Ultima

by Stephen Baxter

  Stef Kalinski, meanwhile, cared for her companions—including the ColU, who shared its deepest concerns with her.

  The ColU said, “Mardina and the others were right not to follow Earthshine—leaving aside the family entanglements. He is furthering his own ends, that’s for sure, and in a horribly destructive way. But, just as I promised him, someday, somehow, I must follow him.”

  Stef frowned. “How, though? Through the Hatch on Mars? But it may not even exist anymore. And why you?”

  “Because he and I, of all the artificial minds of the UN-China Culture, are evidently the only two survivors. There were none like us in the Rome-Xin Culture; it seems likely there will be none here, wherever we are. And, in a way, he seeks the truth.”

  “What truth?” Stef pressed. “What do you mean?”

  “The larger story. The truth of the universe, that links the phenomena of the kernels, the Hatches, and Earthshine’s noostrata, the dreaming bugs in the rocks. Even the reality shifts we call jonbar hinges. And the echoes I saw in the sky, aboard the Malleus, in interstellar space. Echoes, not of a past event, but of a future cataclysm . . . All of this is linked, I am convinced. And Earthshine feels the same.”

  “And you fear, that when he finds this truth—”

  “He means to smash it. To smash it all. He seeks to do this because he is insane. Or,” the ColU added, “perhaps because he is the most sane entity in the universe.”

  “And you must stop him.”

  “It is my destiny. And perhaps yours, Stef Kalinski.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” Stef said, feeling even more small and helpless than usual.

  38

  Four days out from Mars, Centurion Quintus Fabius summoned his senior officers, with Eilidh the trierarchus and some of her Brikanti ship’s crew, and Titus Valerius as a representative of his troops, and the survivors of the UN-China Culture.

  They met in a lounge in the area Stef thought of as officer country, stuffed into the heavily shielded nose of the Malleus. Basically the anteroom of a Roman bathhouse, this was an opulent room with tapestries and thickly embroidered rugs, and even oil lamps of a traditional design burning on the walls. In the absence of gravity, pumps and fans had to keep the oil and air circulating; this was a re-creation of an ancient technology in a space-bound setting. Such backward-looking luxury, Stef had long since learned, was a deliberate ploy by the Romans, and the artificial lamps were a classic touch.

  Stef and the others strapped themselves loosely to couches. Chu carried the ColU, as ever, his eyes modestly downcast. Arab observers sat quietly together against one frescoed wall, and Stef idly wondered if they longed to get out of this place of crowding and light and graven images, and return to the twilight calm of their great observation bays.

  The centurion himself was the last to arrive.

  He pushed through the air with an easy grace, and grabbed a handhold at one end of the room. “So we face the future,” he said briskly. “Mars is behind us now, with all its heroism and failure. We have survived. And we’re here to discuss the nature of the place in which we find ourselves. I’ll leave the briefing itself to my optio, Gnaeus Junius, who draws, in turn, on careful observation from the navigators, assisted by Collius the oracle.” Before he yielded the floor, Quintus Fabius looked around the room. “Everybody here was purposefully invited, whatever your rank aboard this vessel—or the lack of it. Purposefully, that is, by me. I need to make a decision about our future, the future of the vessel and its crew and passengers.

  “And the decision is mine to make, it seems, for we have yet to contact my chain of command. I probably don’t need to tell you of the absence of any signals from Ostia, or Rome itself, or indeed any outpost of the Empire we recognize. Your orders, all of you, are to listen to what’s said here, and advise me to the best of your ability. Is that clear?”

  Titus Valerius snapped out, “Yes, sir, Centurion, sir!”

  Quintus grinned. “Well said, Valerius. And you can tell that daughter of yours that she will not succeed in defeating me with gladio and net next time we meet in the training chambers. Right, get on with it, optio . . .”

