Clodia hovered dubiously. “If I don’t keep you here until the medicus has checked you over, I’m going to be walking back to Terra…”
It was another hour before Penny, fuming with frustration, was at last allowed onto the bridge of the Malleus.
And beyond the observation windows, before her eyes, once more Mars loomed huge, like a plasterwork in oranges and browns, scarred by craters and dry canyons, the silver bands of the canals glowing softly in the sunlight.
When she arrived, a kind of council of war was already under way, involving Quintus, his second-in-command, Gnaeus, and his ship’s trierarchus, Movena, as well as Stef, Beth, Mardina, Ari Guthfrithson, Kerys, and the ColU borne on the shoulders of Chu Yuen. Stef barely glanced at her sister. All of them looked beat-up to Penny, their skin blotchy, their eyes puffy. There was a faint smell of body odor in the crowded room—but then probably none of them had washed for days, Penny reflected; they hadn’t all had the comprehensive medical support she’d enjoyed.
And Jiang was here. He too looked wrung-out. But he held on to a rail, supporting himself in the air, and took her hand in his. “Mars again,” he said. “Where we first met.”
“Yes. All those years ago, at the UN-China conference at Obelisk.”
“No matter what we go through, Mars, it seems, endures.”
Quintus Fabius faced her. “Maybe Mars has not yet changed very much, Academician. But it will shortly. Look up there.” He pointed to a slice of dark sky, beyond Mars’s western limb.
Where hung a single brilliant star.
“Ceres,” Penny whispered.
“Höd, yes.”
“How close is it? That thing looks almost large enough to show a disc.”
Stef said, “Penny, we haven’t been troubling you with updates during the voyage. We hoped you’d sleep through it—”
“Oh, shut up, you fusspot.”
Quintus said, “Höd is larger than the width of Venus, as seen from Earth. So the Arab observers assure me.”
Penny tried to work that out. “Then it must be—what, a few million kilometers out?”
“Rather less,” Stef said. “The asteroid has undergone episodes of immense thrust. We suspect Earthshine has ordered the use of significant chunks of the body’s own material to use as reaction mass. The observers on the Malleus have computed the new trajectory.”
Penny could see the conclusion of all that in her sister’s expression. “My God.”
Stef took a deep breath. “Ceres is going to impact Mars. That’s finally confirmed. It’s probably what Earthshine intended all along.”
Quintus looked furious, as if this was some personal betrayal. “But why?”
“We’ve no idea,” Stef said. “Not yet.”
Penny looked at Stef. “How long?”
“The Arabs estimate twelve hours. No more.”
“As little as that? Very well. That’s the time we have remaining to stop Earthshine.”
Quintus nodded grimly. “Of course we must. This great act, this hurling of cosmic masses, can be intended to do nothing but harm. It may even start a war. We have to stop him. But we will face resistance.”
“Then,” Penny said drily, “I’m glad I’m on a ship full of Roman legionaries. Let’s work out our plan.”
But as the soldiers began to discuss tactics and fallbacks, a clock in Penny’s head began a dreadful countdown.
Twelve hours, and counting.
27
To Stef’s relief, Penny submitted to Michael’s insistence that she needed rest.
“And make sure she straps down again,” the centurion called as she was led from the bridge. “We may have some more hard acceleration to undergo before the day is done.”
“As you wish, Centurion.”
The rest of them inspected Quintus’s images of the layout of Earthshine’s latest base on the ground, at Terra Cimmeria. They were large-scale photographs, grainy wet-chemistry productions like all Roman or Brikanti imagery, but good enough, Stef thought, to get a sense of the layout. She saw three broad clusters of facilities, grouped close together. Farther out, the ground was marked by swaths of scorching, places where the ground had melted altogether: the relics of multiple landings of kernel-drive rockets.
“So, Colonel Kalinski,” Quintus said. “We have been scouting this area for some time—for years, as Earthshine has developed his operation. But I welcome your input now. This is the location where you say that the Xin had their Martian capital in your world.”
“Slap in the heart of the highland we called the Terra Cimmeria, yes.”
“Which was no doubt why Earthshine chose it,” the ColU said from Chu’s backpack, “because of that resonance. Everything Earthshine does will be shaped by an awareness of competing realities. And it is also, no doubt, why the site of a city that was called Obelisk for its greatest single building should be marked here by—point for me, Chu Yuen, left and down—that.” The slave seemed to work well with the master he carried; his finger stabbed down on the image of one of the three clusters of domed buildings.
Stef peered down. “I see a sharp stripe on the ground. Wait—where is the sun? That’s a shadow, of something very tall—”
“A tree,” the ColU said. “Not an obelisk. A tree. Encouraged to grow to some four hundred meters, which is three times the maximum theoretical height on Terra. A tree’s height is limited by the need to lift water to its uppermost leaves—”
“But on Mars, with its one-third gravity,” Stef said, “you can grow as tall as this. It must have been force-grown.”
“Yes. Earthshine has been established on Mars for some years, but not that long. Force-grown and encased in some kind of enclosure to retain air and moisture. We don’t have good enough images to determine the species yet. An impressive stunt.”
Beth leaned closer to see. Beth and Mardina had been quiet since Penny’s brief visit to the bridge. Only Ari had been quieter, Stef thought; the druidh had not spoken a word.
Now Beth asked, “But why would Earthshine grow a tree on Mars? It doesn’t seem to fit.”
“It’s for his allies,” said Kerys grimly. The nauarchus had also been quiet during this voyage on a Roman ship, Stef had observed, but she had watched and listened, evidently filing everything away. Now she pointed to another shadow traced on the Martian ground, in a second compound some distance to the north of the tree. “That is a ship—a ship of the Brikanti Navy, called the Celyn. Earthshine has at least one ship’s company’s worth of support on the ground with him, and most of them drawn from Brikanti ranks.” She glared at Quintus, defiant. “We don’t have time for blame games. This monster, this Earthshine, was after all found, fortuitously, by a Brikanti ship—my ship, all those years ago. How I wish now we had simply thrown the boxes that sustain him out into the Skull of Ymir! Even if we had preserved the rest of you.”
“Thanks,” Beth said drily.
“It was natural that as he began to lay out his schemes for the exploitation of other worlds, he would gather support from the Brikanti government at first. We believed we could control the situation—control him.”
“Well, you were wrong,” Quintus said.
“It began with his subversion of the crews of the ships we sent out to support him. He persuaded them to betray their nation—to follow dreams of greed and power, under him. That is what we believe happened. But they are Brikanti.”