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  Book One: Emperor

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  Published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA). Previously published in a Gollancz hardcover edition. For information contact Gollancz, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, Orion House, 5 Upper St. Martin’s Lane, London WC2H 9EA.

  Copyright © Stephen Baxter, 2014

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Baxter, Stephen.

  Ultima / Stephen Baxter.

  pages cm. —(Proxima)

  ISBN 978-0-698-14296-1

  1. Human-alien encounters—Fiction. 2. Life on other planets—Fiction. 3. Space colonies—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6052.A849U45 2015

  823’.914—dc23 2015008226

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  Other Books by Stephen Baxter

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Two

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Part Three

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Part Four

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Part Five

  Chapter 75

  Afterword

  To all my extended family

  In the heart of a hundred billion worlds—

  Across a trillion dying realities in a lethal multiverse—

  In the chthonic silence—

  There was satisfaction. The network of mind continued to push out in space, from the older stars, the burned-out worlds, to the young, out across the Galaxy. Pushed deep in time too, twisting the fate of countless trillions of lives.

  But time was short, and ever shorter.

  In the Dream of the End Time, there was a note of urgency.

  1

  AD 2227; AUC (AB URBE CONDITA, AFTER THE FOUNDING OF THE CITY) 2980

  “Danger, Yuri Eden! Danger!”

  “ColU? What’s the emergency? Another Prox flare? We need to get to the shelter.”

  “Be calm, Yuri Eden. You are no longer on Per Ardua.”

  “Beth. Beth and Mardina. Where—”

  “Your daughter and her mother are far from here.”

  “Far? . . . Are they safe?”

  “That I cannot tell you, Yuri Eden. We must carry on in the presumption that they are.”

  “So why did you yell ‘danger’ in my ear?”

  “It was the only way to wake you, Yuri Eden. The drugs the medicus has been prescribing for you are rather random in their effects, although they are satisfactorily strong.”

  “So you lied, right? Since when was an autonomous colonization unit programmed to lie?”

  “I fear I have exceeded the parameters of my initial programming rather extensively by now, Yuri Eden.”

  “You know, I feel like I’m blundering down a dark corridor. And I open one door after another, trying to make sense of it all. But I’m safe when I’m asleep . . .”

  “Take your time, Yuri Eden.”

  “Medicus. That word . . . I’m still on that damn Roman tub, aren’t I?”

  “We are still guests aboard the Malleus Jesu, yes.”

  “And—ow!”

  “The medicus would advise you not to try to sit up, Yuri Eden.”

  “When I sleep, I forget. The crap growing inside me. I forget it all.”

  “It’s still here. But so am I, my friend. So am I. Here with you.”

  “Well, I can see that. So why the hell did you wake me?”

  “You asked me to. Well, to be precise, you asked me to witness and record your last will and testament. I can do that for you. But you have been asleep many hours, Yuri Eden. I thought it best to wake you before—”

  “Before the time comes when I never wake up at all, right?”

  “It was Stef Kalinski’s suggestion.”

  “Ha! It would be. How is she, by the way?”

  “The last time I communicated with her she was drinking hardened legionaries under the table. Anything to get the taste of the Romans’ disgusting fish sauce out from between her teeth. That is close to a direct quo
tation.”

  “She’ll outlive us all. Her and her impossible twin, probably.”

  “I hope to learn that someday. Yuri Eden, we must press on—”

  “Before I pass out again. It’s OK, old pal. May I have a glass of water?”

  “Of course . . .”

  “So. My last will and testament. What kind of legal form can we use that will be recognizable in the Roman system? Whatever the hell that is, two thousand years after the Empire was supposed to have fallen. It’s not as if I have much to leave to anybody anyhow. Only the stuff we walked through that final Hatch with.”

  “Including myself.”

  “Including yourself, buddy. It’s strange to think of you as property but I guess that’s how it is.”

  “I am only an AI, Yuri Eden. And in this . . . different reality . . . human beings are property, some of them. Some even on this interstellar vessel. So I am less of an exception than you would imagine here. We cannot change such things, Yuri Eden.”

