Ultima

by Stephen Baxter

  “Maybe not to us. Which is why we must all go. Beth, Mardina—I know how difficult this is going to be for you—but you’re his family. If the ColU is right, he’s already saved you once. Maybe he’ll listen to you again. If there’s even a chance of averting this . . .”

  Beth looked away, and Penny saw how closed-up she became, as, not for the first time in Beth’s life, those around her plotted to manipulate her and her daughter. Penny said gently, “Just think about it, Beth. The consequences of all this. We did bring this creature into this reality. We have to try.”

  Stef said briskly, “But we’ll have to get to Mars first. How are we going to do that?”

  “In my ship,” said Quintus Fabius firmly. “I am serious,” he said in response to their surprised expressions. “The Malleus needs reprovisioning, but the crew have yet to be dispersed, and it stands ready to fly. My legionaries will squawk, but the journey would be short and the bonuses handsome, I imagine. I could have you all on Mars in days . . . if we can arrange suitable clearances quickly,” and he glanced significantly at the shocked-looking provincial official.

  Penny frowned. “Where is this ship of yours? In orbit, on the moon—”

  “About five kilometers north of here,” Stef said drily. “This is a culture where they land interstellar spacecraft at city airports.”

  “I wish I could say you get used to such things,” Penny said to her. “But you don’t.”

  Mardina was looking around at them as they spoke, mouth open, obviously amazed by all she’d heard—overwhelmed perhaps. “Well, then, let’s all fly off to Mars, and find out the truth.”

  Beth touched her arm. “What truth, dear?”

  “That that’s what this terrible old monster with the pretty name, Earthshine, probably intended you to do all along. That he’s been manipulating you all for decades.”

  There was a shocked silence.

  Then the ColU said, “Even I hadn’t thought of that.”

  26

  The deceleration of the Malleus Jesu into Martian space was ferocious.

  Nobody would tell Penny how high they ramped it up in the end. Clearly it was far higher than an Earth gravity, the Roman ship’s standard kernel-driven acceleration regime. And that itself said something of the urgency of the mission. But Penny had little energy to fret, as she lay pressed down into her deep couch, scarcely daring to move a muscle, to lift a finger.

  She was given a private room on the seventh deck, officer country—she was told it was part of Centurion Quintus’s own suite—a very Roman affair, though the couches were riveted to the floor and the tapestries fixed with heavy iron nails, and everything was sturdy, built to withstand the surges of acceleration to be expected of a warship. On the other hand, the Malleus, veteran of several interstellar missions and as a result of cumulative time dilation several decades out of its own era, was an antique. The ship had already been subjected to years of acceleration stress, and the sleeting radiations and corrosive dust and ice grains of interstellar space, and now she was to be put through what in some ways was likely to be her toughest assignment yet. It might only take one component failure, a structural element buckling somewhere, a bulkhead or a hull plate cracking under the unbearable stress, for the whole mission to unravel—and their lives to be lost.

  So Penny lay there in her couch, listening to the deep, almost subsonic thrumming of the kernel engines, and the fabric of the grand old ship popping and banging and creaking around her, and waiting for the end. She did feel an odd empathy for the ship. For what was her own body but a relic, the wreckage of a too-long life—and nearly unable to bear these immense accelerations? She couldn’t have blamed the Malleus if the ship had failed. Just as she couldn’t have blamed her own wretched body if it had given up as she put it through one unbearable strain too many.

  The crew, however, was trained for operation under this kind of acceleration regime. She didn’t lack for company. Even the Greek medicus, Michael, visited her in a wheelchair, tightly strapped in, with a metal brace to support his neck and head.

  What was still more impressive was the legionary assigned to push Michael around the ship in his wheelchair, triple-gravity acceleration or not: Titus Valerius, the big one-armed veteran. He walked with the support of an exoskeleton, creaking and clanking, powered by the crude electric motors—“etheric engines”—that were, apart from kernel engines, handheld radio communicators, which they called “farspeakers,” and some ferocious weaponry, just about the height of mechanical engineering achievement in his world. Penny could see how Titus’s muscles bulged under the strain, how the veins were prominent in his heavily supported neck. But he got the job done, as, evidently, did the rest of Quintus’s highly trained crew.

