Ultima (12 page)

The doctor advised her to wait three hours, in a dark and quiet room, after his brisk and painless treatment, to allow the aftereffects of the drug he rubbed into her gums to wear off.

Titus was waiting for her, with Michael, when she emerged. Titus grinned. “How are you feeling?”

“You were right. The
medicus
here had to peel me off the ceiling.” In fact she still felt giddy, but she wasn't about to admit that to Titus.

“Well, when we take the ascension again, prepare to have your head float away once more.” The legionary led them across the parkland to the fireman's pole. They paused under a complex set of anchors that held cables supporting the various cradles that rode up and down the pole. A couple of legionaries stood by the installation, at ease. “Since Michael is with us we have permission to ride the ascension all the way down to the pen. It's quite a trip, I can tell you. You'll feel like Jesu Himself in the End Times, when He will descend on Rome with Augustus and Vespasian on His left and right hands, to establish the final dominion of the Caesars across the stars.”

“Is that what you believe?”

“So all soldiers believe,” Michael said drily. “Jesu the warrior god embraced Rome by leading Constantius I to a famous victory. I, like most Greeks, take a more philosophical view—I'm more interested in what Jesu said rather than what He did. As for the Brikanti, they are Christians too, but they cling to the image of Jesu the ally of the fishermen, rather than the holy warrior who cleansed Jerusalem of corruption at the point of a sword.”

“But it's all in the Bible,” Titus said briskly. “You can't deny that,
medicus
.”

“Oh, I wouldn't dream of it.”

“I must read the Bible,” Stef said. “Your Bible, I mean.”

Michael looked at her thoughtfully. “Implying yours may be different? Hm. There is another interesting conversation we must have someday.”

This time the ascension cradle they took was an open cage, built stoutly of steel. Titus showed them seats—padded couches—and handrails, and even a small bar stocked with slim flasks of water, cordials and wine. “Not that the journey is very long, but officers always like to travel in style.” He glanced up and waved. “All right, lads? Let her go.”

With a clatter and groan the pulleys started to turn, and the platform lurched downward, dropping immediately beneath the level of the floor. Stef still felt giddy from Michael's Valhallan potion; she grabbed a rail.

“There's an engine up there, powered by steam, kernel heat,” Titus said. “Actually it's usually human muscle that's used to operate the pulleys. A slave party, and punishment details from the army units. Honest work and good discipline for a miscreant. But today we're riding, not Roman muscle, but hot air . . .”

The floor, itself a thick slab of engineering riddled with pipes, cables and ducts, rose up past Stef's head. A plaque marked clearly with “VII” above and “VI” below showed her which decks she was passing between. Below her now opened up the sprawling urban landscape of the township where she had her own small house with Yuri. Hearth smoke rose up from some of the buildings, wisps that drifted off toward great wall-mounted extractor fans. It was still morning, she knew, by ship's time; the big fluorescent lamps were not yet raised to their full noon brilliance, after an eight-hour “night” illuminated only by emergency lanterns. It struck her now that there were few people to be seen, that the neat little community seemed oddly underpopulated. But this township was lacking its slaves, who might number as many head as the citizens and their children themselves.

As their cage descended, dogs barked, and barefoot children ran to see the party pass. Stef smiled at the children, and resisted the temptation to wave.

Down from VI to V, and having passed down through a Roman city, now Stef and her companions descended toward the Roman military camp. It seemed a hive of activity; Stef saw units marching around a track at the perimeter of the deck, heavily laden with packs, while others were building some kind of fortification of sod and dirt—the sod and dirt having been shipped up from the ground for the purpose, Stef supposed.

“We train hard,” Titus said, looking around approvingly. “Suspended as we are in emptiness, we do not forget how to march, with our gear. We do not forget how to build a camp in a few hours at the end of a marching day. We do not forget how to command, how to lead.”

“Or how to complain,” said Michael drily.

“Thank you,
medicus
.”

