There was grumbling in the ranks at this, but Quintus said quietly in thick rural Latin, “Lads, we’ll find weapons as we need them, or steal them, make them. That’s always been my plan.”
The ColU said, “Make sure they don’t confiscate me. Tell them I am an idol. Or a piece of medical equipment. Or a scrap from the farmed moon, a sentimental souvenir…”
But the men had fallen silent.
Mardina turned, and saw that a door at the far end of the chamber had opened, to reveal the interior of the habitat for the first time. A tube of cloud, brightly illuminated, stretching to infinity.
“By Jupiter and Jesu,” muttered Fabius. “Into what have you delivered us, Collius?”
As the Romaoi filed toward the internal transport, one of Inguill’s soldiers approached her, holding a block of metal. “Found this, quipucamayoc. No idea how one of them smuggled this through the cleansing area. And then managed to drop it on the other side…”
Inguill took the piece. It was a kind of belt buckle, she saw, intricately shaped, and stamped with square, ugly Latin lettering that she had to pick out:
LEGIO XC VICTRIX
41
Ruminavi, who was a fussy little man with none of the evident intellect of Inguill, said they would be transported in some kind of carriage to their new home—Mardina imagined something like an elevator car—indeed they would ride in a series of such transports; the carriages would not take all of them at once.
So the Romans were roughly divided into groups of a dozen or less. Quintus, with Titus’s help, made sure the men were in their contubernium tent groups as far as possible, with somebody relatively sensible in charge of each. The legionaries grumbled and moaned as they formed a queue, hanging weightless in the air—a line that would take them into a chamber of wonders, Mardina realized, but soldiers always grumbled whatever you did for them.
When it was her turn, Mardina followed Quintus and Chu and a handful of Romans, and passed through a portal into a box of glass, a box riding on upright rails, which in turn were attached to a tremendous vertical wall that stretched above and below her, as far as she could see. Behind her in this glass box, Ruminavi the apu settled on a seat, surrounded by a handful of spidery axis warriors, and the Romans crowded in. And ahead of her…
She recoiled from the view, closing her eyes. She heard a kind of moaning, high-pitched, like a frightened animal. She thought it might be Chu Yuen, the slave, more intelligent than the average legionary and therefore more capable of wonder, and horror. She hoped it wasn’t herself.
“Look down,” the ColU said now, from the security of its lodging in Chu’s backpack. “Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson, listen to me. Don’t look ahead, or up—don’t look at the wall to which we are fixed—just look straight down.”
Mardina opened her eyes and looked. And, through the transparent floor, she saw what looked like Terra as seen from low orbit, a slice of sprawling landscape, washed-out green and gray under scattered clouds, and with stretches of water that glistened in the sunlight like polished Roman shields. “This isn’t so bad,” she said with relief.
“Here at the axis of the habitat we are over two hundred miles above this landscape. For that is the radius of this cylinder. The view here is just as if you were in a spacecraft, orbiting.”
“It seems almost normal, in the sunlight. Except—”
“What sunlight?” the ColU said. “I know. There are breaks in the habitat’s tremendous walls. Pools that admit what must be reflected sunlight, to illuminate this enclosed environment—surely indirectly reflected, so that the radiation shielding is not compromised. There is one below us and not far ahead—you can look up now, just a little farther…”
The sunlight pool glared under the clouds, like a city on fire. It was an eerie, beautiful sight.
Ruminavi said, “We call them the windows of Inti. For Inti is our sun god, you see.”
The transport suddenly lurched into motion, heading down the face of the wall on its rails. The passengers were jerked into the air, like pebbles in a dropped helmet, Mardina thought, and forced to grab onto whatever handholds they could reach. Already some of the legionaries looked as if they wanted to throw up.
Ruminavi, safe in his seat, looked on with a malicious grin. “Keep tight hold. The acceleration will be high. We’ll be covering a lot of your Roman miles every hour by the time we hit the atmosphere. Of course by then you’ll be feeling the spin weight…” He laughed out loud. “Not so tough now, you Romans, are you? Just like your ancestors who begged on their knees to Tiso Inca’s generals to spare their city from the Fist.”
Quintus Fabius glared at him.
“All right,” the ColU said now. “Look down again, Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson. And look up. Look at the wall itself, down which we are climbing…”
It was more than a wall, she saw now, it was an engineered cliff face, crusted with structures, blocks and domes and pyramids—all essentially constructed of steel, Mardina thought, but ornately painted, even faced with stone and bound by steel straps. Structures—that was the wrong word. She saw lights gleam from within, doorways opening: these were buildings, inhabited by people. At the axial point itself a tremendous tower sprouted straight out from the wall, built of stone blocks of some kind: a stepped pyramid, skinny and enormously long. And in one place she saw a gang of workers, in pressure suits, tethered to handholds fixed to the wall, engaged in the construction of something new. A living, changing place then, a vertical town, stuck to this wall. And the rails on which the transport ran cut through all this clutter in a dead straight line before plunging down into the clouds far below.
Mardina uttered a silent prayer. “It is a city in the sky.”
“No,” said the ColU. “A city above the sky. We are in a near vacuum here, Mardina. The air will only become significantly dense perhaps twenty miles above the ground—I mean, the cylindrical hull. This habitat, four hundred and fifty miles in diameter, essentially contains a vacuum, with a thin layer of air plastered over its inner surface, kept there by the spin gravity.”
“A vast city in the vacuum. Why’s it here?”
The apu snorted. “Why do you think? This is Hanan Cuzco, home of the Inca himself, and his family and heirs and closest advisers. The greatest marvel in Yupanquisuyu, outshining even that dump Hurin Cuzco at the eastern pole. The mitimacs are kept out by all this lovely vacuum. Why, a war could be raging down there on the ground and we’d never know about it up here.”
“‘We,’ Ruminavi?” said Quintus. “But you don’t live here, do you? It was my understanding that you’re coming with us, all the way to this grubby antisuyu, where you live.”
Ruminavi scowled. “Yes, and let’s see how long your Roman arrogance lasts in my jungle, you posturing clown.”
Mardina looked again at the compartment’s rear wall, the relatively comforting vision of a riveted metal wall flying up past her face. Hundreds of miles of metal, of steel and rivets… “All right, Collius. I think I’m ready for the next stage.”
“Very well. Stay upright, feet down toward the ground—so to speak. When we are farther from the axis the spin gravity will become stronger and pull you down. Now look straight ahead, lift your face slowly…”
If she had been in orbit around Terra, at this altitude the curve of the world would be apparent; she would find a horizon in every direction she looked. But here it was different. Here, when she lifted her head, she saw the panorama below her, of rivers and hills and inland seas and what looked like farms, what looked like cities, extending directly ahead, the details becoming a compressed blur with distance, until at last she saw only a band of air glowing with the illumination of the light pools. There was no sense of curvature—not if she looked straight ahead. But if she looked away from that axis, the landscape curved up, rising to either side and joining over her head to form a tube of smeared light, green and blue and gray. It was as if she were holding up a rolled-up map, she thought, and peering through it at a distant source of light.