across Ermsan's face for the poor rifle discipline.

"Let me check I've understood right, if I move along my side of the street they won't have visual on me?" Ermsan said.

"Yeah. Twenty seconds." Jieruk was rushing them, and I could see Dufore wanting to butt in about it.

Without looking at Gogi, Ermsan said, "I give Gogi the fire signal, then I start advancing along the wall, rifle down and safe."

"I take aim and fire at the nearest Alliance," Gogi said immediately.

"You hit, and they fall limp on their rope. Two of the others return fire with energy weapons, and the beams bounce off the chronium on the walls-"

"Wouldn't work like that," Dufore interrupted. Their voice held the sharp overtone of a person watching someone do something they felt they could do better themselves. "Chronium doesn't reflect."

"What d'you mean, doesn't reflect?" Jieruk rounded on them, scowling. "It's shiny, isn't it?"
"You didn't notice?" Dufore gave a slight shake of their head. "It looks shiny but if you look closer there's no reflection in it, it's weird."

"I never looked that close," said Nireba. "It really doesn't?"

"Yeah. Hang on." Dufore pushed to their feet. "Be right back." They set off at a sprint for the opposite wall of the chasm, leaving us all to watch them go in puzzlement. I should have called them back, or instructed them not to leave the group alone, but I was too slow to react.

They took a full-power leap and disappeared over the crest. In the triangle of mattresses, the soldiers exchanged frowns wordlessly. I looked over at Saffa, who tended to listen intently when the game was in session. She noticed me looking and turned her head away.

Just as Jieruk was about to speak again, to resume the game in Dufore's absence, they reappeared, dropping from the cliff to the plaza and landing in the low crouch we were all getting used to. Their feet made a sound not unlike a loud clap of the hands as they landed, though the chasm had little in the way of echoes.

They returned to the group, holding something out for Jieruk to see. Despite feeling that I should maintain some distance from the enlisted, I peered forward myself. It was passed around the group, eventually reaching Ermsan, who leaned back to present it for my appraisal. It was a flaked-off crystal of chronium, a little larger than a thumbnail.

I took it, observing how the light slithered over its surface – at first glance, just as it would on glass or glazed ceramic. But Dufore was right; no matter how I tilted it relative to my face, or a raised finger on my free hand, there was not even an indistinct shadow of a reflection. My eyes played tricks, so that several times as I experimented I flinched, bodily, in expectation of a reflected image that never appeared.

Often since that time I have found myself staring at a chronium-coated wall searching for my own face, or even the outline of my body. The lack of reflection makes perfect sense, though. Chronium is both generally absorbent of energy and slightly luminescent. The mystery is not the absence of reflection but what trick of the light it emits to generate its shimmer.

Perhaps that is why this particular game among all those played by the soldiers sticks with me. With Dufore's point settled, the game resumed, and it quickly became clear that ricocheting energy beams were the trick that Jieruk had built this scenario around. With that trap disarmed, it was simple for Gogi and Ermsan to pick off the alliance rappelers in the last part of their descent and as they emerged from the scaffolding to cross the open ground in front of the camp.

I was pleased to note Ermsan chiding Gogi to conserve ammunition. Sometimes the game seemed to reward bad habits from the soldiers, and it concerned me to consider that they might carry those habits over into live combat if we were ambushed again. Jieruk tried to prolong the scenario by introducing a second wave of Alliance troops, but the game dissolved into squabbling when they tried to deploy a new kind of weapon that did in fact bounce off chronium.

To draw a line under the game before the quarrel could turn angry, I split the soldiers into two groups. Jieruk, Ermsan, Gogi and Nireba I left at the camp to watch Saffa and the guns. Vittar had returned and I took them, with Dufore and Yarbe, to investigate the large building I had first seen when helping Vittar establish their lab. I was certain that it would contain something to help solve the riddle of that place.

Despite its extraordinary size, it stood far enough from the chasm to be out of sight unless one knew what to look for. We were all developing the habit of jumping up to rooftops to get our bearings, and although it ran round a significant portion of the perimeter of the pit we still found ourselves straying off course several times. If we could have walked straight there, it would have been little more than fifteen minutes. Instead it took us close to twice that, even with the benefit of our cylegs.

We reached its base and stood a moment in awe, staring up at it. Its height was nothing to the depth of the pit, of course, but it was nevertheless as tall as the residential towers of a Commonwealth city, or one of our crowntrees. It spoke to something primal in us that was unable to grasp the vastness of the pit and the indestructible perfection of the door.

The whole thing was covered in the usual density of chronium. We began to walk along the foot of the building, looking for the outlines of entrances, as we typically did in our explorations. Although we occasionally passed vertical grooves in the wall, as if whatever structure the purple crystal concealed had once been modular and some of the modules were imperfectly aligned, we found no doors.

In two places we could look up and see jagged dents in the roofline. The angles were not kind, even jumping to the tops of nearby cabins, and so it was hard to guess what might have caused the damage, whether it was collapses due to aging or collateral from the ancient battle fought here. There was, at least, no sign that anything had fallen from up there.

