Ultima (39 page)

This battle was worth the fighting—he'd understood that as soon as he'd grasped the nature of the strange history-switching conspiracy web in which humanity seemed to be enmeshed. All they
could
do was fight, in the end, he and his men. But if in fighting this miniature campaign—even if none of them survived, in the end—if the last of the Legio XC Victrix did something to loosen the grip of that terrible empire-toppling abstract force of which the ColU had spoken, he knew in his heart, in his guts, it was worth it.

Quintus Fabius, the commander, had done all he could. He'd prepared and equipped his men, found the best position to give battle, led the line to the best of his ability. Now there was only the fight. Around him there was a roar, a confluence of war cries and the screams of the wounded and dying, and still the air was full of arrows and stones, any one of which could kill him in a second, and still the terrible erosion of the clashing front ranks continued. In battle it was always the same. It felt like a training exercise right up until the moment the lines closed. Even then you felt invulnerable—the other man would be hit, but not
you
—and you feared fouling up more than the weapons of the enemy
.
But there were moments when you faced a foe, and you looked in his eyes, and it was as if only the two of you existed, your war was yours and his alone. So Quintus slashed and stabbed and swung, and held up his shield, and tried to ignore the tiring of his arms, and the pain of the small wounds he'd already taken, a scrape to the belly, a niggling stab in the shin; he would fight on with his men until he could fight no more.

•   •   •

The clay trumpets of the Incas sounded, a ghastly sound.

The fighting continued at the front, but Quintus could see that the rear Inca lines were pulling back—in good order, but retreating back down the steep slope of the ridge.

Quintus yelled to his trumpeter, “Give the order! Fall back!”

There were three short blasts in response, and then the Romans stepped back warily from the last of the Incas. Warily, and wearily too; one man stumbled over a still-warm corpse behind him.

Quintus, breathing heavily, his
gladio
clasped in his bloody palm as if glued there, sought out Orgilius. The man was sitting on the ground, he seemed to have been hamstrung, but he had not abandoned the eagle. Quintus crouched beside him. “
Aquilifer?
Do you know what's happened?”

For answer, Orgilius pointed to the sky.

Quintus looked up, and saw a Condor, a great black bird, dipping into the atmosphere above him, the leading edges of its wings still glowing from the air friction. It fired a shell that trailed white smoke. At the peak of its trajectory the shell exploded with a crack that reached Quintus's ears a heartbeat after the flash of light. He winced; he couldn't help it.

Orgilius, obviously in pain from his wounded leg, forced a grin. “I think that was more noise than destruction. But still—”

“But still, it's a projectile weapon of the sort that's supposed to be banned in here. These Inca—just like the Romans! You never use a fire-of-life weapon inside a spacecraft, until you do. So the adults have shown up, and we children must put away our toys.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Trumpeter! Signal that we're standing down.”

Orgilius looked over the field. “I think there's a party of their leaders coming over, sir.”

“I'm not surprised. Come on,
aquilifer
, let's get you to the
medicus
.” He got an arm under Orgilius's shoulders and helped him to stand, on one leg. “You, Marcus Vinius—carry the eagle for us. We've got a lot of talking to do, I suspect, and I need you to help me do it, Orgilius. But now, we have to make our peace. After all, we've nowhere else to go, have we?”

“No, sir,” Orgilius said, “that we haven't.”

“Maybe if we fought well enough, they'll let us join the
huamincas.
”

“It was all worth it, wasn't it, sir?”

“If they got away, Titus and the rest. If the
Malleus
was able to pick them up. I don't suppose we'll ever know if they succeeded in what they're trying. Not unless we're scrubbed from history altogether.”

“But we wouldn't know about that either, sir, would we?”

“I certainly hope not,
aquilifer
.”

“And as for Titus and the others—”

“On their way to Mars by now, I hope. But for us it's blood and broken heads, as ever. Let's find that Greek doctor for you; I'm sure he's having a relaxing afternoon . . . Now all I've got to do is find one of their generals to put his foot on my neck. Have I got that right, Orgilius? That's how they can tell you've surrendered . . .”

•   •   •

A few days later Quintus, languishing in an Inca cell, received a message, sent with farspeaker by Titus Valerius, picked up by a legionary working on an Inti window, and then smuggled to the centurion in the Inca
pukara
where he was being interrogated, or negotiating, depending on your point of view.

The plan had worked. And after escaping from the confusion of the Hanan Cuzco hub, it took the
Malleus Jesu
only a few days to reach Mars.