  Gnaeus Junius took his commander’s place. Drifting in the air, papers in his hand, he nodded to a crew member at the back of the room. The lights dimmed—Stef noticed the flames in those oil lanterns drawing back as their pumps and fans were slowed—and an image became visible, cast on the wall behind Gnaeus. The bulky projector wouldn’t have looked out of place in a collection of nineteenth-century technological memorabilia, Stef thought, and she knew the image had been captured by the crudest kind of wet-chemistry photography. But it worked, and the content was all that mattered . . .

  She saw a world, floating in space. Gnaeus let them observe without comment.

  It was Earth—but not Stef’s Earth, and not Quintus’s Terra. She could make out the distinct shape of the continent of Africa, distorted from its school-atlas familiarity by its position toward the horizon of the curving world. Though much of the hemisphere was in daylight, artificial lights glared all over Africa, including what in her reality had been the Sahara and the central forest. Some of these were pinpricks, but others were dazzling bands, or wider smears. The seas looked steel gray, the land a drab brown between the networks of light. Nowhere did she see a splash of green.

  Gnaeus Junius looked around the room. “This is Terra, then—or rather, it is not. This is not the world we left behind. For a start there is no sign of the war whose beginning we witnessed, as we fled from Mars.

  “You can see that the whole planet is extensively industrialized. Much of the glow you see comes from industrial facilities, or the transport links between them, working day and night. The glow, I am told by the observers, is characteristic of kernel energy. The observers do tell me they see the green of growing things nowhere. Clearly the world is inhabited by people, and they must eat; perhaps the food is grown underground, in caverns, or made in some kind of factory. We cannot tell, from a distance of several Ymir-strides.”

  “You have done well to learn so much,” Quintus growled. “And, though I know the mother city is silent, have you seen Rome?”

  Gnaeus nodded to the crewman operating the projector. The screen turned glaring white as the slide was removed, to be replaced by another, much more blurred, evidently magnified. The boot shape of Italy was clearly visible, even though, Stef thought, trying to remember detail, it looked to have been extensively nibbled back by sea-level rise, even compared to what she remembered from the Roman reality. The peninsula was carpeted by the usual network of industrial activity, and Stef tried to map the brighter nodes on the locations of familiar cities.

  Gnaeus pointed to a dark patch near the west coast. “This is Rome. The image has been greatly enlarged, as you can see . . . Sir, we would have to move in closer to do much better than this.”

  “That can wait, optio. The area of darkness, you say—”

  “At first we thought there was some kind of quarry there. Then we realized that the site of Rome is encompassed by a crater, big enough that it would not disgrace Luna. And in the interior of the crater—nothing. No life, no industry.”

  “I reckon we can see what’s gone on here, sir,” said Titus Valerius. “Some of the lads have talked it over. If I may speak, Centurion—”

  “You already are speaking, Titus.”

  “They bombed us, sir. Whoever runs this world. There must have been a war, and they drove us back, and when there was nothing left of us but the mother city herself, they bombed us.” He rubbed his chin. “Maybe they dropped a rock from the sky. Or maybe they used kernel missiles. Making sure Rome would never rise again.” His voice grew more thick, angry. “These bastards did to us what we did to those Carthaginians, long ago, sir.”

  “I fear you’re right, Centurion. The question is who these ‘bastards’ of yours are.”

  He seeme
d to hesitate before speaking further. Stef wondered how the ordinary Romans on this ship had taken the news of the loss of their eternal empire—how the likes of Titus Valerius had coped with such torment of the soul. Rome—gone!

  “Very well. Carry on, optio.”

  “Luna is missing,” Gnaeus said now, bluntly.

  That startled Stef. “What do you mean, ‘missing’?”

  “I’ve got no images to show you . . . It simply isn’t there. We know that must have distorted Terra’s tides and so on, but we’d need more study to understand that fully. Maybe it was destroyed in some war. We made a mess of Luna when we fought the Xin up there. Our best theory, given the level of industrialization on Terra itself, and the massive colonization of space—I’ll discuss that—is that Luna was dismantled for its raw materials.”