After we had walked somewhat more than half the length of the building, Vittar became impatient, and, over my objections, applied their cythorn to the chronium. It was quickly clear that the underlying structure was different from the permatemps we had explored thus far. Vittar commented that it felt like the tip of their thorn was scraping on coarse concrete.

The chronium didn't peel in sheets and fall away as it did from the plastic walls of the camp buildings. Instead, it clung like hook-and-loop fastenings, impossible to cut free with our blades. Sometimes it was possible to pull off a handful or so in a coherent piece, crackling as it parted from the material beneath, but just as often the top layer would crumble, leaving scuffed patches of half-formed crystal behind.

The material underneath was stone, single large panels about as tall as we were and twice as long. There was no mortar joining them, and when we cut and scraped the chronium away from the joints we could see that they were stacked in only relatively imprecise alignment. If they were a wall, then whatever kept them upright was a mystery.

By this time we had been away from our camp for some time. Tracking the passage of hours was always difficult in the pit, and clearing that infuriating chronium was a distractingly laborious process. We pressed on to the far end and repeated the exercise, again finding only stone panels under the crystal.

The corner was seamless. The two faces, the one we had walked along and the one extending from where we stood into the thicket of the scaffolds, met with no sign that they were separate pieces. Indeed, the end face was somewhat longer than the front. We were forced, finally, to the daunting conclusion: what we had walked the length of was not a vast building, full of ancient secrets, but only a stack of some hundreds of thousands of stone blocks.

Yarbe chanced the dark under the towering, decrepit scaffolding and paced out the depth of the pile. We could not estimate its length or height even that precisely, but haggled our way to a consensus guess. Extending their cythorn only a hand's-length or so beyond their fingertips, Yarbe knelt down and began carving numbers in the chronium on the ground. This was a slow effort and produced a barely-recognisable scrawl, but between that and muttering a lot to themself, they pursued their calculation to its end.

It was about the right amount of stone, they eventually announced, to build steps like those we had traversed to reach the pit across the whole area of the camps. The thought of it made my brain tense up, a feeling in the front of my skull like my two hemispheres were being wrenched in opposite directions. Either someone had stockpiled stone here with the plan of finishing the steps and sealing this place away, or the diggers of the pit had removed steps to dig their hole, and then winched all that stone – tens of millions of tons – down here for safekeeping.

We returned to camp dazed, to find we had been gone so long that Ermsan and Jieruk had fallen to arguing about whether to send out a search party. I was too bewildered to keep Yarbe from sharing their conclusion, though it did not make the same impression on the soldiers who had not seen the stacked stones up close – how could it? At the time I took that as a relief, but in hindsight I think that taking so many of the soldiers with me to inspect a pile of ancient rock became to them a sign of my poor judgement.

There followed a lengthy but indistinct period in which we explored the camps, rested, attended to the growing comfort of our base and established something that might be called a routine. We quickly learned that Saffa's 'hygeine kit' did not in fact enable any recycling of her waste, only hygienic storage and covering of tracks. With only chronium for ground, this left us with a problem; Saffa explained that normally she would have buried her faeces, but burial in chronium is the opposite of recycling, a near-perfect preservative.

Of course, there were devices in many of the camp buildings for waste capture, but where these potentially afforded recycling – and some did not; we could by no means be sure of which were which – they required reagents we did not have and power we could not supply. In the end, Vittar took charge of the waste materials, claiming the ability to investigate chemical means of nutrient recovery from them. At the time I did not consider how ambitious this was from a soldier with no formal technical training, simply glad as I was to have a solution for the problem, which clearly embarrassed Saffa greatly.

The power issue is representative of a broader puzzle we encountered in those early explorations. Clearly the camps had been powered. There were laboratories both recognisable and incomprehensible, festooned with complex instruments. The residential quarters were full of screens and other electronic creature comforts. Ceiling and wall-mounted lighting units were everywhere.

And yet we found few, if any, generators. When we scraped the chronium off some of the vehicles, we found that most ran on hydrogen cells or even what we eventually figured out must have once been electrochemical batteries. It was only when we found a motorised cart parked at a small photovoltaic charging station that we made the leap, obvious in hindsight. We had in general not wasted effort clearing the roofs of the permatemps we explored, but the vast majority turned out to be covered in solar panels.

That discovery, once we had finished kicking ourselves over it, changed our exploration process. Now we could rely on the cabins' own lighting rather than such light as the windows admitted. There were hazards too, so that Ermsan and I were constantly cautioning the soldiers not to fiddle with unidentified devices. Fortunately no-one managed to hurt themselves, though more than once we were startled by screens long dormant springing back to life at the combination of available power and our proximity.

With better light it was easier to survey the enormous quantities of printed text contained in the abandoned units. We could read little to none of it, but there were diagrams, illustrations, maps and warning symbols, and sometimes we could derive some meaning from context. There was also the tantalising familiarity of the scripts; each camp seemed to have its own characteristic ancestor of one of the languages known to us, and there were complex relationships among those ancestors that hung just outside reach of our understandings.

The only exception was chronoscript, which we found only in the outmost camps. Indeed, Dufore began to sketch a map of the permatemp city, and their notes of where we found chronoscript gave us the clearest boundaries between the three main groupings. Even there, the uncanny script was used only for warnings, and to title documents whose contents were conventionally printed.

