‘… 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, some day, 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, the remaining time is—’
‘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, Stef. Don’t forget me. Don’t forget that I’ll always
CHAPTER 36
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 travelling 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 told him. What was left of Mars was swathed in a new atmosphere of rock mist and steam – an air of vaporised rock. For a time the whole world would glow as bright as the sun. 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 came 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 recognise, sir. Nor a vessel design we know.’
‘What language? Wait. Ask Collius what language it 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.’
EPIGRAPH 2
In the hearts of the surviving rocky worlds of the solar system –
Across a score of dying realities in a lethal multiverse –
In the chthonic silence –
There was satisfaction.
The artificial entity, which was a parasitic second-order product of the complexification of surface life on the third planet, had struck a deep blow at the Dreamers in the heart of the fourth planet. An unprecedented blow. Dreamers had died at the hands of natural catastrophes before. Even planets were mortal. Never had they been targeted by intelligence, by intention.
There had been shock.
There had been fear.
To extend the network, to open a door for the parasite – to remove it from this time, this place – had been an unpleasant necessity. Otherwise, the destruction would surely have continued, in this system and others, or, worst of all, it might have spread through the network of mind itself.
The parasite had not been destroyed. But, delivered to a new location, perhaps it could be educated. Neutralised through knowledge.