  He showed more slides, more worlds with faces disfigured by massive industrial operations, more carpets of glowing light. “All the rocky worlds are the same, sir. Mercury, Mars. On Venus much of the atmosphere is gone, and some kind of huge operation is going on under the remnant clouds—we don’t know what they’re doing there.”

  “And on Mars,” the ColU put in, “the observers detected a kernel bed. A primordial deposit of the kind we found on Mercury, Stef Kalinski, though not on our copy of Mars.”

  Knowing the ColU’s own obsession, Stef prompted, “And where there’s a kernel bed—”

  “There’s probably a Hatch.”

  The ColU said no more, but Stef understood. Some day we need to get to Mars, and through that Hatch, in pursuit of Earthshine. But, looking at image after image of worlds transformed by industrialization—Gnaeus even showed huge mines on the moons of Jupiter—and given the power and reach of a civilization that had gone so far in mastering their whole solar system, she wondered how and when the chance to do that might ever come.

  Quintus said, “So we have a solar system of integrated industrialization, of intense use of material resources, and, I presume, energy.”

  Gnaeus nodded. “Mostly kernel-based, but not entirely; we’ve seen sunlight captured by huge sails. There are tremendous flows of raw materials, mostly from the asteroid belt inward to the inner planets. Evidence of widespread organization and control. And we see no signs of current conflict, incidentally. As if all this is run by a single, unitary government. One empire, sir.”

  Quintus snapped, “Whose empire? Who’s benefiting from all this? And where are they? The planets, even Terra, barely look livable.”

  “Save by toiling slaves, probably,” said Titus grimly.

  “Cities in space,” Gnaeus said now. “That’s where we think the people must be. Cities—or fortresses. We had a few such settlements, habitats capable of supporting life. Observation platforms, docks for spacecraft and so on. The Xin too.

  “But here, wherever here is, the sky is full of them.”

  He produced images of structures in space, grainily realized, cylinders and spheres and wheels, more angular structures.

  “They cluster around the major planets, or trail them in their orbits around the sun. And they come in all sizes, from units the size of small Roman towns, Centurion, to much larger. There may of course be smaller constructions below our ability to resolve. Some of them, near the asteroids or planets, may be habitats for workers: construction shacks. Others may be the equivalent of military camps, permanent forts—and cities, places of government and administration. We can only guess, for now. We have barely begun to study these objects. One thing that might help us, sir. The smaller habitats are very diverse. There’s a variety of designs, technological strategies. And although this ‘Quechua’ is their dominant language, evidently the official one, we hear scraps of many other tongues—including bits of Latin.”

  Quintus scowled. “So how does that help us, exactly?”

  “We can hide, sir. If we have to. Or at least be camouflaged. Some of those habitats and ships are not unlike the Malleus in size and shape.”

  Quintus waved his hand. “I take your point, optio. And given the challenge of the bookkeeping of an empire on this scale, if it’s anything like our own, there will be room for concealment.”

  “That’s it, sir. And then there’s the big one, the one we’ve been calling the Titan. At the very top end, only one of a kind, the largest structure we have observed in the system by far . . . The big beast resides in a Shadow of Terra.”

  “He means, it’s at L5,” the ColU told Stef. “Trailing Earth at a Lagrange point.”

  Quintus waved his hand. “You’re beginning to bore me, oracle, and not for the first time. Show me that big monster, optio.”

  Gnaeus obeyed.

  It was a blunt cylinder, its exterior scuffed, returning muddled highlights from a distant sun. This was shown against the background of the self-illuminated Earth.

  Quintus drifted to the front of the room to inspect the “Titan” more closely. “That doesn’t look so special. Looks a bit like Malleus, in fact.”

  “It’s a little bigger than that, sir. You’re not grasping the scale of this thing—with respect, Centurion,” he added quickly. “We’ve made guesses about its layout. It is spinning, around its long axis, not quite three times an hour.”

  “To provide spin weight inside that big ugly shell.”

  “Yes, sir. We’ve seen ships approach, along the long axis, where there must be docking ports.” He pointed. “Just there, in fact.”