We came to the conclusion that much of the research conducted here was materials science. The earliest camps, we assumed, had been established to study the door, and in the absence of any mechanism to get it open, must have been concerned primarily with its imperviousness. Their equipment included some tools clearly improvised from serious weaponry, and others covered in so many warnings that they had to share at least operating principles with devices of killing.

It was difficult to judge over what timespan the successive waves of camps had been established, since even with measuring implements scavenged from the labs we had no detailed frame of reference to compare the depth of chronium across them. The presence of chronoscript in only the later camps dated them to the end of the Time Wars, and the timescar we had crossed implied that at least some of the fighting here had taken place during that conflict.

From the rim of the pit we had seen shafts sunk into its bottom, and though these were wide, the majority turned out not to be terribly deep. The largest were fifty metres or so across, and marked out a straight line at intervals perhaps half a dozen times that, running alongside the chasm from close to the door out to the edge of the pit. Only the last was deeper than the chasm itself, and that one we could not see the bottom of, though its sides were chronium and gave off the same diffuse light as everything else in the pit.

For the time being I ordered the soldiers to leave these shafts well alone. I did allow Dufore to jump down into the one nearest the door, which was barely deeper than some of the permatemps were tall. They kicked free some of the chronium at the base and found it only a thin layer over smooth white again. There did not seem to be anything specific that the shaft had been dug to reach.

The soldiers continued to salvage material from the ancient camps to improve their own. Soft furnishings were particularly popular, and available in number. The strength of our cystems made moving them easy, and only a couple of items were destroyed by being carelessly dropped in the process of lowering them into the chasm.

At some point a scaffold segment, a metal-pipe frame outlining a cube about two metres to a side, appeared at our base, parked up against the door. Covered in scavenged blankets, it became an awning that Saffa slept under, on a mattress of her own. I never quite found the time to inquire as to who had brought it, or why. I was not even sure who I should ask.

Vittar came back from their lab one day with Saffa's supply of syrup and offered her, alongside it, a ration bar. They insisted they had tested it and demonstrated its safety, happily breaking off a piece and eating it in front of Saffa to persuade her. She ate with a grimace that was instantly recognisable to anyone who has spent time around soldiers eating preserved rations. This made it harder to keep the soldiers from tucking in to any food they found, but if anyone ended up griping their stomachs they kept it quiet.

Through it all, the soldiers continued to play their game. One rest period, I sat with Ermsan in purloined armchairs while Dufore knelt on a mattress facing Nireba and Jieruk across a battery-powered hand-lamp someone had placed like it was a campfire. Gogi and Saffa watched from the edge of the light.

Dufore began, "You're walking down a tight alley between two buildings. The chronium here seems darker than usual, and you find yourself glancing upward, worrying that it might fall off the walls on top of you. The air is still but your breath sounds loud in your own ears. All the buildings in this part of the camp are close together, and you come to a narrow gap, too narrow to walk through, on your left. You look along it, and something moves at the far end, like you saw a person walk past, too quick to make out their silhouette." They looked from Nireba to Jieruk. "What do you do?"

I shifted in my seat and leaned forward, working my shoulders to loosen them. "Let's not…" I began, looking for words. "Let's not do anything that's going to make us jumpy, Dufore. Training exercises are fine, but… well, ghost stories are a bit much in this place, don't you think?"

All three turned to me, as did Saffa and Gogi. "It's just a game, sir," Nireba said, their voice a little unsteady.

"Be that as it may, I'd rather you not do anything that might spook someone. Our ammunition reserves are meagre enough that we cannot afford itchy trigger fingers." I managed to hold my tone of authority, but internally I could feel a flush of embarrassment, as if I had somehow spoken out of turn. That was quickly followed by anger, a second heat on the first, that my soldiers had induced me to feel that way.

Dufore began again, a similar scenario but this time clearly identifying Commonwealth infantry as the foe. They glanced at me as they spelled that out, and their expression did not suggest that they were seeking approval. Nevertheless, I nodded, and settled back in my seat.

Quietly, Ermsan said, "Sir, several of the troops have reported sightings like that from their explorations. What if we aren't alone down here?"

"I'd have thought better of you than to be swayed by soldiers' tales, Ermsan," I said, though I kept my voice low to match theirs. "I'd be more surprised if this place wasn't starting to get to them."

"I'm not sure we should be so dismissive, sir…"

Keeping my tone crisp, despite our posture of relaxation, I said, "Have you seen anything yourself?"

"Well, no, sir, but several of the others have reported to me that they've seen things." I was, I could see in the way their frown deepened, getting through to them.

I pressed the point. "What have they said they've seen? Troops? Wearing what uniform? Civilians? How many? Where? And at what distance?"

"Mostly just across the chasm, sir," Ermsan said, downcast. "In camp two or three."

