So Penny lay there in her couch, listening to the deep, almost subsonic thrumming of the kernel engines, and the fabric of the grand old ship popping and banging and creaking around her, and waiting for the end. She did feel an odd empathy for the ship. For what was her own body but a relic, the wreckage of a too-long life – and nearly unable to bear these immense accelerations? She couldn’t have blamed the Malleus if the ship had failed. Just as she couldn’t have blamed her own wretched body if it had given up as she put it through one unbearable strain too many.

The crew, however, was trained for operation under this kind of acceleration regime. She didn’t lack for company. Even the Greek medicus Michael visited her in a wheelchair, tightly strapped in, with a metal brace to support his neck and head.

What was still more impressive was the legionary assigned to push Michael around the ship in his wheelchair, triple-gravity acceleration or not: Titus Valerius, the big one-armed veteran. He walked with the support of an exoskeleton, creaking and clanking, powered by the crude electric motors – ‘etheric engines’ – that were, apart from kernel engines, handheld radio communicators, which they called ‘farspeakers’, and some ferocious weaponry, just about the height of mechanical engineering achievement in his world. Penny could see how Titus’s muscles bulged under the strain, how the veins were prominent in his heavily supported neck. But he got the job done, as, evidently, did the rest of Quintus’s highly trained crew.

‘You’re doing fine,’ Michael told her from his chair, as he examined her. ‘I can assure you, you’re a tougher old eagle than you look, or may feel. As long as you do as I say, as long as you lie there and don’t take chances, and are patient—’

‘My catheter itches.’

He laughed. ‘Bad luck. You’ll have to fix that yourself.’

Penny’s most welcome attendant, however, was Titus’s daughter, Clodia, just fifteen years old by her own subjective timekeeping, who had spent most of her young life aboard the Malleus during its mission to the Romulus-Remus double-star system. Clodia was evidently strong, able to get around the ship under gravity using a chair and prosthetic aids built for an adult twice her size, and turned out a bright, chatty kid.

At first she brought Penny her meals – that is, she changed the drip bags according to Michael’s schedule. But as the ship’s watches passed, and they got to know each other better, she responded to Penny’s other needs. She turned out to be the kindest of Penny’s team of aides in changing her catheter bag, and washing her face, and even changing the diaper-like garment that soaked up her old-lady poop. Penny had done her level best not to be embarrassed at having to be changed, at one end of her long life, like the infant she’d been at the other.

Penny was surprised Clodia had volunteered for this mission, however. On the last day, as the ship approached Mars and they waited for the end of acceleration, they talked about this.

‘Let me get it straight. You were just a toddler when your father took you with him on the Malleus Jesu, the journey to Romulus and Remus.’

‘My mother died when I was very small, before we left Terra. There was only my father and me—’

‘Yes. I’m sorry. So you spent a few years running around on the planet. And then, age ten or so, you’re scooped up and brought back to Earth – I mean, Terra. I’d have thought you’d find Terra a lot more exciting than life on the ship. All the different people, the cities.’

Clodia pulled a face. ‘Lutetia Parisiorum is a dump. And it’s badly laid out from a defensive point of view. I suppose I’d like to see Rome. And the great cities of Brikanti as well, of course—’

‘There’s no need to be polite with me, child!’

Clodia grinned. ‘But wherever you go on the ground there’s no, no … People sort of wander around doing whatever they want.’

‘No discipline?’

‘That’s it. It’s not like when you’re on the march, and you build your camp every night, and everything’s in the same place each time, exactly where it should be. Night after night. That’s what I like.’

‘You’re an army brat, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Well, I’m glad you’re here, Clodia, you’ve been a comfort to me … What of the future, though? Even your father can’t last in the legion for ever. What will you do? I can’t imagine you being satisfied to be some soldier’s wife.’

‘I don’t remember my mother, but I saw the women in camp, at Romulus. Having babies and baking bread and washing clothes, day after day?’ She pulled her face. ‘That’s not for me.’

‘Then what? They don’t allow women in the Roman army, do they?’

‘Not into the legions, no. Not in the fighting infantry. But there are masses of other jobs you can do. In administration, in training, in logistics. A lot of that is based in the cities, the big central military establishments. And there are jobs in the front line women can take, even in the fighting units, some kinds of auxiliary. Or I might become a weapons specialist. Go into training.’

‘Or be a medicus. There are plenty of front-line jobs there. You ought to talk to Michael about that.’

Again, a self-deprecating face-pull. ‘Maybe I could be a nurse. I’m not sure I’m clever enough otherwise. I can strip down field artillery pieces, but an injured legionary … I’ll find something.’

‘I’m sure you will—’

That was when the warning trumpet sounded, filling the hull with its shrill note.

Clodia said, ‘Just lie still, until it’s over.’

And Penny, lying in her couch, felt the cessation of the kernel engines, a deep shudder transmitted through the ship’s fabric. That chorus of creaks and alarming bangs ceased immediately too, as the strain of three gravities was removed. And only then, it seemed, did the sense of heavy acceleration lift from her body.

‘Ah,’ she murmured. ‘It’s as if your father has been sitting on my chest for two days, and now he’s got off.’

Clodia impatiently unbuckled the restraints that held her in her chair, pushed aside her exoskeletal aids, and let herself drift up into the air, whooping. ‘I always love this bit!’

‘How long were we—’

‘Fifty hours. Twenty-five accelerating at three weights, and then the turnover, and twenty-five decelerating. And here we are at Mars, just like that. We couldn’t have got here any quicker. Roman ships are the best performing in the world, and the trierarchus will have pushed us as hard as she could.’

‘Oh, I don’t doubt it, child. But we might be too late even so.’ She struggled to emerge from her cocoon of blankets and cushions, an aged butterfly. ‘Oh, help me out of this thing.’

Clodia hovered dubiously. ‘If I don’t keep you here until the medicus has checked you over, I’m going to be walking back to Terra …’

It was another hour before Penny, fuming with frustration, was at last allowed onto the bridge of the Malleus.

And beyond the observation windows, before her eyes, once more Mars loomed huge, like a plasterwork in oranges and browns, scarred by craters and dry canyons, the silver bands of the canals glowing softly in the sunlight.

When she arrived a kind of council of war was already underway, involving Quintus, his second in command Gnaeus and his ship’s trierarchus Movena, as well as Stef, Beth, Mardina, Ari Guthfrithson, Kerys, and the ColU borne on the shoulders of Chu Yuen. Stef barely glanced at her sister. All of them looked beat up to Penny, their skin blotchy, their eyes puffy. There was a faint smell of body odour in the crowded room – but then probably none of them had washed for days, Penny reflected; they hadn’t all had the comprehensive medical support she’d enjoyed.

And Jiang was here. He too looked wrung out. But he held onto a rail, supporting himself in the air, and took her hand in his. ‘Mars again,’ he said. ‘Where we first met.’