Ultima (10 page)

“This is what we built there, these great Halls. And Ceres became the hub from which the exploitation of the asteroids progressed. Here is another world.”

He snapped his fingers, and icy Ceres was replaced by a more familiar world, a burnt-orange ball, its surface scarred by canyons and craters, ice caps like swirls of cream at either pole.

“Mars,” said Kerys.

“Yes—a name we share. Look what we built
there
.” He pulled his hands apart. The planetary image exploded, becoming misty and faint, but the center, before Earthshine's chest, zoomed in on a sprawling city, a tower at its heart—a needle-like structure whose height only became apparent when the scale was such that people could be made out individually, in pressure suits at the base of the tower.

“This is the Chinese capital, in a region we called Terra Cimmeria. I know how all this was built, even the great tower. I can help you discover it. And more. Again, do not be alarmed . . .”

On his upturned hands, a series of animals walked, elephants, bison, lions, horses, each three-dimensional image scaled against a human figure.

The Brikanti stared.

Earthshine said, “I and my brothers were created, some centuries ago, for
this
, above all else. To save the diversity of living things. The destruction of our natural world was not so advanced as it is here, despite centuries of ardent effort,” he said drily. “These animals are known to you only through fossil remains, from bones you find in the ground. To you, the elephants and the apes and the whales are as remote as the dinosaurs. I store genetic data—that is, the information required to recover these animals, to rebuild them. I can give you back your past.”

The animals melted away; he lowered his hands.

“Also I have books,” Earthshine said. “And art. Think about that. Two millennia of a different tradition.” He tapped his skull. “All stored in here—”

Kerys cut him off. “The logic is obvious. Whatever we make of you, we can't allow you to fall into the hands of our rivals. Welcome aboard,” she said simply.

Earthshine inclined his head, as if he'd expected no other reaction.

Oddly, Beth noticed, Ari Guthfrithson the
druidh
appeared more skeptical; she would have imagined the scholar in him would have responded to Earthshine's pitch.

“Well, now that's decided, we have work to do,” Kerys said briskly. Again she glanced out the window. “I don't need to inform Dumnona of my decision; I only need to implement it. And no need to give that lot out there any notice. Ari, take charge here; I want all these people strapped in their couches for landing in an hour.”

“Yes,
trierarchus
.” But as Kerys stalked out of the cabin, Ari continued to stare at Earthshine.

The virtual smiled smoothly. “Is there something more you want,
druidh
? After all, the decision is made.”

“Yes. But what strikes me is that in all your bamboozling presentation of the miracles you offer, you never once suggested what it is you want in return.”

Earthshine spread his hands. “Your
trierarchus
has guaranteed me continued existence. Isn't that enough?”

“Not in your case, no. I don't think it is.”

And, studying Earthshine, and the cautious reactions of Penny Kalinski and even Lex McGregor, Beth had a profound suspicion that he was right. That there was far more going on here than Earthshine was yet revealing.

But a warning trumpet sounded piercing blasts, and they hurried to their acceleration couches. There was no more time for debate.

AD 2222; AUC 2975

Even from the ground, on the nameless planet of Romulus, Stef Kalinski had spotted the
Malleus Jesu
, star vessel of the
Classis Sol
of the Roman imperium, orbiting in the washed-out sky, a splinter of light. But it was not until the final evacuation from the planet, as she, Yuri, the ColU, and Titus Valerius with his daughter, all rode one of the last shuttles into space, that Stef first got a good look at the craft.

The
Malleus Jesu
was a fat cylinder of metal and what looked like ceramic, capped with a dome at one end, a flat surface at the other. It looked as if it was held together with huge rivets. There were windows visible in the flanks of the tremendous hull, protected by venetian-blind shutters. The whole craft spun slowly on its axis, presumably to equalize the heating load it received from the sun. The walls were ornately carved with figures in the Roman style: heroic military men striding over defeated peoples, or marching from world to world. Even the rim of that leading dome was elaborately decorated, though the dome itself looked like a crude layering of rock.

Titus Valerius was a massive presence in the seat beside her; he smelled of sweat, stale wine, and straw. Titus pointed at the base of the craft. “Kernels. A bank of them. To push the craft, yes?”

“I know the theory,” Stef said drily.

“Push halfway, turn around, slow down the other half and stop at Earth.” He pointed again, at the dome. “Shield from space dust. Rock from world below. Shoveled on by slaves in armor.”

By which he meant, Stef knew by now, some kind of crude pressure suit.

Yuri, pale but intent, peered out. “It looks like Trajan's Column, topped by the Pantheon.”

Stef sniffed. “Looks more phallic to me. The
Penis of Jesus.
”

“Oh, come on. This is just great. An imperial Roman starship! . . . We know they lack sophisticated electronics, computers. I wonder how the hell they navigate that thing.”

“The drive isn't always on,” said Titus.

Stef realized that a more precise translation of his words might have been,
The vulcans do not always vomit fire.