I am not sure who started it – most likely Dufore, I suppose – but we had adopted the loose convention of calling the camp on the side atop the door, the one where Saffa's tank lay wrecked, camp one. Camp two had the pits, and camp three was the one I had tried to steer our explorations away from to shield Vittar's experiments from view. If the soldiers were seeing phantoms at a hundred metres, or two, away across the chasm and the attendant gap between the camps, that was surely no cause for worry.

I said as much to Ermsan and they subsided, clearly not entirely content. In front of us, the game wound on, Dufore running witty rings around Nireba and Jieruk's stiff, unimaginative tactics. They had clearly begun with the intention of creating something like a campfire ghost story, but slapstick comedy quickly became the dominant theme.

Once again I found myself watching Saffa watch the game. The soldiers spoke in Federation, their choice of words often scurrilous with double meanings. Saffa understood our language to a broadly functional degree, but she laughed along with the jokes as if she grasped those too, without a hint of self-conscious crowd-following.

Even so, she did not speak or volunteer any contributions. When the game had tumbled to a stop, she drifted back towards her awning, with Gogi barely paying her any attention at all. I got up from my chair and walked over to join her.

The look she greeted me with was stiff, a little tense. Not entirely unlike the face she had pulled trying the preserved rations, which I suppose I must accept, as an officer of an opposing army. Doing my best to keep my tone gentle, I said, "The soldiers' game interests you."

"It's strange," she frowned at herself. "I feel like I'm watching you relearn… humanity. Like children."

I knew enough of her culture to be piqued. "You believe we do not play?"

"Don't you?" She looked back at the soldiers. "They play like they're still learning the basics of the game."

"They are." I tried not to sound defensive. Checking my cystem's internal status, I was surprised at the passage of time, and hesitated. "It's been… it's only been two months. Sujib invented the game as we were crossing the steps."

Saffa flinched. She had of course known Sujib only down the barrel of her tank's autocannon, and I think even then was beginning to feel some remorse for those of my soldiers she had killed. She folded her arms, looking away for a moment. "You play other games, then?"

"Of course," I said. "Cards, dice, those sorts of things. If we had cards or dice at hand I doubt the soldiers would have invented this game at all."

"Do you… it's a lot like us boasting. You know, things we did in battle, everyone exaggerates but nobody minds."

"We do that too, of course. I suspect all soldiers do." I put my hand on her shoulder, and though I could feel her twitch slightly at the contact, she did not push me away. "You have been told much about us that is not true, to make you hate us."

"And you haven't?" She said, with a little more venom. Then she let out a small, bitter chuckle and, in Federation, mimicked my, "I suspect all soldiers are."

The linguistic play put a thought in my head. I drew her over to the corner of the buttress, where we had found the scratched graffiti. The letters were barely distinguishable, with only the faint glittering of chronium to pick them out. I had to have her run her fingers over them before she could make them out.

"What does it say?" She asked eventually, after some time convincing herself that I was not, in fact, hallucinating.

"I have no idea," I had to reply. I traced the lines of the one character I did think I could recognise, midway along the upper row. "Does any of it look familiar to you? This one looks a lot like a negation in our writing, but I don't know what of."

Saffa put her hand up under mine, fingertips against the next two characters. I lowered my arm to make room for her to see. She peered at the stone for a while, tilting her head back and forth. "This… might… you could maybe read it as something like 'victory'?"

I pointed to the negation again. "So, 'not victory'? Defeat?"

"Or 'couldn't win'?" She looked left and up, at the immensity of the door. "They sealed something here that they couldn't defeat?"

"I would have thought they'd leave more warnings. Don't you think?"

She shrugged. "Maybe all the others faded. This stuff's all really old, right? And it's hard to make any mark on this." She tapped the stone. "There was a big battle here. Maybe this is what they fought against. Inside it, I mean."

That was, as I remember it, the first time I heard anyone voice an idea about what might lie behind the door. The soldiers, even in the more imaginative iterations of their game, had never touched on it. I suppose none of us believed then that we would ever see the door open, and so had locked away speculation as firmly as the door's creators had sealed whatever it was they had sealed in there.

Inevitably, though, the thought, now voiced, lingered. I did not share it with the soldiers and I doubt Saffa did either, but as we went about our explorations it began to nag at me. I saw its absence in the soldiers' concerns, and began to believe that the phantom they saw moving about the camps was really a blessing, a displacement of their justified unease at this strange place onto something tangible, something fightable.

Our explorations continued, and for a while I did not hear more of spectres from the soldiers. Our approach grew more systematic as our grasp of the camps improved. We would go to a building, scrape the chronium off its roof to uncover its solar panels, and then go through its contents thoroughly, identifying what we could, steering around such warnings as we could understand, leaving anything whose use was beyond us and scavenging the rest.

In this way it would take a shift or so to resolve a single permatemp. Yarbe delighted in telling us their estimates of how long we would have to work to fully explore all the camps – despite our lack of accurate chronometers, for even those we found on devices we reactivated were scrambled beyond calibration, they insisted we would be at our self-appointed task for sixty years.

The cut sheets of chronium we piled like turfs as neatly as we could wherever there was space for them. They were very light, awkward to carry only if we cut them too large and they broke up in transit. The stacks were treacherous, though, with a tendency to slip, and where buildings were closely packed we often found ourselves creating accidental labyrinths of difficult terrain. Although the air stayed visually clear, we must have stirred up considerable dust, because at one point as I walked past Saffa's wrecked tank I saw a faint grey-purple shimmer on its top panels.