  “You’re doing fine,” Michael told her from his chair, as he examined her. “I can assure you, you’re a tougher old eagle than you look, or may feel. As long as you do as I say, as long as you lie there and don’t take chances, and are patient—”

  “My catheter itches.”

  He laughed. “Bad luck. You’ll have to fix that yourself.”

  Penny’s most welcome attendant, however, was Titus’s daughter, Clodia, just fifteen years old by her own subjective timekeeping, who had spent most of her young life aboard the Malleus during its mission to the Romulus-Remus double-star system. Clodia was evidently strong, able to get around the ship under gravity using a chair and prosthetic aids built for an adult twice her size, and turned out a bright, chatty kid.

  At first, she brought Penny her meals—that is, she changed the drip bags according to Michael’s schedule. But as the ship’s watches passed, and they got to know each other better, she responded to Penny’s other needs. She turned out to be the kindest of Penny’s team of aides in changing her catheter bag, and washing her face, and even changing the diaper-like garment that soaked up her old-lady poop. Penny had done her level best not to be embarrassed at having to be changed, at one end of her long life, like the infant she’d been at the other.

  Penny was surprised Clodia had volunteered for this mission, however. On the last day, as the ship approached Mars and they waited for the end of acceleration, they talked about this.

  “Let me get it straight. You were just a toddler when your father took you with him on the Malleus Jesu, the journey to Romulus and Remus.”

  “My mother died when I was very small, before we left Terra. There was only my father and me—”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. So you spent a few years running around on the planet. And then, age ten or so, you’re scooped up and brought back to Earth—I mean, Terra. I’d have thought you’d find Terra a lot more exciting than life on the ship. All the different people, the cities.”

  Clodia pulled a face. “Lutetia Parisiorum is a dump. And it’s badly laid out from a defensive point of view. I suppose I’d like to see Rome. And the great cities of Brikanti as well, of course—”

  “There’s no need to be polite with me, child!”

  Clodia grinned. “But wherever you go on the ground there’s no, no . . . People sort of wander around doing whatever they want.”

  “No discipline?”

  “That’s it. It’s not like when you’re on the march, and you build your camp every night, and everything’s in the same place each time, exactly where it should be. Night after night. That’s what I like.”

  “You’re an army brat, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Well, I’m glad you’re here, Clodia; you’ve been a comfort to me . . . What of the future, though? Even your father can’t last in the legion forever. What will you do? I can’t imagine you being satisfied to be some soldier’s wife.”

  “I don’t remember my mother, but I saw the women in camp, at Romulus. Having babies and baking bread and washing clothes, day after day?” She pulled a face. “That’s not for me.”

  “Then what? They don’t allow women in the Roman army,
do they?”

  “Not into the legions, no. Not in the fighting infantry. But there are masses of other jobs you can do. In administration, in training, in logistics. A lot of that is based in the cities, the big central military establishments. And there are jobs in the front line women can take, even in the fighting units, some kinds of auxiliary. Or I might become a weapons specialist. Go into training.”

  “Or be a medicus. There are plenty of front-line jobs there. You ought to talk to Michael about that.”

  Again, a self-deprecating face-pull. “Maybe I could be a nurse. I’m not sure I’m clever enough otherwise. I can strip down field artillery pieces, but an injured legionary . . . I’ll find something.”

  “I’m sure you will—”

  That was when the warning trumpet sounded, filling the hull with its shrill note.

  Clodia said, “Just lie still, until it’s over.”

  And Penny, lying in her couch, felt the cessation of the kernel engines, a deep shudder transmitted through the ship’s fabric. That chorus of creaks and alarming bangs ceased immediately too, as the strain of three gravities was removed. And only then, it seemed, did the sense of heavy acceleration lift from her body.

