Ultima

by Stephen Baxter

  Scorpus pulled the girl back from the door, and Orgilius slammed the hatch closed.

  “At last!” Titus Valerius rammed forward his control lever and the testudo surged away from the lock. There were more complaints and curses as people fell over each other in the sudden acceleration. Titus just laughed, swung around the nose of the testudo, and headed straight for the welcoming belly of the Malleus Jesu.

  35

  “Academician? Can you still hear me? This is Malleus Jesu—”

  “I can hear you, dear Mardina. Oh, my. This couch is just too comfortable. I believe I dozed off! There’s one disadvantage of such an elderly observer.”

  “Well, it’s been a long day for us all, Academician.”

  “Please. Call me Penny.”

  “Penny, then. There’s only half an hour to go.”

  “Yes, dear. I guessed it must be about that. Now, let me see. Ceres—Höd—is almost directly over my head. The glass roof of Earthshine’s peculiar garden is nothing if not revealing, and I have a dramatic view of the sky . . .

  “I should report what I see as objectively as I can, shouldn’t I? Ceres looks, I would say, three times as wide as the sun does from Earth. And it is growing in size, as if swelling, almost visibly. What a strange sight it is! I have seen a total solar eclipse on Earth, and that had something of the same strange, slow grandeur of movement in the sky. You can sense there are huge masses sliding to and fro in the firmament above. But I can’t see the scar left by the fall of the Celyn, no glowing new crater. The spin of the asteroid has kept it away from me, and I imagine there will not be time enough for a full rotation. How brave those young crew were! But, oh my, it grows ever larger. And yet there is no effect yet, nothing to feel here on the ground, even though there are only minutes left.”

  “I understand little of this, Academician Penny. What will happen to Mars? And why would Earthshine do this?”

  “As to the what—I think I can estimate some of that for you. Here we have Ceres—forgive me for using the name I grew up with—a ball of ice and rock six hundred miles across, coming in at forty or fifty thousand Roman miles in every Roman hour. If a respectable fraction of that tremendous kinetic energy is injected into the rocks of Mars, then I estimate—and I was always good at mental arithmetic—some two hundred billion cubic miles of Mars rock will be melted and vaporized. Two hundred billion cubic miles, on a world only four thousand miles across. A layer of rock some four miles thick will be destroyed. All traces of a human presence will be eradicated, of course. And this is without considering the effect of the kernels, embedded here in Mars, in the ground of Ceres itself. If what we saw on Mercury is a guide, the total event may be even more energetic, even more destructive . . .

  “You ask, why has Earthshine done this? To strike back at what he calls the noostratum. That’s what I think. These deep bugs that he believes survived even the destruction of our world, our Earth—indeed, if they are the Hatch builders, they may have engineered those events to create jonbar hinges, for their own unfathomable purposes. Well, they won’t survive this; Mars will be sterilized far too deeply even for the bugs to survive. And maybe he’s right. He did force a response from them, didn’t he? They, or some agency, did give him a Hatch . . . Oh, I must sip some of my water. Excuse me, dear.”

  • • •

  “. . . Penny? Are you still there?”

  “I’m sorry, child. Have you been calling? My wretched hearing . . . How long left?”

  “Only a sixth part of an hour, Penny.”

  “Ten minutes. Is that all? Such a brief time, and soon gone, like life itself. I take it we have failed, then; all our stratagems are busts. Well, perhaps it was always beyond us. But we must persist, you know. Earthshine is right about that, at least. We must understand why and how our history has become fragile—who is engineering all this. And yet we must, too, find a way to contain Earthshine himself.

  “Ceres is huge, now spanning—what? Eight or nine times the diameter of sun or moon? I can see features on that surface now, clearly visible through the fine Martian air. Craters, of course. Long cracks, almost like roadways—annealed fissures in the ice, perhaps caused by the stress of the displacement from the object’s original orbit. Ceres is already damaged, then. And it is growing, swelling; it is all so easily visible now. Oh my, it is a quite oppressive presence, and I should have expected that. Almost claustrophobic. You must forgive them, you know, Mardina.”