Dufore and Nireba found a telescope, excitedly lugging its bulky black case back to our campsite. They took it out and set it up on its complex tripod, squabbling about which screws and knobs on the thing did what. They almost dropped it at least once, thinking they had securely tightened the legs only for one to fold when they stopped supporting its weight.

It was a large-bore device, a meter long and perhaps a third of that across. An eyepiece that looked a bit like a playpen for a small rodent clambered awkwardly through more angles than could possibly be necessary up from the top quarter of the barrel. At the other end of the barrel was what I first assumed would be a lens assembly of some sort, positively festooned with dials and controls and unlit readouts.

It seemed to be this last device which kept the telescope from functioning. We all took our turns peering into the eyepiece, but nothing we could do, and no angle we could point the thing at, produced anything besides a puce-pink blur, as if someone had pressed a pale finger to the inside of the eyepiece-lens. Dufore fiddled endlessly with the various controls, but even once we had figured out how our ancient predecessors had charged their power supplies, they could get no functionality out of it.

There had been star charts in the building where they had found the telescope, both printed onto transparent plastic and encoded into a projector in one small room whose walls were treated to allow it to function as a makeshift planetarium. We could see, looking through them, that the charts recorded observations taken over the course of many years, with constellations shifting gently from one to the next. Dufore doubtless hoped to pin our point in time by comparing those to contemporary observations, though Yarbe insisted that four millenia of change would render the charts unrecognisable.

So we continued. Our explorations ranged steadily further through camp one; I had managed to keep the soldiers from the other camps, to protect Vittar's lab. Our collected comforts piled up, rather more comprehensively than our understanding of our circumstances. Now that I had sensed the lacuna of the unopened door at the heart of the soldiers' game, it began to seem stale. Mercifully, Nireba found a deck of cards in a residential block, and while they numbered only fifty-six, we were able to adapt them to some games we knew.

Perhaps because I am describing events in such bland generality, for a moment I am permitted to pause in my telling. The same device that delivers my words to you, translated, I hope, for your understanding, draws those words out of me in a torrent which I am all but powerless to abate. I believe this is to prevent me lying; certainly so far it has been successful.

I am granted some leeway in how I describe what I remember, and of course my memory provides an ultimate limit on what I can tell. There is some consideration behind my choice of expression. In particular, I grow increasingly focussed on two minority audiences; if my current understanding of the distribution of my testimony is correct, it is unlikely you are in either of those groups, and for that I can only apologise. I can only hope that my story is of some value to you as well.

The machine's patience wears thin. Back to the telling.

At the end of one shift which seemed much like any other, I returned to our camp to find Vittar standing at the weapon pile, by this point almost lost behind the canopies and tenting. They were in the final stages of reassembling a rifle after field-stripping and cleaning it, another slung across their back and presumably already cleaned. Saffa stood stiffly a few metres away, peering at them with unease etched on her face, though Gogi, Ermsan and Jieruk looked less worried.

I went straight to Vittar, bringing my head close to theirs and keeping my voice low. "Trouble, soldier?"

"Someone's been in my lab, sir," they said, tone gruff.

That sent a race of chills through the roots of my cystem, across my back and out along my arms. Still, I did not lose my head. "Are you sure?"

"Doors were smashed in." Vittar snapped the long barrel section into its socket in the stock and thumbed the fastenings closed. "Don't think they took anything, but they're still out there."

I looked around. "Could it have been one of the others? Where's Yarbe?" I had taken Nireba and Dufore on my exploration this time, but Yarbe was not visible with the other soldiers who'd been off-shift. I did not truly believe, then, that they could have mutinied, but something in me was reluctant to give any ground to the soldiers' fear of strangers in the camps.

"Yarbe's watching the place while I get guns," Vittar said, straightening as they slid a clip into the rifle. "I need to get back to them, they shouldn't be alone out there."

"They- you showed them-" I spluttered. "I told you not to-"

"I needed their help with some numbers." They started to walk away and I grabbed their arm. They faced me again, a sterner irritation in their voice. "I haven't told the others anything, just said we were out on a recce."

Which would doubtless draw more questions and give the game away when the dust settled, but we would have to pluck that weed when it sprouted. I had few options for disciplining Vittar, though, and they were right that Yarbe should not be left isolated. I sent them on their way and steeled myself to get the other soldiers settled.

I stepped out into the still more-or-less-open space of the plaza, picking my footing carefully between discarded blankets and clothes. Keeping the place tidy had been impossible from the start; there was nowhere correct to store things, and soldiers are wont to live in disorder even in optimal living conditions.

Ermsan stood to attention, their tone crisply military as they said, "What shall we do, sir?"

"At ease," I answered. "It's probably nothing."

"Vittar said they found a door broken down." Disquiet showed on Ermsan's face, and I was glad that they stood ahead of the other soldiers, their expression concealed by the angle.