Stef Kalinski had to be helped out of the
testudo
rover, and through the improvised airlock into the dome that long-gone Inca explorers had set up over the Hatch they had discovered. Even once she was safely inside the dome, she stumbled and had to be caught by Mardina and led to the rest of the party.

“Damn Martian gravity,” Stef growled. “Neither one thing nor the other, neither a proper weight nor weightlessness, so a person my age can get around without inconveniencing herself.”

Mardina laughed. “But, Stef, if you can't even get out of the
testudo
without a struggle, how will you manage the great leap between the worlds through—
that
?”

Stef glanced around to get her bearings, here on the Mars of the Incas, a heavily mined but intact Mars—very unlike the Mars that had been wrecked by Earthshine at the terminus of the lost Roman-Brikanti history. The
Malleus
had been landed close by, and over they had come in the
testudo
. Aside from the rover tracks back to the ship,
this
Mars, in this area anyhow—a copy of the ancient landscape of the Terra Cimmeria—looked pristine, to Stef's eyes. Pristine and untouched, save for this damn Hatch that shouldn't be here, and the unmanned emplacement around it. Now, holding Mardina's arm, Stef walked over to the Hatch itself.

It was just another emplacement, a rectangular plate marked with the circular seam of the Hatch itself, the surface blank and featureless, in another kernel field. Just like the one she'd first been brought to on Mercury long ago, and in a different history entirely. Just another mundane impossibility.

Already the
Malleus
crew had loaded into the dome a pile of equipment and supplies, anonymous boxes and trunks under woollen blankets, which Stef briefly inspected. Most obviously, there were none of the Romans' clumsy, brass-laden, Jules-Verne-type pressure suits. The feeling among the Romans was that the Hatch builders wouldn't send you somewhere you couldn't survive. And besides, none of their supplies would last long in a nonhabitable environment. It was all or nothing. There was a stove, however, a compact steel box that would serve as a heater or an oven, a technology the Roman army had developed for campaigns in wintry climes. It was without an obvious fuel source—and Stef was surprised, and somehow appalled, to learn that it was powered by a single kernel, an interstellar miracle of deadly potency stuffed inside a gadget you could dry your socks on.

Stef looked around at the party gathered here in the dome. The ColU was in its pack on the back of Chu Yuen, of course. The other would-be travelers included herself, Clodia, Titus, Mardina—and Ari Guthfrithson, the
druidh
from Brikanti—and, to everybody's surprise, Inguill the
quipucamayoc
from Yupanquisuyu, who had insisted on traveling with them from Hanan Cuzco. Of those who weren't intending to travel onward through the Hatch, Gnaeus Junius, acting commander of the
Malleus
, stood by, with his
trierarchus
Eilidh, others of his crew—and Jiang Youwei.

They all looked at her expectantly.

Stef said, “You all seem to be waiting for me to speak. What, because I'm the oldest? If Quintus Fabius was here, he'd be taking charge, you know,
optio
.”

Gnaeus Junius shrugged. “I am not Quintus. I wish I were. I only wish to complete this mission.”

“Yes. Unlikely as it seems. It still seems impossible that we can have got those girls out of the clutches of the Incas as we did.”

“But into whose clutches,” Eilidh said, “as you put it, some of us will have to return. After all, we have nowhere else to go in this system save Yupanquisuyu.”

“You will be made welcome,” Inguill said now. “You know about the messages I sent to Cuzco, trying to explain all this . . . The Inca's advisers won't understand it all now, but with time, and your help, and the evidence I've left behind, it will make sense. I am sure Quintus Fabius and your companions will be pardoned.”

Eilidh said, “And we can all become good citizens of the Inca empire.”

“There are probably worse fates,” Mardina said. “Look on the bright side. At least you're too old to become a mummy and stuck on a ledge in the vacuum forever.”

“Nor am I pretty enough,” said Eilidh drily.

“But you, Inguill,” Stef said. “You're
sure
you want to come? The rest of us have a personal investment. I have studied Hatches all my adult life. The ColU is—well, it's on a mission. Besides, we are all already displaced.
This
history, this Inca Culture, is your home.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Perhaps. But you know nothing of the court of Cuzco. The Sapa Inca is a weak boy, and the faction behind him is crumbling. His life expectancy is not long—and nor, as a consequence, is that of his key appointees, such as myself. That's one reason to try something new.