  “Maybe not. But my instructions are clear enough. If Stef survives me, my share of you, in the Romans’ eyes, is to go to her. If she doesn’t survive me, you go to Beth, on Earth, if by some miracle you can find her.”

  “Quintus Fabius has promised me he will make sure of it, Yuri Eden, with the support of the legion’s collegia.”

  “So, let’s begin. I was born in 2067, old style. Getting on for a hundred and sixty years ago, then. Even though I have only lived—”

  “Sixty-two years, Yuri. The name your parents gave you—”

  “Is irrelevant. I was born in North Britain. My parents were both members of the Heroic Generation, who struggled to save the world from the climate Jolts of the previous decades. Well, they succeeded. And before the prosecutors caught up with them, they had me cryo-frozen at age nineteen. Just as well they never saw me revived on Mars, a century later.”

  “Your name, though . . .”

  “Some joker called me ‘Yuri’ when they hauled me out of the cryo tank.”

  “Very well. And after a year on Mars—”

  “I was caught up in an ISF sweep, with a little help from the Peacekeepers at Eden. Who were sorry to see me go.”

  “You are being sarcastic.”

  “Yeah, flag it. Found myself waking up again, aboard the ISF ship Ad Astra. A kernel-driven interstellar hulk full of press-ganged losers like me. I made myself popular once more . . .

  “So I spent—what, twenty-four years?—on Per Ardua, planet of Proxima Centauri. With Mardina Jones, and our baby Beth, and you, ColU. Struggling to stay alive. We found others, other ‘colonists’ stranded as we had been, and we fought our way to the Hub of the world, the substellar. There we found— ”

  “A Hatch.”

  “A step through, just that, and we were back on planet Mercury, across four light-years. So, everything changed yet again, for humanity, for me. I had taken Mardina and Beth home, and that’s where they stayed . . .”

  “But you couldn’t stay with them.”

  “For me, it was go back to Ardua, or face jail. So, back to Ardua it was, with Stef Kalinski at my side. Who has her own issues with all of this, by the way.”

  “Are you tiring, Yuri Eden?”

  “Don’t fuss, ColU. I hate it when you fuss. Back to the story. So, on Ardua, the UN started to clamp down, just like it had in the solar system, because war was brewing up. A war to be fought with kernel-powered ships, over the lodes of kernels on Mercury . . .”

  “Yuri Eden?”

  “Still here, ColU.”

  “Do you remember how we drove to the antistellar point? The darkest, coldest place on Per Ardua, in the deepest shadow of Proxima. Where we found, among other mysteries, another Hatch.”

  “Yes, the Hatch. And we stepped through, Stef and I, and you. We found ourselves under the light of another star. And there was a man, in a cloak and a helmet, striding toward us . . .”

  Quid estis?

  “Yes. Do you remember, Yuri Eden?”

  Quid agitis in hac provincia? . . .

  2

  AD 2222; AUC 2975

  The intruders at the Hatch emplacement were first spotted by sharp-eyed Arab navigators aboard the Malleus Jesu. In their quiet chambers aboard the interstellar craft circling high above this world, the Arabs, doubling as observers and mapmakers here at the destination, routinely scrutinized the area around the Hatch through their farwatchers. The newly minted Hatch was the key objective of the mission, after all, and deserved surveillance and protection.

  And now Centurion Quintus Fabius himself was in the air, on the way to investigate.

  The leather sac of the aerial cetus creaked and snapped as the great craft shifted in the light wind. Quintus was standing alongside the command position, a bank of levers worked by a remex, one of the junior crew who reported to Movena, the trierarchus, the commander of the ship itself. Like Movena, this remex was a Brikanti, and just as arrogant and sullen as Movena herself and all her kind. And yet you couldn’t argue about his competence. As he stroked his levers, great paddles shifted in the air around the flank of the cetus, and the craft moved sweetly in response, heading toward the Hatch, which stood open on the scarred plain that Quintus’s engineers had made when they had unleashed the hot breath of the kernels on this world, and created this wonder.

  The bridge of the cetus was a clutter of controls and instruments, and scuffed wooden tables on which lay heaped charts and itineraries, mappings of this world hand-drawn since the expedition’s arrival three years ago. The air was redolent with the characteristic scent of the Brikanti, the folk of the uncivilized north, with the mead they drank and the treated hog-leather they wore, and the tang of the Valhallan tobacco they liked to chew as they worked.