I shook my head. "Let's not surrender to paranoia. It may well be that door has stood broken since these camps were abandoned." I took a risk in the lie, but a small one; I judged it unlikely that Vittar's own lie to the others had provided enough detail to contradict it.
Ermsan came a step and a half closer, lowering their voice. "Is that wise, sir? I'd rather do what we can to make sure."

"We can't indulge the soldiers' fears." I matched Ermsan's tone, though I wish I could have been sterner. "You remember how things got on Ihona. The enlisted were firing at shadows for weeks."

"There was a prespector on Ihona, sir," Ermsan hissed. "They killed several of us."

"Don't be ridiculous," I said, looking up into my own lowered brow. "What interest would any chrononaut have in a place an order of magnitude younger than true timescars?"

"I saw it, sir." Ermsan hunched, turning sullen. "Lots of us did. Most died."

Most of the soldiers who had gone with us into the timescar on Ihona had indeed died, but it was to the incomprehensible chronic aftereffects of the weapons detonated there, not incient graverobbers that were more folklore than fact. Some part of me, I think, found the displacement of reality disrespectful. Certainly there was heat in my cheeks as I drew breath to respond.

The unmistakable crack of a rifle discharge interrupted me, and sealed the practical component of the argument in Ermsan's favour. I spoke before anyone else could, taking charge before further challenges to my authority. "Dufore, Nireba, Jieruk, rifles. Two clips each, no more. Ermsan, take the flare gun, use it if you're engaged. Gogi, you're here with me."

Ermsan hesitated a second, then jerked their head in Saffa's direction. "What about them?"

"Her." The heat in Saffa's voice was by this point familiar.

"Sorry," Ermsan mumbled, with a stiff nod to the pilot.

"I'll talk to th- her." I stumbled trying to change language midsentence. "Go."

The four soldiers armed themselves, and I was satisfied with their speed after so long without drills. After I had watched them hop up out of the chasm, I turned to Saffa. In her language, assuming Gogi would not understand, I said, "My soldiers fear a chrononaut has come robbing the camps. More likely someone from one of our armies has made it through the timescar. Will you not at least tell me how things stood in the system last you knew?"

Her glare went from my face, to Gogi's, to the distance, and back again. Then her shoulders rose and fell in a sigh. "The Alliance held the system. We were meant to be infiltrators but our cover was blown. I doubt any of my comrades survive."

Gogi was nodding along, I noticed out of the corner of my eye, their posture inclined as if they were considering speaking. I ignored them. "In our time it was your fleet and the Affenstrin, and we never sighted Alliance. I suppose it could be anyone out there, then."

"Not likely to be anyone who'd rescue me," she said sullenly, and glanced over at the corner where the remaining weapons, including her pistol, were stockpiled.

"What will you do, if they circle past my soldiers and come here?"

"Will you give me a weapon?"

"I think you can trust her, sir," Gogi said, in Federation, and looking at their face I could not judge how closely they had followed the conversation. They had spent more time with Saffa than any of the rest of us; I had not until that moment accounted for the possibility that they might have talked to her and in so doing improved their grasp of her language.

Regardless, I held up my hand to silence them. To Saffa, in Commonwealth, I said, "Can I trust you not to turn it on us?"

She glared at me. "Shall I swear on my mother?"

"You have to understand that would mean nothing to us." I said it earnestly, without scorn.
Saffa took my words in the same spirit. "It means everything to me. What do you swear by?"

"'By the root of the crowntree that sheltered me' is the traditional formulation," I said, speaking the oath in Federation. I was sure she must already know that much at least.

"We normally say 'By my roots'," Gogi offered, wholly in Commonwealth. I looked at them, frowning, but they did not notice.

Saffa snorted slightly, more in frustration than bitterness. "Don't you see that's the same thing?"

"We are not, as you think, the slaves of our trees." I felt my voice rise as I spoke. Saffa's suggestion was profoundly offensive to me, one of the few points of my beliefs about the Commonwealth which has not softened at all with time.

"And you think my mother didn't shelter me?" Using our word for 'shelter' rather than her own made a mangled horror of her grammar. "She gave me everything I have, everything she had to give."

"She made you what you are-"

"And your trees don't do that to you?" Stepping forward suddenly, she seized my arm at the wrist, pulling it up to wave in front of me – she was too short to get right up in my face, but she did her best. "Look at this… this thing they put in you! In your actual body!"

I wrenched free, hard enough with the assistance of my cystem that she staggered. "I chose this. As an adult. Freely. So did all my soldiers. We knew what the saplings would do to us. Your mother-" and as I sneered the word I realised that my tongue's grammar made it almost a curse in its own right – "your mother was working on you from the moment you parted her body, before you could speak, before you could learn."

"Could you speak when they dumped you out of your pod?" Rubbing her tested shoulder, Saffa did not relent. "Could you think for yourself when they first told you to hate us? To love plants more than people? To celebrate when your soldiers cut their way through our cities?"
Blood singing hot in my veins, I started to speak and checked myself. When I did answer, my tone was drier than I perhaps felt. "You seek to convince me that what was done to you was wholesome by showing me that the same things, done to me, were not."

