Ultima (28 page)

But, Beth saw, Earthshine was right;
this
dirt looked old. And that dusty Martian color in the sky wasn't the way she remembered it either. It was a long time since any mountains had got built here.

A small voice asked again,
How long
? And how could that be?

“But there's still weather here,” Earthshine said. “Which is logical. The substellar point, directly beneath the star, will always be the hottest place on the planet, always a center of low pressure, like a permanent storm system. And the antistellar, the opposite point, will always be the coldest—
ouch.
” The first few heavy drops of rain fell, pattering on the broad, dead leaves around them, and slicing through Earthshine's body. “I don't get wet in the rain, but it hurts me.”

“Your software's consistency protocols.”

She dragged the tent over the ground, trying to get to the shelter of the trees.

She saw that the upright cylindrical carcass of the support unit had sprouted open panels, from which manipulator arms had emerged. Small components were being lifted out of the interior of the carcass, while net-like structures were being used to scrape together heaps of dirt. “What is it doing?”

“Wheels,” Earthshine said, walking slowly beside her. “It's making wheels.”

“Planning a journey, are you?”

“Obviously.”

“Where to?”

“Away from here. Away from this
wrong
place.” His anger was evident now; he said this with a snarl.

She reminded herself that he wasn't human. Everything about him was the product of software logic of some kind. Yet she wondered too if he had the artificial equivalent of a subconscious. Given the way he'd behaved in the past, including smashing the Mars of the Rome-Xin history, that would explain a lot. So maybe his anger was genuine, the display unconscious.

At the fringe of the forest clump she found a couple of stout trees ideally positioned to anchor her shelter. She took lengths of her rope and began lashing the shelter to the trunks. The trees at least were as she remembered them, basically expanded forms of the ubiquitous stems. “If this isn't Per Ardua, it's a damn good impersonation,” she muttered as she worked.

By the time she was done the rain was coming down harder, hissing on the leaf-carpeted ground. She looked back at the Hatch, whose lid, she saw, was closing. “The Hatch is a space-time artifact, and yet its designers took care that it's protected from the rain. Well, that's attention to detail for you.” But there was no reply, and when she glanced around she saw that Earthshine had already retreated to the interior of the tent.

Beside the Hatch, in the rain, the support unit was rapidly assembling big skeletal wheels, four of them.

The reception chamber was meant to impress, Mardina thought, if not to awe. Even before you got into the main body of the Titan, the huge space habitat itself.

The chamber was a wide, deep cylinder set precisely at the spin axis of the rotating habitat, with zero-gravity guide ropes strung from wall to wall. To reach this chamber you had already had to pass through a series of locks, each of which alone had been larger than any single cabin in the
Malleus Jesu
. The place was ornate, too, with rich woven blankets spread over the steel walls, and sprays of brilliantly colored feathers, even the gleam of gold and silver plate. The huge face of some angry god, his eyes picked out by emeralds, glared down at the Romans from the opposite wall.

And, from glass-walled emplacements all around them, troops stared down at the newcomers. They wore a uniform of a simple shift tied at the waist, brightly colored, and functional helmets of what looked like hard steel. They had weapons to hand, short swords and stabbing spears—even some kind of artillery, and blunt muzzles peered at the Romans from all sides.

And now the stranded
Malleus
personnel—forty legionaries with their Centurion Quintus Fabius, Mardina, Titus Valerius and his daughter, Michael the Greek
medicus
, and Chu Yuen with the ColU in its pack on his back—were huddled in this vast arena, tangled up in the guide ropes like flies in a spiderweb. It didn't help that all of them had been cleansed before being allowed this far into the habitat—stripped naked, bathed in hot showers, their clothes shaken out in the vacuum. The ColU said it was entirely sensible that the controllers of this enclosed world would try to keep out fleas and lice and diseases. But it had taken all of Quintus's personal authority to persuade his men to submit to this.

The Romans, in their military tunics and boots with their cloaks and packs, looked like savages in this setting, like the barbarians they effected to despise. At least they didn't look like soldiers anymore. Well, Mardina hoped not. At Quintus's orders the legionaries had left behind on the
Malleus Jesu
their
gladios
and spears and fire-of-life weapons, and their armor, even their military belts and medals.

The bulk of the ship's occupants had transferred to the habitat. The ship itself, having come close enough to the Titan for the smaller yachts to deliver the legionaries to the hub port, was now hiding among the asteroids manned by a skeleton crew, a handful of legionaries under the command of
optio
Gnaeus Junius and
trierarchus
Eilidh—and with the more fragile passengers, including Jiang, Stef Kalinski and Ari Guthfrithson—able to survive for a long time on supplies meant for five times their number.

