Nevertheless, her tooth hurt.

Through one of their slates the ColU, inspecting the tooth, clucked sympathetically, and Penny wondered absently when this farming machine had picked up that particular speech trait. ‘An unfortunate accident,’ it said. ‘Your teeth are very healthy for a woman of your age.’

‘Thanks.’

‘But nothing’s going to protect you from an unground grain in a loaf of bread. And unfortunately there’s nothing I can do for you. Lacking my old body, my manipulator arms – once I could have pulled the broken tooth for you, or even printed you a repair or a replacement. But now that I am disembodied—’

‘So what am I supposed to do? Tie a length of string to a doorknob?’

‘You must ask the Romans for help.’

‘The Romans? I’m to go to ancient Romans for dental work?’

‘Well, they’re not ancient Romans,’ Yuri pointed out gently. ‘And it’s not a Roman you’ll be seeing but a Greek – Michael – go and find Titus Valerius and have him take you to Michael. I can tell you from experience, he might not know so much but he listens. Why, I bet legionaries lose teeth all the time.’

‘That is not reassuring.’

Still, she had no better options. She waited a couple of days, munching her way through their hoarded supply of ISF-issue painkillers, brought in their packs through the Hatch. She had the illogical feeling that if only she could have a decent hot shower she’d feel a hell of a lot better. But there was no running water available within much of the ship, save in the bath houses. Every morning and evening you washed from a bowl that you carried into your room from a communal supply.

At last, as the ColU had suggested, she asked the medicus for help.

Michael grinned back. ‘I’ll need supplies from the officers’ clinic. I take any excuse to go up to the villas. Come and find me tomorrow.’

The next day Titus Valerius led Stef through the sketchy township to the ‘ascension’, as the crew called it. This was the central shaft, open at every deck, that led along the axis of the ship. That stout fireman’s pole ran the length of the vessel, and a series of platforms and cages regularly rose and fell along its length, hauled by rope-and-pulley arrangements.

There were many breaks in the decks, Stef had learned. You would often come across holes in the floor fenced off for safety. But these were mostly offset from each other, the floor holes not matching the ceiling, for obvious reasons of safety. The ascension, though, was the one shaft open to all decks. Stef thought this great way had a certain unifying aesthetic appeal, a tremendous shaft that penetrated the metal heaven above and the ground under your feet, and spanned the ship from officer country in the crown to the engineers and their kernel arrays at the root of the ship. But the soldier in her recognised the value of a fast road that could take a squad of legionaries straight to any part of the ship within minutes or less. The Romans had always built their Empire on roads, and that, it seemed, was still true now.

So, with a nod to the bored-looking legionaries who manned the system, Titus Valerius escorted Stef up from deck six, the township, to deck seven, the deck of the villas.

Sitting in a steel elevator-like cage, it was like ascending into a park. Stef’s first impression was of green, the green of grass, trees, bushes, and moist, pleasantly warm air. She glimpsed only a handful of people – a group of men in togas and carrying scrolls, holding some earnest discussion beside the waters of a lake, a rectangular basin surrounded by slim nude statues. She might have been looking at a scene from two thousand years ago, the senators plotting the assassination of Caesar, perhaps. But over the heads of the debaters soared a metal vault, riveted and painted sky blue. The light, which felt warm and authentically like sunlight, came from fluorescent lanterns that dangled from the ceiling. And the surface of the pond, strewn with lilies, bore a subtle pattern of ripples, a product of the slightest irregularities in the kernel drive that thrust this scrap of pretty parkland through interstellar space. She wondered briefly how they covered over this water feature when the drive was turned off and the gravity disappeared.

Titus Valerius led her along a path by the lake, stone blocks set in the short-cut grass. He was a slab of muscle, out of place in this rather effete setting. ‘We’ll meet the doctor at the quarters of the optio, Gnaeus Junius. Which is not the grandest up here, believe me. They modelled this whole deck, so they say, on a villa of the Emperor Hadrianus, in Italia itself. Although that was probably a lot more than a hundred paces across.’

‘I can believe it.’

‘Waste of space if you ask me.’

‘That’s officers for you.’ But she remembered the ColU’s speculation about the life support systems in this big hulk of a ship. ‘You know, Titus, this park might be part of the ship’s design, as well as a luxury for the officers. It’s probably good for the ship as a whole, to have all this greenery up here—’

‘Hush.’ He’d frozen.

From a clump of trees, a slim face peered out at them. Some kind of deer, evidently. It held Titus’s gaze for a second, two. Then it turned and bounded into the shadow of the trees, and Stef glimpsed a slim body, a white tail.

Titus growled as they moved on. ‘They won’t let us hunt, you know.’

Stef laughed. ‘There can’t be more than a handful of animals up here. And it wouldn’t really be fair, Titus; they couldn’t run far in this metal box.’

‘True. A well-shot arrow could reach from wall to wall. But still, the hunter in me aches to follow, one-armed or not.’

She patted his shoulder. ‘You’ll be home in a few years, Titus Valerius, and then you can hunt all you like.’

‘I’ll take you with me,’ he promised. ‘Meanwhile here we are – home from home for the equestrian and his subordinate officers.’

Gnaeus’s ‘quarters’, set close to the curving hull wall, turned out to be a compact cluster of buildings centred on a cobbled rectangular courtyard, and surrounded by a fringe of carefully manicured garden. There was a gate, wide open, and Titus walked in boldly, followed by Stef. A fountain bubbled from a stone bowl at the centre of the yard. The buildings were neat, single storey, walled with plaster painted white and roofed with red tiles. Steam drifted from the windows of a blocky building in the corner. The only concession to the environment of space travel that Stef spotted were a few steel bands to hold the stonework in place in the absence of thrust gravity.

Titus saw Stef looking curiously at the rising steam. ‘A bathhouse. Do you have steam baths where you come from?’ He pointed up over his head. ‘The whole dome up there, in the nose of the ship, is one big bathhouse. I’ve never been up there, I can tell you that. They say there are cohorts of whores up there, male and female, exclusively for the use of the officers, whores who never even see the rest of the ship, let alone the target planet. The lads spend a lot of time on the march speculating about that.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘But the most senior officers, like the optio, have their own private baths too. There’s plenty of heat from the kernels to fire the hypocausts, and plenty of slaves to serve you, so why not? …’ He frowned. ‘Speaking of slaves, we should have been met by now, by one of the optio’s household slaves, or failing that a guard.’

‘I meant to ask you about the slaves. We still haven’t seen Chu Yuen since we left Romulus.’

‘Well, there’s a problem down in the pen.’ He rubbed his nose with the wooden stump of his arm. ‘I might suggest the optio has a couple of men posted up here. We’re not expecting trouble but you never know, you can’t have fellows just wandering in as we have.’