Before Saffa could speak again, there was a slight shift in the light. In other contexts it would have been unnoticeable, but the light in the pit had been so plain and constant that even that tiny variation drew my eye. I looked around and up, and sure enough, the red plume of a flare rose from the direction of camp three. Two shots rang out, then a third.

I turned back to the pilot, still in some sense our prisoner. Her height made her a poor candidate for one of our rifles; certainly she would struggle to carry one safely even across her back, and I doubted she would have the reach to brace it properly when aiming. I said, "Your sidearm is with the others. Take it and conceal yourself. Mind your ammunition - do not engage, especially not my soldiers."

"Yes, sir!" She mocked me with a salute, but went to the weapon pile.

To Gogi, I said, "We'll go after them. With luck the enemy are few and we can catch their flank or rear."

We collected our own arms. I took my sidearm in addition to a rifle, relieved to notice that Ermsan had also taken theirs. That left Saffa's handgun with its bare handful of remaining bullets the only weapon she was likely to wield effectively, and our pistols might be more manageable if we found ourselves chasing or chased through the camp's alleyways.

I did not bother, as Vittar had, with stripping, cleaning, and reassembling the rifle I took. The stockpile had been unattended for some time, though there was no sign of the chronium dust that had settled on the abandoned spider-tank, and I made a mental note to assign armoury upkeep as part of our regular shift rotation. That thought was to slip my mind, though, before it could be put into practice.

Gogi and I left Saffa burrowing behind one of our canopies – it would offer cover only from a basic visual survey, but if our enemies had the equipment for more than that we were probably all lost anyway – and leapt out of the chasm. The flare's trail hung in the air, eerily still. By travelling across the roofs of the permatemps we could keep it in view easily.

Chronium made the rooftops slippery, especially at the speed we travelled, and I extended my heel cythorns a few centimetres for extra purchase. The cabins were surely not designed to support the weight of our vaulting bodies, but the chronium layer absorbed enough energy from our impacts to prevent any damage. We heard no more shots but became aware of raised voices as we closed on the flare's tail.

The smoke hung over the approximate centre of camp three, where we found a town square of sorts. We approached it across a low unit whose roof had a slight pitch to our left; squat blocks much like the one where Vittar had established their lab lined the right-hand side of a piece of flat, open ground perhaps forty metres long and thirty wide. Opposite them were half-cylinder-roofed storage units, their upturned-D ends facing the square.

At the far end was a larger building, probably a stack of the standard permatemps, three wide and two high. The far corner bore a large hole, chronium-coated edges buckled as if it had long ago been torn open by an explosion. In the middle of the building's front was a double doorway, one of its panels missing and the other hanging loose.

In the doorway, hunched behind the broken panel as if it would offer them any cover at all, was a figure whose russet-and-gold uniform marked them an Alliance chaplain of some rank. In their hand I could see the delicate, menacing silver shape of an energy pistol. The weapons of the Alliance were wretched to maintain in the field, their power sources toxic beyond what we of the Federation are willing to tolerate, but the Alliance took those tradeoffs for a reason.

Vittar stood in the middle of the square, exposed and caught with their rifle lowered. Yarbe looked on from the corner of one of the storage units, aiming at the chaplain. Ermsan's group were on the other side, Dufore prone at the edge of a hab roof with Jieruk as their spotter, Ermsan and Nireba in the alley behind.

The voice we had heard was the chaplain's, high and cutting in the style of all the Alliance's priests. It cut off as they noticed my arrival, then resumed in my direction. "Begone! Begone, Lucian spectres! Return to the time from which you came! Your blasphemous empire is no more!"

There was fanatic frenzy in the ringing words. Of all our enemies the Alliance were the least likely to respond to reason, especially where they perceived heresy at play. If the chaplain thought it was us and not they who had come to this place out of our own time, if as their imprecation suggested they postdated the fall of the Empire Saffa had named successor to our Federation, then the chance of averting further violence was slim.

But if they fired, no question, Vittar would die. An Alliance handgun would cut freely through anything short of battlecruiser hull plating. In their language, I called out, "Peace, Reverend. Will you parlay?"

"Speak not, phantom!" There was no echo in the pit at all, the chronium saw to that. The chaplain's voice creaked with the strain of shouting with such volume. "I will not suffer your seeds to be implanted in me, and I will not let you take the" – and here they used a word in their tongue which I had never heard before, and for which I had no frame of reference. I do not know what the translator will make of it if I render it phonetically, whether it will somehow be able to deliver a translation, or whether you will get the sounds as I heard them. The word was 'preliquary'. What it meant, or at least what I know now of what it meant, will have to come later.

I saw in the chaplain's tone and posture then that they would shoot. Not in an abstract or distant sense, but that they were teetering on the edge of pulling the trigger in that second or the next. I do not know how I was so instantly sure, and indeed it may be confabulation, backfilled from the knowledge that they did in fact shoot. I was struck by paralysis, with no chance to raise my own rifle or order Dufore or Yarbe to fire without tipping the balance and dooming Vittar.