“And besides, I have been talking to Ari Guthfrithson. Like him, I have become fascinated by the mystery of the Hatches, and whoever it is we build them for. I am seduced, perhaps, by the idea of the power being wielded here. Once, I never imagined any entity could be more powerful than the Sapa Inca. Now . . .”

Stef studied her, and Ari. “Mardina goes in search of her mother. Beth was only trying to go home, as she saw it. Whereas you, Ari, have abandoned your home, abandoned everything you know, for the sake of this ambition. And you too, Inguill. I'm not sure these are the healthiest reasons for progressing with this. I think I'll keep an eye on you two.”

“But I go in search of Beth too,” Ari said. “Look—I don't care what you think of me, Mardina. Yes, I'm just as fascinated by the enigma of the jonbar hinges as Inguill here. I was a
druidh
, a scholar too, remember. Why, if not for me, none of you might have had the chance to be here at all. You might all have vanished into nonexistence when Earthshine triggered the hinge—”

“Very well,” Mardina said. “You're forgiven, Father. Just shut up, all right?”

“And you, Jiang,” Stef said. “You're sure you want to stay?”

He shrugged. “There is more for me here, Stef. Though I feel a loyalty to you, as to your departed sister. Just as these people are the last free Romans in an Inca reality, so I am the last free Xin. I want to find my people. I believe there are colonies in the Yupanquisuyu
.
I would seek them out.”

“There are worse missions in life,” the ColU said gently.

Gnaeus glanced around. “There's no reason to delay further.”

Clodia was staring at the Hatch. “And I think it's ready for us.”

Stef turned to see. The Hatch surface, which had been blank and featureless, was now marked at its rim by a string of indentations: the imprints of human hands.

After leaving Earthshine, Beth took her time to get back to the substellar.

She made a number of detours, exploring the scenery along the route. It wasn't as if there was anybody waiting for her. Or so she thought. And it wasn't as if she could get lost; the substellar was the easiest place to find in the entire hemisphere.

She searched water courses and lakes, looking for traces of builders. She found plenty of stem beds, of the kind that had sustained builder communities
before
. The little creatures had been modular, and assembled themselves, literally, from the reed-like stems, which were themselves complicated pieces of biological machinery. But here she found no trace of the builders, or their works: the shelters they built for their young, the middens they constructed from the remains of their dead, the elaborate dams and dikes they built to control the water flowing through their landscapes. She thought she would have all the time in the world to pursue such interests. She was, after all, home—even if home had changed while she'd been away.

She was almost disappointed when she got back to the substellar and found the Hatch wide-open.

She unpacked her stuff, and boiled water for tea, and waited for the new arrivals.

•   •   •

Practical matters came first, as ever.

It was immediately obvious, when Stef and the rest of the group came through the Hatch, that Beth's two-person bubble tent was much too small for the eight of them—or nine, if you counted the ColU. So, just an hour after Titus Valerius had led the way through the Hatch, and as the rain began to fall, Beth organized Clodia and Chu Yuen to take down her tent and fix it up as a kind of improvised roof, stretched across a stand of close-growing stem-trees. This arrangement wouldn't be much use in a storm, Stef could see, of the kind she remembered lashing the substellar of Per Ardua even on a good day. And still less would it offer any shelter if Per Ardua fell into another of its starspot winters. But today, as if in welcome of the new arrivals, the rain fell in gentle verticals from a cloudy sky, and the improvised canopy was enough to keep them dry.

Beth even lit a small fire and began brewing tea: tea she had gathered herself, she said, from a plant she'd found growing wild here, brewing in a clay pot she'd cast herself.

“Always takes a while to boil in an open bowl,” she said apologetically.

Nobody objected. The group was very quiet, in fact, gathered around the unnecessary warmth of the fire, as they waited for the tea.

Stef glanced around at her unlikely companions, relics of multiple collapsed histories, participating in what she supposed was a kind of welcoming ceremony. Titus Valerius sat with his daughter, who leaned against his muscular bare legs. Titus himself looked restless, baffled, oddly resentful, like a bull in a cage, Stef thought. Maybe he was still sulking from missing out on the battle at the habitat hub.

And Clodia was staring with obvious hostility at Mardina, who was rubbing some kind of ointment into the bare shoulders of Chu Yuen. The former slave had taken his shirt off, and Stef could see how his shoulders and chest had been chafed by friction from the heavy pack that bore the ColU. Stef, already thinking ahead to how they would survive here in the days and weeks to come, made a mental note that the ointment, whatever it was, wouldn't last forever. But they had the ColU, she reminded herself, which for now sat on a rock of its own, liberated from its customary backpack, interior lights gleaming. The ColU was a machine specifically designed to survive in the conditions of Per Ardua, and would no doubt be full of recipes for such things as skin ointments . . .

