It turns out that Earthshine has finally determined the origin of the mysterious creators of the Kernels.
Later, the disparate group of characters, amongst them Yuri’s daughter, Beth, and her daughter Mardina, sisters Stef and Penny, Centurion Quintus Fabius and a farming AI unit ColU, all aboard Malleus Jesu, leaves Earth (or Terra, as the Romans call it) for the planet Mars in the footsteps of another AI – Earthshine (a unique one amongst the three ‘Core AIs’ – because he originated as an upload of several human minds – one of them being Robert Braemann, father of Yuri Eden, whose true surname was Braemann) that has managed to be transported there and clearly has plans of his own. Stephen Baxter doesn’t make any attempt to explain how he proposes his minute ‘dreaming bugs in the rocks’ engineer highly sophisticated devices that are tapping into the energy of dying universe They learn that the Romans and Xin are locked in an endless war, now, thanks to the Hatches, extended out into the solar system and beyond and super-charged by the stupendous power of the Kernels, the seemingly unlimited sources of energy left behind by the mysterious alien entities, which humans were only quick to turn into horrific weapons of mass destruction. There they are met by Centurion Quintus Fabius aboard the interstellar vessel Malleus Jesu (from Latin: 'Hammer of Jesus'), and learn that in this parallel universe the expansion of the Roman Empire has continued essentially unchallenged, kept in check only by the Xin (continuation of the Chinese Empire) in the east, and neutral Brikanti (descendants of the Celts living on the British Isles and Vikings of Scandinavia) in the north, and it is in the company of the latter, that Ultima’s other central characters – including Yuri’s daughter Beth Eden Jones and Stef’s twin sister Penny – find themselves caught. Ultima opens on the other side of the Per Arduan portal, with two of the main characters of the novel, Yuri Eden and Stef Kalinski, having arrived in an alternative reality where the Roman Empire has never fallen. Humans discover that there are minds in the universe that are billions of years older than human race who have a plan for mankind – the plan that isn't necessarily in humanity's best interest. Now in Ultima the consequences of this new freedom make themselves felt. The universe suddenly opened up to humankind. In the first novel of this two-book series of novels – Proxima, humans ventured to the planet of Per Ardua, in Proxima system, where they discovered another of ‘Hatches’ – ancient alien artefacts of unknown origin that are portals allowing their users to step across vast distances of space and time in an instance – as if one was stepping into another room.
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