Quintus turned to the slave. ‘What can we do, Collius? Can we stop this?’
‘Time is short,’ the ColU whispered. ‘It is fortuitous we arrived back here in time to observe this, let alone intervene. I would suggest that only Earthshine himself can stop the collision – if he wills it.’
Stef said, ‘Then we have to go there. To Mars.’
Penny said, ‘Why should he even speak to us?’
‘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 kilometres 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.’
CHAPTER 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. 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, 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.’