  “Who?”

  “Your parents. Even your fool of a father—deluded, self-serving and greedy as he is—has always done his best for you, as he sees it. And your mother was horribly harmed by the circumstances of her birth. She was the only child on a whole world, or so she grew up thinking, and yet she grew to love the place, as all children love their homes. But she was taken from that home by the Hatches, that greater power that is manipulating our destiny—all our destinies. After all that you can’t blame her for longing to find a way home.”

  “I don’t blame her. I’m just trying to understand. Do you think she will ever find what she’s looking for?”

  “It’s not impossible. We understand very little of the true structure of this multiverse we inhabit. I’m sorry—I used an English word. And maybe, someday, you will find her again.”

  “Your sister is here. Stef. Would you like to speak to her?”

  “No. It would do no good. But I am glad she is there, now, at the end. What of Jiang Youwei?”

  “He was very distressed that you did not return.”

  “Ah. Youwei has been such a good friend . . . A burden has been lifted from his shoulders, however. Please ask my sister to keep an eye on him.”

  “She will.”

  “And tell her I’m sorry.”

  “She knows, Penny. And she says she forgives you.”

  “How good of her. Ha! What an old witch I am, bitter and sarcastic to the end . . .”

  “She says she expects nothing less. Umm, four of your minutes remain, Penny.”

  “Thank you. But I don’t feel I need a countdown, dear. Oh, that brute in the sky—individual features, the craters and canyons, grow in my sight now. Ceres becomes a plain that is extending away, extending to the horizon.”

  “Penny—”

  “Oh, it’s beautiful! A sky like a mirror of the ground, a sky of rock! Mardina, Penny. Don’t forget me. Don’t forget that I’ll always—”

  36

  Höd, Ceres, was about a seventh the diameter of the target planet. It took a minute for it to collapse into the surface of Mars. Mardina saw that the smaller world kept its spherical shape throughout the stages of the impact, the internal shock waves that would otherwise have disrupted the asteroid traveling more slowly than the arc of destruction that consumed the asteroid at the point of contact.

  Even before the asteroid was gone, a circular wave like a mobile crater wall was washing out around the planet. This tremendous ripple crossed Mars, destroying famous landscapes billions of years old: the Hellas basin, the Valles Marineris, which briefly brimmed with molten rock before dissolving in its turn. Following the rock wave came a bank of glowing, red-hot mist that obscured the smashed landscape.

  And when the ripple in the crust had passed right around the planet, it converged on the antipode to the impact site, closing in on the Tharsis region in a tremendous clap, where huge volcanoes died in one last spasm of eruption.

  The Malleus Jesu fled the scene at an acceleration of three gravities. Fled away from the sun, into the dark.

  • • •

  Centurion Quintus Fabius sat brooding in his observation lounge, where his Arab navigators had fixed up farwatcher instruments to watch the impact—sat in his acceleration couch, with the triple weight of the engine’s thrust pushing down on him.

  Once the impact event itself was over, Höd was gone, and Mars was transformed, become something n
ot seen in the solar system since it was born, so his Arab philosophers and druidh told him. What was left of Mars was swathed in a new atmosphere of rock mist and steam—an air of vaporized rock. For a time the whole world would glow as bright as the sun itself. And it would cool terribly slowly, the philosophers said. It would take years before the rock mist congealed, before the planet itself ceased to glow red-hot, and then a heavy rain would fall as all the water of the old ice caps and aquifers returned, to sculpt a new face for Mars . . .

  But Mars was only a distraction, for the reports soon started to come in from the ground, from Terra. The impact had sent immense volumes of molten rock spraying out across the solar system. Much of this was observed, from the ground, from space. Some of the debris, inevitably, would strike Terra itself, falling on a world full of panic and suspicion. There was a brief flurry of messages, passed between the capitals of the world. A peremptory order from Ostia, home of the Roman fleet, for the Malleus Jesu to return to the home world. Quintus ignored the order.

