‘And you fear, that when he finds this truth—’
‘He means to smash it. To smash it all. He seeks to do this because he is insane. Or,’ the ColU added, ‘perhaps because he is the most sane entity in the universe.’
‘And you must stop him.’
‘It is my destiny. And perhaps yours, Stef Kalinski.’
‘I’ll keep it in mind,’ Stef said, feeling even more small and helpless than usual.
CHAPTER 38
Four days out from Mars, Centurion Quintus Fabius summoned his senior officers, with Eilidh the trierarchus and some of her Brikanti ship’s crew, and Titus Valerius as a representative of his troops, and the survivors of the UN-China Culture.
They met in a lounge in the area Stef thought of as officer country, stuffed into the heavily shielded nose of the Malleus. Basically the anteroom of a Roman bathhouse, this was an opulent room with tapestries and thickly embroidered rugs, and even oil lamps of a traditional design burning on the walls. In the absence of gravity, pumps and fans had to keep the oil and air circulating; this was a recreation of an ancient technology in a spacebound setting. Such backward-looking luxury, Stef had long since learned, was a deliberate ploy by the Romans, and the artificial lamps were a classic touch.
Stef and the others strapped themselves loosely to couches. Chu carried the ColU, as ever, his eyes modestly downcast. Arab observers sat quietly together against one frescoed wall, and Stef idly wondered if they longed to get out of this place of crowding and light and graven images, and return to the twilight calm of their great observation bays.
The centurion himself was the last to arrive.
He pushed through the air with an easy grace, and grabbed a handhold at one end of the room. ‘So we face the future,’ he said briskly. ‘Mars is behind us now, with all its heroism and failure. We have survived. And we’re here to discuss the nature of the place in which we find ourselves. I’ll leave the briefing itself to my optio, Gnaeus Junius. Who draws in turn on careful observation from the navigators, assisted by Collius the oracle.’ Before he yielded the floor, Quintus Fabius looked around the room. ‘Everybody here was purposefully invited, whatever your rank aboard this vessel – or the lack of it. Purposefully, that is, by me. I need to make a decision about our future, the future of the vessel and its crew and passengers.
‘And the decision is mine to make, it seems, for we have yet to contact my chain of command. I probably don’t need to tell you of the absence of any signals from Ostia, or Rome itself, or indeed any outpost of the Empire we recognise. Your orders, all of you, are to listen to what’s said here, and advise me to the best of your ability. Is that clear?’
Titus Valerius snapped out, ‘Yes, sir, Centurion, sir!’
Quintus grinned. ‘Well said, Valerius. And you can tell that daughter of yours that she will not succeed in defeating me with gladio and net next time we meet in the training chambers. Right, get on with it, optio …’
Gnaeus Junius took his commander’s place. Drifting in the air, papers in his hand, he nodded to a crew member at the back of the room. The lights dimmed – Stef noticed the flames in those oil lanterns drawing back as their pumps and fans were slowed – and an image became visible, cast on the wall behind Gnaeus. The bulky projector wouldn’t have looked out of place in a collection of nineteenth-century technological memorabilia, Stef thought, and she knew the image had been captured by the crudest kind of wet-chemistry photography. But it worked, and the content was all that mattered …
She saw a world, floating in space. Gnaeus let them observe without comment.
It was Earth – but not Stef’s Earth, and not Quintus’s Terra. She could make out the distinct shape of the continent of Africa, distorted from its school-atlas familiarity by its position towards the horizon of the curving world. Though much of the hemisphere was in daylight, artificial lights glared all over Africa, including what in her reality had been the Sahara and the central forest. Some of these were pinpricks, but others were dazzling bands, or wider smears. The seas looked steel grey, the land a drab brown between the networks of light. Nowhere did she see a splash of green.
Gnaeus Junius looked around the room. ‘This is Terra, then – or rather, it is not. This is not the world we left behind. For a start there is no sign of the war whose beginning we witnessed, as we fled from Mars.
‘You can see that the whole planet is extensively industrialised. Much of the glow you see comes from industrial facilities, or the transport links between them, working day and night. The glow, I am told by the observers, is characteristic of kernel energy. The observers also tell me they see the green of growing things nowhere. Clearly the world is inhabited by people, and they must eat; perhaps the food is grown underground, in caverns, or made in some kind of factory. We cannot tell, from a distance of several Ymir-strides.’
‘You have done well to learn so much,’ Quintus growled. ‘And, though I know the mother city is silent, have you seen Rome?’
Gnaeus nodded to the crewman operating the projector. The screen turned glaring white as the slide was removed, to be replaced by another, much more blurred, evidently magnified. The boot shape of Italy was clearly visible, even though, Stef thought, trying to remember detail, it looked to have been extensively nibbled back by sea-level rise, even compared to what she remembered from the Roman reality. The peninsula was carpeted by the usual network of industrial activity, and Stef tried to map the brighter nodes on the locations of familiar cities.
Gnaeus pointed to a dark patch near the west coast. ‘This is Rome. The image has been greatly enlarged, as you can see … Sir, we would have to move in closer to do much better than this.’
‘That can wait, optio. The area of darkness, you say—’
‘At first we thought there was some kind of quarry there. Then we realised that the site of Rome is encompassed by a crater, big enough that it would not disgrace Luna. And in the interior of the crater – nothing. No life, no industry.’
‘I reckon we can see what’s gone on here, sir,’ said Titus Valerius. ‘Some of the lads have talked it over. If I may speak, Centurion—’
‘You already are speaking, Titus.’
‘They bombed us, sir. Whoever runs this world. There must have been a war, and they drove us back, and when there was nothing left of us but the mother city herself, they bombed us.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘Maybe they dropped a rock from the sky. Or maybe they used kernel missiles. Making sure Rome would never rise again.’ His voice grew more thick, angry. ‘These bastards did to us what we did to those Carthaginians, long ago, sir.’
‘I fear you’re right, Centurion. The question is who these “bastards” of yours are.’
He seemed to hesitate before speaking further. Stef wondered how the ordinary Romans on this ship had taken the news of the loss of their eternal empire – how the likes of Titus Valerius had coped with such torment of the soul. Rome – gone!
‘Very well. Carry on, optio.’
‘Luna is missing,’ Gnaeus said now, bluntly.
That startled Stef. ‘What do you mean, “missing”?’
‘I’ve got no images to show you … It simply isn’t there. We know that must have distorted Terra’s tides and so on but we’d need more study to understand that fully. Maybe it was destroyed in some war. We made a mess of Luna when we fought the Xin up there. Our best theory, given the level of industrialisation on Terra itself, and the massive colonisation of space – I’ll discuss that – is that Luna was dismantled for its raw materials.’
He showed more slides, more worlds with faces disfigured by massive industrial operations, more carpets of glowing light. ‘All the rocky worlds are the same, sir. Mercury, Mars. On Venus much of the atmosphere is gone, and some kind of huge operation is going on under the remnant clouds – we don’t know what they’re doing there.’