But Stef's old-lady maundering at this moment was missing the point, she realized, the central theme of the little scene. After their adventure at Hanan Cuzco, both the girls had been glad to be reunited with Chu Yuen—but of course there was more to it than that. Chu was the only young man here—perhaps in all this world—and Mardina and Clodia were the only young women, though Clodia was a few years younger. Mardina seemed close to Chu, but Stef had no idea if there was a genuine relationship there. Anyhow, what you had here was a Chinese Adam—and two Eves.

Oddly, Stef recalled, it was not unlike the scheme the ISF and its controlling UN agencies had drawn up for the original colonization of Per Ardua, in a different reality: to seed the planet with apparently impossibly small groups, a dozen people each or so, screened for genetic diversity, and let them work it out. Beth herself was a survivor of all that. In the end the colonists had found their own way, basically by abandoning the ISF plan and congregating at the substellar. But they had left behind a trail of blood and lust and jealousy. Trouble ahead, Stef thought, just from the difficult triangle of these youngsters alone.

And then there were Inguill and Ari Guthfrithson, sitting side by side on the far side of the fire, not speaking, looking around at the group, at Beth's improvised homestead—at the forest, the tall shafts of Per Arduan stem-trees, presumably the most alien life-form either of them had seen before. Beth, who had never visited the Inca Culture, was astonished by the sight of this woman in her cloak of hummingbird feathers. Inguill, looking around greedily at this new world, would say only through the ColU's translation interface that she was here to extend the glory of the Sapa Inca.

What did the future hold for those two, Inguill and Ari? They were both scholars, both highly intelligent and manipulative people. They had both, in their separate histories, more or less deduced the existence of alternate realities from the accounts of jonbar-hinge survivors, if not from scraps of evidence they'd turned up themselves. Stef wondered how they felt now that their questing had brought them to this strange, sparse, distant, unexpected place. Watching them, she realized she really had no clear idea what they were thinking—what they were scheming. Penny seemed to have been suspicious too; she had restrained Ari from following Earthshine through the Hatch on that other Mars. It was a strange thought that Stef probably had less in common with them, two fellow humans, than with the ColU: a mind calm, analytical—and loyal.

Loyal, yes. And that reflection made her realize that once again she was missing a central point. Ari, Beth, and Mardina were father, mother, and daughter. And yet they had barely acknowledged one another after the initial moments of shock as the group had emerged from the Hatch and the family was reunited. Even now, sitting in this little circle around the fire, they could scarcely be farther apart. Not to mention Earthshine, who was Beth's grandfather in some sense, off to the other side of the planet.

“Families,” she muttered. She caught Beth looking at her with a grin. “Sorry. Did I say that out loud?”

“At least you broke the silence,” Beth said.

“Perhaps we're all in some kind of state of shock. This has been a peculiar . . . journey. It's difficult to know what to say.”

Beth nodded. “Well, then, just say what you feel. You, at least, have been here before, Stef. As I have. And indeed the ColU.”

The colonization unit sat silently, inner lights winking.

Beth pressed, “
You know I'm right
, don't you? Earthshine wouldn't accept it. But you know this is Per Ardua. You knew it from the minute you walked through that Hatch—as I did, months back. I could see it in your face.”

Stef sighed, and looked out at the world, the mix of muddy Arduan green-brown with the more brilliant splashes of Earth life—the vertical shadows that were appearing now that the rain was stopping, and the clouds above were clearing from the face of the overhead star. “Yes,” she admitted. “I spent enough of my own life here
.
I think I could even sense it in the gravity, that slight, peculiar lightness you feel, like nowhere else I ever walked. Of course it's Per Ardua. But it's different, right? No traces of the human structures that used to be here—this was the UN's administrative center, after all, and a pretty well-developed city grew up here. But then we don't know what timeline we're in now, what became of Earth and Per Ardua—”

“People got here,” Beth pointed out, “from whatever version of Earth. They must have. Otherwise no tea.”

“Or, strictly speaking,” the ColU said now, “no heavily evolved wild descendant of a tea plant.”

