He grunted. ‘That’s officers for you. Don’t tell you a damn thing about what you’re supposed to do, even as they kick you up the arse for not doing it right—’

She asked patiently, ‘Such as, how long will the flight be?’

‘That’s easy,’ he said. ‘Four years, three hundred and thirty-six days. Same as coming out.’

‘Hallelujah,’ the ColU said drily. ‘A precise number at last. And are you under full gravity for the whole trip?’ Silence. ‘That is, when the drive is on, do you feel as heavy as you do on Terra?’

The legionary puzzled that out. ‘Yes,’ he said in the end. ‘The officers don’t want you bouncing around going soft, like you were on Luna, or Mars. The training’s tougher in flight than it is on the ground.’

‘I’ll bet,’ Stef said. ‘I know the military. Locked up in a big tin can like this, they’ll keep the lower ranks as busy as possible to keep them from causing mischief.’

The ColU said, ‘With the numbers the legionary has provided I can at last estimate how far we are from home …’

If the drive burned continually, exerting an acceleration equivalent to one Earth gravity, after about a year the ship’s velocity would be approaching the speed of light.

‘Of course we won’t pass lightspeed but we’ll run into time dilation. Time on the ship will pass much more slowly from the point of view of an observer on Earth—’

‘I have two physics doctorates,’ Stef snapped. ‘I know about relativistic time dilation.’

‘Well, I have two less doctorates,’ Yuri said tiredly. ‘Give me the bottom line, ColU.’

‘If the journey takes us, subjectively, four years, three hundred and thirty-six days, then eleven years and ninety-one days will have passed on Earth. That’s not allowing for small corrections because of the shutdown periods. And the double-star system of Romulus and Remus must be some nine light years from Earth. Titus here will have spent maybe ten years of his life travelling to the destination and back, plus another three years or so on the ground – a thirteen-year mission. But by the time he returns home, about twenty-five years will have passed on the ground.’

Titus shrugged. ‘That’s what you sign up for. Got my daughter with me, on the ship. No other family to worry about. And back home the legion’s collegia will make sure we get treated right, with our pay and pensions and such.’

The ColU said, ‘Perhaps it takes an empire, solemn, calm and antique, to manage operations on such scales.’

‘We Romans get it done,’ Titus said simply. ‘We’ll be joining the Malleus soon. Make sure you’re buckled into your seats.’

The ferry docked with a port on the slowly turning hull of the starship. Stef saw that the hull here was blazoned with large ‘V’ symbols; she assumed she was landing at the fifth deck, then, which Titus had called the ‘camp’.

She knew that an ISF crew would not have attempted a docking with a rotating structure, save at the axis. By contrast the crew of this ferry took them in with terrifying nonchalance, swooping down on the slowly turning Malleus, until they drove straight into a system of nets which fielded them neatly and dragged them down to the hull, where docking clamps rattled noisily against the base of the craft. Once the docking was complete she heard whoops and backslaps from behind closed doors. She had met none of the pilots but had glimpsed them on the ground. They were young Brikanti, male and female, cocky, smart, and they enjoyed showing off their skills before the nervous, superstitious, ground-based Romans. As she unbuckled from her seat, Stef offered up silent thanks that this risky display of super-competence was at an end.

One by one they were led out through a port in the base of the ferry, and down through thick layers of hull metal and insulation into the body of the Malleus Jesu. They were weightless, of course, save for the faintest centrifugal tug towards the wall of the rotating craft.

Once inside the main body, Stef had to adjust her orientation, her sense of up and down, even as she was battered by a barrage of sensory impressions: brilliant lights, smells of animals and humans, a clutter of structures, heaps of supplies and equipment, and people swimming everywhere in the air. The ship stood upright, essentially. The hull surface she had passed through was no longer a floor or ceiling, but a vertical wall. And she had a clear view across the interior of the cylindrical hull; ‘floor’ and ‘ceiling’ were tremendous plates below and above her, slicing off the fifth deck, this pie-shaped section of the craft – though the plates were pierced by gaps through which passed pipes, ducts and, at the centre, a kind of fireman’s pole arrangement from which chains dangled, connecting this deck to the rest of the ship. Pillars of steel were bolted in place across the area too, adding structural support between floor and ceiling, she guessed the better to withstand the thrust of the kernel engine. It was a vast, cavernous space, this deck alone, sixty metres deep and a hundred across, and illuminated by sunlight from the windows and big, crude-looking fluorescent strip lights. The tall pillars spanning floor to roof gave the place the feeling of a cathedral, to Stef’s sensibilities.

And set up on the floor plate was, yes, a camp, just as Titus had said, a near copy of the colonia down on the ground, a rectangle with rounded corners, like a playing card, set slap in the middle of the circular deck. Looking down across the deck from her elevated position at this port, Stef recognised the crosswise layout of the main streets; there was a handsome building of wooden panels that might be the principia, next to it a small chapel, and beyond an open space that might be a parade ground or training area. There was even a row of granaries, though she saw nothing like barrack blocks. All these structures looked conventional enough, with wood-panelled walls and red-tiled roofs. The walls of the principia, the headquarters, even looked as if they were plastered. But, looking more closely, Stef could see that the buildings were built on frameworks of strong steel girders, firmly riveted to the hull plates.

And she was treated to the surreal sight of Roman legionaries paddling through the air above the ‘camp’, pulling themselves along ropes strung across the cavernous deck, manhandling heaps of supplies wrapped up in nets, food, clothes, even weapons.

A Roman camp, in interstellar space! But then, she knew, this mixture of antiquity and modernity was typical of these strange late Romans.

From conversations with Eilidh, Movena, Michael and others, she’d gathered something of the altered history of the Empire, compared to the account she was familiar with – a history that had brought a Roman legion to a distant star. After Kartimandia’s time, Germany had ultimately been conquered up to the Baltic coast. It was Vespasian, later an emperor, who planted the eagle of Rome on the bank of the Vistula. After that, with the German tribes civilised, there had been no barbarian hordes to cross the Rhine in the late fourth century as in Stef’s world, the event that had ultimately destabilised the Empire in the west. Rome had continued to rule. In the end, however, the Empire had reached natural limits on the Eurasian landmass, penned in by the Xin to the east, the Brikanti to the north, and the deserts of North Africa to the south. For centuries Rome had grown inward-looking, static, its citizenry heavily taxed, its imperial elite self-obsessed, remote and over-powerful – and unstable, subject to endless palace coups.

That had all changed in the twelfth century AD. By then the Brikanti had already been in the Americas for two hundred years, thanks to their adventurous Scand partners, and had explored the coast of Africa, seeking the lands below the equator. Belatedly the Romans followed them into this new world – and the centuries of stasis were over. In a new age of expansiveness and conquest, the Romans remembered their ancestors, who they had imagined as stern, lean men ploughing their fields and going to war. It was as if the Empire had been cleansed. Though the modern Romans remained Christian, traditional forms of society and the military – such as the legions – had been revived. Even old family naming conventions had been dug up, ancient lineages ferociously researched. Which was why a planet of a distant star had been colonised by units of the ninetieth legion, called Victrix, in commemoration of a tremendous victory over the Brikanti just south of the Great Lakes. In later centuries the need to avoid the use of explosive weapons inside pressure hulls, in spacecraft and surface habitats, had even led to a revival of the traditional weapons of hand-to-hand combat, spear and sword and knife, pilum and gladio and pugio.