“Of course we won’t pass lightspeed but we’ll run into time dilation. Time on the ship will pass much more slowly from the point of view of an observer on Earth—”
“I have two physics doctorates,” Stef snapped. “I know about relativistic time dilation.”
“Well, I have two fewer doctorates,” Yuri said tiredly. “Give me the bottom line, ColU.”
“If the journey takes us, subjectively, four years, three hundred and thirty-six days, then eleven years and ninety-one days will have passed on Earth. That’s not allowing for small corrections because of the shutdown periods. And the double-star system of Romulus and Remus must be some nine light-years from Earth. Titus here will have spent maybe ten years traveling to the destination and back, plus another three years or so on the ground—a thirteen-year mission. But by the time he returns home, about twenty-five years will have passed on the ground.”
Titus shrugged. “That’s what you sign up for. Got my daughter with me, on the ship. No other family to worry about. And back home the legion’s collegia will make sure we get treated right, with our pay and pensions and such.”
The ColU said, “Perhaps it takes an empire, solemn, calm and antique, to manage operations on such scales.”
“We Romans get it done,” Titus said simply. “We’ll be joining the Malleus soon. Make sure you’re buckled into your seats.”
• • •
The ferry docked with a port on the slowly turning hull of the starship. Stef saw that the hull here was blazoned with large “V” symbols; she assumed she was landing at the fifth deck, then, which Titus had called the “camp.”
She knew that an ISF crew would not have attempted a docking with a rotating structure, save at the axis. By contrast the crew of this ferry took them in with terrifying nonchalance, swooping down on the slowly turning Malleus, until they drove straight into a system of nets that fielded them neatly and dragged them down to the hull, where docking clamps rattled noisily against the base of the craft. Once the docking was complete she heard whoops and backslaps from behind closed doors. She had met none of the pilots but had glimpsed them on the ground. They were young Brikanti, male and female, cocky, smart, and they enjoyed showing off their skills before the nervous, superstitious, ground-based Romans. As she unbuckled from her seat, Stef offered up silent thanks that this risky display of super-competence was at an end.
One by one they were led out through a port in the base of the ferry, and down through thick layers of hull metal and insulation into the body of the Malleus Jesu. They were weightless, of course, save for the faintest centrifugal tug toward the wall of the rotating craft.
Once inside the main body, Stef had to adjust her orientation, her sense of up and down, even as she was battered by a barrage of sensory impressions: brilliant lights, smells of animals and humans, a clutter of structures, heaps of supplies and equipment, and people swimming everywhere in the air. The ship stood upright, essentially. The hull surface she had passed through was no longer a floor or ceiling, but a vertical wall. And she had a clear view across the interior of the cylindrical hull; “floor” and “ceiling” were tremendous plates below and above her, slicing off the fifth deck, this pie-shaped section of the craft—though the plates were pierced by gaps through which passed pipes, ducts and, at the center, a kind of fireman’s pole arrangement from which chains dangled, connecting this deck to the rest of the ship. Pillars of steel were bolted in place across the area too, adding structural support between floor and ceiling, she guessed the better to withstand the thrust of the kernel engine. It was a vast, cavernous space, this deck alone, sixty meters deep and a hundred across, and illuminated by sunlight from the windows and big, crude-looking fluorescent strip lights. The tall pillars spanning floor to roof gave the place the feeling of a cathedral, to Stef’s sensibilities.
And set up on the floor plate was, yes, a camp, just as Titus had said, a near copy of the colonia down on the ground, a rectangle with rounded corners, like a playing card, set slap in the middle of the circular deck. Looking down across the deck from her elevated position at this port, Stef recognized the crosswise layout of the main streets; there was a handsome building of wooden panels that might be the principia, next to it a small chapel, and beyond an open space that might be a parade ground or training area. There was even a row of granaries, though she saw nothing like barrack blocks. All these structures looked conventional enough, with wood-panelled walls and red-tiled roofs. The walls of the principia, the headquarters, even looked as if they were plastered. But, looking more closely, Stef could see that the buildings were built on frameworks of strong steel girders, firmly riveted to the hull plates.