  Quintus frowned. “I see no ships. Must be tiddlers.”

  “Sir, there are plenty of vessels larger than the Malleus itself; we see them coming and going . . . You still don’t see the scale.”

  “Tell me, then, you posturing fool.”

  “Centurion, the cylinder is nearly three thousand miles long.”

  “Three thousand—”

  “That is more than the diameter of Luna, sir. The end hubs alone could swallow a small moon. The land area within must be similar to that of the whole of Asia . . .”

  Titus Valerius, muttering a blasphemous prayer to Jupiter, floated before the image of the great habitat, inspecting it more closely, casting shadows on the screen. He pointed to a blemish on the hull. “By God’s bones. That looks like a crater.”

  “Yes,” Gnaeus said. “We’ve spotted many such scars. The structure may be old—centuries old.”

  “What a monster. No wonder they had to take poor Luna apart to build such things.”

  Gnaeus said, “The question is, of course, who would live in such a structure—”

  “I can tell you that, optio,” Quintus said. “That’s where the emperor will be. And the very rich. Living off the huge rivers of goods that flow between the worlds.”

  “An emperor become a god,” Titus said. “I wonder how you could ever get rid of him.”

  Quintus grinned back. “Good question, Titus. All right, optio, thank you. Well. We’ve seen enough. Now we need to decide what we’re going to do about all this.”

  Stef had to smile.

  The centurion growled. “Am I amusing you, Colonel Kalinski?”

  “I’m sorry, Centurion. I’m just admiring your boldness.”

  “I’m a Roman,” he said, to a muttered rumble of support from his troops in the room. “And that’s what Romans are. We are bold. We take control. Although,” he said, “to get through this crisis we may have to behave in ways Romans aren’t particularly used to.”

  The men looked more uncertain.

  “Look—we’ve been out here four days, since Mars. And our time is already running out. Why? Because our supplies are. Our mission was supposed to last only weeks, at most. Soon we’ll need to land somewhere.”

  Titus Valerius said, “Sky full of rocks out there, sir, among the Tears of Ymir. We could find a place of our own. Kick out a few Quechua speakers if we have to. We could call some of those other Latin speakers the optio heard out i
n the dark. Start building another Rome, to replace that hole in the ground we saw.”

  Again Stef heard rumbles of approval.

  “I admire your spirit, Titus Valerius. But the problem with that plan is simple. Not enough women. Most of us didn’t bring our families on this mission, to my eternal regret. But then, none of us knew what was going to become of us, did we? You know how things would go if we tried to make do with the ship’s population as it is.”

  Stef laughed. “Even I would get a date.”

  The centurion eyed her sternly. “Stef Kalinski, we would destroy ourselves within a few years at best. That is, if these Quechua speakers didn’t seek us out and destroy us first. Think about that, Titus Valerius. You remember our strongest enemy. Even now, Carthagio is a powerful memory for us all, the campaigns gone over again and again during training. Do you imagine these Quechuas, these Incas, will have forgotten Rome?”

  “Never,” Titus rumbled.

  “There you are then. And besides, Titus, we need to be wilier. We need to buy ourselves some time.” He glared around at them. “I don’t want any of you telling me that what I’m going to propose isn’t the Roman way. It isn’t all about blunt force; sometimes you get your way by stealth and guile—by waiting until you’re ready to strike. Remember Germania? Augustus lost his legions in those dense forests. The Caesars had to wait a generation—but when Vespasian finally struck north, destiny was ready to embrace him. So it will be with us . . .”

  Only a Roman, thought Stef with exasperated affection, could come through a jonbar hinge into some kind of Inca space empire and deal with the situation by referring to the adventures of the Emperor Vespasian in the first century after Christ.

  Titus said, “So what is the plan, sir?”

  “We do as the optio suggested. We’ll need to use the drive, of course, to fly back into the heart of the solar system, but kernel drives are common here. But we keep our heads down. We hide. We go in camouflage—we’re a bunch of miners from the other side of Jupiter, come in for supplies, maybe looking for work . . .”