Ultima (11 page)

As they swam up, following more ropes, Stef wasn't surprised to find that on this deck, which Titus had curtly labeled the “town,” was indeed a small town of the Roman type, or at least a section of one, like a walled-off suburb. Rising easily into the air above tiled rooftops, she glimpsed a grid layout of streets centered on an open space, a forum perhaps, surrounded by multistory porticoes and with a small triumphal arch at one edge. Built up against one section of hull wall were banks of seats over an open space, a kind of open-air theater. And around the circuit of the hull walls ran a track, for racing or other sports. Everywhere people swarmed in the air: men, women, children, hovering over the buildings and ducking down into crowded streets. The noise in this enclosed space, and echoing off yet another roof partition above, was tremendous, a clamor of voices that sounded like a sports crowd.

Stef felt overwhelmed by the sheer vivacity of it all, the complexity, and she realized how little she'd seen of this mobile community down on the planet—and now here it was, cramming itself back into this tin can in space for the five-year journey home. But, even more so than on the military camp deck below, she smelled the sour stink of weightlessness-sickness vomit, and laced in with the general noise she heard the wail of infants. Any children under three must have been born on the planet itself, she realized, and they must be utterly bewildered by the environment of the ship.

With effortless skill, impressive given he had only one hand to use and with the ColU pack on his back, Titus led them down through a lacing of guide ropes to a neighborhood a block away from the forum. “You've been assigned a house down there. Not a bad district; there's a decent food shop and a tavern. You'll need to sign in with a councillor, he'll find you, and the
optio
will come and check on you before the engine fire-up . . . Any questions?”

Yuri asked, “Why do you put tiles on the roofs? We're inside a spaceship.”

Titus shrugged. “It does ‘rain' in here sometimes. You have to cleanse the air of dust. And besides, it's tradition to have tiles on your roof. We Romans don't live like animals, you know.”

Stef said, “I can't get over how big all this is. How many people aboard, Titus, do you know?”

“Well, the core of it is us, a century of the Legio XC. Eighty men give or take. But then you've got the officers and the staff and the auxiliaries, and then you've got our wives and families, and
then
you've got the merchants and cooks and artisans, and doctors and schoolteachers and such. Oh, and there's the ship's crew, mostly Brikanti, or Arab. What have I forgotten?”

“The slaves?”

“Oh, yes, the slaves,” Titus said. “As many of them as there are soldiers and other citizens. I'd say five, six hundred warm bodies on the ship.”

“That's a lot of people.”

“But it's the Roman way. You can't do it much smaller than that, miss.”

“Quite,” said the ColU. “And that's why the ship itself has to be so big. Stef Kalinski, we know these people have no grasp of fine engineering. Small-scale, closed life-support systems would be beyond their capability. So they build big! They bring along a massive volume of air and water—you said there was a whole deck devoted to farming, Titus?”

“Yes. A lot of greenery up on the villas deck too.”

“They build so big that this ecology is reasonably buffered, stable against blooms and collapses, despite the crudeness of the technology. It's all logical, in its way.”

Yuri said, “So when will they fire up the kernels, Titus?”

The big man grinned. “Six hours. You want to be lying flat when they sound the horn. And believe me, you want to be indoors. It's not like the camp here. No discipline. Nobody listens to the warnings. There'll be a sky full of babies and their shit, suspended overhead. You do
not
want to get caught in that rain when it falls. Come on, your residence is just below. I'll get you settled . . .”

Stef thought they descended like angels into the street where they would live for the next five years.

•   •   •

Six hours later, right on cue and accompanied by trumpet blasts, the banks of kernels at the base of the craft fired up. Stef imagined arrays of the enigmatic wormholes being prodded open to release their energies, streams of high-energy radiation and high-velocity particles, morsels of thrust pushing ever harder at the huge, ungainly structure of the
Malleus Jesu.

As the acceleration built up, Stef, sitting with Yuri and the ColU in deep couches in the small house to which they'd been assigned—surrounded by plaster walls with crudely painted frescoes—heard cracks and pops and bangs as the giant frame absorbed the stress, the rattle of a tile falling from a roof. She imagined the ship's basic structure would be sound: it was built of good Scand steel, Eilidh had assured her, not your Roman rubbish. But even so, after three years in microgravity—three years of neglect, as everybody was busy on the surface of the planet—there would be point failures, breakages of pipes and cables. Now there were shouts and distant alarm horns as, she imagined, emergency teams dealt with various local calamities. She even heard a rushing collapse, like an ocean wave breaking, as, perhaps, some small building fell in on itself.

Then there were the people. As she and Yuri sat in the semi-gloom—no lamps could be lit during the fire-up; that was the rule—and as the weight built up and pressed her into her chair, all around her on this deck with its model-railway toy town, she heard cries and groans, the clucking of distressed chickens, the barking of confused dogs, and the crying of children.

Five years of this, Stef thought. She closed her eyes and tried to relax as the acceleration pressed down on her.

A week after the fire-up, Stef broke a tooth.

