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  “For now I wouldn’t get too bound up with the ‘battle gods’,” he said. “I think we’ll just be wasting our time if the archive is deliberately avoiding our questions. Let’s keep it in the back of our minds for later. I know it’s frustrating, but what subjects will the archives talk to us about?”

  The answer, when it came, was a surprise to them all. Sallyanne stumbled onto a raft of new information almost by accident when the research team weren’t far from finishing up their first shift.

  “Orouth,” she said to herself, as if trying the word on for size.

  Roberto looked up from his work on Rothii physiology.

  “Just let me check the additional references . . .” continued Sallyanne, her voice tailing off.

  “Several of these are coordinates,” she muttered, as the others began to leave their seats and crowd around her.

  “By the gods, it really is!” she shrieked, before unplugging a recording tablet and springing to her feet. She was looking at what she’d just downloaded as if she thought something precious might disappear any second.

  “It’s Earth’s coordinates!” she shouted, looking around for Finch, who was now hurrying over.

  “I mean early Earth,” she said excitedly. “Other Earth, the first Earth.”

  Andre grabbed the recorder as she showed him a map with the location of the planet relative to the Spiral Arm. Celia looked intently at Sallyanne. “Are you sure?” she said, finding it hard to believe.

  Sallyanne nodded. “The footnotes clearly identify a population that was transferred to coordinates that match up with those of Earth.”

  “What did you call it?” said Jeneen.

  “Orouth,” said Sallyanne. “It even sounds like ‘Earth’. I wonder if the word survived the transfer of our ancestors to Earth, and our word for our planet has changed so little over the last few hundred thousand years.”

  “Well it’s a long way from the present Earth,” said Andre, looking at the map of the Spiral Arm displayed on the recording tablet.

  “Let’s get that up in 3D,” said Roberto, and motioned Andre over to the processor he was setting up for the purpose. Andre plugged the recorder in, and a 3D reproduction of the Spiral Arm sprang to life above the processor. Earth’s sun showed clearly as a small gold point of light, and the suns of key planets in the Sumerian empire showed a pale red. As they watched, a small green ball flickered into life on the opposite side of the Spiral Arm to Earth, well outside areas controlled by the Sumerian empire.

  “That’s a fair hike,” said Roberto appreciatively.

  “Yep, even with star drive,” added Andre.

  “It would take a well-planned mission . . ,” said Finch thoughtfully, scratching his jaw as he thought about what would be required for such an expedition.

  “But we are going,” said Sallyanne imploringly, “surely. We have to know where we came from, and we have to know what happened to the people who stayed there. Did they change into such greatly different races, as the Rothii thought they would?”

  Privately she didn’t know if she wanted the answer to that. What would have become of humanity’s distant cousins in the intervening two hundred and something thousand years? What would they look like?

  “Calm down,” said Finch, smiling, as the others whooped and clapped. But then he nodded.

  “Yes, I’ll need to check a few things with Cordez, as I always do, but I think we will be putting together a mission to Orouth.”

  CHAPTER 9

  ________________

  Celia looked up from her desk. Her team had a much smaller lab space at Prometheus now the diminutive Mersa had joined Cordez’ alliance against the Invardii. The Mersa were a race without space travel, but they were great theorists, and had turned out to be exceptional scientists. They were pacifists, but they were prepared to help the war effort in any other way.

  Jeneen asked Celia a question about the research equipment on the freighter they would be using for the long haul to Orouth. Celia could only shrug her shoulders. She had put in a requisition list, and Roberto was trying every source he could think of in the Solar System to find the equipment they would need.

  Everything was in short supply as the demands of the war effort doubled, and doubled again. The stuff they needed was slow to arrive, turning up in bits and pieces. How much of it they’d have by the time they left for Orouth was anybody’s guess.

  She managed to impart the gloomy news with a cheerful smile, and Jeneen smiled back just as warmly. There was no doubting the close relationship between the older woman and the research assistant she thought of as her daughter.

  “Finch has said ‘no’ to sending an unmanned probe to Orouth,” Celia continued, knowing this had been a particular request of Jeneen’s. It was hard to work at a new research site without a thorough survey of the whole planet, and a probe would have saved them a lot of time.

  “We just don’t have the resources, and we might somehow lead the Invardii to Orouth, so it’s a no for both reasons. But we’ve got an indefinite time frame for the expedition, and the first thing we’ll do is a planet-wide survey.”

  Jeneen nodded. There was going to be an awful lot to get through in the first few days after they arrived in orbit around the planet.

  “So far the expedition has been assigned a squad of Hud pilots,” said Celia, “who will also be bodyguards, and a dozen Mersa technicians.”

  The Hud pilots were a very recent addition to the Prometheus programs. Hud was a medieval planet, but the Hudnee had reflexes that had to be seen to be believed. More and more of them were being trained up to pilot the complex Javelin star fighters.

  Their planet had no magnetic fields to deflect dangerous radiation from the sun, and their bronze skin was one defence they had developed. Their internal chemistry, which attacked cancer cells extremely vigorously – and also caused their exceptional reflexes – had been another.