Now, as the Romans waited for the latest step in their induction, Quintus Fabius kept up a steady stream of encouragement. “Take it easy, lads. You look stranger to them than they do to you—even if you are simple farmers of the ice moons. I doubt very much if they've seen the likes of
you
before, Titus Valerius, save in their nightmares . . . Ah. Here comes somebody new to order us about.”

An official approached them now, a stocky, scowling woman of perhaps fifty, pulling herself along a guide rope. Flanked by an unarmed man and two soldiers, she wore a simple tunic not unlike the soldiers', but with a pattern of alternately colored squares—like a gaudy chessboard, the shades brilliant—and obviously expensive, Mardina thought. It was a brash garb that did not sit well with what appeared to be an irritable personality. And she carried a peculiar instrument, a frame almost like an abacus but laced with knotted string. She glanced down at this as she approached them, working the knots with agile fingers.

Titus Valerius murmured, “Speaking of nightmares, Centurion—
look
at those lads with the clerk.”

The soldiers who accompanied the official were tall, almost ludicrously so, a head or more taller even than Titus Valerius. Their long limbs looked stick thin but were studded by muscles under wiry flesh, and their faces were bony, skull-like. They moved through the mesh of guide ropes with practiced ease. Close to, they were very strange, even inhuman, and Mardina tried not to recoil.

“They look ill,” Quintus said. “Too long without weight and no exercise. Put them under my command and I'd soon sort them out . . .”

“No, Centurion,” Michael murmured. “I think you're misreading them. These are perfectly healthy—and functional for their environment. They are
adapted
for the lack of weight. Look how strong they appear, strong in a wiry sense; look how confidently they move. I suspect they would be formidable opponents, just here at the axis of the ship, where there is no weight. Perhaps they have been raised in this environment, from children: specialist axis warriors. Or perhaps they are the result of generations born and bred without weight.”

“Or,” the ColU murmured from its pack, “perhaps they are the result of genetic tinkering. We have spoken of this,
medicus
. Your culture knew nothing of this, but we could have done it—”

“Before the last jonbar hinge but one,” the
medicus
said drily.

“Be interesting to fight them, then,” Quintus said thoughtfully. “But not yet. And hush, Collius; that clerk is looking suspicious.”

The lead official looked up at them now from her knotted strings, her scowl deepening, and she inspected them one by one. Fifty-something she might be, but, Mardina thought, like the soldiers with her, she was handsome. Under black hair streaked with gray she had dark eyes, copper-brown skin, high cheekbones and a nose a Roman might have been proud of.

The official pulled herself up into the air, so she could look down on the disorderly group of Romans. “
Inguill sutiymi—quipucamayoc. Maymanta kanki? Romaoi? Hapinkichu? Runasimi rimankichu?
”

•   •   •

Inguill was not having a good day, and when the strangers muttered disrespectfully among themselves before her, her disquiet and irritation quickly deepened.

Inguill's formal title was senior
quipucamayoc
, keeper of the
quipu
s. She was one of a dozen of her rank who, on behalf of the Sapa Inca and through a hierarchy of record-keepers beneath her, effectively governed all of Yupanquisuyu, this great habitat, both
cuntisuyu
and
antisuyu
, from Hurin Cuzco at the eastern hub to Hanan Cuzco, palace of the Inca himself, at this western hub. It was a role that, it was said, had had a place in Inca culture since the days before the empire's conquest of the lands of the first
antisuyu
, the passage across the eastern ocean, and the move out into the sky.

And it was a role dedicated to the primary function of
control
: the essence of the imperial system of the Intip Churi, the Children of the Sun.

That fact had become apparent to Inguill at a very young age, when the teachers at her
ayllu
had first picked her out as an exceptional talent and had put her forward for training at the Cuzco colleges. Inguill had risen up the ranks of the imperial administration smoothly—shedding her family and her ties to her
ayllu
, shunning personal relationships in favor of the endless fascination of the work.

She had always been able to grasp the key importance of maintaining control, in the empire of the Sapa Inca. Especially in a habitat like this, huge yet finite and fragile, where you had to control the people in order to ensure the maintenance of the complex, interlocked systems that kept them all alive. And in the theology of the Intip Churi, you had to control the gods, too, endlessly placating, and excluding the willful divine anger that could break into the world if chaos and disorder were allowed to reign, even briefly. Of course this great box of a habitat—a box from which there was no possibility of escape, under constant and total surveillance from Hanan Cuzco at the hub, from the Condor craft that continually patrolled the axis, and from operatives dispersed on the ground—lent itself to such control.

It soon became apparent too that
camayocs
like herself, endowed with that kind of intuitive perception about the need for unsleeping and unrelenting control, were rare indeed, and prized. So she had found herself plucked out for promotion ahead of many of her age-group cadre—even the privileged sort, the sons and daughters of the rich of the Cuzcos who could afford the finest pharmaceutical enhancements, the most refined extracts from plants and animals bred for the purpose over generations, to sharpen their intellects to a degree of brilliance. Even such an expensively shaped mind was of little use to the state if beneath the glitter and the quick-talk was a lack of basic perception, a lack of an understanding of the challenges of existence. And that was the understanding that Inguill enjoyed, and cultivated in herself.