V to IV, and here was another deck Stef was familiar with, the “barracks,” the level where she had first boarded the ship. There were orderly rows of huts here, accommodation for the century of legionaries and the various auxiliary units that made up the ship's military force. Titus pointed out a group of huts, almost an afterthought in the layout below, where the
remiges
were quartered when off duty, the ship's crew, all of them Brikanti—they were mostly Scand, in fact, Stef learned, the descendants of Vikings. Away from the obviously military facilities were blocks of sprawling housing, clustered around squares and courtyards. Here Stef could see women working and walking, a huddle of children engaged in what looked like some open-air lesson. She was reminded that these soldiers had brought their families with them on this interstellar march, their wives and lovers, and children born in and out of wedlock.

There were legionaries stationed at the hole in the floor through which they would descend farther. And this time the breach was actually blocked by a covering of wood and glass.

Michael dug into his satchel and handed Titus and Stef masks of linen soaked in some kind of alcohol. “You may prefer to wear this when we descend.”

Stef apprehensively donned the mask.

The platform slowed as it approached the level of the deck. Titus spoke softly to the guards stationed there, and they laughed at a joke Stef did not hear. Then the guards hauled back the big hatches that covered the portal in the ground, and the platform descended.

IV to III. The slave pen.

It was the stench that hit Stef first, a stench of shit and piss and vomit, of blood and of rotting flesh—a stench of an intensity she hadn't known since her first experience of zero-gravity emergency drills, in her early days as a raw ISF recruit.

Then she made out the detail of the deck, sixty meters below. Illuminated by bright white light, the entire floor was covered by an array of cubicles, neat rectangular cells, block after block of them lapping to the hull on either side. Above the floor, supported by angular gantry towers and fixed to the hull, was a spiderweb of walkways and rails, a superstructure of steel. Soldiers patrolled the walkways, or were stationed on towers mounted with heavy lights and weapons. All the troops wore masks. The troops carried none of the gunpowder handguns they called
ballistae
, she saw; instead they were armed with swords, knives, lightweight crossbows. Even the big weapons mounted on the towers were some kind of crossbow. No gunpowder weapons in a pressure hull; it was a good discipline that the ISF had always tried to follow.

It almost looked neat, industrial, a cross between some vast dormitory and a beehive, she thought. Until she looked more closely at the contents of the cells.

What had looked like worms, or maggots perhaps, were people, all dressed in plain grayish tunics of some kind, crammed in many to a cell. She thought she saw bunks—or maybe shelves would be a better word. People stacked, like produce in a store. A party was working its way along a corridor that snaked between the cells, hauling at a kind of cart—a cart laden with bodies, she saw, peering down, bodies loosely covered by a tarpaulin, with skinny limbs dangling from the edges.

Titus seemed moved to explain. “Obviously none of the slaves is allowed above this level because of the ongoing plague. So the security issues are more troublesome than usual.”

“‘Troublesome'?”

“We'll find your slave boy. There'll be a record of his cell.” The platform was slowing, and Titus pointed down. “You can see this shaft goes on down to the lower decks, but we'll stop at the walkways and move out laterally from that point.”

For one second Stef bit her tongue.
This isn't your world, Stef. Keep out of trouble . . . The hell with it.
She turned on Michael, her self-restraint dissolving. “You're supposed to be a doctor. Do you have the Hippocratic oath in your world? How can you condone this? How can you cooperate?”

Michael looked at her strangely. “You ask me? We Greeks think the Romans are soft on their slaves.”

“Soft?”

“There are ways for slaves to win their freedom, in much of the Empire. But to us, the slaves are barbarians, irredeemable. Once a slave, always a slave.”

“
But you're a doctor . . .
Never mind. I guess my own people don't have an unblemished record. You say there's a plague down here?”

“Yes. It is . . .” The words Michael used were not translated by the ColU's earpiece.

She dug her slate out of her tunic pocket. “ColU, are you there?”

“Always, Stef.”

