But Mars was only a distraction, for the reports soon started to come in from the ground, from Terra. The impact had sent immense volumes of molten rock spraying out across the solar system. Much of this was observed, from the ground, from space. Some of the debris, inevitably, would strike Terra itself, falling on a world full of panic and suspicion. There was a brief flurry of messages, passed between the capitals of the world. A peremptory order came from Ostia, home of the Roman fleet, for the Malleus Jesu to return to the home world. Quintus ignored the order.

And then the missiles started flying.

Quintus Fabius saw it for himself, through the farwatchers, peering back past the glare of the drive plume. Sparks of brilliant light burst all over the beautiful hide of Terra. Luna, too. It had happened before. There had been a war on Luna, rocks had fallen on Terra – people thought it was a deliberate if deceptive strike by some rival, or maybe they mistook the rocks for some kind of kinetic-energy weapon. Or maybe they just took the chance to have a go. So it was now.

There was a final flare of light, a global spasm that dazzled Quintus, making him turn his heavy head away from the eyepiece.

And in that instant Quintus was called by his optio. ‘Centurion, we’re being hailed.’

‘By who? One of ours, Brikanti, Xin—’

‘It’s not a language we recognise, sir. Nor a vessel design we know.’

‘What language? Wait. Ask Collius what language it is.’

A moment later, the reply came. ‘Collius had an answer, sir.’

‘Why aren’t I surprised?’

‘He says it’s a variant of – it’s difficult to pronounce.’

‘Spit it out, man.’

‘Quechua.’

EPIGRAPH 2

In the hearts of the surviving rocky worlds of the solar system –

Across a score of dying realities in a lethal multiverse –

In the chthonic silence –

There was satisfaction.

The artificial entity, which was a parasitic second-order product of the complexification of surface life on the third planet, had struck a deep blow at the Dreamers in the heart of the fourth planet. An unprecedented blow. Dreamers had died at the hands of natural catastrophes before. Even planets were mortal. Never had they been targeted by intelligence, by intention.

There had been shock.

There had been fear.

To extend the network, to open a door for the parasite – to remove it from this time, this place – had been an unpleasant necessity. Otherwise, the destruction would surely have continued, in this system and others, or, worst of all, it might have spread through the network of mind itself.

The parasite had not been destroyed. But, delivered to a new location, perhaps it could be educated. Neutralised through knowledge.

That was the hope. Or the desperation.

For time was short, and ever shorter.

In the Dream of the End Time, the note of urgency sharpened.

THREE

CHAPTER 37

AD 2233; AUC 2986; AY (AFTER YUPANQUI) 795

Two days after the impact, after a day under full acceleration and a second cruising at nearly a hundredth of the speed of light – beyond most of the asteroids, so far out that the sun showed only a shrunken, diminished disc – the Malleus Jesu floated in emptiness, an island of human warmth and light.

And yet it was not alone.

With the ship drifting without thrust, the Arab communications engineers unfolded huge, sparse antennas, which picked up a wash of faint radio signals coming from across the plane of the solar system: from Earth, from Mars, from the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the asteroid belt, and the Trojans, great swarms of asteroids that preceded and trailed Jupiter in gravitationally stable points in the giant planet’s orbit – some from even further out, from the ice objects of the Kuiper belt.

The signals weren’t sophisticated, the ColU murmured to his companions. They were just voice transmissions, and mostly of an official kind: listings of positions, trajectories, cargoes, permissions sought and denied or granted, payments made and received. Very occasionally sparks of laser light were picked up, fragments of signals. Maybe these carried the more sophisticated communications of whatever culture dominated here, with the radio reserved for those who could afford no better. The narrow-beam laser signals could only be picked up if the ship happened to swim in the way of their line-of-sight trajectories, of course. What made all this harder to understand and interpret was that many of these messages were like one side of a conversation, such were the distances between transmitter and receiver. It could take forty minutes for a signal to travel from Jupiter to Earth. Why, it could take ten or twelve seconds for a radio signal just to cross between Jupiter’s moons, such were the dimensions of that miniature planetary system alone.

The Arab observers gathered other evidence of activity too, mostly the characteristic radiation leakage of kernel engines, as ships criss-crossed a very busy inner solar system and sailed to the great islands of resources further out.

The Roman and Brikanti officers listened hard to the messages, trying to make sense of these static-masked scraps of information. Listening, mostly, for Latin and Brikanti voices. They even had Chu and Jiang up in the observation suites listening for traces of Xin.

At least they seemed to be sailing undetected. There had been no direct hails, no approach by another ship – no sign that any other craft was being diverted to rendezvous with them. That was no accident. As soon as the first transmissions had been received, Quintus Fabius had ordered the shutdown of all attempts to transmit from the Malleus. Even the ship’s radar-like sensor systems, which were capable of characterising other ships, surfaces and other objects to a fine degree of detail, were put out of commission; only passive sensors, like the Arabs’ telescopes, were permitted. And nor was Quintus yet ready to fire the drive, even to decelerate a craft fleeing from the inner solar system, for a kernel drive would surely be immediately visible. Quintus didn’t put it this way, Stef recognised, but he had instinctively locked down the Malleus into a stealth mode. The ship was undetected, and Quintus wanted it to remain that way as long as possible.

After a few days the ColU summed up the dismal results to its companions.

‘There are a few scraps of a kind of degenerate Latin to be heard,’ it reported. ‘The crew leap on these as if they were messages from the Emperor himself. But they are only a few, and usually just phrases embedded in a longer string of communication. As if a speaker of a foreign language lapses into his or her native tongue when searching for a word, when muttering a familiarity or a prayer … There is actually more Xin spoken, by word count, than Latin, but again it’s a minor trace compared to the dominant tongue.’

Stef prompted, ‘And that dominant tongue is …’

‘As I detected from the beginning, Quechua.’

‘Inca?’

‘Inca.’

The Malleus wasn’t just an island of life in the vast vacuum of space; to the crew it was an island of romanitas in a sea of barbarians.

Inca.

For the time being there was no great urgency to act. The ship had been reasonably well stocked with supplies before its voyage from Terra to Earthshine’s Mars; that wouldn’t last for ever but there was no immediate crisis.

Meanwhile the centurion managed his crew. As soon as the drive was cut Quintus had ordered the fighting men, legionaries and auxiliaries, to adopt the routines of in-cruise discipline, and they threw themselves into this with enthusiasm. They were without gravity, of course, so that such exercises as marching and camp-building were ruled out. But soon the great training chambers within the hull were filled with men wrestling, fighting hand to hand or with weapons, blunted spears and swords and dummy firearms. They were building up to a mock battle on a larger scale, a practice for free-fall wars of a kind that had in fact been fought out in reality, in the long history of the triple rivalry of Rome and Brikanti and Xin.