What happened instead was that, as the energy pistol bloomed and we heard the first whine of burning atmosphere, a hand reached out of an uncolour fold in the air right in front of the chaplain and seized the beam. I cannot describe it any other way; those of my soldiers who had a clear view all gave similar descriptions. As if it was a ribbon, the beam swirled around the figure stepping out of the temporal rift, growing brighter as it recrossed its own path.

Then it plunged into the chaplain's body with an audible crackling of sublimating flesh. The chaplain fell back and the chrononaut who now stood before them turned on one heel to take in the square. I felt my arms go slack, lowering my rifle, dreading what the time traveller would do, but all they did was tilt their chin up slightly to look at me. At forty metres I could barely make out their face. They took a step backwards, towards the door of the large building, and vanished again, their exit rift more clearly visible than the one they had entered by but gone in a moment.

While I stood, slack-jawed, the soldiers fell back on their training. Vittar burst into a sprint and threw themself down to one side of the doorway, rifle lowered. Ermsan shouted deployments and advanced with Nireba along the right-hand side of the square. Yarbe turned to cover the approach by which they and Vittar must have arrived at the scene, then backed around the corner into the plaza.

I gathered my wits and brought Gogi forward with me. We crossed the open ground at a run but no more energy beams appeared, either from the building ahead or our exposed flanks. The chaplain, we were eventually able to be sure, had arrived in the camps alone. By the time we reached Ermsan by the door to the large building, Vittar and Nireba were already inside.

The greasy smell of burnt meat hung about the chaplain's corpse. The centre of their torso was a blackened hole, not just singed but fully carbonised. Their face still held the shock of their death, eyes wide. They had a broad, square jaw, a heavy brow and flat nose, a wreath of white hair that was cut to shape rather than the result of balding. Up close, they appeared younger than the haircut made them seem at a distance.

While Ermsan directed the securing of the building, I knelt to check over the chaplain's person. The energy weapon had fallen from their hand and I left the wretched thing where it lay. Insignia on their lapel proclaimed their rank to be equivalent to one lower than mine but higher than Ermsan's. I did not recognise the classification of their unit.

They carried dog tags, and a little rummaging under their collar was enough to pull them out. I was not entirely surprised to see that the script seemed a distortion of the Alliance script I knew, simplified in places and with added marks in others. What struck me more clearly were the dates they gave for the chaplain's birth and initiation, which, if I was doing the conversion correctly, postdated those on my own tags by some twelve hundred years.

I said nothing of this to the soldiers, even Ermsan. Lucian spectres, the chaplain had called us. Your blasphemous empire is no more. It was unthinkable to me then that the Commonwealth could ever be entirely consigned to history, but doubtless those who dug the pit and built the camps thought the same of their nations, four thousand years or more in my past.

Ermsan called me forward into the building. The entrance hall was fully coated in chronium, with a thin layer even across the ceiling. This already set the place apart from every other permatemp we had explored, though presumably it was just because the door had stood open, rather than closed, when the camps were abandoned.

The bigger difference was what Vittar had found at the far end of the room. The chronium had been picked and peeled off – individual crystals lay scattered loose atop the thick floor coating around our feet – perhaps by the chaplain's bare hands, and the door underneath opened to a narrow hall in which there was no chronium. The door itself was festooned with yellow-and-black warning tape which had torn off at the frame.

In the centre of the door panel, covering other, older informational labels with more placid tone, was a large sticker whose message was in chronoscript: WARNING – DO NOT ENTER – SEVERE TEMPORAL HAZARD. As I have mentioned before, we had only found chronoscript in the peripheral, and thus by inference more recent, parts of the camps. This was the first – and indeed was to be the only - time we saw any near the centre of one.

Through the doorway we could see into a dark, windowless corridor, perhaps a dozen metres long. We could make out little of what was on the walls – no chronium at all, from the lack of light – but the door at the far end was open a crack and limned by that familiar silver-purple glow. The doorhandle looked to have been melted or burned through, presumably by the chaplain's energy weapon.

The soldiers did not need persuading to leave exploring the remainder of that building for a later time, though Vittar hesitated slightly before agreeing with the rest of us. In the absence of means to provide last rites to the chaplain in either their convoluted funereal tradition or our own, we cut a shallow ditch in the chronium of the square outside, placed their body in it, and covered them with the cut chronium as if it was turf. It would preserve them rather than facilitate their return to nature, but it is my understanding that this is in alignment with the Alliance's religion.

We returned to our own camp by the door in an odd mix of relief and frustrated adrenaline. The soldiers' chatter was of the chrononaut's appearance and its significance. Were we being protected? And if so, to what incient purpose were we being shepherded?
Saffa listened to our story with wide eyes, then weakly joked that we had only left her behind to concoct an implausible story together. I did my best to reproduce the unfamiliar word the chaplain had used and asked if she knew it, or its equivalent in her tongue. She thought for a while, and suggested a word which meant no more to me than the first – phonetically, it was 'matrichron'.

This one took too long to finish, sorry about that, life got busy and then I hit a fatigue wall for like a week, hopefully the next one will be a little bit quicker at least (she says, staring at the onrush of the teaching term)

Chapter 4 is here

Lupi

@lupi

cow of tailed snake (gay)

The First Step, chapter 3

3. The Priest

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