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?”
“It did. What are you suggesting?”
“Let me take the ColU through this ship’s systems. With you, Michael, and the remiges.”
The ColU said, “Colonel Kalinski, I would not advise—”
She buried the slate in her tunic so the ColU could not be heard. “We’ll find a way to upgrade. Does that translate? We’ll improve the output of the farms. My God, it can’t be so hard; it’s probably no better than medieval down there. We’ll improve the water filtration and reclamation. Show you how to clean up the air better.”
Michael was frowning, unsure. “You mean you could make the Malleus better able to support a larger population of crew. And that way you would have us spare the slaves.”
“That’s the idea.”
He shook his head. “Romans are suspicious of innovation, Stef.”
“Well, they can’t be that suspicious, or they wouldn’t have put their money into Brikanti starships like this, would they? And that centurion of yours strikes me as an imaginative man.” She was stretching the truth there, but at least Quintus hadn’t gone running and screaming when two strangers and a robot from an alternate history had come wandering through his brand new Hatch. “Suppose the Malleus Jesu were to return, not just with its mission at Romulus completed, but new and improved—a prototype for a new wave of starships to come? What if he were able to present that to his own commanders? Romans might not like innovation. What about opportunity, staring them in the face?”
Titus and Michael looked at her, and at each other.
“We must talk this over,” Michael said. “Before the optio first of all.”
“I agree,” said Titus.
Michael waggled a finger at her. “And don’t start meddling before you’ve got specific approval from the centurion—and the trierarchus, come to that. Or we’ll all be for the Brikanti long jump.”
Which, Stef had already gathered, meant being thrown out of an airlock.
Titus growled, “But first let’s do what we came for and find your slave boy, Stef Kalinski, if he’s still alive.” He leered at her. “And what then? Will you come with me down into the pen, and confront these dying maggots you insist on saving?”
She couldn’t meet his gaze.