Ultima

by Stephen Baxter

  “I can make soil.”

  The ColU’s voice came clearly from Yuri’s backpack. Yuri, reluctantly being examined by the Greek doctor, looked alarmed at the sudden direct communication.

  The Brikanti ship’s commander was surprised too. Then, without hesitation, she marched over to Yuri, shoved him around so she could get at his pack, opened it, and peered at the components inside. “What trickery is this?”

  “No trickery, trierarchus. I am a machine. An autonomous colonization unit. I am designed to assist humans in the conquest of alien worlds. And in particular, I can make soil.”

  “If this is true—”

  “Soil is a complex of organisms, many of them microscopic, and nutrients of various kinds. If one of those is missing on this world, I will detect it, and with suitable equipment can begin the synthesis of supplements, the breeding of organisms. Trierarchus, I can make soil.”

  “And your price?”

  “Safety for myself and my companions.”

  Movena considered. “You know, I believe you. Impossible as it seems—but then you two, you three, are walking, talking impossibilities already, aren’t you? If Quintus Fabius believes this too—and, I suspect, if he buys off Titus Valerius by offering him and his daughter a ride off this dust bowl—then perhaps the situation can be resolved. And all you want is safety?”

  Yuri was racked by a coughing spasm. The doctor, looking concerned, helped him to sit.

  “Safety,” said the ColU from the pack that was still on Yuri’s back, “and medical attention for my friend.”

  Movena grinned. “How pleasing it will be for me to deliver this miracle to the arrogant Romans. Let me talk to Quintus.”

  5

  AD 2213; AUC 2966

  By the time the Nail struck Mercury, the ISF spacecraft Tatania had already been traveling for three days. The ship had headed straight out from the Earth-moon system, away from the sun, and was more than three times as far from the sun as the Earth, when Beth Eden Jones picked up a fragmentary message from her mother.

  “I’m sorry I had to throw you at General Lex, even if he does owe me a favor. Wherever you end up, I’ll come looking for you. Don’t forget that I’ll always—”

  And then, immediately after, the flash, dazzling bright, from the heart of the solar system. The bridge was flooded with light.

  Beth saw them react. Lex McGregor, in his captain’s chair, straightening his already erect back. Penny Kalinski grabbing Jiang Youwei’s hands in both her own. Earthshine, the creepy virtual persona, seeming to freeze. They all seemed to know what had happened, the significance of the flash.

  All save Beth.

  “What?” Beth snapped. “What is it? What happened?”

  Earthshine turned his weird artificial face to her. In the years she’d spent in the solar system, Beth had never got used to sharing her world with fake people like him.

  “They have unleashed the wolf of war. We, humanity, we had it bound up with treaties, with words. No more. And now, this.”

  “They being . . .”

  “The Hatch builders. Who else?”

  “And you, you aren’t human. You say we. You have no right to say that.”

  The virtual looked at her mournfully. “I was human once. My name was Robert Braemann.”

  And she stared at him, shocked to the core by the name.

  Lex McGregor turned to face Penny. “So this is the kernels going up. Right, Kalinski?”

  “I think so.”

  “What must we do? We were far enough from the flash for it to have done us no immediate harm, I think. God bless inverse-square spreading. What comes next?”

  Penny seemed to think it over. “There’ll probably be a particle storm. Like high-energy cosmic rays. Concentrated little packets of energy, but moving slower than light. They’ll be here in a few hours. Hard to estimate.”

  “OK. Maybe I should cut the drive for a while, turn the ship around so we have the interstellar-medium shields between us and Mercury?”

  “Might be a good idea.”

  Beth didn’t understand any of this. “And what of Earth? What’s become of Earth?”

  Penny looked back at her. “Life will recover, ultimately. But for now . . .”

  McGregor began the procedure to shut down the main drive and turn the ship around. His voice was calm and competent as he worked through his checklists with his crew.

  Beth imagined a burned land, a black, lifeless ocean.

  As it turned out, she was entirely wrong.

  • • •

  With the drive off, and the acceleration gravity reduced to zero, the crew and passengers of the ISF kernel hulk Tatania took a break—from the situation, from each other. Beth unbuckled her harness, swam out of her couch, and made her clumsy way to the bathroom, locked herself in, and just sat, eyes closed, trying to regulate her breathing. Trying not to think.

  But then she heard the rest talking, and the crackle of radio messages. Voices, speaking what sounded to Beth like a mash-up of Swedish and Welsh. Thirty minutes after the kernel drive had been shut down, and the screen of high-energy particles and short-wavelength radiation from its exhaust dissipated, the first radio messages from the inner system were being received by the Tatania’s sprawling antennas.

  Gathered once more on the bridge of the Tatania, the passengers and crew listened to the fragmentary voices, staring at one another, uncomprehending. Beth looked around the group, in this first moment of stillness since the Tatania had flung itself away into space from Earth’s moon.

  Herself: Beth Eden Jones, thirty-six years old, born on a planet of Proxima Centauri but brought back to Earth by a mother who was now, presumably, burned to a crisp on Mercury—but not before she had forced Beth on this new journey into strangeness.