And she was treated to the surreal sight of Roman legionaries paddling through the air above the “camp,” pulling themselves along ropes strung across the cavernous deck, manhandling heaps of supplies wrapped up in nets, food, clothes, even weapons.
A Roman camp, in interstellar space! But then, she knew, this mixture of antiquity and modernity was typical of these strange late Romans.
From conversations with Eilidh, Movena, Michael and others, she’d gathered something of the altered history of the Empire, compared to the account she was familiar with—a history that had brought a Roman legion to a distant star. After Kartimandia’s time, Germany had ultimately been conquered up to the Baltic coast. It was Vespasian, later emperor, who planted the eagle of Rome on the bank of the Vistula. After that, with the German tribes civilized, there had been no barbarian hordes to cross the Rhine in the late fourth century as in Stef’s world, the event that had ultimately destabilized the Empire in the west. Rome had continued to rule. In the end, however, the Empire had reached natural limits on the Eurasian landmass, penned in by the Xin to the east, the Brikanti to the north, and the deserts of North Africa to the south. For centuries Rome had grown inward-looking, static, its citizenry heavily taxed, its imperial elite self-obsessed, remote and over-powerful—and unstable, subject to endless palace coups.
That had all changed in the twelfth century AD. By then the Brikanti had already been in the Americas for two hundred years, thanks to their adventurous Scand partners, and had explored the coast of Africa, seeking the lands below the equator. Belatedly the Romans followed them into this new world—and the centuries of stasis were over. In a new age of expansiveness and conquest, the Romans remembered their ancestors, who they had imagined as stern, lean men plowing their fields and going to war. It was as if the Empire had been cleansed. Though the modern Romans remained Christian, traditional forms of society and the military—such as the legions—had been revived. Even old family naming conventions had been dug up, ancient lineages ferociously researched. Which was why a planet of a distant star had been colonized by units of the ninetieth legion, called Victrix, in commemoration of a tremendous victory over the Brikanti just south of the Great Lakes. In later centuries the need to avoid the use of explosive weapons inside pressure hulls, in spacecraft and surface habitats, had even led to a revival of the traditional weapons of hand-to-hand combat, spear and sword and knife, pilum and gladio and pugio.
But Stef was sure no Roman of the “old” history she knew had ever seen a sight like the one she glimpsed on the far side of this fifth deck, as a squad of legionaries under the control of a hovering tribune struggled to fold up the squirming hull of a deflated cetus airship.
Titus gathered the newcomers together. He was carrying the ColU in its pack, handling it as tenderly as a baby, Stef observed. “Come on. Soldiers’ business on this deck. You’re in the civilian town, next one up.” Grabbing a rope, he pulled himself one-handed away from the docking port, and headed up to the ceiling.
Stef and Yuri glanced at each other, shrugged, and followed. Stef made sure she let Yuri go first, unsure how strong he’d be feeling today, but he seemed to be moving freely enough. Maybe a lack of gravity for a while would be good for him. She called up after Titus, �
��Why are you carrying the ColU? What about Chu?”
“He’ll be taken straight to the third deck.”
She remembered. The slave pen, Titus had called it, above the farm, below the barracks.
“Slaves are stupid creatures and more so without gravity. They flap around uselessly and puke everywhere. They’re best strapped down for the duration. You won’t see Chu until we’re under way and we get stuff properly sorted out on board.”
She was in no position to argue.
They passed easily through an open port up to the sixth deck—open, but Stef noticed there was a heavy iron hatch on hinges over the port. She imagined whole decks of this vessel needing to be locked down in case of some disaster, a blowout perhaps—or even in case of a rebellion by disaffected soldiers, or the slaves in their belowdecks pens.
