Ultima

by Stephen Baxter

  Ari raised an eyebrow. “I haven’t heard the rumors that you have some wine from Italia tucked away in here, by the way.”

  “Hmph,” Kerys said, reaching for the relevant bottle in a compartment of her desk. The Roman bottle was pottery, shaped like a miniature amphora, and came with a couple of matching mugs into which she poured the ruby wine, working with care with the ship’s thrust operating at less than full weight. “You’ve sophisticated tastes for one so immature.”

  “I’m twenty-nine years old, trierarchus,” he said, sipping his drink.

  “Younger than me by the best part of a decade, by Thor’s left arse cheek.”

  “Well, I am a druidh, Kerys.”

  The word derived from an old Brikanti word for “oak,” Kerys knew, and signified “great knowledge.” Ari was one of the generalist scholars that all Brikanti ships carried, if they had the room, as opposed to specialists in ship engineering, or in navigation in the deep ocean of vacuum the Brikanti called Ymir’s Skull, or in other essential functions. Ari was assigned here to explore the unknown, to study and categorize the new. After all, each of the fragments of ice and stone and metal that made up the giant belt of worldlets known as the Tears of Ymir—resource lodes it was the Ukelwydd’s mission to survey—was a new country in its own right; you never knew what you were going to find.

  “Here’s to druidh, then,” Kerys said, raising her mug. “And let’s get back to work before we’re too drunk to concentrate. What of this ship you found?”

  “Not me, in fact, trierarchus. Your astronomers were using their farwatchers, fixing our position and mapping a sky full of Ymir’s teardrops, as they do day and night—”

  “Or so they claim in their duty logs.”

  “They spotted this thing. A point of light in the sky, moving steadily. You understand, trierarchus, that if you split open the spectrum of the light from such an object, you can learn about its nature and trajectory.”

  “I may not be a druidh but I know that much.”

  “I apologize. Well, the astronomers had thought it was just another teardrop, previously unmapped. Or perhaps a hairy star wandering in from the greater void.”

  Kerys prompted, “But in fact . . .”

  “In fact this object is beyond the main belt of Ymir’s teardrops. It is heading nearly directly away from our position—away from the sun, in fact. Its apparent motion across our field of view is quite small, but it is receding swiftly. Not only that, the object is actually decelerating. You can tell that from the shifting shadow bands in the unfolded light—”

  “Yes, druidh. Thank you.”

  “I apologize again.”

  “Decelerating. Is this a ship?”

  “Yes, trierarchus. You won’t be surprised to know that the split light shows it to be using a kernel drive, like the ships of all the empires. But it is not a configuration we recognize, not from any of the empires, not ours, not Roman or Xin.”

  “You have challenged it?”

  “We have—or rather our signalers have, following my suggestion.”

  “Hm. Maybe I should have been informed before such a step was taken.”

  Ari Guthfrithson sighed, and poured them both some more Roman wine. “Would you have paid attention, trierarchus? Your mind has been focused, rightly, on the operations at the teardrop, and our course to the next. The hail was routine. It was thought best not to disturb you until—”

  “All right,” she said grumpily. “I take it no reply was received to our hail.”

  “None. We have in fact heard the rogue being hailed by other vessels, Roman and Xin both; again we have heard no reply.”

  Kerys frowned. “But if it’s not Brikanti or Roman or Xin, then what? Some kind of pirate?”

  “If so, evidently formidable. That’s the situation, trierarchus. Given the deceleration we can see, we know that this rogue will slow to a halt in three days. We also happen to know that the Ukelwydd is the closest Brikanti vessel to the object. And we have the chance to be first to intercept.”

  Kerys eyed the druidh. “I think you’re telling me a decision point is approaching.”

  “At which you will need to report back to the fleet headquarters at Dumnona, trierarchus. If we were to abandon our mission here and intercept the rogue—”

  “When will it come to a halt?”