  General Lex McGregor of the ISF: a monument of a man in his seventies, commander of this space fleet ship, looking professionally concerned but unperturbed. Even his voice was soothing, or at least it was for Beth. McGregor, like Beth’s father, Yuri Eden, was British, but McGregor had grown up in Angleterre, the southern counties of England heavily integrated into a European federation, while Yuri had been born in an independent North Britain, and to Beth’s ear McGregor’s accent had the softest of French intonations as a result.

  Penny Kalinski: some kind of physicist who had known Beth’s mother, herself nearly seventy, looking bewildered—no, Beth thought, she was scared on some deeper level, as if all this strangeness was somehow directed at her personally.

  Jiang Youwei: a forty-year-old Chinese who had some antique relationship with Penny, and who had got swept up on the wrong side of the UN-Chinese war that looked to have exploded across the solar system.

  The two young members of the Tatania’s bridge crew: junior ISF officers, male and female, looking equally confused. But, Beth thought, as long as McGregor was around and captain of this hulk, they didn’t need to think, didn’t need to care, regardless of the bonfire of the worlds they had fled and now the utter strangeness leaking through the communication systems. McGregor would take care of them. Or such was their comforting illusion.

  And, creepiest of all, Earthshine: an artificial intelligence, with the projected body of a smartly dressed forty-something male, and a look of calm engagement on his face—an appearance that was, Beth knew, a mendacious simulation, a ghost of light. The closest to reality Earthshine came was an ugly lump of technology stowed away somewhere on this vessel, a store of the memory and trickling thoughts that comprised his artificial personality. He was a creature who, with his two “brothers,” locked deep in high-technology caverns on the Earth, had exerted real power over all humanity for decades.

  And he’d told her his true name, or one of them: Robert Braemann. He’d known Beth would understand the significance, for her.

  All her life, and especially since being
brought to Earth against her will, she’d been reluctant to get involved in her parents’ past: the muddled old Earth society from which they’d emerged before they’d come to the emptiness of Per Ardua, planet of Proxima Centauri, where Beth had been born, her home. Nothing had changed in that regard now. She could see Earthshine was still waiting for some kind of reaction from her. She turned away from him, deliberately.

  McGregor, swiveling in his command couch, surveyed them all with a kind of professional sympathy. “I know this is difficult,” he began. “It’s only days since we fled what was apparently a catastrophic war in the inner solar system. We feared—well, we feared the destruction of everything, of the space colonies, even the Earth itself. We had no destination in mind, specifically. My mission, mine and my crew’s, was essentially to save you, sir,” and he nodded to Earthshine. “That was my primary order, coming from the UN Security Council and my superiors in the ISF, in the hope that you could lead a rebuilding program to follow.”

  “And the rest of us,” said Penny Kalinski drily, “were swept up in Earthshine’s wake.”

  McGregor faced her. He was still handsome, Beth thought, despite his years, and he had a charisma that was hard not to respond to. He said, “That’s the size of it. Of course you, Ms. Jones, are here because—well, because I owed a favor to your mother. Ancient history. However, whatever the fates that brought us together, here we are in this situation now. As to what that situation is . . .” He glanced at his juniors.

  Responding to the prompt, the young woman raised a slate. Age maybe twenty-five, Beth guessed, she was solidly built with a rather square face; her blond hair was tightly plaited. A tag stitched on her jumpsuit read ISF LT MARIE GOLVIN, alongside the ISF logo. Beth noted absently that she had a small crucifix pinned beside the tag.

  Tapping at her slate, Golvin summarized quickly. “Sir, we accelerated for a full gravity for three days. We shut down the drive, but we’re still cruising, at our final velocity of just under one percent lightspeed.” She glanced around at the passengers, evidently wondering how much they could understand of the situation. “We set off from lunar orbit and headed directly out from the sun. We’re currently three astronomical units from the sun—that is, deep in the asteroid belt. And still heading outward.”

  “But now we’re looking back,” Earthshine said. “Now that the drive exhaust is no longer screening our ability to look, and listen. And, instead of news from a shattered Earth, we’re receiving—”

  “Messages, all right,” Golvin said. “But messages we don’t understand.”

  She tapped her slate, and fragments of speech filled the air, distorted, soaked by static, ghost voices speaking and fading away.

  “To begin with,” Golvin said, “these are all radio broadcasts—like twentieth-century technology, not like the laser and other narrow-beam transmission methods the ISF and the space agencies our competitors use nowadays. In fact we picked them up, not with the Tatania’s comms system, but with a subsidiary antenna meant for radio astronomy and navigation purposes. The messages don’t seem to be intended for us—they’re leakage, essentially, that we’re picking up fortuitously.”

  Jiang said, “Maybe these are from scattered communities, on Earth and beyond. Radio is all they can improvise. Requests for help, for news—”

  “I don’t think so, sir,” Golvin said politely. “For one thing, the distribution is wrong. We’re picking up these messages from all around the plain of the ecliptic—that is, all around the sky, the solar system. From bodies where we have no colonies—none of us, either UN or Chinese—such as the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, some of the smaller asteroids.”