  And then the missiles started flying.

  Quintus Fabius saw it for himself, through the farwatchers, peering back past the glare of the drive plume. Sparks of brilliant light burst all over the beautiful hide of Terra. Luna, too. It had happened before. There had been a war on Luna, rocks had fallen on Terra—people thought it was a deliberate if deceptive strike by some rival, or maybe they mistook the rocks for some kind of kinetic-energy weapon. Or maybe they just took the chance to have a go. So it was now.

  There was a final flare of light, a global spasm that dazzled Quintus, making him turn his heavy head away from the eyepiece.

  And in that instant Quintus was called by his optio. “Centurion, we’re being hailed.”

  “By who? One of ours, Brikanti, Xin—”

  “It’s not a language we recognize, sir. Nor a vessel design we know.”

  “What language? Wait. Ask Collius. Ask him what language that is.”

  A moment later, the reply came. “Collius had an answer, sir.”

  “Why aren’t I surprised?”

  “He says it’s a variant of—it’s difficult to pronounce.”

  “Spit it out, man.”

  “Quechua.”

  In the hearts of the surviving rocky worlds of the solar system—

  Across a score of dying realities in a lethal multiverse—

  In the chthonic silence—

  There was satisfaction.

  The artificial entity, which was a parasitic second-order product of the complexification of surface life on the third planet, had struck a deep blow at the Dreamers in the heart of the fourth planet. An unprecedented blow. Dreamers had died at the hands of natural catastrophes before. Even planets were mortal. Never had they been targeted by intelligence, by intention.

  There had been shock.

  There had been fear.

  To extend the network, to open a door for the parasite—to remove it from this time, this place—had been an unpleasant necessity. Otherwise, the destruction would surely have continued, in this system and others, or, worst of all, it might have spread through the network of mind itself.

  The parasite had not been destroyed. But, delivered to a new location, perhaps it could be educated.

  That was the hope. Or the desperation.

  For time was short, and ever shorter.

  In the Dream of the End Time, the note of urgency sharpened.

  37

  AD 2233; AUC 2986; AY (AFTER YUPANQUI) 795

  Two days after the impact, after a day under full acceleration and a second cruising at nearly a hundredth of the speed of light—beyond most of the asteroids, so far out that the sun showed only a shrunken, diminished disc—the Malleus Jesu floated in emptiness, an island of human warmth and light.

  And yet it was not alone.

  With the ship drifting without thrust, the Arab communications engineers unfolded huge, sparse antennas, which picked up a wash of faint radio signals coming from across the plane of the solar system: from Earth, from Mars, from the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the asteroid belt, and the Trojans, great swarms of asteroids that preceded and trailed Jupiter in gravitationally stable points in the giant planet’s orbit—some from even farther out, from the ice objects of the Kuiper belt.

  The signals weren’t sophisticated, the ColU murmured to his companions. They were just voice transmissions, and mostly of an official kind: listings of positions, trajectories, cargoes, permissions sought and denied or granted, payments made and received. Very occasionally sparks of laser light were picked up, fragments of signals. Maybe these carried the more sophisticated communications of whatever culture dominated here, with the radio reserved for those who could afford no better. The narrow-beam laser signals could only be picked up if the ship happened to swim in the way of their line-of-sight trajectories, of course. What made all this harder to understand and interpret was that many of these messages were like one side of a conversation, such were the distances between transmitter and receiver. It could take forty minutes for a signal to travel from Jupiter to Earth. Why, it could take ten or twelve seconds for a radio signal just to cross between Jupiter’s moons, such were the dimensions of that miniature planetary system alone.

