The bulk of the ship’s occupants had transferred to the habitat. The ship itself, having come close enough to the Titan for the smaller yachts to deliver the legionaries to the hub port, was now hiding among the asteroids manned by a skeleton crew, a handful of legionaries under the command of optio Gnaeus Junius and trierarchus Eilidh – and with the more fragile passengers, including Jiang, Stef Kalinski and Ari Guthfrithson – able to survive for a long time on supplies meant for five times their number.

Now, as the Romans waited for the latest step in their induction, Quintus Fabius kept up a steady stream of encouragement. ‘Take it easy, lads. You look stranger to them than they do to you – even if you are simple farmers of the ice moons. I doubt very much if they’ve seen the likes of you before, Titus Valerius, save in their nightmares … Ah. Here comes somebody new to order us about.’

An official approached them now, a stocky, scowling woman of perhaps fifty, pulling herself along a guide rope. Flanked by an unarmed man and two soldiers, she wore a simple tunic not unlike the soldiers’, but with a pattern of alternately coloured squares – like a gaudy chessboard, the shades brilliant – and obviously expensive, Mardina thought. It was a brash garb that did not sit well with what appeared to be an irritable personality. And she carried a peculiar instrument, a frame almost like an abacus but laced with knotted string. She glanced down at this as she approached them, working the knots with agile fingers.

Titus Valerius murmured, ‘Speaking of nightmares, Centurion – look at those lads with the clerk.’

The soldiers who accompanied the official were tall, almost ludicrously so, a head or more taller even than Titus Valerius. Their long limbs looked stick-thin but were studded by muscles under wiry flesh, and their faces were bony, skull-like. They moved through the mesh of guide ropes with practised ease. Close to, they were very strange, even inhuman, and Mardina tried not to recoil.

‘They look ill,’ Quintus said. ‘Too long without weight and no exercise. Put them under my command and I’d soon sort them out …’

‘No, Centurion,’ Michael murmured. ‘I think you’re misreading them. These are perfectly healthy – and functional for their environment. They are adapted for the lack of weight. Look how strong they appear, strong in a wiry sense; look how confidently they move. I suspect they would be formidable opponents, just here at the axis of the ship, where there is no weight. Perhaps they have been raised in this environment, from children: specialist axis warriors. Or perhaps they are the result of generations born and bred without weight.’

‘Or,’ the ColU murmured from its pack, ‘perhaps they are the result of genetic tinkering. We have spoken of this, medicus. Your culture knew nothing of this, but we could have done it—’

‘Before the last jonbar hinge but one,’ the medicus said drily.

‘Be interesting to fight them, then,’ Quintus said thoughtfully. ‘But not yet. And hush, Collius; that clerk is looking suspicious.’

The lead official looked up at them now from her knotted strings, her scowl deepening, and she inspected them one by one. Fifty-something she might be, but, Mardina thought, like the soldiers with her, she was handsome. Under black hair streaked with grey she had dark eyes, copper-brown skin, high cheekbones and a nose a Roman might have been proud of.

The official pulled herself up into the air, so she could look down on the disorderly group of Romans. ‘Inguill sutiymi – quipucamayoc. Maymanta kanki? Romaoi? Hapinkichu? Runasimi rimankichu?’

Inguill was not having a good day, and when the strangers muttered disrespectfully among themselves before her, her disquiet and irritation quickly deepened.

Inguill’s formal title was senior quipucamayoc, keeper of the quipus. She was one of a dozen of her rank who, on behalf of the Sapa Inca and through a hierarchy of record-keepers beneath her, effectively governed all of Yupanquisuyu, this great habitat, both cuntisuyu and antisuyu, from Hurin Cuzco at the eastern hub to Hanan Cuzco, palace of the Inca himself, at this western hub. It was a role that, it was said, had had a place in Inca culture since the days before the empire’s conquest of the lands of the first antisuyu, the passage across the eastern ocean, and the move out into the sky.

And it was a role dedicated to the primary function of control: the essence of the imperial system of the Intip Churi, the Children of the Sun.

That fact had become apparent to Inguill at a very young age, when the teachers at her ayllu had first picked her out as an exceptional talent and had put her forward for training at the Cuzco colleges. Inguill had risen up the ranks of the imperial administration smoothly – shedding her family and her ties to her ayllu, shunning personal relationships in favour of the endless fascination of the work.

She had always been able to grasp the key importance of maintaining control, in the empire of the Sapa Inca. Especially in a habitat like this, huge yet finite and fragile, where you had to control the people in order to ensure the maintenance of the complex, interlocked systems that kept them all alive. And in the theology of the Intip Churi you had to control the gods, too, endlessly placating, and excluding the wilful divine anger that could break into the world if chaos and disorder were allowed to reign, even briefly. Of course this great box of a habitat – a box from which there was no possibility of escape, under constant and total surveillance from Hanan Cuzco at the hub, from the Condor craft that continually patrolled the axis, and from operatives dispersed on the ground – lent itself to such control.

It soon became apparent too that camayocs like herself, endowed with that kind of intuitive perception about the need for unsleeping and unrelenting control, were rare indeed, and prized. So she had found herself plucked out for promotion ahead of many of her age-group cadre – even the privileged sort, the sons and daughters of the rich of the Cuzcos who could afford the finest pharmaceutical enhancements, the most refined extracts from plants and animals bred for the purpose over generations, to sharpen their intellects to a degree of brilliance. Even such an expensively shaped mind was of little use to the state if beneath the glitter and the quick-talk was a lack of basic perception, a lack of understanding of the challenges of existence. And that was the understanding that Inguill enjoyed, and cultivated in herself.

Not that it did her career much good. She had proven to be so good at her job that she was given a kind of roaming brief, sent to manage, not the orderly, everyday problems of Yupanquisuyu, but the disorder, the unusual, the out of the ordinary, wherever it might crop up – either within the habitat or coming from without, like this bunch of Romaoi. The paradox was that as a result she spent much of her working life in a state of frustration, even anxiety, and certainly irritation. For the unusual, the disorderly, the chaotic, the very stuff it was her job to deal with, annoyed her profoundly until she could master it and clean it up. And all the while her rivals, over whom she had in theory been promoted, were busily worming their way into comfortable niches in the vast hierarchy of the Cuzcos.

Nothing in recent times had annoyed her more than these mysterious Romaoi, with their bulging muscles and sullen expressions. Ice moon farmers? Hah! Not likely … But where there was novelty, she reminded herself, where there was strangeness, there was always opportunity – for herself, if not the empire.

Now she faced the big man with the gaudy cloak who looked to be the leader.