  “Two more days. By which time—” Ari grabbed a bit of parchment and quickly sketched positions. “Ymir, the god who built the cosmos, made a single stride from the sun to the place where he built Midgard,” he said, a bit of rote taught to all students of interplanetary navigation at the college at Dumnona—and it amused Kerys that he used the old Brikanti word for the world, rather than the Roman “Terra” long incorporated into his people’s everyday language. “Here we are about three Ymir-strides from the sun. The rogue is here, more than half a stride farther out, but along a different radius from our own. We calculate that if it keeps decelerating as it is—we’ve no guarantee about that, of course—it will come to a halt here, in about three days, farther out along that radius, about five strides from the sun.”

  “Hm.” Kerys spanned the distance between Ukelwydd and the rogue with her hand. “If you’ve drawn this roughly accurately, then we are perhaps two Ymir-strides from the rogue’s final position. And we have three days to get there? Could we do that?”

  “The engineers say that we could do it with a double-weight acceleration load all the way—a day and a half out, a day and a half to decelerate.”

  “The crew will love that.”

  Ari said drily, “They will relish the challenge.”

  “Perhaps. You advise me well, Ari . . .”

  It was clear to Kerys that her commanders would order her to intercept this rogue, if she could, to be the first there, beating the Xin, the Romans.

  The Brikanti were the weakest of the three great powers of Earth, spread thin along their northern margin, a vast terrain of mostly unproductive land: the northern coasts of the Eurasian landmass, the Scand countries, Pritanike and Iveriu, and the northern reaches of Valhalla Superior, though that was under constant threat from the Roman legions whose roads and marching camps crisscrossed the great plains to the south of the vast continent. Since the days two millennia past when Queen Kartimandia had used guile to persuade the Romans under Claudius to invade Germania rather than Pritanike, the Brikanti and their allies had relied for their survival not on brute strength, not on numbers and vast armies, but on cunning, on ability and knowledge. And the chance to acquire new knowledge was never to be passed up. That was why the Ukelwydd was out here scouting for treasure amid the Tears of Ymir in the first place.

  The rogue ship represented opportunity—an unknown opportunity, but an opportunity even so. It would be Kerys’s duty to grasp that opportunity, she was sure.

  She began to roll up her charts of Ymir’s Tears. “Well, Ari, if I am to speak to Dumnona, I will need a draft mission plan. I don’t think we’ll be allowed to ignore this.”

  Ari stood. “I took the liberty of getting that process started already, trierarchus.”

  “You know me too well. Get on with it, then, and I’ll make my way to the communicators.”

  7

  The Tatania finally drew to a halt five astronomical units from the sun. Halted in emptiness.

  This was the orbit of Jupiter, Beth was told, a giant bloated world with a retinue of moons like a miniature solar system in itself, a world that would have dwarfed any planet in the Proxima system—even the Pearl, which had been bright in the permanent daylight of the Per Ardua sky. But this monster among planets was on the far side of the sky just now, invisibly remote, and the ship hung in a void, star-scattered, where even the mighty local sun was a mere speck of fire, a source of sharp rectilinear shadows. If only Jupiter had been closer, Beth thought, there might not be this sense of abandonment, of isolatio
n.

  But they were not alone. The foreign ship had already been waiting for them here, even as, after three days of burning the kernel drive, the Tatania’s velocity relative to the sun was reduced to zero.

  The Tatania had been repeatedly hailed, over radio frequencies Marconi could have exploited, and Earthshine had at last been able to put together a rough translation. This was a vessel called the Ukelwydd, which was a word similar to the Welsh for “mistletoe.” It was part of a fleet commanded from a place called Dumnona, which Earthshine speculated might be in Britain, on Earth. That fleet was a military arm of a nation, or federation, called something like the “Brikanti.” As the Tatania was not recognized as a vessel either of the Brikanti, or of the Latin-speakers, or the Xin, and as it refused to respond to any hails, it would be regarded as a pirate and treated as such.

