Ultima (25 page)

For the final pickup, Centurion Quintus Fabius brought the
Malleus Jesu
down to the ground of Mars itself.

Titus Valerius called from the
testudo
, “About time you joined the party, sir.”

“Shut up, legionary. You still alive, Gnaeus Junius?”

“Here, Centurion.”

“All right. Make sure the meatheads in that glorified chariot do as they're ordered. We're nearly out of time—we almost waited too long. In particular, we haven't the time to wait for the yacht, with the Academician and her party at the bunker. So I want you two to go pick them up in the
testudo
.”

Titus glanced over his shoulder, at a vehicle already crowded with legionaries, and those few Brikanti from the installation who had been intelligent enough to surrender in time. “It's kind of sweaty in here, Centurion. No place for an elderly lady. And I do know the layout of that bunker. There's only one docking port, which is where the yacht will be—”

“Use your initiative, legionary. Get the thing out of the way.”

“Whichever way I see fit, sir?”

“Whichever way, Titus Valerius.”

As far as Titus was concerned there were no finer words in the vocabulary of a commanding officer. With a whoop, he gunned the
testudo
at top speed for the bunker. Behind him he heard groans, and the odd thump as some clown who hadn't secured himself properly fell off his bench.

And, with Höd looming in the sky larger than the sun, larger than Luna, an overwhelming reminder of the urgency of the situation, they came to the bunker. The yacht was indeed still docked to the only port.

The
testudo
didn't even slow down. Titus Valerius drove straight into the flaring single wing of the yacht.

The
testudo
slammed to a halt, throwing them all forward once more. Then Titus put the
testudo
in its lowest gear, and just started pushing. The wing crumpled, the hull buckled, but the yacht came away from its lock with the bunker with a screech of torn metal, and was then shoved away over the Martian ground.

The passengers of the
testudo
actually gave him a round of applause. “You're a hero, Titus Valerius!”

“You're also an idiot,” Gnaeus said, peering out of the port at the bunker. “But a lucky idiot. I think that port is still serviceable.”

“I never doubted it. Anyway, those ports are designed to yield under torsion; I was cheating. Now go get our passengers,
optio.
” With a crunch of gears, Titus reversed the
testudo
and roughly positioned its flank against the bunker's port.

As the
optio
had predicted, the port was still working, just, and Gnaeus, with the help of a couple of crew, soon managed to achieve an airtight bridge to the bunker. Titus, impatiently nurturing the running engine, was surprised to see that not all the landed party came back— just Penny Kalinski, Cadet Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson, the rodent-like
druidh
Ari Guthfrithson, and the slave boy with the talking rucksack.

And at the last minute Penny Kalinski herself refused to follow.

Mardina wouldn't leave her behind. She grasped the old lady's hands, trying gently to pull her forward to the port. “You must come. There's no need to die here.”

“But I would die soon anyhow, my dear. And you need a witness—you, all of your people—a witness to what is being done, today, in your system, to your worlds. For, after all, it is Earthshine, with whom I traveled through the jonbar hinge, who is responsible for all this. The least I can do is file a report. And I am a
scientist
, you know—a
druidh
in my culture. A trained observer. Go, child, go—my mind is made up. But leave me that farspeaker of yours.”

“Academician—”

“It will soon be over, child. What, an hour? No more.”

Titus Valerius was running out of time. “Scorpus, Orgilius, get that damn door closed. Right now.”

“Right, Titus.” The two burly legionaries made for the hatch.

Penny called, “Oh, and Mardina—tell that centurion of yours, make him instruct his
trierarchus
—tell him not to hang around. Don't hover near Mars, waiting to see what happens. And don't head back to Earth either.
Tell him to flee
—out of the system, with the greatest acceleration he can muster—tell him to flee as Lex McGregor once fled, with the kernel drive burning. He will understand—”

Scorpus pulled the girl back from the door, and Orgilius slammed the hatch closed.

“At last!” Titus Valerius rammed forward his control lever and the
testudo
surged away from the lock. There were more complaints and curses as people fell over each other in the sudden acceleration. Titus just laughed, swung around the nose of the
testudo
, and headed straight for the welcoming belly of the
Malleus Jesu.