Not that it did her career much good. She had proven to be so good at her job that she was given a kind of roaming brief, sent to manage, not the orderly, everyday problems of Yupanquisuyu, but the
dis
order, the unusual, the out of the ordinary, wherever it might crop up—either within the habitat or coming from without, like this bunch of Romaoi. The paradox was that as a result she spent much of her working life in a state of frustration, even anxiety, and certainly irritation. For the unusual, the disorderly, the chaotic, the very stuff it was her job to deal with, annoyed her profoundly until she could master it and clean it up. And all the while her rivals, over whom she had in theory been promoted, were busily worming their way into comfortable niches in the vast hierarchy of the Cuzcos.

Nothing in recent times had annoyed her more than these mysterious Romaoi, with their bulging muscles and sullen expressions. Ice-moon farmers? Hah! Not likely . . . But where there was novelty, she reminded herself, where there was strangeness, there was always opportunity—for herself, if not the empire.

Now she faced the big man with the gaudy cloak who looked to be the leader.

“My name is Inguill—I am a
quipucamayoc
. Where are you from? Are you Roman? Do you understand? Do you speak
runasimi
?”

•   •   •

The ColU's earpieces had been given to Quintus, Michael, Mardina and a few others. Now Mardina heard the strange device whisper its translation in her ear—a translation from Quechua, which the official called
runasimi
, into Latin, by an artificial being whose own first language was a kind of bastardized German. Just when it seemed her life couldn't have got any stranger . . .

Quintus grunted. “I will never be able to speak this tongue of theirs! It sounds like squabbling birds.”

“Allichu, huq kuti rimaway!”

“That was, ‘Say that again,'” the ColU whispered. “Apologize, Centurion. And wait for me to translate.”

“I am sorry.”

“Pampachaykuway . . .”

“My name is Quintus Fabius. I am the leader of this group. We are grateful for your shelter.”

“Well, you haven't been granted it yet.” The
quipucamayoc
glared at Quintus and his men, suspicion bristling as visibly as feathers on a predatory bird, Mardina thought. “Tell me again where you claim to come from.”

“We lived on an ice moon, far from the sun. I apologize; I do not know the names of these bodies as they are known in your mighty empire . . .” (“Collius, I'm not comfortable with all this lying . . .”)

(“Be humble, Centurion. Guile, remember? You can display your strengths later.”)

“We were there for many generations. Our fathers and mothers, our grandfathers and grandmothers worked the ice, living off the thin sunlight. We farmed—”

“You were there so long you forgot most of your Quechua, it seems. Ha! Five centuries after Tiso Inca stomped Rome flat, you refugees still cling to your primitive tongue. Oh, never mind. So you farmed. Why are you here now?”

Mardina could hear the tension in Quintus Fabius's voice as he swallowed these insults and responded. She was glad Titus Valerius and the rest could not understand what was said.

“There was a calamity,
quipucamayoc.
Another body, a fast-moving rogue, hit our home. We, most of the men, were away, investigating another moon that seemed mineral-rich. We had not detected the rogue, there was no time—our home was destroyed, most of the women and children. All we had built over generations. We who survived came here in the last of our ships, to throw ourselves on your mercy.”

She peered into his face. “Well, at least you're sticking to your story. But you don't betray much grief. That's either a sign that you're strong, which is admirable, or you're lying, which is less so.” She pulled herself along a guide rope and inspected the legionaries. “Also you don't look like no-weight farmers to me. You're too solid. Too muscular.”

Quintus straightened his back. “We—our ancestors were Roman. We retained their sense of discipline, even in our exile out in the dark.”

“Really. And that ship that brought you in—don't imagine we didn't see it before it scurried off into the dark—it didn't look like any kind of mining craft to me.”

“Another relic of our pioneering ancestors,
quipucamayoc
. All we had left. We sent it back to the ice moons to search again for survivors of our family. While we came here looking for work.” (“Collius, these lies become elaborate.”)

(“Please, Centurion. Humor me. We are playing a long game.”)

(“Hmm . . .”)

Inguill glared at Quintus. “You mutter in your antique tongue, as if talking to a voice in your head. Are you simple or insane?” She studied the group, deeply suspicious. “I don't like you, Quintus Fabius, if that is your name. I don't like this rabble you have brought into my world. I don't like your story, which stinks like a week-old fish head. I don't like the way you hesitate before speaking every line, as if somebody is whispering in your ear.
You don't fit
—and I don't like things that don't fit. I have the power to throw you all out into the airlessness, you know.”