  “Ah,” she murmured. “It’s as if your father has been sitting on my chest for two days, and now he’s got off.”

  Clodia impatiently unbuckled the restraints that held her in her chair, pushed aside her exoskeletal aids, and let herself drift up into the air, whooping. “I always love this bit!”

  “How long were we—”

  “Fifty hours. Twenty-five accelerating at three weights, and then the turnover, and twenty-five decelerating. And here we are at Mars, just like that. We couldn’t have got here any quicker. Roman ships are the best performing in the world, and the trierarchus will have pushed us as hard as she could.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt it, child. But we might be too late even so.” She struggled to emerge from her cocoon of blankets and cushions, an aged butterfly. “Oh, help me out of this thing.”

  Clodia hovered dubiously. “If I don’t keep you here until the medicus has checked you over, I’m going to be walking back to Terra . . .”

  • • •

  It was another hour before Penny, fuming with frustration, was at last allowed onto the bridge of the Malleus.

  And beyond the observation windows, before her eyes, once more Mars loomed huge, like a plasterwork in oranges and browns, scarred by craters and dry canyons, the silver bands of the canals glowing softly in the sunlight.

  When she arrived, a kind of council of war was already under way, involving Quintus, his second-in-command, Gnaeus, and his ship’s trierarchus, Movena, as well as Stef, Beth, Mardina, Ari Guthfrithson, Kerys, and the ColU borne on the shoulders of Chu Yuen. Stef barely glanced at her sister. All of them looked beat-up to Penny, their skin blotchy, their eyes puffy. There was a faint smell of body odor in the crowded room—but then probably none of them had washed for days, Penny reflected; they hadn’t all had the comprehensive medical support she’d enjoyed.

  And Jiang was here. He too looked wrung-out. But he held on to a rail, supporting himself in the air, and took her hand in his. “Mars again,” he said. “Where we first met.”

  “Yes. All those years ago, at the UN-China conference at Obelisk.”

  “No matter what we go through, Mars, it seems, endures.”

  Quintus Fabius faced her. “Maybe Mars has not yet changed very much, Academician. But it will shortly. Look up there.” He pointed to a slice of dark sky, beyond Mars’s western limb.

  Where hung a single brilliant star.

  “Ceres,” Penny whispered.

  “Höd, yes.”

  “How close is it? That thing looks almost large enough to show a disc.”

  Stef said, “Penny, we haven’t been troubling you with updates during the voyage. We hoped you’d sleep through it—”

  “Oh, shut up, you fusspot.”

  Quintus said, “Höd is larger than the width of Venus, as seen from Earth. So the Arab observers assure me.”

  Penny tried to work that out. “Then it must be—what, a few million kilometers out?”

  “Rather less,” Stef said. “The asteroid has undergone episodes of immense thrust. We suspect Earthshine has ordered the use of significant chunks of the body’s own material to use as reaction mass. The observers on the Malleus have computed the new trajectory.”

  Penny could see the conclusion of all that in her sister’s expression. “My God.”

  Stef took a deep breath. “Ceres is going to impact Mars. That’s finally confirmed. It’s probably what Earthshine intended all along.”

  Quintus looked furious, as if this was some personal betrayal. “But why?”

  “We’ve no idea,” Stef said. “Not yet.”

  Penny looked at Stef. “How long?”

  “The Arabs estimate twelve hours. No more.”

  “As little as that? Very well. That’s the time we have remaining to stop Earthshine.”

  Quintus nodded grimly. “Of course we must. This great act, this hurling of cosmic masses, can be intended to do nothing but harm. It may even start a war. We have to stop him. But we will face resistance.”

  “Then,” Penny said drily, “I’m glad I’m on a ship full of Roman legionaries. Let’s work out our plan.”

  But as the soldiers began to discuss tactics and fallbacks, a clock in Penny’s head began a dreadful countdown.

  Twelve hours, and counting.

  27

  To Stef’s relief, Penny submitted to Michael’s insistence that she needed rest.