  “Survivors, then,” Jiang suggested. “In ships. Fleeing as we are.”

  Golvin shook her head with a scrap of impatience. “Sir, there hasn’t been time. Nobody can have fled much farther and faster than we did. And besides, there’s the question of the languages.”

  Beth listened again to the voices coming from the slate, both male and female, some speaking languages that were almost, hauntingly, familiar, yet not quite . . .

  Earthshine said, “I can help with some of this. My own systems are interfaced with the ship’s; I have a rather more extensive language analysis and translation suite than the vessel’s own.”

  McGregor grunted, as if moved to defend his vessel. “Nobody expected the Tatania to need such a suite, sir.”

  “Evidently the situation has changed,” Earthshine said smoothly. “There seem to be three main clusters in these messages—three languages, or language groups. The first, the most common actually, is what sounds like a blend of Scandinavian languages, Swedish, Danish, mixed with old Celtic tongues—Gaelic, Breton, Welsh. The grammar will take some unpicking; much of the vocabulary is relatively straightforward.” He glanced at Jiang. “The second group you might recognize.”

  Jiang, frowning, was struggling to listen. “It sounds like Han Chinese,” he said. “But heavily distorted. A regional dialect, perhaps?”

  “We’re hearing this from all over the solar system,” Golvin said. “If it’s a dialect, it’s somehow become a dominant one.”

  Penny asked, “And the third group?”

  Golvin said calmly, “Actually, that’s the easiest to identify. Latin.”

  There was a beat, a shocked silence.

  McGregor said, “I might add that we’ve had no reply to our attempted communications, by conventional means, with ISF command centers. And, of course, we haven’t replied to any of these radio fragments. The question now is what we should do about all this.”

  Penny nodded. “I don’t think we have many options. I take it this vessel can’t flee to the stars.”

  McGregor smiled. “This is, or was, a test bed for new kernel technologies, to replace the generation of ships that first took your parents, Beth, to Proxima Centauri. But it’s not equipped for a multiyear interstellar flight, no. In fact we don’t even have the supplies for a long stay away from dock; as you know, our escape from the moon was arranged in something of a panic.”

  “We need to land somewhere soon,” Beth said.

  “That’s the size of it.”

  “But where?”

  “Well, we don’t have to decide immediately. We’re still speeding out of the solar system, remember. It took us three days under full power to accelerate up to this velocity; it will take another three days just to slow us to a halt, before we can begin heading back into the inner system.”

  Golvin said, “And then we will have a journey of several more days, to wherever we choose as our destination. We’ll have plenty of time to study the radio communications, maybe even make some telescopic observations of the worlds. Maybe,” she said brightly, “we’ll even be in touch with ISF or the UN by then.”

  “I doubt that very much,” Penny said drily.

  “Yes,” said Earthshine, watching her. “You understand, don’t you, Penny Kalinski? You suspect you know what’s happened to us. Because it’s happened to you before.”

  McGregor stared at him, frowning, evidently unsure what he meant. “Let’s not speculate. Look, I’m the Captain. I’m in command here. But the situation is . . . novel. I’d rather proceed on the basis of consensus. I’ll give the order to fire up the drive for deceleration. Do I have your agreement for that? When we’ve come to a halt, we’ll review our situation; we’ll make decisions on our next steps based on the information we have to hand then.”

  “Good plan,” Penny said. “Unless, by then, somebody makes those decisions for us. Think about it. We’re in a massive ship with a highly energetic drive, about to plunge back into a solar system where—well, where we may not be recognized. We’ll be highly visible.”

  “Fair point. But we have no choice. All agreed? Then, if I can ask you to prepare for the burn, to make your way to your couches and lock down any loose gear . . .”

  6

&nb
sp; The trierarchus of the Brikanti vessel Ukelwydd was known to her crew, as she was known to her family and associates, only by her given name: Kerys.

  It was a custom of the Brikanti, especially those Pritanike-born, to eschew the complex family name structures of their fiercest rivals, the Romans, all of whom seemed to trace their lineages all the way back through various senatorial clans to the Romans’ Etruscan forebears, and also the traditions of the Brikanti’s oldest allies, the Scand, with their complicated son – or daughter-of-this-fellow naming convention. Such as the tongue-twisting surname of Ari Guthfrithson, the druidh who stood before Kerys now, rather ill at ease in the commander’s cabin, and looking at her with growing exasperation.

  “Trierarchus, I get the sense you’re not listening to me.”

  Kerys allowed herself a grin. “Well, you’re right, druidh Ari, and I apologize. It’s just we’ve been so busy—prospecting like crazy at this latest teardrop before we move on to the next, and the next, following a schedule drawn up by some idiot in Dumnona with a blank parchment and a blanker mind and absolutely no experience of what life is actually like, out here in the expanses of Ymir’s Skull . . . And you walk in with this incomprehensible news of—what? A ship out in the void?”

  “A ship that shouldn’t be there, trierarchus.”

  “You see what I mean? Incomprehensible. Would you like a drink? I’m stocked up with the usual.” Meaning Brikanti mead and Scand beer.