“Academician? Can you still hear me? This is
Malleus Jesu
—”

“I can hear you, dear Mardina. Oh, my. This couch is just too comfortable. I believe I dozed off! There's one disadvantage of such an elderly observer.”

“Well, it's been a long day for us all, Academician.”

“Please. Call me Penny.”

“Penny, then. There's only half an hour to go.”

“Yes, dear. I guessed it must be about that. Now, let me see. Ceres—Höd—is almost directly over my head. The glass roof of Earthshine's peculiar garden is nothing if not revealing, and I have a dramatic view of the sky . . .

“I should report what I see as objectively as I can, shouldn't I? Ceres looks, I would say, three times as wide as the sun does from Earth. And it is growing in size, as if swelling, almost visibly. What a strange sight it is! I have seen a total solar eclipse on Earth, and that had something of the same strange, slow grandeur of movement in the sky. You can
sense
there are huge masses sliding to and fro in the firmament above. But I can't see the scar left by the fall of the
Celyn
, no glowing new crater. The spin of the asteroid has kept it away from me, and I imagine there will not be time enough for a full rotation. How brave those young crew were! But, oh my, it grows ever larger. And yet there is no effect yet, nothing to feel here on the ground, even though there are only minutes left.”

“I understand little of this, Academician Penny. What will happen to Mars? And why would Earthshine do this?”

“As to the what—I think I can estimate some of that for you. Here we have Ceres—forgive me for using the name I grew up with—a ball of ice and rock six hundred miles across, coming in at forty or fifty thousand Roman miles in every Roman hour. If a respectable fraction of that tremendous kinetic energy is injected into the rocks of Mars, then I estimate—and I was always good at mental arithmetic—some two hundred billion cubic miles of Mars rock will be melted and vaporized. Two hundred billion cubic miles, on a world only four thousand miles across. A layer of rock some four miles thick will be destroyed. All traces of a human presence will be eradicated, of course. And this is without considering the effect of the kernels, embedded here in Mars, in the ground of Ceres itself. If what we saw on Mercury is a guide, the total event may be even more energetic, even more destructive . . .

“You ask, why has Earthshine done this? To strike back at what he calls the noostratum. That's what I think. These deep bugs that he believes survived even the destruction of our world, our Earth—indeed, if they are the Hatch builders, they may have engineered those events to create jonbar hinges, for their own unfathomable purposes. Well, they won't survive
this
; Mars will be sterilized far too deeply even for the bugs to survive. And maybe he's right. He did force a response from them, didn't he? They, or some agency, did give him a Hatch . . . Oh, I must sip some of my water. Excuse me, dear.”

•   •   •

“. . . Penny? Are you still there?”

“I'm sorry, child. Have you been calling? My wretched hearing . . . How long left?”

“Only a sixth part of an hour, Penny.”

“Ten minutes. Is that all? Such a brief time, and soon gone, like life itself. I take it we have failed, then; all our stratagems are busts. Well, perhaps it was always beyond us. But we must persist, you know. Earthshine is right about that, at least. We must understand why and how our history has become fragile—who is engineering all this. And yet we must, too, find a way to contain Earthshine himself.

“Ceres is huge, now spanning—what? Eight or nine times the diameter of sun or moon? I can see features on that surface now, clearly visible through the fine Martian air. Craters, of course. Long cracks, almost like roadways—annealed fissures in the ice, perhaps caused by the stress of the displacement from the object's original orbit. Ceres is already damaged, then. And it is growing, swelling; it is all so easily visible now. Oh my, it is a quite oppressive presence, and I should have expected that. Almost claustrophobic. You must forgive them, you know, Mardina.”

“Who?”

“Your parents. Even your fool of a father—deluded, self-serving and greedy as he is—has always done his best for you, as he sees it. And your mother was horribly harmed by the circumstances of her birth. She was the only child on a whole world, or so she grew up thinking, and yet she grew to love the place, as all children love their homes. But she was taken from that home by the Hatches, that greater power that is manipulating our destiny—all our destinies. After all that you can't blame her for longing to find a
way home
.”

“I don't blame her. I'm just trying to understand. Do you think she will ever find what she's looking for?”

“It's not impossible. We understand very little of the true structure of this
multiverse
we inhabit. I'm sorry—I used an English word. And maybe, someday, you will find her again.”