As they swam up, following more ropes, Stef wasn’t surprised to find that on this deck, which Titus had curtly labeled the “town,” was indeed a small town of the Roman type, or at least a section of one, like a walled-off suburb. Rising easily into the air above tiled rooftops, she glimpsed a grid layout of streets centered on an open space, a forum perhaps, surrounded by multistory porticoes and with a small triumphal arch at one edge. Built up against one section of hull wall were banks of seats over an open space, a kind of open-air theater. And around the circuit of the hull walls ran a track, for racing or other sports. Everywhere people swarmed in the air: men, women, children, hovering over the buildings and ducking down into crowded streets. The noise in this enclosed space, and echoing off yet another roof partition above, was tremendous, a clamor of voices that sounded like a sports crowd.
Stef felt overwhelmed by the sheer vivacity of it all, the complexity, and she realized how little she’d seen of this mobile community down on the planet—and now here it was, cramming itself back into this tin can in space for the five-year journey home. But, even more so than on the military camp deck below, she smelled the sour stink of weightlessness-sickness vomit, and laced in with the general noise she heard the wail of infants. Any children under three must have been born on the planet itself, she realized, and they must be utterly bewildered by the environment of the ship.
With effortless skill, impressive given he had only one hand to use and with the ColU pack on his back, Titus led them down through a lacing of guide ropes to a neighborhood a block away from the forum. “You’ve been assigned a house down there. Not a bad district; there’s a decent food shop and a tavern. You’ll need to sign in with a councillor, he’ll find you, and the optio will come and check on you before the engine fire-up . . . Any questions?”
Yuri asked, “Why do you put tiles on the roofs? We’re inside a spaceship.”
Titus shrugged. “It does ‘rain’ in here sometimes. You have to cleanse the air of dust. And besides, it’s tradition to have tiles on your roof. We Romans don’t live like animals, you know.”
Stef said, “I can’t get over how big all this is. How many people aboard, Titus, do you know?”
“Well, the core of it is us, a century of the Legio XC. Eighty men give or take. But then you’ve got the officers and the staff and the auxiliaries, and then you’ve got our wives and families, and then you’ve got the merchants and cooks and artisans, and doctors and schoolteachers and such. Oh, and there’s the ship’s crew, mostly Brikanti, or Arab. What have I forgotten?”
“The slaves?”
“Oh, yes, the slaves,” Titus said. “As many of them as there are soldiers and other citizens. I’d say five, six hundred warm bodies on the ship.”
“That’s a lot of people.”
“But it’s the Roman way. You can’t do it much smaller than that, miss.”
“Quite,” said the ColU. “And that’s why the ship itself has to be so big. Stef Kalinski, we know these people have no grasp of fine engineering. Small-scale, closed life-support systems would be beyond their capability. So they build big! They bring along a massive volume of air and water—you said there was a whole deck devoted to farming, Titus?”
“Yes. A lot of greenery up on the villas deck too.”
“They build so big that this ecology is reasonably buffered, stable against blooms and collapses, despite the crudeness of the technology. It’s all logical, in its way.”
Yuri said, “So when will they fire up the kernels, Titus?”
The big man grinned. “Six hours. You want to be lying flat when they sound the horn. And believe me, you want to be indoors. It’s not like the camp here. No discipline. Nobody listens to the warnings. There’ll be a sky full of babies and their shit, suspended overhead. You do not want to get caught in that rain when it falls. Come on, your residence is just below. I’ll get you settled . . .”
Stef thought they descended like angels into the street where they would live for the next five years.
• • •
Six hours later, right on cue and accompanied by trumpet blasts, the banks of kernels at the base of the craft fired up. Stef imagined arrays of the enigmatic wormholes being prodded open to release their energies, streams of high-energy radiation and high-velocity particles, morsels of thrust pushing ever harder at the huge, ungainly structure of the Malleus Jesu.
