Free Ultima by Stephen Baxter Page B

had time to step back home yet. Maybe they are still traveling, oblivious.”
    â€œIt’s possible. Oddly there is a soldiers’ legend along those lines. Perhaps the travelers have gone, not to Proxima, the nearest star, but to Ultima, the
furthest
star of all.”
    Stef frowned. What could that mean? The furthest star, in an expanding universe full of galaxies and clusters of galaxies . . .
    â€œBut, though we have not walked through the Hatches to Proxima and its worlds, we have journeyed there in ships—ships like the
Malleus Jesu
, orbiting high above. When we got there, on the third planet from the star—”
    Per Ardua.
    â€œâ€”we found a kernel field, not unlike that on Mercury—by then we had learned how to search for such things—and we found a Hatch, and
we found instructions
on how to construct a fresh one. Just as I have described.”
    â€œInstructions. Of what kind?”
    â€œEnigmatic. Graphic, but enigmatic. Enough for us to work out the rest, after—”
    â€œAnother blood toll.” Stef remembered the builders, natives of Per Ardua—
her
Per Ardua. She had seen little of them, but she knew Yuri remembered them with affection from his early, near-solitary years on the planet. “These graphic instructions—was there any sign of the natives who created them?”
    â€œNone. So I’m told. Not a trace save these odd diagrams, and even they were lodged inside a Hatch.” She eyed Stef. “It was another scrap that doesn’t fit, another fragment of a lost history. Like you and your companions. What do you think?”
    A scrap like her own unexpected sister in the Hatch on Mercury, Stef thought. The first reality tweak of all. She shrugged. “I don’t know what to think.”
    â€œWell, keep trying. And now—look down.”
    The
cetus
was now sailing serenely over mountains.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    The sun of this world was not high, it might have been an early afternoon at a temperate latitude on Earth, and shadows pooled in the valleys that separated the peaks. The second sun was in the sky too and cast a fainter double shadow. Ice striped the taller peaks, and rivers flowed through the valleys like bands of steel. And, save for the shadow cast by the
cetus
itself, Stef could see nothing moving down there, no people, no animals, not so much as a thread of smoke.
    But everywhere she looked, Stef saw artifice. Every mountain seemed to have been shaped, regularized as a pyramid or a tetrahedron. The valleys looked as if they had been shaped, too, straightened. Some of the peaks were connected by tremendous bridges of stone. Many of the mountain walls were terraced, so that it looked as if giant staircases climbed their flanks, while others had huge vertical structures fixed to their faces, almost like the flying buttresses of medieval cathedrals, or were deeply inscribed with gullies and channels.
    Eilidh was watching her. “Tell me what you see.”
    â€œIt’s like a simulation.”
    â€œA what?”
    â€œSorry. Like a model. A mock-up of a mountain range. It doesn’t look real.”
    â€œYet it is real. This planet is laced by mountain ranges; it is, or at least was, very active. And all of them have been shaped and reshaped by hands unseen, just as you see here. All as far as we have visited and studied. There’s much you can’t see from the surface. We burrowed into one mountain, sounded out others. The mountains are hollowed, strengthened within by huge remnant pillars of rock. They have been transformed into immense granite fortresses, or so it seems. For the Roman military engineers, who eat and breathe fortifications, this is Elysium, as you can imagine.”
    â€œWe noticed this the minute we stepped out of the Hatch,” Stef said, wondering. “I never dreamed the
whole world
was like this. But—who built all this? And where are