In this most exotic of environments, a starship run by a Roman legion, it was the most mundane of accidents, caused by biting down on a slab of coarse Roman bread. She knew by now something about the tumors that riddled Yuri's body, detectable by the ColU but untreatable by it without the medical suite in the physical body it had left behind on Per Ardua. Yuri hadn't wanted to tell her; she'd forced it out of Michael, the kindly physician. Compared to Yuri's problems, this was nothing.

Nevertheless, her tooth
hurt.

Through one of their slates, the ColU, inspecting the tooth, clucked sympathetically, and Stef wondered absently when this farming machine had picked up that particular speech trait. “An unfortunate accident,” it said. “Your teeth are very healthy for a woman of your age.”

“Thanks.”

“But nothing's going to protect you from an unground grain in a loaf of bread. And unfortunately there's nothing I can do for you. Lacking my old body, my manipulator arms—once I could have pulled the broken tooth for you, or even printed you a repair or a replacement. But now that I am disembodied—”

“So what am I supposed to do? Tie a length of string to a doorknob?”

“You must ask the Romans for help.”

“
The Romans?
I'm to go to ancient Romans for dental work?”

“Well, they're not
ancient
Romans,” Yuri pointed out gently. “And it's not a Roman you'll be seeing but a Greek—Michael—go find Titus Valerius and have him take you to Michael. I can tell you from experience, he might not know so much, but he listens. Why, I'd bet legionaries lose teeth all the time.”

“That is
not
reassuring.”

Still, she had no better options. She waited a couple of days, munching her way through their hoarded supply of ISF-issue painkillers, brought in their packs through the Hatch. She had the illogical feeling that if only she could have a decent hot shower she'd feel a hell of a lot better. But there was no running water available within much of the ship, save in the bathhouses. Every morning and evening you washed from a bowl that you carried into your room from a communal supply.

At last, as the ColU had suggested, she asked the
medicus
for help.

Michael grinned back. “I'll need supplies from the officers' clinic. I take any excuse to go up to the villas. Come find me tomorrow.”

•   •   •

The next day, Titus Valerius led Stef through the sketchy township to the “ascension,” as the crew called it. This was the central shaft, open at every deck, that led along the axis of the ship. A stout fireman's pole ran the length of the vessel, and a series of platforms and cages regularly rose and fell along its length, hauled by rope-and-pulley arrangements.

There were many breaks in the decks, Stef had learned. You would often come across holes in the floor fenced off for safety. But these were mostly offset from each other, the floor holes not matching the ceiling, for obvious reasons of safety. The ascension, though, was the one shaft open to all decks. Stef thought this great way had a certain unifying aesthetic appeal, a tremendous shaft that penetrated the metal heaven above and the ground under your feet, and spanned from officer country in the crown to the engineers and their kernel arrays at the root of the ship. But the soldier in her recognized the value of a fast road that could take a squad of legionaries straight to any part of the ship within minutes or less. The Romans had always built their Empire on roads, and that, it seemed, was still true now.

So, with a nod to the bored-looking legionaries who manned the system, Titus Valerius escorted Stef up from deck six, the township, to deck seven, the deck of the villas. Sitting in a steel elevator-like cage, it was like ascending into a park. Stef's first impression was of green, the green of grass, trees, bushes, and moist, pleasantly warm air. She glimpsed only a handful of people—a group of men in togas and carrying scrolls, holding some earnest discussion beside the waters of a lake, a rectangular basin surrounded by slim nude statues. She might have been looking at a scene from two thousand years ago, the senators plotting the assassination of Caesar, perhaps. But over the heads of the debaters soared a metal vault, riveted and painted sky blue. The light, which felt warm and authentically like sunlight, came from fluorescent lanterns that dangled from the ceiling. And the surface of the pond, strewn with lilies, bore a subtle pattern of ripples, a product of the slightest irregularities in the kernel drive that thrust this scrap of pretty parkland through interstellar space. She wondered briefly how they covered over this water feature when the drive was turned off and the gravity disappeared.

Titus Valerius led her along a path by the lake, stone blocks set in the short-cut grass. He was a slab of muscle, out of place in this rather effete setting. “We'll meet the doctor at the quarters of the
optio
, Gnaeus Junius. Which is not the grandest up here, believe me. They modeled this whole deck, so they say, on a villa of the Emperor Hadrianus, in Italia itself. Although
that
was probably a lot more than a hundred paces across.”

“I can believe it.”

“Waste of space if you ask me.”

“That's officers for you.” But she remembered the ColU's speculation about the life-support systems in this big hulk of a ship. “You know, Titus, this park might be part of the ship's design, as well as a luxury for the officers. It's probably good for the ship as a whole, to have all this greenery up here—”

“Hush.” He'd frozen.

From a clump of trees, a slim face peered out at them. Some kind of deer, evidently. It held Titus's gaze for a second, two. Then it turned and bounded into the shadow of the trees, and Stef glimpsed a slim body, a white tail.

Titus growled as they moved on. “They won't let us hunt, you know.”