  The Ukelwydd was evidently a kernel-drive ship like the Tatania, and its basic hull was a cylindrical shape, like the Tatania’s, the most obvious design choice in response to the high thrust levels of the kernel drive—and, according to McGregor, it had blasted out here at multiple gravities to overhaul the Tatania. Even from the first glimpse, Stef thought, the Ukelwydd had the look of a fighting ship, with an evidently massive hull, heavy armor around the kernel-drive units in the base of the ship, and what looked like scarring, the result of weapons fire, in the insulation that swathed the main body.

  Hours after the first encounter, still the hails came from the Brikanti ship, and still the crew of the Tatania failed to reply.

  All on board the lightly manned Tatania, passengers, Lex McGregor, his command crew—and the three-strong engineering crew who Beth hadn’t even seen before now—were ordered up to the bridge for this extraordinary encounter. Ten people, Beth thought, if you included Earthshine as a person, ten survivors of Earth and moon and the UN-Chinese war. Ten survivors of a whole history that seemed to have been lost here, if the ship waiting to meet them was anything to judge by.

  Now Penny said drily, “Lex, explain again the logic of why we’re just sitting here?”

  He sighed. “Penny, the Tatania looks tough but she’s no warship, unlike that bird of prey out there. You saw the way she maneuvered when she moved in close—swept in like a bloody Spitfire. Conversely we’re a hulk, literally, a scow for carrying garbage and passengers. We’ve nothing to fight with—”

  “Save a couple of handguns,” said one young engineer, sourly.

  “Yes, thank you, Kapur. All we can do is bluff. At least give an impression of strength by not jumping when we’re ordered to. Believe me—in many confrontations, posture is everything. Why, I remember when I was boxing champion four years in a row at the ISF academy, I could win a fight just by the way I looked at my opponent at the weigh-in—”

  Penny said, “Perhaps we ought to stick to the point? Fascinating though your anecdotes always are, Lex.”

  Earthshine turned to her, his face blank, expressionless—eerily so, Penny thought. He said, “But what is the point, Colonel Kalinski? Sooner or later we must all face the reality of what has happened here. But you, most of all—you should be our guide. Because it has happened to you before, hasn’t it?”

  He had hinted at such secrets before, Beth realized, but not so openly. Now every eye on the bridge was on Penny.

  She scowled at Earthshine. “That’s my business. My personal business.”

  “Not since you and your impossible sister came to see me in Paris, all those years ago. And we visited your parents’ graves—do you remember? Of course you do. And there on the stone of your mother was proof that your sister—no, you were the impossible one, weren’t you? It’s so easy to get confused, isn’t it? But since then, you see, since that strange day decades ago, I have been involved in your secret, in your peculiarly twisted lives—”

  “Much good it’s done any of us.”

  “At least it has given us a clue as to the nature of the transfiguration we have now endured. From a solar system riven by war, to this, this new landscape with a warrior-bird spaceship called Ukelwydd that hails us in a mixture of Norse and Gaelic . . .”

  Lex McGregor shook his head. “Earthshine, as we stand in peril from an alien battleship—what the hell are you talking about?”

  “We live in strange times, Captain. Times when the fabric of reality has a tendency to come unstuck, and then to ravel itself up again, but with flaws. That battleship wouldn’t belong in our reality—as we do not belong here—as Stef Kalinski, once an only child, did not belong in a reality inhabited by her twin sister, Penny here. Everything changed, that day when the Mercury Hatch was first opened, for Stef Kalinski. Now, with the huge pounding of the UN-China war, perhaps everything has changed for the rest of us—”

  Light flashed from a dozen screens all around the deck.

  “Missile fire!”

  It was engineer Kapur who had shouted, pointing at the nearest screen. Beth saw fast-moving lights, an impossibly bright glare.

  Golvin had to expand the field of view of the screens to give an image that made sense. The Brikanti ship still hung in space. But sparks of fire had swept out of emplacements in that battered hull, were sailing out into space—and were turning, visibly converging on the screen’s viewpoint, on the Tatania.

  “I guess they ran out of patience,” Penny said.

  “Get to your couches!” McGregor yelled, pushing his way to his own position. “Strap in! Golvin, their trajectories—”

  “The birds are heading for the lower third of the fuselage. I’m seeing kernel radiations, Captain. The missiles are kernel-tipped, kernel – driven.”

