The continents did not drift on Per Ardua. Perhaps that was something to do with the way this world was tidally locked to its star, the same hemisphere forever bathed in the light, the other forever dark. But there had been internal heat that needed release, as on Earth, and the result had been volcanic provinces, as the ColU had identified them. Every so often a whole chunk of some continent or sea floor would dissolve into chaotic geological upheavals, releasing heat, ash, lava, even building new mountains to be eroded away by the rain.
But, Beth saw, Earthshine was right; this dirt looked old. And that dusty Martian colour in the sky wasn’t the way she remembered it either. It was a long time since any mountains had got built here.
A small voice asked again, How long? And how could that be?
‘But there’s still weather here,’ Earthshine said. ‘Which is logical. The substellar point, directly beneath the star, will always be the hottest place on the planet, always a centre of low pressure, like a permanent storm system. And the antistellar, the opposite point, will always be the coldest – ouch.’ The first few heavy drops of rain fell, pattering on the broad, dead leaves around them, and slicing through Earthshine’s body. ‘I don’t get wet in the rain, but it hurts.’
‘Your software’s consistency protocols.’
She dragged the tent over the ground, trying to get to the shelter of the trees. She saw that the upright cylindrical carcass of the support unit had sprouted open panels, from which manipulator arms had emerged. Small components were being lifted out of the interior of the carcass, while net-like structures were being used to scrape together heaps of dirt. ‘What is it doing?’
‘Wheels,’ Earthshine said, walking slowly beside her. ‘It’s making wheels.’
‘Planning a journey, are you?’
‘Obviously.’
‘Where to?’
‘Away from here. Away from this wrong place.’ His anger was evident now; he said this with a snarl.
She reminded herself that he wasn’t human. Everything about him was the product of software logic of some kind. Yet she wondered too if he had the artificial equivalent of a subconscious. Given the way he’d behaved in the past, including smashing the Mars of the Rome-Xin history, that would explain a lot. So maybe his anger was genuine, the display unconscious.
At the fringe of the forest clump she found a couple of stout trees ideally positioned to anchor her shelter. She took lengths of her rope and began lashing the shelter to the trunks. The trees at least were as she remembered them, basically expanded forms of the ubiquitous stems. ‘If this isn’t Per Ardua it’s a damn good impersonation,’ she muttered as she worked.
By the time she was done the rain was coming down harder, hissing on the leaf-carpeted ground. She looked back at the Hatch, whose lid, she saw, was closing. ‘The Hatch is a spacetime artefact, and yet its designers took care that it’s protected from the rain. Well, that’s attention to detail for you.’ But there was no reply, and when she glanced around she saw that Earthshine had already retreated to the interior of the tent.
Beside the Hatch, in the rain, the support unit was rapidly assembling big skeletal wheels, four of them.
CHAPTER 40
The reception chamber was meant to impress, Mardina thought. If not to awe. Even before you got into the main body of the Titan, the huge space habitat itself.
The chamber was a wide, deep cylinder set precisely at the spin axis of the rotating habitat, with zero-gravity guide ropes strung from wall to wall. To reach this chamber you had already had to pass through a series of locks, each of which alone had been larger than any single cabin in the Malleus Jesu. The place was ornate, too, with rich woven blankets spread over the steel walls, and sprays of brilliantly coloured feathers, even the gleam of gold and silver plate. The huge face of some angry god, his eyes picked out by emeralds, glared down at the Romans from the opposite wall.
And, from glass-walled emplacements all around them, troops stared down at the newcomers. They wore a uniform of a simple shift tied at the waist, brightly coloured, and functional helmets of what looked like hard steel. They had weapons to hand, short swords and stabbing spears – even some kind of artillery, and blunt muzzles peered at the Romans from all sides.
And now the stranded Malleus personnel – forty legionaries with their Centurion Quintus Fabius, Mardina, Titus Valerius and his daughter, Michael the Greek medicus, and Chu Yuen with the ColU in its pack on his back – were huddled in this vast arena, tangled up in the guide ropes like flies in a spider web. It didn’t help that all of them had been cleansed before being allowed this far into the habitat – stripped naked, bathed in hot showers, their clothes shaken out in the vacuum. The ColU said it was entirely sensible that the controllers of this enclosed world would try to keep out fleas and lice and diseases. But it had taken all of Quintus’s personal authority to persuade his men to submit to this. The Romans, in their military tunics and boots with their cloaks and packs, looked like savages in this setting, like the barbarians they effected to despise. At least they didn’t look like soldiers any more. Well, Mardina hoped not. At Quintus’s orders the legionaries had left behind on the Malleus Jesu their gladios and spears and fire-of-life weapons, and their armour, even their military belts and medals.
The bulk of the ship’s occupants had transferred to the habitat. The ship itself, having come close enough to the Titan for the smaller yachts to deliver the legionaries to the hub port, was now hiding among the asteroids manned by a skeleton crew, a handful of legionaries under the command of optio Gnaeus Junius and trierarchus Eilidh – and with the more fragile passengers, including Jiang, Stef Kalinski and Ari Guthfrithson – able to survive for a long time on supplies meant for five times their number.
Now, as the Romans waited for the latest step in their induction, Quintus Fabius kept up a steady stream of encouragement. ‘Take it easy, lads. You look stranger to them than they do to you – even if you are simple farmers of the ice moons. I doubt very much if they’ve seen the likes of you before, Titus Valerius, save in their nightmares … Ah. Here comes somebody new to order us about.’
An official approached them now, a stocky, scowling woman of perhaps fifty, pulling herself along a guide rope. Flanked by an unarmed man and two soldiers, she wore a simple tunic not unlike the soldiers’, but with a pattern of alternately coloured squares – like a gaudy chessboard, the shades brilliant – and obviously expensive, Mardina thought. It was a brash garb that did not sit well with what appeared to be an irritable personality. And she carried a peculiar instrument, a frame almost like an abacus but laced with knotted string. She glanced down at this as she approached them, working the knots with agile fingers.
Titus Valerius murmured, ‘Speaking of nightmares, Centurion – look at those lads with the clerk.’
The soldiers who accompanied the official were tall, almost ludicrously so, a head or more taller even than Titus Valerius. Their long limbs looked stick-thin but were studded by muscles under wiry flesh, and their faces were bony, skull-like. They moved through the mesh of guide ropes with practised ease. Close to, they were very strange, even inhuman, and Mardina tried not to recoil.
‘They look ill,’ Quintus said. ‘Too long without weight and no exercise. Put them under my command and I’d soon sort them out …’
‘No, Centurion,’ Michael murmured. ‘I think you’re misreading them. These are perfectly healthy – and functional for their environment. They are adapted for the lack of weight. Look how strong they appear, strong in a wiry sense; look how confidently they move. I suspect they would be formidable opponents, just here at the axis of the ship, where there is no weight. Perhaps they have been raised in this environment, from children: specialist axis warriors. Or perhaps they are the result of generations born and bred without weight.’