“Every month they shut it down, and turn the ship.” He mimed this with his one good hand, like aligning a cannon. “The surveyors take sightings from the stars. Then they swivel the ship to make sure we're on the right track, and fire up the drive again. It's like laying a road, on the march. You lay a stretch, and at the end of the day the surveyors take their sightings to make sure you're heading straight and true where you're supposed to go, and the next day off you go. Works like a dream. Why, I remember once on campaign—”

“Navigation by dead reckoning,” said the ColU. “Taking sightings from the stars—simply pointing the craft at the destination. They have no computers here, Colonel Kalinski, nothing more complex than an abacus. And they have astrolabes, planispheres, orreries, sextants, and very fine clocks—all mechanical, and remarkably sophisticated. But, Colonel, this starship is piloted using clockwork! However, if you have the brute energy of the kernels available, you don't need subtlety, you don't need fine control. You need only aim and fire.”

Titus pointed again at the craft. “Seven decks. Each sixty yards deep.” He counted up from the base of the ship. “Kernels and stores, farm, slave pen, barracks, camp, town, villas of the officers. Plus a bathhouse in the dome for the officers.”

Stef frowned, figuring that out. The word the ColU translated as “yard” was a Roman unit about a yard in length, or roughly a meter. “That must make the cylinder something like four hundred meters long. And, judging by the proportions, around a hundred meters in diameter. What a monster. Titus, we've been told very little about this flight.”

He grunted. “That's officers for you. Don't tell you a damn thing about what you're supposed to do, even as they kick you up the arse for not doing it right—”

She asked patiently, “Such as, how long will the flight be?”

“That's easy,” he said. “Four years, three hundred and thirty-six days. Same as coming out.”

“Hallelujah,” the ColU said drily. “A precise number at last. And are you under full gravity for the whole trip?” Silence. “That is, when the drive is on, do you feel as heavy as you do on Terra?”

The legionary puzzled that out. “Yes,” he said in the end. “The officers don't want you bouncing around going soft, like you were on Luna, or Mars. The training's tougher in flight than it is on the ground.”

“I'll bet,” Stef said. “I know the military. Locked up in a big tin can like this, they'll keep the lower ranks as busy as possible to keep them from causing mischief.”

The ColU said, “With the numbers the legionary has provided I can at last estimate how far we are from home . . .”

If the drive burned continually, exerting an acceleration equivalent to one Earth gravity, after about a year the ship's velocity would be approaching the speed of light.

“Of course we won't pass lightspeed but we'll run into time dilation. Time on the ship will pass much more slowly from the point of view of an observer on Earth—”

“I have two physics doctorates,” Stef snapped. “I know about relativistic time dilation.”

“Well, I have two fewer doctorates,” Yuri said tiredly. “Give me the bottom line, ColU.”

“If the journey takes us, subjectively, four years, three hundred and thirty-six days, then eleven years and ninety-one days will have passed on Earth. That's not allowing for small corrections because of the shutdown periods. And the double-star system of Romulus and Remus must be some nine light-years from Earth. Titus here will have spent maybe ten years traveling to the destination and back, plus another three years or so on the ground—a thirteen-year mission. But by the time he returns home, about twenty-five years will have passed on the ground.”

Titus shrugged. “That's what you sign up for. Got my daughter with me, on the ship. No other family to worry about. And back home the legion's
collegia
will make sure we get treated right, with our pay and pensions and such.”

The ColU said, “Perhaps it takes an empire, solemn, calm and antique, to manage operations on such scales.”

“We Romans get it done,” Titus said simply. “We'll be joining the
Malleus
soon. Make sure you're buckled into your seats.”

•   •   •

The ferry docked with a port on the slowly turning hull of the starship. Stef saw that the hull here was blazoned with large “V” symbols; she assumed she was landing at the fifth deck, then, which Titus had called the “camp.”

She knew that an ISF crew would not have attempted a docking with a rotating structure, save at the axis. By contrast the crew of this ferry took them in with terrifying nonchalance, swooping down on the slowly turning
Malleus
, until they drove straight into a system of nets that fielded them neatly and dragged them down to the hull, where docking clamps rattled noisily against the base of the craft. Once the docking was complete she heard whoops and backslaps from behind closed doors. She had met none of the pilots but had glimpsed them on the ground. They were young Brikanti, male and female, cocky, smart, and they enjoyed showing off their skills before the nervous, superstitious, ground-based Romans. As she unbuckled from her seat, Stef offered up silent thanks that this risky display of super-competence was at an end.

One by one they were led out through a port in the base of the ferry, and down through thick layers of hull metal and insulation into the body of the
Malleus Jesu.
They were weightless, of course, save for the faintest centrifugal tug toward the wall of the rotating craft.

