‘Never,’ Titus rumbled.
‘There you are then. And besides, Titus, we need to be wilier. We need to buy ourselves some time.’ He glared around at them. ‘I don’t want any of you telling me that what I’m going to propose isn’t the Roman way. It isn’t all about blunt force; sometimes you get your way by stealth and guile – by waiting until you’re ready to strike. Remember Germania? Augustus lost his legions in those dense forests. The Caesars had to wait a generation – but when Vespasian finally struck north, destiny was ready to embrace him. So it will be with us …’
Only a Roman, thought Stef with exasperated affection, could come through a jonbar hinge into some kind of Inca space empire and deal with the situation by referring to the adventures of the Emperor Vespasian in the first century after Christ.
Titus said, ‘So what is the plan, sir?’
‘We do as the optio suggested. We’ll need to use the drive, of course, to fly back into the heart of the solar system, but kernel drives are common here. But we keep our heads down. We hide. We go in camouflage – we’re a bunch of miners from the other side of Jupiter, come in for supplies, maybe looking for work …’
‘And where do we go, sir? Not Terra.’
‘Not the hellhole it’s become, Titus, no. This is where we go.’ He gestured at the screen. ‘This big monster, this artificial Asia. That is the centre of power and wealth. Think of us as an undercover military mission if you like. Rome strikes back! I can’t take you home. But I can give your life meaning in this new situation, and mine. It may not be you who gets to sit on whatever magnificent throne they have in there, Titus Valerius – but I guarantee your grandson will, or your great-grandson!’
That won him a cheer, as Stef might have predicted.
‘But,’ Quintus said now, ‘the journey to the top of the mountain begins with a single step into the foothills. We make our way in, as cautiously as possible. We show up at that tremendous terminus, where the optio says he sees ships coming and going. We find a way to make them let us land. And if necessary …’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘We surrender, Titus Valerius. We surrender.’
CHAPTER 39
DATE UNKNOWN
Once again Beth Eden Jones walked across the stars, and between realities.
The chamber into which Beth emerged, having passed through from Mars, was empty, a bare-walled cylinder. It was Hatch architecture stripped to the basics, she thought, with no equipment – no ladder, no steps – no adornment on the walls, nothing resembling any science gear, no signs that humans had ever been here before.
But the chamber was flooded with light.
She looked up. The roof was open, the Hatch cover was raised, a slim circle tipped up on invisible hinges over the circular opening. And a star hung directly over her head, a sun, huge, pale, just too bright to look at directly, a circle of brilliance suspended in a clear faun-coloured sky. Its light poured into the shaft, and Beth’s shadow was a patch of grey directly beneath her feet.
She knew that star. She knew how it felt to stand directly under such a star.
She let her Mars pressure suit run a quick check of the ambient atmosphere – she wasn’t surprised to find it was breathable, with no toxins – and opened up her faceplate with a hiss of equalising pressure. She breathed in, deeply. The smell of the air was familiar too, a dusty, dead-leaves smell, not unpleasant. She even knew the gravity, she thought, a lot heavier than Mars, just a touch less than Earth.
A deep warmth filled her, almost a kind of relaxation, despite the extraordinary journey she had just undergone, despite the strangeness of her only companion. She dumped her pack on the floor and began to shuck off the outer layers of her pressure suit. ‘I’m home,’ she said.
Earthshine stood beside her, projected as a slick avatar to the usual standard, a middle-aged man dressed in a robust grey coverall. His own instant disposal of his virtual pressure suit was reassuring enough, she supposed; his monitors must agree with her own suit’s that the air was safe. But the projection looked oddly unreal in the vertical starlight, not quite as convincing as usual, as if the software that generated such images hadn’t yet quite adapted to this environment.
And the avatar looked on anxiously as his support unit, squat and blocky, rolled up to the final doorway to join them in this cylindrical shaft; it had to raise itself up on extensible rods to climb through the door frame.
Beth ran her toe over the floor, disturbing a fine layer of dust. ‘I wonder how long it is since anybody was in here.’
‘Or any thing. We don’t know where we are – not yet.’
She met his gaze as he said that – he sounded almost defiant, as if denying the reality – but she knew. She recognised this star, this air, and she had some deeper body sense of the familiarity of this world, a sense she couldn’t have put into words. But the argument would keep.
‘Well,’ she said practically, ‘wherever we are, the first priority when you’re in a hatch is always the same. We have to climb out of this hole. You’re a virtual; you can hardly give me a leg-up. We have rope in our packs. We could rig up a loop, try to lasso something …’
‘Use the support unit.’ The boxy machine rolled up to the wall and stood there, patient and silent. ‘You could stand on it—’
‘Reach the lip of the well, and pull myself out. OK. But I could never lift your unit out.’
‘No need. It contains grappling hooks, cables – it’s actually been specifically designed to negotiate Hatches, among other environments.’
She smiled. ‘I suppose that makes sense.’ She dug rope out of her pack anyhow and began to attach it to her pressure suit and her pack, so she could haul the stuff out after herself later.
Earthshine said, ‘Once we establish where we are the unit will adapt itself appropriately. It has extensive self-repair and self-modification facilities. Various kinds of fabricator, for instance.’
‘A regular Swiss Army knife.’
He looked at her. ‘That’s an old reference.’
‘Something my father used to say, some relic of his own past. His boyhood on Earth, before the freezer lid closed on him.’ As you know very well, she thought.
Earthshine just turned away.
She crossed to the machine, set her hands on its upper surface, and hoisted herself up. ‘I feel stiff. Stiff and heavy. That’s what a few hours on Mars will do for you. Getting too old for this.’
‘You’ll toughen up,’ Earthshine said dismissively. ‘Excuse me if I take a short cut.’ He flickered out of existence, and reappeared over her head, standing on the lip of the pit, hands on hips, surveying his domain.
‘I bet you can’t see a damn thing.’
‘Not with my eyes and ears still stuck down that shaft, no. Nothing but the crudest extrapolation from the available information. The star in the sky. A blank landscape, a horizon appropriately positioned for a rocky world of a size that can be extrapolated from the gravity we experience.’
On top of the support unit, Beth unsteadily stood upright and reached up to take hold of the rim of the cylindrical pit. The substance of the Hatch structure was smooth under the skin of her hands, and, as always, felt oddly elusive, as if her hands were slipping sideways. The Kalinskis had tried to explain to her that a Hatch, to the best of anybody’s knowledge, wasn’t a material artefact at all but a structure of distorted spacetime, and that the sideways forces she felt were something like a tide, a secondary gravitational effect … None of that made it any easier to climb out of this hole, however.
‘The gravity, yes.’ With a lunge she pulled herself up, straightening her arms under her and lifting one leg over the lip of the pit. ‘Ninety-eight per cent of Earth’s. Right?’ Of course that was the value; she’d grown up knowing it. She got to her feet, panting a little; she really did feel out of condition.