“Your sister is here. Stef. Would you like to speak to her?”

“No. It would do no good. But I am glad she is there, now, at the end. What of Jiang Youwei?”

“He was very distressed that you did not return.”

“Ah. Youwei has been such a good friend . . . A burden has been lifted from his shoulders, however. Please ask my sister to keep an eye on him.”

“She will.”

“And tell her I'm sorry.”

“She knows, Penny. And she says she forgives you.”

“How good of her. Ha! What an old witch I am, bitter and sarcastic to the end . . .”

“She says she expects nothing less. Umm, four of your minutes remain, Penny.”

“Thank you. But I don't feel I need a countdown, dear. Oh, that brute in the sky—individual features, the craters and canyons, grow in my sight now. Ceres becomes a plain that is extending away, extending to the horizon.”

“Penny—”

“Oh, it's beautiful! A sky like a mirror of the ground, a sky of rock! Mardina, Penny. Don't forget me. Don't forget that I'll always—”

Höd, Ceres, was about a seventh the diameter of the target planet. It took a minute for it to collapse into the surface of Mars. Mardina saw that the smaller world kept its spherical shape throughout the stages of the impact, the internal shock waves that would otherwise have disrupted the asteroid traveling more slowly than the arc of destruction that consumed the asteroid at the point of contact.

Even before the asteroid was gone, a circular wave like a mobile crater wall was washing out around the planet. This tremendous ripple crossed Mars, destroying famous landscapes billions of years old: the Hellas basin, the Valles Marineris, which briefly brimmed with molten rock before dissolving in its turn. Following the rock wave came a bank of glowing, red-hot mist that obscured the smashed landscape.

And when the ripple in the crust had passed right around the planet, it converged on the antipode to the impact site, closing in on the Tharsis region in a tremendous clap, where huge volcanoes died in one last spasm of eruption.

The
Malleus Jesu
fled the scene at an acceleration of three gravities. Fled away from the sun, into the dark.

•   •   •

Centurion Quintus Fabius sat brooding in his observation lounge, where his Arab navigators had fixed up farwatcher instruments to watch the impact—sat in his acceleration couch, with the triple weight of the engine's thrust pushing down on him.

Once the impact event itself was over, Höd was gone, and Mars was transformed, become something not seen in the solar system since it was born, so his Arab philosophers and
druidh
told him. What was left of Mars was swathed in a new atmosphere of rock mist and steam—an air of vaporized rock. For a time the whole world would glow as bright as the sun itself. And it would cool terribly slowly, the philosophers said. It would take years before the rock mist congealed, before the planet itself ceased to glow red-hot, and then a heavy rain would fall as all the water of the old ice caps and aquifers returned, to sculpt a new face for Mars . . .

But Mars was only a distraction, for the reports soon started to come in from the ground, from Terra. The impact had sent immense volumes of molten rock spraying out across the solar system. Much of this was observed, from the ground, from space. Some of the debris, inevitably, would strike Terra itself, falling on a world full of panic and suspicion. There was a brief flurry of messages, passed between the capitals of the world. A peremptory order from Ostia, home of the Roman fleet, for the
Malleus Jesu
to return to the home world. Quintus ignored the order.

And then the missiles started flying.

Quintus Fabius saw it for himself, through the farwatchers, peering back past the glare of the drive plume. Sparks of brilliant light burst all over the beautiful hide of Terra. Luna, too. It had happened before. There had been a war on Luna, rocks had fallen on Terra—people thought it was a deliberate if deceptive strike by some rival, or maybe they mistook the rocks for some kind of kinetic-energy weapon. Or maybe they just took the chance to have a go. So it was now.

There was a final flare of light, a global spasm that dazzled Quintus, making him turn his heavy head away from the eyepiece.

And in that instant Quintus was called by his
optio
. “Centurion, we're being hailed.”

“By who? One of ours, Brikanti, Xin—”

“It's not a language we recognize, sir. Nor a vessel design we know.”

“What language? Wait. Ask Collius. Ask him what language that is.”

A moment later, the reply came. “Collius had an answer, sir.”

“Why aren't I surprised?”

“He says it's a variant of—it's difficult to pronounce.”

“Spit it out, man.”

“Quechua.”