  “Oh, I forgot to say,” she added. “We’re going to get a K'Sarth freighter – they’re much bigger than ours – and it’s being modified to our needs on K'Sarth right now.”

  Jeneen’s face fell, and Celia understood her thinking. They had enough to do without different systems to get used to, and teething troubles with new machinery.

  “Don’t worry,” she smiled, “we’ll be taking the right people with us to keep everything running. All you have to do is look after our own equipment, and share your engineering insights on what we find at Orouth.”

  “It’s going to be a bigger expedition than I thought,” said Jeneen after a while. “Will Finch send Javelins with the freighter?”

  “No,” said Celia. “Cordez doesn’t think we’ll need protection from the Invardii where we’re going, and Finch agrees – it’s too far from their spheres of interest.

  “Of course it all depends on what flesh-eating monsters we find out there!” she added, with one eyebrow comically raised.

  Jeneen laughed. Being so many parsecs from home brought it’s own problems, and some of them could get you killed. You had to make a joke of it if you wanted to keep your sanity.

  Andre dropped in a moment later, and seeing Jeneen in Celia’s office he ruffled her hair. She pushed him away, laughing, and Celia had to smile. A certain playfulness had always been part of their relationship. They had married after the last trip to the Rothii archives, saying the universe was a bigger and scarier place than either of them had thought, and you needed someone who was solidly in your corner to cope with it.

  Celia could understand that. In some ways the frail Human grasp of reality shouldn’t have to be exposed to the vast perspectives of time and distance that went with the Caerbrindii wars.

  The two engineers had never mentioned children, and Celia assumed the Druanii acceleration of Jeneen’s metabolism to save her life had left her unable to have them. Her hair had continued to whiten, until it was a platinum blonde mop that made her look like a character out of a ‘mad scientist’ novel. Fortunately this was offset by
her warmth, and her sincere commitment to her friends.

  Sallyanne had dropped by the previous day, once Finch had told her she would also be on the expedition, though he was too busy to join them. Sallyanne’s trawl through the downloads from the Rothii Archives had delivered no further information about the ‘battle gods’. Still, it was enticing to know they were probably out there, somewhere.

  Celia had the feeling everything would depend on what happened when they got to Orouth. They wouldn’t have much of a plan except to go and look at the place, and they wouldn’t know what it was, exactly, they were looking for.

  The somewhat emotional question of what had happened to the ancestors of the human race in the intervening 200 thousand years troubled her. Had the Rothii prediction of ‘cultural dissonance’ come to pass? Were the race on Orouth now unrecognisable to each other, each seen as an alien enemy? Had that transformation already been underway when they were transported from Orouth to Earth? Everything was a bunch of unknowns.

  The day finally came when the good ship Orouth Freighter – why try to improve on the obvious, Celia had thought when it came to a name, and Finch had agreed – floated in one of the larger bays of the Prometheus spaceport, fully provisioned and fitted out with most of the equipment Celia had requested.

  The research team were heading to Orouth with one particular purpose, and that was to find something, anything, that would help the Alliance drive the Invardii back to their beginnings. If they were left with nothing more than caves to live in and a hearth fire, then all the better. Perhaps there they would learn what the pain and suffering of others felt like!

  The last meeting was a briefing from Finch, running over what they already knew. The crew had already been through their antibody checks, and the tests showed the all-purpose synthetic antibodies had adapted to their new hosts. There was unlikely to be any disease on Orouth that the antibodies couldn’t deal with quickly.

  The Hud pilots now had a pale, breathable plastic skin applied to their entire bodies, put there by Cantoselli and the other Mersa members of the team to make them appear more Human. They would still be almost as wide as they were tall, but it was the best way to make them fit in with the other members of the team that Celia could think of.

  When they were all assembled in front of the Orouth Freighter, Finch waved a hand for silence.

  “As you know, you have two objectives,” he began. “To find out everything you can about our remote ancestors, assuming they are still alive somewhere on Orouth, and to track down any alien technology on the planet.

  “Sallyanne will be head of the investigations into Orouth culture, politics, and if it applies, economics. Celia and her team will be spread a little more loosely, assisting Sallyanne where necessary, but also in charge of initial surveys of the planet, and following up on any signs of a technological base.

  “Geelong will pilot the freighter, and he has been familiarising himself with the K'Sarth technology, along with some of the Mersa technicians. The systems are essentially a simpler version of the Sumerian systems. Ursul and Cantoselli will lead a small communications team.”

  The little Mersa bobbed their heads a few times, and the technicians behind them shuffled their feet nervously.

  “Habid will lead a squad of Hud pilots. They will carry stun guns on the planet unless we have reason to believe more than that is needed. If our ancestors evolved there, the larger predators shouldn’t be too hard for us to handle.” Finch paused for a moment.

  “And if we’re now the top predators on the planet, we don’t want to be shooting ourselves, do we?”

  There was a ripple of laughter.

  “You’re from Prometheus,” said Finch lastly, placing emphasis on each word. “You’ve shown you can work day and night, until you get the job done. You’ve shown you can work together, and produce something greater than the sum of your individual contributions.

  “That’s all I ask of you, that you continue to give of your best. Once again, I want you to put the Prometheus objectives ahead of your own wishes.”