  But this mundanity terminated at the window, before which an alien world unfolded before Quintus’s eyes. Even after three years, even after he had walked so much of it—and even after he had changed its face significantly by building roads and camps and the permanent colony, and of course creating the Hatch—still Quintus found this world astounding.

  The Hatch itself had been set on a scrap of higher land, overlooking a plain on which native vegetation sprawled, a low scrub of purple and white studded with odd orange cones. The Greek philosophers aboard assured Quintus that the cones were communities of creatures mostly too small to see—cities of the invisible, each mound a Rome of the germs. Farther away the land rose, ascending toward lofty mountains before which foothills stood in attendance. And those mountains and hills, each a massive plug of volcanic rock, had been shaped with terraces and walls and mighty crenellations that cast sharp shadows in the unchanging mother-of-pearl light of the principal sun, Romulus. They were mountains turned into fortresses by beings who had once lived here, and remade their world, and vanished—blown themselves to bits, no doubt, Quintus had heard his gloomier legionaries conclude in the camps. And yet those mountain sculptors evidently shared something with the rudest legionary from the poorest province of the Empire: they had built Hatches.

  Well, Quintus had brought his ship here, and the engineers and the legionaries and the slaves had built their own Hatch, and their names would be remembered for it, the ancient number of the legion of which this century was a part inscribed at the foot of the stone Cross of Jesu, which was the only human monument permitted to accompany a Hatch. This was forever Quintus’s Hatch. And this world, the fourth of the family that surrounded this stellar twin, Romulus, would, once the permanent colonia was formally dedicated by the vicarius, become the latest province of a Roman Empire that had now reached to the stars themselves.

  This was what he had achieved, he, Quintus Fabius; this was what he had bought at what would be the cost of thirteen years of his own life before he saw home again, and, thanks to the mysteries of near-lightspeed travel, a sundering by many more years than that from the family and friend
s he had left behind. It was a price he paid gladly; to command such a vessel as the Malleus Jesu on such a mission as this, to build a Hatch, was the pinnacle of his career so far—and likely not to be surpassed, he reminded himself with a twinge of resentment, as it was rare for officers from the provinces to rise much further in the imperial army unless they were wily enough for intrigue and assassination. Yet the Hatch was not for Fabius, or his crew, or any human; the Hatch was a thing in itself, its own purpose as ineffable as that of a temple to a forgotten god.

  And now, as he peered down from a washed-out sky, the perfection of the Hatch and its setting was ruined by the intruders. As the cetus made its ponderous way toward the Hatch position, Quintus felt his temper boil up, and he clenched and unclenched one massive fist, feeling the muscles in his arm work.

  “Two of them,” said Gnaeus Junius. Gnaeus was Quintus’s optio, his second in command. Gnaeus was peering down at the Hatch location through a finely wrought Greek farwatcher, leather and glass in a wooden tube.

  “Give me that.” Quintus grabbed the instrument from Gnaeus’s hands and held it up to his eye. As usual, at first, he saw only darkness.

  “You need not squint so much, sir.”

  “I’m angry. When I’m angry, I squint.”

  “Yes, sir. You also grind your teeth.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “No, sir.”

  Slim, dark, elegant, his tunic always spotless, Gnaeus Junius was an equestrian, a member of one of Rome’s oldest aristocratic pedigrees. Gnaeus, though so young, was likable, flawlessly competent, and had displayed none of the arrogance or sense of entitlement redolent of so many of his class. Quintus had found him utterly dependable. None of which saved Quintus from a sour resentment that this boy was destined to rise far higher in the army and beyond it than Quintus himself ever could—that the only way Quintus could avoid having to report to this elegant boy someday would be retirement.

  Now Gnaeus reminded him calmly of the issue in question. “So, about the intruders, sir. Two of them.”

  Quintus studied the strangers through the farwatcher. “A man and a woman. Old enough. In their fifties, or older? That makes them older than any of our veterans, or their wives. Save maybe Titus Valerius of the seventh cohort, who I know for a fact has been lying about his age for a decade. Some men just don’t want to retire.”