  “And make sure she straps down again,” the centurion called as she was led from the bridge. “We may have some more hard acceleration to undergo before the day is done.”

  “As you wish, Centurion.”

  The rest of them inspected Quintus’s images of the layout of Earthshine’s latest base on the ground, at Terra Cimmeria. They were large-scale photographs, grainy wet-chemistry productions like all Roman or Brikanti imagery, but good enough, Stef thought, to get a sense of the layout. She saw three broad clusters of facilities, grouped close together. Farther out, the ground was marked by swaths of scorching, places where the ground had melted altogether: the relics of multiple landings of kernel-drive rockets.

  “So, Colonel Kalinski,” Quintus said. “We have been scouting this area for some time—for years, as Earthshine has developed his operation. But I welcome your input now. This is the location where you say that the Xin had their Martian capital in your world.”

  “Slap in the heart of the highland we called the Terra Cimmeria, yes.”

  “Which was no doubt why Earthshine chose it,” the ColU said from Chu’s backpack, “because of that resonance. Everything Earthshine does will be shaped by an awareness of competing realities. And it is also, no doubt, why the site of a city that was called Obelisk for its greatest single building should be marked here by—point for me, Chu Yuen, left and down—that.” The slave seemed to work well with the master he carried; his finger stabbed down on the image of one of the three clusters of domed buildings.

  Stef peered down. “I see a sharp stripe on the ground. Wait—where is the sun? That’s a shadow, of something very tall—”

  “A tree,” the ColU said. “Not an obelisk. A tree. Encouraged to grow to some four hundred meters, which is three times the maximum theoretical height on Terra. A tree’s height is limited by the need to lift water to its uppermost leaves—”

  “But on Mars, with its one-third gravity,” Stef said, “you can grow as tall as this. It must have been force-grown.”

  “Yes. Earthshine has been established on Mars for some years, but not that long. Force-grown and encased in some kind of enclosure to retain air and moisture. We don’t have good enough images to determine the species yet. An impressive st
unt.”

  Beth leaned closer to see. Beth and Mardina had been quiet since Penny’s brief visit to the bridge. Only Ari had been quieter, Stef thought; the druidh had not spoken a word.

  Now Beth asked, “But why would Earthshine grow a tree on Mars? It doesn’t seem to fit.”

  “It’s for his allies,” said Kerys grimly. The nauarchus had also been quiet during this voyage on a Roman ship, Stef had observed, but she had watched and listened, evidently filing everything away. Now she pointed to another shadow traced on the Martian ground, in a second compound some distance to the north of the tree. “That is a ship—a ship of the Brikanti Navy, called the Celyn. Earthshine has at least one ship’s company’s worth of support on the ground with him, and most of them drawn from Brikanti ranks.” She glared at Quintus, defiant. “We don’t have time for blame games. This monster, this Earthshine, was after all found, fortuitously, by a Brikanti ship—my ship, all those years ago. How I wish now we had simply thrown the boxes that sustain him out into the Skull of Ymir! Even if we had preserved the rest of you.”

  “Thanks,” Beth said drily.

  “It was natural that as he began to lay out his schemes for the exploitation of other worlds, he would gather support from the Brikanti government at first. We believed we could control the situation—control him.”

  “Well, you were wrong,” Quintus said.

  “It began with his subversion of the crews of the ships we sent out to support him. He persuaded them to betray their nation—to follow dreams of greed and power, under him. That is what we believe happened. But they are Brikanti.”

  “Ah,” Stef said. “I’ve been reading up on this during the journey home. To the druidh, in the Brikanti tradition, the tree is a sacred symbol.”

  Ari spoke now. “Whatever other projects they are pursuing, they will have relished the chance to nurture what may still be the only tree on Mars, and certainly the greatest—greater than any on Earth. Even Christians would respond to the symbol. You Romans nailed Christ to a wooden cross, and His blood nurtured the roots of the World Tree Yggdrasil, which—”