For these few days he was one of them, and for the first time in his life nobody was looking askance at him because of his heredity – or being pointedly virtuous in ignoring it. If he could fix a piston, weld a joint and clear a fuel line then he was one of the elite, with the privileges and responsibilities that earned him. They were not all Beetle-kinden there, after all. A renegade Ant was lord of the main engine, having grown tired of war machines. There was a brace of Fly troubleshooters whose small frames and delicate fingers could fit into places the larger folk could not reach. There was another halfbreed, too, her ancestry being like his, Beetle and Ant conjoined. Her Ant parent had come from pale-skinned Tark, though, so she and Totho looked less like each other than anyone else on board.

A tenday into the voyage, with Helleron close on the horizon, Totho and a handful of the other engineers were called to the very belly of the ship, where he had never ventured before. Here, between the freight holds, gaped an open wound in the Sky Without’s underside. A broad rectangle of open sky was being winched open, with the dusty countryside appearing in a dun haze, far below, as they slowly lowered the Sky’s huge loading ramp into empty space.

‘What’s happening?’ Totho asked.

‘Incoming,’ explained an engineer. ‘New visitors, messengers probably. Look, there she is.’

Squinting, Totho made out a dark dot that closed, even as he watched, until he could identify it as a fixed-wing flier. Fixed-wings were new, quite the fastest things in the sky but expensive to build and easy to break. Totho watched its approach with interest. He had seen the design before, two stacked wings set back of the mid-point, the hull itself curving forwards and down like a hunched insect’s body, with stabilizing vanes like a box-kite thrust forward. The single propeller engine, the drone of which came to them even at this distance, was fixed at the back, below a mounted ballista.

The hull of the fixed-wing was dark wood, and it was only as the craft was jockeying for position, trying to match speeds with the Sky Without, that Totho noticed the hurried repainting that had taken place: gold and black in ragged bars across the sides and the wings.

The flier swayed and darted, trying to meet up with the sloping runway the loading ramp had now been turned into. The engineer next to Totho swore. ‘Bloody stupid, bringing a flying machine in like that. Had one once, an idiot who decided the best way to make the hatch was to come in at full speed. Went through three walls, punched out of the bows and dropped like a stone ’cos he’s shorn his wings off doing it.’

At last the pilot managed the task, wings wobbling uncertainly, and the moving plane rolled up into the hold with the crew hauling the ramp closed as soon as it did. It was left sitting on the closed hatch with its propeller slowing gradually.

There were five Wasp soldiers in total packed into the flier, but one was very obviously in charge. He was standing up even as the engineers secured the ropes and clasps that ensured the loading ramp stayed closed.

The Wasp leader surveyed them all coldly, his gaze passing over Totho as easily as the rest. To him they were clearly all menials.

‘Send a runner to Captain Halrad,’ he ordered them, ‘and tell him that Captain Thalric wants his company.’

The chief engineer folded her arms. ‘Sorry, sir, I didn’t hear you. Did you say you wanted to speak with the ship’s master?’ Her tone was profoundly unimpressed. If this Thalric had four armed soldiers at his back, she didn’t even seem to have noticed.

The Wasp officer regarded her narrowly, and then mustered a tight smile. ‘Of course that is what I meant,’ he said, stepping out onto the Sky’s deck. ‘Shall I bring my men along, or would it be possible for them to be billeted with their compatriots?’

Totho stepped back as the arrangements were made. As soon as it was possible, without catching the Wasps’ notice, he was out of the hangar and running.

Captain Halrad had a professed fondness for Beetle-grown wine, Tynisa had soon discovered. He made a great show of sipping it, savouring the bouquet as he had undoubtedly seen the sophisticates do. He would tell her what a good blend this particular vintage was, when her own palette informed her it was what they called ‘orchard wine’, inferior stuff from the westerly vineyards.

She politely agreed with him. He was meanwhile telling her about life in the Wasp military. Or life in the Empire. It seemed to equate to the same thing.

‘But you can’t all be in the army,’ she protested. ‘How would that work?’

‘A Wasp is a warrior. A male Wasp, I mean. There’s no other livelihood,’ he told her.

‘What about artificers? Scholars?’

‘Warriors,’ he confirmed. ‘Warriors first. If you’re not a warrior you’re less than a man, like our subject peoples.’

‘But what about people with skills you need. They can’t all be in the army too.’

‘But they have to be,’ he said. ‘Let’s say there was someone from outside whose particular assets,’ he smiled at her, ‘could be useful to the Empire. We’d make them army, army auxillian anyway, give them a rank. Without that, they would be nobody. No more than a slave, even.’

‘You’re looking at me as though I might be useful to the Empire,’ she said, disarmingly coy.

‘We’ll make a general of you yet,’ he promised, and then hissed wine through his teeth as someone suddenly hammered on the door of his stateroom.

‘What is it?’ he demanded, flinging the door open. One of his soldiers stood there at attention, and Tynisa saw something new, something urgent in his expression.

‘You’re to come right away, Captain,’ the soldier announced, and when Halrad made to dispute this, he added, ‘Captain Thalric says it.’

The change in Halrad was marked. Instantly he turned from being a man in control to a man being watched. Tynisa was fascinated. She stepped up behind him, asking, ‘What is it?’ In the doorway the soldier stared back at her with patent loathing.

‘You just stay here,’ Halrad told her shortly. ‘I have to go. For your own safety you had better not leave this room.’

A moment later he was out of the room, and to her amazement she heard the key turn in the lock.

Che had tried her best to make herself useful on the voyage, but instead she had found herself without place, without purpose. Tynisa was off being either devious or indiscreet with the Wasp officer, Halrad, Totho had disappeared into the ship’s bowels, and Salma seemed to be playing some dangerous game with the Wasp soldiers. He could always be found somewhere in their line of sight but usually somewhere public. He kept smiling at them in that strange way of his. She feared he was going to get himself killed, but somehow he was still alive each morning.

She therefore spent the voyage browsing the few books on the common room’s shelves, or meditating in her own cabin. She had found that the constant soft revolution of the airship’s engine was in some ways an aid to concentration. Well, at least she was able to enter something approximating a trance, although the Ancestor Art remained conspicuous in its absence.

Totho practically kicked the door open in his haste to find her, startling her into diving for her sword, which was all the way across the room.

‘Trouble!’ he told her.

‘Wha-?’ She gaped at him.

‘More Wasps,’ he explained. ‘Turned up on a flier. New orders, I reckon.’

‘That means the game’s changed.’ She stood, brushing her robes down. ‘What do you think?’

‘We can’t take chances, because that makes eleven of them on board now.’ His eyes went wide. ‘With that many they could overpower the crew.’