‘Yes,’ Gnaeus said. ‘We’ve spotted many such scars. The structure may be old – centuries old.’

‘What a monster. No wonder they had to take poor Luna apart to build such things.’

Gnaeus said, ‘The question is, of course, who would live in such a structure—’

‘I can tell you that, optio,’ Quintus said. ‘That’s where the emperor will be. And the very rich. Living off the huge rivers of goods that flow between the worlds.’

‘An emperor become a god,’ Titus said. ‘I wonder how you could ever get rid of him?’

Quintus grinned back. ‘Good question, Titus. All right, optio, thank you. Well. We’ve seen enough. Now we need to decide what we’re going to do about all this.’

Stef had to smile.

The centurion growled. ‘Am I amusing you, Colonel Kalinski?’

‘I’m sorry, Centurion. I’m just admiring your boldness.’

‘I’m a Roman,’ he said, to a muttered rumble of support from his troops in the room. ‘And that’s what Romans are. We are bold. We take control. Although,’ he said, ‘to get through this crisis we may have to behave in ways Romans aren’t particularly used to.’

The men looked more uncertain.

‘Look – we’ve been out here four days, since Mars. And our time is already running out. Why? Because our supplies are. Our mission was supposed to last only weeks, at most. Soon we’ll need to land somewhere.’

Titus Valerius said, ‘Sky full of rocks out there, sir, among the Tears of Ymir. We could find a place of our own. Kick out a few Quechua speakers if we have to. We could call some of those other Latin speakers the optio heard out in the dark. Start building another Rome, to replace that hole in the ground we saw.’

Again Stef heard rumbles of approval.

‘I admire your spirit, Titus Valerius. But the problem with that plan is simple. Not enough women. Most of us didn’t bring our families on this mission, to my eternal regret. But then none of us knew what was going to become of us, did we? You know how things would go if we tried to make do with the ship’s population as it is.’

Stef laughed. ‘Even I would get a date.’

The centurion eyed her sternly. ‘Stef Kalinski, we would destroy ourselves within a few years at best. That is, if these Quechua speakers didn’t seek us out and destroy us first. Think about that, Titus Valerius. You remember our strongest enemy. Even now, Carthagio is a powerful memory for us all, the campaigns gone over again and again during training. Do you imagine these Quechuas, these Incas, will have forgotten Rome?’

‘Never,’ Titus rumbled.

‘There you are then. And besides, Titus, we need to be wilier. We need to buy ourselves some time.’ He glared around at them. ‘I don’t want any of you telling me that what I’m going to propose isn’t the Roman way. It isn’t all about blunt force; sometimes you get your way by stealth and guile – by waiting until you’re ready to strike. Remember Germania? Augustus lost his legions in those dense forests. The Caesars had to wait a generation – but when Vespasian finally struck north, destiny was ready to embrace him. So it will be with us …’

Only a Roman, thought Stef with exasperated affection, could come through a jonbar hinge into some kind of Inca space empire and deal with the situation by referring to the adventures of the Emperor Vespasian in the first century after Christ.

Titus said, ‘So what is the plan, sir?’

‘We do as the optio suggested. We’ll need to use the drive, of course, to fly back into the heart of the solar system, but kernel drives are common here. But we keep our heads down. We hide. We go in camouflage – we’re a bunch of miners from the other side of Jupiter, come in for supplies, maybe looking for work …’

‘And where do we go, sir? Not Terra.’

‘Not the hellhole it’s become, Titus, no. This is where we go.’ He gestured at the screen. ‘This big monster, this artificial Asia. That is the centre of power and wealth. Think of us as an undercover military mission if you like. Rome strikes back! I can’t take you home. But I can give your life meaning in this new situation, and mine. It may not be you who gets to sit on whatever magnificent throne they have in there, Titus Valerius – but I guarantee your grandson will, or your great-grandson!’

That won him a cheer, as Stef might have predicted.

‘But,’ Quintus said now, ‘the journey to the top of the mountain begins with a single step into the foothills. We make our way in, as cautiously as possible. We show up at that tremendous terminus, where the optio says he sees ships coming and going. We find a way to make them let us land. And if necessary …’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘We surrender, Titus Valerius. We surrender.’

CHAPTER 39

DATE UNKNOWN

Once again Beth Eden Jones walked across the stars, and between realities.

The chamber into which Beth emerged, having passed through from Mars, was empty, a bare-walled cylinder. It was Hatch architecture stripped to the basics, she thought, with no equipment – no ladder, no steps – no adornment on the walls, nothing resembling any science gear, no signs that humans had ever been here before.

But the chamber was flooded with light.

She looked up. The roof was open, the Hatch cover was raised, a slim circle tipped up on invisible hinges over the circular opening. And a star hung directly over her head, a sun, huge, pale, just too bright to look at directly, a circle of brilliance suspended in a clear faun-coloured sky. Its light poured into the shaft, and Beth’s shadow was a patch of grey directly beneath her feet.

She knew that star. She knew how it felt to stand directly under such a star.

She let her Mars pressure suit run a quick check of the ambient atmosphere – she wasn’t surprised to find it was breathable, with no toxins – and opened up her faceplate with a hiss of equalising pressure. She breathed in, deeply. The smell of the air was familiar too, a dusty, dead-leaves smell, not unpleasant. She even knew the gravity, she thought, a lot heavier than Mars, just a touch less than Earth.

A deep warmth filled her, almost a kind of relaxation, despite the extraordinary journey she had just undergone, despite the strangeness of her only companion. She dumped her pack on the floor and began to shuck off the outer layers of her pressure suit. ‘I’m home,’ she said.

Earthshine stood beside her, projected as a slick avatar to the usual standard, a middle-aged man dressed in a robust grey coverall. His own instant disposal of his virtual pressure suit was reassuring enough, she supposed; his monitors must agree with her own suit’s that the air was safe. But the projection looked oddly unreal in the vertical starlight, not quite as convincing as usual, as if the software that generated such images hadn’t yet quite adapted to this environment.

And the avatar looked on anxiously as his support unit, squat and blocky, rolled up to the final doorway to join them in this cylindrical shaft; it had to raise itself up on extensible rods to climb through the door frame.

Beth ran her toe over the floor, disturbing a fine layer of dust. ‘I wonder how long it is since anybody was in here.’

‘Or any thing. We don’t know where we are – not yet.’

She met his gaze as he said that – he sounded almost defiant, as if denying the reality – but she knew. She recognised this star, this air, and she had some deeper body sense of the familiarity of this world, a sense she couldn’t have put into words. But the argument would keep.

‘Well,’ she said practically, ‘wherever we are, the first priority when you’re in a hatch is always the same. We have to climb out of this hole. You’re a virtual; you can hardly give me a leg-up. We have rope in our packs. We could rig up a loop, try to lasso something …’