  They bowed their heads in assent.

  “Now get on that freighter, and go take that planet apart! You’ve got six days in star drive to get your equipment calibrated, and to hone your plan of attack. Use that time well.”

  Finch gave them a smart salute, and marched out of the cargo bay. The others looked around, acknowledging each other with little smiles and waves. It was up to them now. Then it was time to board.

  The days in the grainy, grey nothingness of stardrive were rather monotonous, but it did give them time to check out their instruments, and jury-rig the few items neither Celia or Roberto had been able to lay their hands on in the Solar System.

  Geelong and Andre spent most of their time fussing over the ship’s massive containment chamber in the centre of the aft propulsion bay, as it chewed through Orscantium rods, bit by bit.

  “We’re burning through a fortune of this stuff,” said Andre, as Geelong checked their reserves yet again. Geelong smiled. The two men, equally fascinated by the miracle of star travel, had forged an instant friendship on the last Rothii expedition.

  “Cordez has been stockpiling the stuff from the day he knew war was coming,” said the amiable pilot. “He could see the war might be won or lost by how much of it we had. He will have dumps of it squirrelled away in places the Invardii would never think of looking.”

  “Maybe, but the nuclear accelerators that make it have all been destroyed.”

  “True,” said Geelong thoughtfully. “There won’t be any more of it for a year or two, and that’s a fact.”

  They checked the complex operations of the containment chamber one more time. It continued to hum quietly to itself, folding space and hurling the Orouth Freighter expertly through the loops every time.

  On the afternoon of the sixth day, Geelong was able to put up a picture of Orouth on the overhead screens, built up over time by the long-range scanners. The 23 members of the Orouth expedition gathered on the flight deck of the K'Sarth freighter to look at it.

  There was an awed silence from the Human members of the team, as they stood looking at the original home of their race. The other members of the team were equally silent, as they stared in wonder at the strange, cloud-banded planet.

  CHAPTER 10

  ________________

  “What makes weather patterns like that?” said Geelong after a while. He’d given up trying to make anything out of the constantly moving image, taken at extreme magnification.

  His words brought the others out of their trance, and one or two of them moved back to their work stations to check the incoming data. One of Cantoselli’s Mersa technicians was the first to speak. Celia heard a rapid run of chirps, and hastily brought the linguist earpiece up and into place behind her ear.

  “Clear weather from 12 degrees north to 26 degrees south,” the little Mersa said, “and from 48 degrees north to the north pole. Extreme turbulence everywhere else.” Latitude and longitude were being taken from an Earth standard framework.

  Celia nodded. That agreed with what she saw on the main screen. The lower third of the planet was completely shrouded in weather systems, and there was a band of tumultuous cloud in the middle of the northern hemisphere. That left a band of clear skies around the middle of the planet, and a cap of clear weather across the top.

  “But the boundaries are so exact,” said Sallyanne. “What sort of conditions make cloud cover that stops at the same latitude around an entire planet?”

  “Could just be a settled time in the planet’s weather, a season that’s particularly calm,” suggested Roberto.

  “Maybe,” said Jeneen, “but Orouth has zero inclination to it’s sun’s system.”

  “That means no seasons,” she added, as some of the Hud pilots looked a little puzzled.

  “The weather could become self-fulfilling,” added Roberto. “Rain on one side of the line leads to forests and cloud cover, dry conditions on the other side le
ad to deserts and a hotter surface that dispels moisture.”

  “Not bad for an artifact specialist,” said Celia, with a smile. “Give us a few days to get more data, and we’ll see if you’re right.”

  “There is a moon,” said Cantoselli, “though it’s on the other side of the planet right now.”

  “That’s something more like Earth,” said Roberto happily.

  “Look at those mountains!” exclaimed Sallyanne, pointing to the tops of a massive range that lay in the belt of northern storms. The planet filled the main screen now, and details were becoming clearer.

  “They might explain the northern storm systems,” said Celia tentatively.

  “No major seas,” said Geelong quietly. “Seas would disrupt weather patterns passing over them. There are large areas of swamp and tundra inside the cloud covered areas, and extensive forests.”

  “I think most of the water stays in the air,” said Roberto in disbelief, as the turbulence of the cloud cover became apparent in the twists and swirls below them.

  “Major storm system coming into view at the edge of the cloud band along the 26th parallel,” said Geelong suddenly. “We might get a chance to see how rigid those boundaries are.”

  The storm grew larger as the Orouth Freighter drew closer to the planet. By the time it was face on to the freighter it dwarfed the other weather systems south of the 26th parallel.

  “Goddamn, look at the size of the weather cells around the eye,” said Andre. “Shear forces in there must be incredible.”

  “The isobars flatten along the 26th all right,” said Andre. “Hard to believe. The two sides of that boundary must be like chalk and cheese. Desert and rain forest, side by side!”

  “If you think of ocean currents, said Andre, “a few degrees difference in temperature and they’ll run side by side for days without mixing.”

  Celia was beginning to regret the lack of a meteorologist on the expedition. It looked like understanding Orouth’s weather might be more important than they had first thought.