Of course he was listening in; she wouldn't have been translated otherwise. “There's plague down here, in their slave pen. You have chemical sensors in this thing? Can you tell what it is from up here?”

Michael and Titus both stared as she held the slate high in the air, pointing the screen down into the honeycomb of a deck.

After a pause, the ColU said, “A kind of cholera, I think. Clearly endemic on the ship. I imagine that the appropriate vaccines are unknown to this culture. The disease must flare up when water filtering systems fail—it is possible the Romans don't even understand the mechanism, why filtering is effective—and the death rate in the conditions you show me below—”

“Am I in danger?”

“No, Colonel Kalinski. The immunization programs the ISF gave you over the years leave you fully protected.”

“And Yuri was surely treated too.”

“By the ISF medics before he was left on Per Ardua, yes.”

She thought quickly. “Could you manufacture a vaccine? You could start from samples of our blood . . .”

The ColU hesitated. “It is not impossible. With the help of the
medicus
, perhaps, the assembly of a cultivation lab from local equipment . . . it might take time, but it could be done.”

“In time to save a lot of lives?”

“Yes, Colonel Kalinski.”

Titus put his big hand over the slate, gently compelling her to lower it. He said tensely, “You speak to your oracle through your talking glass. It perturbs me that my commanders seem willing to accept you and your miracles without explanation.
I
would not permit it, were I the centurion—”

“But you are not, Titus Valerius,” Michael said gently.

“No. I am not. But I believe I understood what you have plotted with the oracle.”

“‘Plotted' doesn't seem the right word—”

“You intend to damp down the plague, to preserve the lives of slaves who would otherwise die.”

“That's the idea. What's wrong with that?”

Titus fumed. “It will break the ship's budget, and bring us all to starvation long before we cross the orbits of Constantius, Vespasian and Augustus, that's what!”

Stef frowned. “I don't understand.”

Michael said gently, “I fear you do not, Stef. You are not used to thinking like a slave-owner. I have mixed with the Brikanti, for example, who use slaves much less sparingly—indeed, mostly for trade with the Empire. But you
are
a star traveler. You must know that a ship like this has a fixed budget of consumables—water and food and air.”

“Of course.”

“Then you must see that to the centurion—or specifically the
optio
who manages such things—the slave labor aboard is just another asset, to be used according to a plan. In the first year we have so many slaves, who will eat this much food, who will get this amount of work done—of whom
this
number will die of various causes, and in the second year we will have a diminished number of slaves, reduced by the deaths, augmented by births, of course, but most of those will be exposed. And that diminished number is in the plan, as is the food they eat, the work they will do, the further deaths during the year—”

“And so it goes on,” said Stef.

“So it goes on,” Titus said grimly. “And as long as there's one slave left at the end of the journey to wipe the centurion's arse, the job will be done.”

“We
expect
disease, you see,” Michael said. “We factor it into the numbers. And if by some miracle you and Collius the oracle were to prevent those deaths—”

“I told you,” Titus said. “We'll all be chewing the hull plates before we're halfway home. Why, I remember once on campaign—”

“It won't be as bad as that,” Michael said. “You do dramatize, Titus. There would be culls; the numbers would be managed one way or another. But it would be severely destabilizing, and not welcome to the command hierarchy.”

“And the alternative,” Stef said slowly, “is to let them all die. Down in that pit.”

“We have no choice,” the ColU murmured from the slate.

“No,” Stef growled. “No! I don't know why the hell I was brought to this world, but I'm damn sure it wasn't to stand by and watch hundreds of men, women, children, die a preventable death.” She said desperately to Michael, “What if we could cut a deal?”

Titus snorted.

But Michael frowned, evidently intrigued. “What kind of deal?”

“The ship couldn't feed all these people, if they stayed alive. Very well. Let them live, and we'll find ways to feed them. The ColU, Collius, is a pretty resourceful oracle. You saw that already. Why, Titus, it showed you how to make soil down at the
colonia
, did it not?”