  Penny and Jiang pulled each other through the air to couches side by side, back from the control positions. They strapped in hastily, then grabbed each other’s hands.

  Jiang said, “After all we’ve been through—”

  “We’re not dead yet, Jiang Youwei.”

  Beth, isolated in her couch, longed to be closer to them, closer to anybody, to have a hand to hold.

  McGregor glanced over his shoulder. “Everybody in place? Good. Those birds are closing. Brace!”

  When the missiles struck it felt as if the whole ship rang like a gong.

  • • •

  The roar of noise passed quickly, to be replaced by a chorus of alarm howls from the bridge instruments, and panels glared with warnings of catastrophic failures. The crew worked quickly, going over their displays, shouting complex technical data to each other. The Tatania was tumbling, Beth gathered, falling out of what must have been a spectacular explosion. She could feel the slow wheeling, as the rump of the ship turned over and over.

  “The pressure bulkheads are holding,” Kapur called.

  Golvin said, “Captain, the strike was surgical. They hit a circumference around the hull. The blasts were shaped, I think. They cut away our lower third.”

  McGregor growled, “So they snipped off the kernel drive.”

  Penny said, “These Brikanti, whoever they are, use kernel technology as routine weapons of war. Even we never went that far, not until the Nail, the last desperate throw. To fight our kernel war we had to improvise . . . What kind of people are they?”

  “You might soon find out,” McGregor said grimly. “A party is cutting its way through the outer airlock door. They must have come aboard before launching those stingers. Oh, put away your pop gun, Kapur. Resisting will only get us killed the quicker.”

  “We don’t belong here,” Penny said. “Earthshine’s right. Any more than I belonged in Stef’s reality, after the Mercury Hatch. My God, Lex, these characters make you look like a UN diplomat—”

  Now the lights started to go out all over the bridge, Beth saw. Even the screens went dark, displays fritzing to emptiness. The bridge crew hammered their touchpads and keyboards and slates, and yelled instructions into microphones, without success.

  “It’s all shutting d
own,” Golvin said. “We’re losing everything.”

  McGregor demanded, “Is it the Brikanti?”

  Jiang said, “They communicate by crude radio. I would be surprised if they could hack into our sophisticated information systems to do this.”

  And Beth turned to look at Earthshine. While the rest of the bridge shut down—even the main lights were flickering now—he seemed to be glowing, oddly, from within, as if transfigured. A golden light.

  “You,” she said. “It’s not the Brikanti doing this—this isn’t part of their attack. It’s you, Earthshine.”

  McGregor turned on him. “What the hell are you doing to my ship, you old monster?”

  Earthshine stood up from his couch, his virtual body passing through the harness. “Saving you all. General, the only asset we have in this reality is the knowledge we bring from—where we came from. I have taken that knowledge into myself, for safekeeping. Even the ship’s physical systems are being destroyed, now they are drained of data. The Brikanti have captured a useless hulk. I will use the knowledge I have stored in myself to bargain for our lives.”

  McGregor roared, “And who the hell put you in charge?”

  “I just did. And now, I think—”

  The door slid open.

  A party of figures floated into the bridge without ceremony, in clunky pressure suits of what looked like leather and steel ribbing, each bearing a stylized rifle with bayonet fixed. They all had their faceplates open, and they stared around at what was evidently a very unfamiliar environment. At a quiet word from a central figure, they spread out quickly into the bridge, one standing over each crew or passenger.

  Beth found herself facing a short, squat, heavily built man; she had to raise her hand to shield her eyes from a flashlight attached to his weapon that he shone in her face.

  “Nobody resist,” McGregor murmured. “We’re in their hands now.”

  The leader of the invading party lowered her rifle—she was a woman, pale complexion, perhaps fortyish—and she made straight for Lex McGregor, the obvious command figure. She spoke, softly but firmly, and Beth heard a simultaneous translation come from a speaker on a console.