CHAPTER 35

‘Academician? Can you still hear me? This is Malleus Jesu—’

‘I can hear you, dear Mardina. Oh, my. This couch is just too comfortable. I believe I dozed off! There’s one disadvantage of such an elderly observer.’

‘Well, it’s been a long day for us all, Academician.’

‘Please. Call me Penny.’

‘Penny, then. There’s only half an hour to go.’

‘Yes, dear. I guessed it must be about that. Now, let me see. Ceres – Höd – is almost directly over my head. The glass roof of Earthshine’s peculiar garden is nothing if not revealing, and I have a dramatic view of the sky …

‘I should report what I see as objectively as I can, shouldn’t I? Ceres looks, I would say, three times as wide as the sun does from Earth. And it is growing in size, as if swelling, almost visibly. What a strange sight it is! I have seen a total solar eclipse on Earth, and that had something of the same strange, slow grandeur of movement in the sky. You can sense there are huge masses sliding to and fro in the firmament above. But I can’t see the scar left by the fall of the Celyn, no glowing new crater. The spin of the asteroid has kept it away from me, and I imagine there will not be time enough for a full rotation. How brave those young crew were! But, oh my, it grows ever larger. And yet there is no effect yet, nothing to feel here on the ground, even though there are only minutes left.’

‘I understand little of this, Academician Penny. What will happen to Mars? And why would Earthshine do this?’

‘As to the what – I think I can estimate some of that for you. Here we have Ceres – forgive me for using the name I grew up with – a ball of ice and rock six hundred miles across, coming in at forty or fifty thousand Roman miles in every Roman hour. If a respectable fraction of that tremendous kinetic energy is injected into the rocks of Mars, then I estimate – and I was always good at mental arithmetic – some two hundred billion cubic miles of Mars rock will be melted and vaporised. Two hundred billion cubic miles, on a world only four thousand miles across. A layer of rock some four miles thick will be destroyed. All traces of a human presence will be eradicated, of course. And this is without considering the effect of the kernels, embedded here in Mars, in the ground of Ceres itself. If what we saw on Mercury is a guide, the total event may be even more energetic, even more destructive …

‘You ask, why has Earthshine done this? To strike back at what he calls the noostratum. That’s what I think. These deep bugs that he believes survived even the destruction of our world, our Earth – indeed, if they are the Hatch builders, they may have engineered those events to create jonbar hinges, for their own unfathomable purposes. Well, they won’t survive this. And maybe he’s right. He did force a response from them, didn’t he? They, or some agency, did give him a Hatch … Oh, I must sip some of my water. Excuse me, dear.’

‘… Penny? Are you still there?’

‘I’m sorry, child. Have you been calling? My wretched hearing … How long left?’

‘Only a sixth part of an hour, Penny.’

‘Ten minutes. Is that all? Such a brief time, and soon gone, like life itself. I take it we have failed, then, all our stratagems are busts. Well, perhaps it was always beyond us. But we must persist, you know. Earthshine is right about that, at least. We must understand why and how our history has become fragile – who is engineering all this. And yet we must, too, find a way to contain Earthshine himself.

‘Ceres is huge, now spanning – what? Eight or nine times the diameter of sun or moon? I can see features on that surface now, clearly visible through the fine Martian air. Craters, of course. Long cracks, almost like roadways – annealed fissures in the ice, perhaps caused by the stress of the displacement from the object’s original orbit. Ceres is already damaged, then. And it is growing, swelling, it is all so easily visible now. Oh my, it is a quite oppressive presence, and I should have expected that. Almost claustrophobic. You must forgive them, you know, Mardina.’

‘Who?’

‘Your parents. Even your fool of a father – deluded, self-serving and greedy as he is – has always done his best for you, as he sees it. And your mother was horribly harmed by the circumstances of her birth. She was the only child on a whole world, or so she grew up thinking, and yet she grew to love the place, as all children love their homes. But she was taken from that home by the Hatches, that greater power that is manipulating our destiny – all our destinies. After all that you can’t blame her for longing to find a way home.’

‘I don’t blame her. I’m just trying to understand. Do you think she will ever find what she’s looking for?’

‘It’s not impossible. We understand very little of the true structure of this multiverse we inhabit. I’m sorry, I used an English word. And maybe, some day, you will find her again.’

‘Your sister is here. Stef. Would you like to speak to her?’

‘No. It would do no good. But I am glad she is there, now, at the end. What of Jiang Youwei?’

‘He was very distressed that you did not return.’

‘Ah. Youwei has been such a good friend … A burden has been lifted from his shoulders, however. Please ask my sister to keep an eye on him.’

‘She will.’

‘And tell her I’m sorry.’

‘She knows, Penny. And she says she forgives you.’

‘How good of her. Ha! What an old witch I am, bitter and sarcastic to the end …’

‘She says she expects nothing less. Umm, the remaining time is—’

‘Thank you. But I don’t feel I need a countdown, dear. Oh, that brute in the sky – individual features, the craters and canyons, grow in my sight now. Ceres becomes a plain that is extending away, extending to the horizon.’

‘Penny—’

‘Oh, it’s beautiful! A sky like a mirror of the ground, a sky of rock! Mardina, Stef. Don’t forget me. Don’t forget that I’ll always

CHAPTER 36

Höd, Ceres, was about a seventh the diameter of the target planet. It took a minute for it to collapse into the surface of Mars. Mardina saw that the smaller world kept its spherical shape throughout the stages of the impact, the internal shock waves that would otherwise have disrupted the asteroid travelling more slowly than the arc of destruction that consumed the asteroid at the point of contact.

Even before the asteroid was gone, a circular wave like a mobile crater wall was washing out around the planet. This tremendous ripple crossed Mars, destroying famous landscapes billions of years old: the Hellas basin, the Valles Marineris, which briefly brimmed with molten rock before dissolving in its turn. Following the rock wave came a bank of glowing, red-hot mist that obscured the smashed landscape.

And when the ripple in the crust had passed right around the planet, it converged on the antipode to the impact site, closing in on the Tharsis region in a tremendous clap, where huge volcanoes died in one last spasm of eruption.

The Malleus Jesu fled the scene at an acceleration of three gravities. Fled away from the sun, into the dark.

Centurion Quintus Fabius sat brooding in his observation lounge, where his Arab navigators had fixed up farwatcher instruments to watch the impact – sat in his acceleration couch, with the triple weight of the engine’s thrust pushing down on him.

Once the impact event itself was over, Höd was gone, and Mars was transformed, become something not seen in the solar system since it was born, so his Arab philosophers told him. What was left of Mars was swathed in a new atmosphere of rock mist and steam – an air of vaporised rock. For a time the whole world would glow as bright as the sun. And it would cool terribly slowly, the philosophers said. It would take years before the rock mist congealed, before the planet itself ceased to glow red-hot, and then a heavy rain would fall as all the water of the old ice caps and aquifers returned, to sculpt a new face for Mars …