Stef said carefully, “So the evidence of my senses tells me—yes, this is Per Ardua. But the differences are significant.” She glanced up, at the pale image of Proxima that, as the clouds cleared, was beginning to shine through the fabric of the shelter-canopy. “Even the star seems different, somehow, subtly. My senses, my perception of the world, say one thing. But my head tells me that this isn't the Per Ardua I know. Not quite.”

Titus Valerius grunted, and took an angry, impatient swig of water from a flask dangling from his heavy belt. “You talk of abstractions. This world is one thing or another, it is what you remember from before, it is not. What does it matter? We are here, now, in this place.” He glanced around at the group, at their pitifully small pile of equipment, Beth's and the Romans.' “Our hands and hearts and muscles, and the resources we find around us—that is all we have. That is all that matters. And,” he said pointedly, looking at Beth, “those we share this world with.”

Beth sighed. “And we are all there is. Look, I can't
prove
that we're alone here. I haven't explored every square kilometer of the planet. But while Earthshine was here we did do some exploring, and I walked a good way off to the southeast when he began his trek to the antistellar. I didn't see anybody else, or any traces of their works. Nothing but the bedrock structures we found buried under the dirt here.” She'd shown them the sonar images on her slate. “I'm ready to be proved wrong. But I don't believe there's another human soul on this world—nobody save Earthshine, wherever he is now.”

“And he,” Stef said drily, “is neither human nor has a soul.”

“I didn't even find any evidence of the complex life we saw here
before
. When I was a kid. The builders, the structures they made, the other life-forms like the kites in the air, the fish-analogues in the water courses.”

“No animals?” Titus snorted. “It doesn't sound like much fun. You can't hunt a tree.”

Clodia patted his knee. “Come, Father. Look on the bright side. We're Romans, the only Romans in all this world. You could be the Caesar of Per Ardua.” She wrinkled her nose. “The world already has a Latin name. I never thought of that before. How strange.”

“That's a long story,” Beth said. “I think my own mother was responsible for that.”

Titus growled and shook a leonine head. “There's no value in conquering a wilderness. No farmers to tax!”

Beth said, “But there's plenty of work to do here. I've made a start, with shelter, tools.” She grinned. “I've dug a latrine ditch. With eight of us using it, we'd better get that extended, fast.”

“We must save the compost,” the ColU said gravely. “For the farm we will someday build.”

Beth went on, “The good news is there's air to breathe, water to drink—I don't know if we
had a right to expect that on the far side of a Hatch on Mars. There's even food to eat. Not just tea. I've found root vegetables, things like peas, beans, squashes, even something like maize, I think, but gone wild.”

All this was slowly sinking in for Stef. “Wild variants of crop plants presumably brought from Earth. From
an
Earth.”

The ColU said, “They could be domesticated once more, given time and patience.”

“Time, yes. ColU, how much time must it have taken for the various strains to drift so much?”

“Not long,” the ColU said. “Not nearly as long as, for example, it must have taken for the installation here at the substellar, whatever it was, to erode away to its foundations and then be covered over by meters of earth.
That
is a better indication of duration. There has evidently been plenty of time here for all this to happen—time behind us—even if, as I fear, there may be little time ahead of us.”

They all stared at the complex little unit, its glistening lights.

“Textbook enigmatic,” Stef said, annoyed.

Titus growled, “You know, that twisted piece of junk always seems so much less
human
when it isn't in the bag on the boy's back. When you can see what it really is. Do you have something you want to tell us, you glass demon?”

But the ColU was silent.

Beth broke in, “I'll talk to it . . . I grew up with it, remember. We'll figure out what's on its mind, and what to do about it.”

“All of which,” Titus said, “is less of a priority than digging that latrine you talked about. We've got spades and other tools in the bundles of gear from the
Malleus.
At least in the army I was used to
that
.” He rubbed his daughter's shoulder. “As is my Clodia, who grew up in army camps.”

“I can dig a ditch,” Clodia said defensively. “I wanted to be in the army, before all
this
made a mess of everything.”

Stef studied Titus. “This won't be the life you're used to, Titus Valerius—or you, Clodia.”

“We came here in pursuit of Earthshine,” the ColU said simply.

“Well, that's true, but—”

“The glass demon is right,” Titus growled. “That was the mission we set ourselves. That was what
I
expected, and all I expected. That remains so.” He glanced around, at the stem-trees, the face of Proxima dimly visible through the canopy. “And this is where we have been brought—where Earthshine was brought. We must remember we are not the only agents in this matter. The beings who control the Hatches—”

“The Dreamers,” Beth said. “As Earthshine calls them. Among other, more insulting names.”