Thus the troops were kept busy, and that struck Stef as a good thing, because it stopped them thinking too hard about the reality of their situation.

These were men, and a few women, who were trained for long interstellar flights; they were used to the idea of being cut off from home for years at a time. Yet there were compensations. The legion’s collegia promised to hold your back pay for you, and manage your other rights. And, on the journey itself, you could take your family with you, even to the stars.

But now, Stef realised, many of those psychological props were missing. The mission should have been a relatively short duration mission to Mars – with a return to Terra in mere weeks, perhaps. There had been no need to take families on such a jaunt, although a few had come along anyhow, such as Clodia, the bright-eyed daughter of Titus Valerius. Many of the men grumbled that they hadn’t even been offered the chance of signing the usual pre-mission paperwork with the legion’s collegia. They shouldn’t have been away that long. The men already missed their families.

And there was a greater fear, under all the petty grumbling and uncertainty. Rumours swirled, disinformation was rife. But most of the men had some dim idea that they had been brought to a place more remote than the furthest star in the sky, further, some said, even than the legendary Ultima. And, they feared, nobody, not even the mighty Centurion Quintus Fabius himself, knew how to get them home again.

Stef Kalinski, meanwhile, cared for her companions – including the ColU, who shared its deepest concerns with her.

The ColU said, ‘Mardina and the others were right not to follow Earthshine – leaving aside the family entanglements. He is furthering his own ends, that’s for sure, and in a horribly destructive way. But, just as I promised him, some day, somehow, I must follow him.’

Stef frowned. ‘How, though? Through the Hatch on Mars? But it may not even exist any more. And why you?’

‘Because he and I, of all the artificial minds of the UN-China Culture, are evidently the only two survivors. There were none like us in the Rome-Xin Culture; it seems likely there will be none here, wherever we are. And, in a way, he seeks the truth.’

‘What truth?’ Stef pressed. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The larger story. The truth of the universe, that links the phenomena of the kernels, the Hatches, and Earthshine’s noostrata, the dreaming bugs in the rocks. Even the reality shifts we call jonbar hinges. And the echoes I saw in the sky, aboard the Malleus, in interstellar space. Echoes, not of a past event, but of a future cataclysm … All of this is linked, I am convinced. And Earthshine feels the same.’

‘And you fear, that when he finds this truth—’

‘He means to smash it. To smash it all. He seeks to do this because he is insane. Or,’ the ColU added, ‘perhaps because he is the most sane entity in the universe.’

‘And you must stop him.’

‘It is my destiny. And perhaps yours, Stef Kalinski.’

‘I’ll keep it in mind,’ Stef said, feeling even more small and helpless than usual.

CHAPTER 38

Four days out from Mars, Centurion Quintus Fabius summoned his senior officers, with Eilidh the trierarchus and some of her Brikanti ship’s crew, and Titus Valerius as a representative of his troops, and the survivors of the UN-China Culture.

They met in a lounge in the area Stef thought of as officer country, stuffed into the heavily shielded nose of the Malleus. Basically the anteroom of a Roman bathhouse, this was an opulent room with tapestries and thickly embroidered rugs, and even oil lamps of a traditional design burning on the walls. In the absence of gravity, pumps and fans had to keep the oil and air circulating; this was a recreation of an ancient technology in a spacebound setting. Such backward-looking luxury, Stef had long since learned, was a deliberate ploy by the Romans, and the artificial lamps were a classic touch.

Stef and the others strapped themselves loosely to couches. Chu carried the ColU, as ever, his eyes modestly downcast. Arab observers sat quietly together against one frescoed wall, and Stef idly wondered if they longed to get out of this place of crowding and light and graven images, and return to the twilight calm of their great observation bays.

The centurion himself was the last to arrive.

He pushed through the air with an easy grace, and grabbed a handhold at one end of the room. ‘So we face the future,’ he said briskly. ‘Mars is behind us now, with all its heroism and failure. We have survived. And we’re here to discuss the nature of the place in which we find ourselves. I’ll leave the briefing itself to my optio, Gnaeus Junius. Who draws in turn on careful observation from the navigators, assisted by Collius the oracle.’ Before he yielded the floor, Quintus Fabius looked around the room. ‘Everybody here was purposefully invited, whatever your rank aboard this vessel – or the lack of it. Purposefully, that is, by me. I need to make a decision about our future, the future of the vessel and its crew and passengers.

‘And the decision is mine to make, it seems, for we have yet to contact my chain of command. I probably don’t need to tell you of the absence of any signals from Ostia, or Rome itself, or indeed any outpost of the Empire we recognise. Your orders, all of you, are to listen to what’s said here, and advise me to the best of your ability. Is that clear?’

Titus Valerius snapped out, ‘Yes, sir, Centurion, sir!’

Quintus grinned. ‘Well said, Valerius. And you can tell that daughter of yours that she will not succeed in defeating me with gladio and net next time we meet in the training chambers. Right, get on with it, optio …’

Gnaeus Junius took his commander’s place. Drifting in the air, papers in his hand, he nodded to a crew member at the back of the room. The lights dimmed – Stef noticed the flames in those oil lanterns drawing back as their pumps and fans were slowed – and an image became visible, cast on the wall behind Gnaeus. The bulky projector wouldn’t have looked out of place in a collection of nineteenth-century technological memorabilia, Stef thought, and she knew the image had been captured by the crudest kind of wet-chemistry photography. But it worked, and the content was all that mattered …

She saw a world, floating in space. Gnaeus let them observe without comment.

It was Earth – but not Stef’s Earth, and not Quintus’s Terra. She could make out the distinct shape of the continent of Africa, distorted from its school-atlas familiarity by its position towards the horizon of the curving world. Though much of the hemisphere was in daylight, artificial lights glared all over Africa, including what in her reality had been the Sahara and the central forest. Some of these were pinpricks, but others were dazzling bands, or wider smears. The seas looked steel grey, the land a drab brown between the networks of light. Nowhere did she see a splash of green.

Gnaeus Junius looked around the room. ‘This is Terra, then – or rather, it is not. This is not the world we left behind. For a start there is no sign of the war whose beginning we witnessed, as we fled from Mars.

‘You can see that the whole planet is extensively industrialised. Much of the glow you see comes from industrial facilities, or the transport links between them, working day and night. The glow, I am told by the observers, is characteristic of kernel energy. The observers also tell me they see the green of growing things nowhere. Clearly the world is inhabited by people, and they must eat; perhaps the food is grown underground, in caverns, or made in some kind of factory. We cannot tell, from a distance of several Ymir-strides.’

‘You have done well to learn so much,’ Quintus growled. ‘And, though I know the mother city is silent, have you seen Rome?’