Stef laughed. “There can't be more than a handful of animals up here. And it wouldn't really be fair, Titus; they couldn't run far in this metal box.”

“True. A well-shot arrow could reach from wall to wall. But still, the hunter in me aches to follow, one-armed or not.”

She patted his shoulder. “You'll be home in a few years, Titus Valerius, and then you can hunt all you like.”

“I'll take you with me,” he promised. “Meanwhile here we are—home away from home for the equestrian and his subordinate officers.”

Gnaeus's “quarters,” set close to the curving hull wall, turned out to be a compact cluster of buildings centered on a cobbled rectangular courtyard, and surrounded by a fringe of carefully manicured garden. There was a gate, wide open, and Titus walked in boldly, followed by Stef. A fountain bubbled from a stone bowl at the center of the yard. The buildings were neat, single story, walled with plaster painted white and roofed with red tiles. Steam drifted from the windows of a blocky building in the corner. The only concession to the environment of space travel that Stef spotted were a few steel bands to hold the stonework in place in the absence of thrust gravity.

Titus saw Stef looking curiously at the rising steam. “A bathhouse. Do you have steam baths where you come from?” He pointed up over his head. “The whole dome up there, in the nose of the ship, is one big bathhouse.
I've
never been up there, I can tell you that. They say there are cohorts of whores up there, male and female, exclusively for the use of the officers, whores who never even see the rest of the ship, let alone the target planet. The lads spend a lot of time on the march speculating about that.”

“I can imagine.”

“But the most senior officers, like the
optio
, have their own private baths too. There's plenty of heat from the kernels to fire the hypocausts, and plenty of slaves to serve you, so why not?. . .” He frowned. “Speaking of slaves, we should have been met by now, by one of the
optio
's household slaves, or failing that, a guard.”

“I meant to ask you about the slaves. We still haven't seen Chu Yuen since we left Romulus.”

“Well, there's a problem down in the pen.” He rubbed his nose with the wooden stump of his arm. “I might suggest the
optio
has a couple of men posted up here. We're not expecting trouble, but you never know—you can't have fellows just wandering in as we have.”

“I heard that.” Gnaeus Junius, in a loose-fitting toga, came walking from one of the buildings, trailed by Michael, who was more plainly dressed in tunic and light cloak, with a satchel at his waist. Through the open door behind the two men Stef glimpsed lantern light, a low table covered by scattered scrolls, some kind of fresco on the patterned walls—a mosaic on the floor?

Titus stood to attention. “Sorry, sir. Didn't mean to be insolent.”

“Not at all. That's good advice, about posting guards. Sort it out when you return to barracks, would you? And consult the other officers about a similar arrangement, at least until the slaves are back.” He smiled at Stef. “It's good to see you again, Colonel Kalinski. How are you enjoying the journey?”

“I'm intrigued by it all. But I have a tooth that wants to get off.”

Titus grinned. “Broke it on a bit of bread. Whatever army you once served with, you wouldn't last a month on the march with a Roman legion, madam. With all respect.”

“That's probably true of most of us.” Michael deftly produced a small mirror on a probe from the satchel on his waist, asked Stef to open up, and made a quick inspection. “No sign of infection or other injury. I'm afraid the tooth will have to come out, however.”

Stef winced. “I was afraid you'd say that. I'm not terribly good with pain.”

“Don't worry. I have treatments, in particular a paste concocted from certain flowers unique to Valhalla Inferior. You won't feel a thing.”

“I'll say you won't,” Titus said with a grin. “They give me that stuff when I have problems with the stump. Why, I remember once on campaign—”

“Oh, hush, legionary,” the
optio
said, “you're not in barracks now.”

“Sorry, sir. Stef asked about the boy, Chu Yuen, who was assigned as a carrier for, umm, Collius.”

Gnaeus nodded seriously. “There is an issue in the slave pen, I'm afraid. None of the slaves have been released yet, since the launch.” He smiled. “Which has caused rather a lot of grumbling from those who miss their little conveniences.”

Conversations about the slaves always made Stef wince. Yet she felt compelled to press the point; as the ColU had said Chu at least was one slave they maybe could protect. “You couldn't make an exception for the boy? He was remarkably useful.”

Gnaeus glanced at the doctor. “Well, Michael, you're due to go down to the pen for another inspection anyhow. Why not seek out the boy, and see if he's fit to be released? Take Colonel Kalinski with you.”

Michael didn't look thrilled at the idea of such a journey, Stef thought, but he nodded amiably enough. “Fine. And perhaps you could spare Titus here for our protection.”

Titus looked even more gloomy, but he nodded grimly. “I'll do it,
optio.
After thirty years in Legio XC, sir, I've probably caught everything I'm going to catch and survived the lot.”

“That's the spirit,” Michael said. “And it is possible the boy, being of Xin stock, will have been spared the plagues running around the rest of the herd down there.”

Plagues?

“But first things first,” the doctor said, smiling, and he took Stef's arm. “If you would lend us a room,
optio
, let's sort out this tooth.”

Gnaeus led the way, and Stef, reluctantly, followed, with Titus grinning after her.