Ultima (Proxima Book 2) by Stephen Baxter

Author:Stephen Baxter [Baxter, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

40

The reception chamber was meant to impress, Mardina thought, if not to awe. Even before you got into the main body of the Titan, the huge space habitat itself.

The chamber was a wide, deep cylinder set precisely at the spin axis of the rotating habitat, with zero-gravity guide ropes strung from wall to wall. To reach this chamber you had already had to pass through a series of locks, each of which alone had been larger than any single cabin in the Malleus Jesu. The place was ornate, too, with rich woven blankets spread over the steel walls, and sprays of brilliantly colored feathers, even the gleam of gold and silver plate. The huge face of some angry god, his eyes picked out by emeralds, glared down at the Romans from the opposite wall.

And, from glass-walled emplacements all around them, troops stared down at the newcomers. They wore a uniform of a simple shift tied at the waist, brightly colored, and functional helmets of what looked like hard steel. They had weapons to hand, short swords and stabbing spears—even some kind of artillery, and blunt muzzles peered at the Romans from all sides.

And now the stranded Malleus personnel—forty legionaries with their Centurion Quintus Fabius, Mardina, Titus Valerius and his daughter, Michael the Greek medicus, and Chu Yuen with the ColU in its pack on his back—were huddled in this vast arena, tangled up in the guide ropes like flies in a spiderweb. It didn’t help that all of them had been cleansed before being allowed this far into the habitat—stripped naked, bathed in hot showers, their clothes shaken out in the vacuum. The ColU said it was entirely sensible that the controllers of this enclosed world would try to keep out fleas and lice and diseases. But it had taken all of Quintus’s personal authority to persuade his men to submit to this.

The Romans, in their military tunics and boots with their cloaks and packs, looked like savages in this setting, like the barbarians they effected to despise. At least they didn’t look like soldiers anymore. Well, Mardina hoped not. At Quintus’s orders the legionaries had left behind on the Malleus Jesu their gladios and spears and fire-of-life weapons, and their armor, even their military belts and medals.

The bulk of the ship’s occupants had transferred to the habitat. The ship itself, having come close enough to the Titan for the smaller yachts to deliver the legionaries to the hub port, was now hiding among the asteroids manned by a skeleton crew, a handful of legionaries under the command of optio Gnaeus Junius and trierarchus Eilidh—and with the more fragile passengers, including Jiang, Stef Kalinski and Ari Guthfrithson—able to survive for a long time on supplies meant for five times their number.

Now, as the Romans waited for the latest step in their induction, Quintus Fabius kept up a steady stream of encouragement. “Take it easy, lads. You look stranger to them than they do to you—even if you are simple farmers of the ice moons.

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