Once inside the main body, Stef had to adjust her orientation, her sense of up and down, even as she was battered by a barrage of sensory impressions: brilliant lights, smells of animals and humans, a clutter of structures, heaps of supplies and equipment, and people swimming everywhere in the air. The ship stood upright, essentially. The hull surface she had passed through was no longer a floor or ceiling, but a vertical wall. And she had a clear view across the interior of the cylindrical hull; “floor” and “ceiling” were tremendous plates below and above her, slicing off the fifth deck, this pie-shaped section of the craft—though the plates were pierced by gaps through which passed pipes, ducts and, at the center, a kind of fireman's pole arrangement from which chains dangled, connecting this deck to the rest of the ship. Pillars of steel were bolted in place across the area too, adding structural support between floor and ceiling, she guessed the better to withstand the thrust of the kernel engine. It was a vast, cavernous space, this deck alone, sixty meters deep and a hundred across, and illuminated by sunlight from the windows and big, crude-looking fluorescent strip lights. The tall pillars spanning floor to roof gave the place the feeling of a cathedral, to Stef's sensibilities.

And set up on the floor plate was, yes, a camp, just as Titus had said, a near copy of the
colonia
down on the ground, a rectangle with rounded corners, like a playing card, set slap in the middle of the circular deck. Looking down across the deck from her elevated position at this port, Stef recognized the crosswise layout of the main streets; there was a handsome building of wooden panels that might be the
principia
, next to it a small chapel, and beyond an open space that might be a parade ground or training area. There was even a row of granaries, though she saw nothing like barrack blocks. All these structures looked conventional enough, with wood-panelled walls and red-tiled roofs. The walls of the
principia
, the headquarters, even looked as if they were plastered. But, looking more closely, Stef could see that the buildings were built on frameworks of strong steel girders, firmly riveted to the hull plates.

And she was treated to the surreal sight of Roman legionaries paddling through the air above the “camp,” pulling themselves along ropes strung across the cavernous deck, manhandling heaps of supplies wrapped up in nets, food, clothes, even weapons.

A Roman camp, in interstellar space! But then, she knew, this mixture of antiquity and modernity was typical of these strange late Romans.

From conversations with Eilidh, Movena, Michael and others, she'd gathered something of the altered history of the Empire, compared to the account she was familiar with—a history that had brought a Roman legion to a distant star. After Kartimandia's time, Germany had ultimately been conquered up to the Baltic coast. It was Vespasian, later emperor, who planted the eagle of Rome on the bank of the Vistula. After that, with the German tribes civilized, there had been no barbarian hordes to cross the Rhine in the late fourth century as in Stef's world, the event that had ultimately destabilized the Empire in the west. Rome had continued to rule. In the end, however, the Empire had reached natural limits on the Eurasian landmass, penned in by the Xin to the east, the Brikanti to the north, and the deserts of North Africa to the south. For centuries Rome had grown inward-looking, static, its citizenry heavily taxed, its imperial elite self-obsessed, remote and over-powerful—and unstable, subject to endless palace coups.

That had all changed in the twelfth century AD. By then the Brikanti had already been in the Americas for two hundred years, thanks to their adventurous Scand partners, and had explored the coast of Africa, seeking the lands below the equator. Belatedly the Romans followed them into this new world—and the centuries of stasis were over. In a new age of expansiveness and conquest, the Romans remembered their ancestors, who they had imagined as stern, lean men plowing their fields and going to war. It was as if the Empire had been cleansed. Though the modern Romans remained Christian, traditional forms of society and the military—such as the legions—had been revived. Even old family naming conventions had been dug up, ancient lineages ferociously researched. Which was why a planet of a distant star had been colonized by units of the ninetieth legion, called Victrix, in commemoration of a tremendous victory over the Brikanti just south of the Great Lakes. In later centuries the need to avoid the use of explosive weapons inside pressure hulls, in spacecraft and surface habitats, had even led to a revival of the traditional weapons of hand-to-hand combat, spear and sword and knife,
pilum
and
gladio
and
pugio.

But Stef was sure no Roman of the “old” history she knew had ever seen a sight like the one she glimpsed on the far side of this fifth deck, as a squad of legionaries under the control of a hovering tribune struggled to fold up the squirming hull of a deflated
cetus
airship.

Titus gathered the newcomers together. He was carrying the ColU in its pack, handling it as tenderly as a baby, Stef observed. “Come on. Soldiers' business on this deck. You're in the civilian town, next one up.” Grabbing a rope, he pulled himself one-handed away from the docking port, and headed up to the ceiling.

Stef and Yuri glanced at each other, shrugged, and followed. Stef made sure she let Yuri go first, unsure how strong he'd be feeling today, but he seemed to be moving freely enough. Maybe a lack of gravity for a while would be good for him. She called up after Titus, “Why are you carrying the ColU? What about Chu?”

“He'll be taken straight to the third deck.”

She remembered. The slave pen, Titus had called it, above the farm, below the barracks.

“Slaves are stupid creatures and more so without gravity. They flap around uselessly and puke everywhere. They're best strapped down for the duration. You won't see Chu until we're under way and we get stuff properly sorted out on board.”

She was in no position to argue.

They passed easily through an open port up to the sixth deck—open, but Stef noticed there was a heavy iron hatch on hinges over the port. She imagined whole decks of this vessel needing to be locked down in case of some disaster, a blowout perhaps—or even in case of a rebellion by disaffected soldiers, or the slaves in their belowdecks pens.