Ultima (26 page)

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.

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 and 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.

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.

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 seemed 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.”