Read Ultima for Free Online Page A

to think it over. “There’ll probably be a particle storm. Like high-energy cosmic rays. Concentrated little packets of energy, but moving slower than light. They’ll be here in a few hours. Hard to estimate.”
    â€œOK. Maybe I should cut the drive for a while, turn the ship around so we have the interstellar-medium shields between us and Mercury?”
    â€œMight be a good idea.”
    Beth didn’t understand any of this. “And what of Earth? What’s become of Earth?”
    Penny looked back at her. “Life will recover, ultimately. But for now . . .”
    McGregor began the procedure to shut down the main drive and turn the ship around. His voice was calm and competent as he worked through his checklists with his crew.
    Beth imagined a burned land, a black, lifeless ocean.
    As it turned out, she was entirely wrong.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    With the drive off, and the acceleration gravity reduced to zero, the crew and passengers of the ISF kernel hulk
Tatania
took a break—from the situation, from each other. Beth unbuckled her harness, swam out of her couch, and made her clumsy way to the bathroom, locked herself in, and just sat, eyes closed, trying to regulate her breathing. Trying not to think.
    But then she heard the rest talking, and the crackle of radio messages. Voices, speaking what sounded to Beth like a mash-up of Swedish and Welsh. Thirty minutes after the kernel drive had been shut down, and the screen of high-energy particles and short-wavelength radiation from its exhaust dissipated, the first radio messages from the inner system were being received by the
Tatania
’s sprawling antennas.
    Gathered once more on the bridge of the
Tatania
, the passengers and crew listened to the fragmentary voices, staring at one another, uncomprehending. Beth looked around the group, in this first moment of stillness since the
Tatania
had flung itself away into space from Earth’s moon.
    Herself: Beth Eden Jones, thirty-six years old, born on a planet of Proxima Centauri but brought back to Earth by a mother who was now, presumably, burned to a crisp on Mercury—but not before she had forced Beth on this new journey into strangeness.
    General Lex McGregor of the ISF: a monument of a man in his seventies, commander of this space fleet ship, looking professionally concerned but unperturbed. Even his voice was soothing, or at least it was for Beth. McGregor, like Beth’s father, Yuri Eden, was British, but McGregor had grown up in Angleterre, the southern counties of England heavily integrated into a European federation, while Yuri had been born in an independent North Britain, and to Beth’s ear McGregor’s accent had the softest of French intonations as a result.
    Penny Kalinski: some kind of physicist who had known Beth’s mother, herself nearly seventy, looking bewildered—no, Beth thought, she was scared on some deeper level, as if all this strangeness was somehow directed at her personally.
    Jiang Youwei: a forty-year-old Chinese who had some antique relationship with Penny, and who had got swept up on the wrong side of the UN-Chinese war that looked to have exploded across the solar system.
    The two young members of the
Tatania
’s bridge crew: junior ISF officers, male and female, looking equally confused. But, Beth thought, as long as McGregor was around and captain of this hulk, they didn’t need to think, didn’t need to care, regardless of the bonfire of the worlds they had fled and now the utter strangeness leaking through the communication systems. McGregor would take care of them. Or such was their comforting illusion.
    And, creepiest of all, Earthshine: an artificial intelligence, with the projected body of a smartly dressed forty-something male, and a look of calm engagement on his face—an appearance that was, Beth knew, a mendacious simulation, a ghost of light. The closest to reality Earthshine