  The Arab observers gathered other evidence of activity too, mostly the characteristic radiation leakage of kernel engines, as ships criss-crossed a very busy inner solar system and sailed to the great islands of resources farther out.

  The Roman and Brikanti officers listened hard to the messages, trying to make sense of these static-masked scraps of information. Listening, mostly, for Latin and Brikanti voices. They even had Chu and Jiang up in the observation suites listening for traces of Xin.

  At least they seemed to be sailing undetected. There had been no direct hails, no approach by another ship—no sign that any other craft was being diverted to rendezvous with them. That was no accident. As soon as the first transmissions had been received, Quintus Fabius had ordered the shutdown of all attempts to transmit from the Malleus. Even the ship’s radar-like sensor systems, which were capable of characterizing other ships, surfaces and other objects to a fine degree of detail, were put out of commission; only passive sensors, like the Arabs’ telescopes, were permitted. And nor was Quintus yet ready to fire the drive, even to decelerate a craft fleeing from the inner solar system, for the kernel drive would surely be immediately visible. Quintus didn’t put it this way, Stef recognized, but he had instinctively locked down the Malleus into a stealth mode. The ship was undetected, and Quintus wanted it to remain that way as long as possible.

  After a few days the ColU summed up the dismal results to its companions.

  “There are a few scraps of a kind of degenerate Latin to be heard,” it reported. “The crew leap on these as if they were messages from the Emperor himself. But they are only a few, and usually just phrases embedded in a longer string of communication. As if a speaker of a foreign language lapses into his or her native tongue when searching for a word, when muttering a familiarity or a prayer . . . There is actually more Xin spoken, by word count, than Latin, but again, it’s a minor trace compared to the dominant tongue.”

  Stef prompted, “And that dominant tongue is . . .”

  “As I detected from the beginning, Quechua.”

  “Inca?”

  “Inca.”

  The Malleus wasn’t just an island of life in the vast vacuum of space; to the crew it was an island of romanitas in a sea of barbarians.

  Inca.

  • • •

  For the time being there was no great urgency to act. The ship had been reasonably well stocked with supplies before its voyage from Terra to Earthshine’s Mars; that wouldn’t last forever but there was no immediate crisis.

  Meanwhile the centurion managed his crew. As soon as the drive was cut Quintus had ordered the fighting men, legionaries an
d auxiliaries, to adopt the routines of in-cruise discipline, and they threw themselves into this with enthusiasm. They were without gravity of course, so that such exercises as marching and camp building were ruled out. But soon the great training chambers within the hull were filled with men wrestling, fighting hand to hand or with weapons, blunted spears and swords and dummy firearms. They were building up to a mock battle on a larger scale, a practice for free-fall wars of a kind that had in fact been fought out in reality, in the long history of the triple rivalry of Rome and Brikanti and Xin.

  Thus the troops were kept busy, and that struck Stef as a good thing, because it stopped them thinking too hard about the reality of their situation.

  These were men, and a few women, who were trained for long interstellar flights; they were used to the idea of being cut off from home for years at a time. Yet there were compensations. The legion’s collegia promised to hold your back pay for you, and manage your other rights. And, on the journey itself, you could take your family with you, even to the stars.

  But now, Stef realized, many of those psychological props were missing. The mission should have been a relatively short-duration mission to Mars—with a return to Terra in mere weeks, perhaps. There had been no need to take families on such a jaunt, although a few had come along anyhow, such as Clodia, the bright-eyed daughter of Titus Valerius. Many of the men grumbled that they hadn’t even been offered the chance of signing the usual premission paperwork with the legion’s collegia. They shouldn’t have been away that long. The men already missed their families.

  And there was a greater fear, under all the petty grumbling and uncertainty. Rumors swirled; disinformation was rife. But most of the men had some dim idea that they had been brought to a place more remote than the farthest star in the sky, farther, some said, even than the legendary Ultima. And, they feared, nobody, not even the mighty Centurion Quintus Fabius himself, knew how to get them home again.