As the acceleration built up, Stef, sitting with Yuri and the ColU in deep couches in the small house to which they’d been assigned—surrounded by plaster walls with crudely painted frescoes—heard cracks and pops and bangs as the giant frame absorbed the stress, the rattle of a tile falling from a roof. She imagined the ship’s basic structure would be sound: it was built of good Scand steel, Eilidh had assured her, not your Roman rubbish. But even so, after three years in microgravity—three years of neglect, as everybody was busy on the surface of the planet—there would be point failures, breakages of pipes and cables. Now there were shouts and distant alarm horns as, she imagined, emergency teams dealt with various local calamities. She even heard a rushing collapse, like an ocean wave breaking, as, perhaps, some small building fell in on itself.
Then there were the people. As she and Yuri sat in the semi-gloom—no lamps could be lit during the fire-up; that was the rule—and as the weight built up and pressed her into her chair, all around her on this deck with its model-railway toy town, she heard cries and groans, the clucking of distressed chickens, the barking of confused dogs, and the crying of children.
Five years of this, Stef thought. She closed her eyes and tried to relax as the acceleration pressed down on her.
13
A week after the fire-up, Stef broke a tooth.
In this most exotic of environments, a starship run by a Roman legion, it was the most mundane of accidents, caused by biting down on a slab of coarse Roman bread. She knew by now something about the tumors that riddled Yuri’s body, detectable by the ColU but untreatable by it without the medical suite in the physical body it had left behind on Per Ardua. Yuri hadn’t wanted to tell her; she’d forced it out of Michael, the kindly physician. Compared to Yuri’s problems, this was nothing.
Nevertheless, her tooth hurt.
Through one of their slates, the ColU, inspecting the tooth, clucked sympathetically, and Stef wondered absently when this farming machine had picked up that particular speech trait. “An unfortunate accident,” it said. “Your teeth are very healthy for a woman of your age.”
“Thanks.”
“But nothing’s going to protect you from an unground grain in a loaf of bread. And unfortunately there’s nothing I can do for you. Lacking my old body, my manipulator arms—once I could have pulled the broken tooth for you, or even printed you a repair or a replacement. But now that I am disembodied—”
“So what am I supposed to do? Tie a length of string to a doorknob?”
“You must ask the Romans for help.”
“The Romans? I’m to go to ancient Romans for dental work?”
“Well, they’re not ancient Romans,”
Yuri pointed out gently. “And it’s not a Roman you’ll be seeing but a Greek—Michael—go find Titus Valerius and have him take you to Michael. I can tell you from experience, he might not know so much, but he listens. Why, I’d bet legionaries lose teeth all the time.”
“That is not reassuring.”
Still, she had no better options. She waited a couple of days, munching her way through their hoarded supply of ISF-issue painkillers, brought in their packs through the Hatch. She had the illogical feeling that if only she could have a decent hot shower she’d feel a hell of a lot better. But there was no running water available within much of the ship, save in the bathhouses. Every morning and evening you washed from a bowl that you carried into your room from a communal supply.
At last, as the ColU had suggested, she asked the medicus for help.
Michael grinned back. “I’ll need supplies from the officers’ clinic. I take any excuse to go up to the villas. Come find me tomorrow.”
• • •
The next day, Titus Valerius led Stef through the sketchy township to the “ascension,” as the crew called it. This was the central shaft, open at every deck, that led along the axis of the ship. A stout fireman’s pole ran the length of the vessel, and a series of platforms and cages regularly rose and fell along its length, hauled by rope-and-pulley arrangements.
There were many breaks in the decks, Stef had learned. You would often come across holes in the floor fenced off for safety. But these were mostly offset from each other, the floor holes not matching the ceiling, for obvious reasons of safety. The ascension, though, was the one shaft open to all decks. Stef thought this great way had a certain unifying aesthetic appeal, a tremendous shaft that penetrated the metal heaven above and the ground under your feet, and spanned from officer country in the crown to the engineers and their kernel arrays at the root of the ship. But the soldier in her recognized the value of a fast road that could take a squad of legionaries straight to any part of the ship within minutes or less. The Romans had always built their Empire on roads, and that, it seemed, was still true now.
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