Mardina grinned. ‘Good for you. For me, it’s just that I need to find myself here first, that’s all. Before getting lost in Quizo.’

‘Very wise,’ Clodia said gravely. ‘You take your time. But can we talk a bit more about his eyes first?’

Quintus didn’t hesitate to remind all the Romans of their true purpose here: to survive, to remember their comrades still aboard the Malleus Jesu, and to amass stores to enable them to escape, if they chose – or maybe to knock the Sapa Inca off his throne, so the men dreamed over their beer.

And, though they had had to give up any weapons at the entry hub, Quintus began quietly to have the men make their own: spears of fire-hardened wood, clubs. He negotiated with local artisans, metalworkers, for spear points. Soon there was quiet talk of getting hold of bladed weapons, swords and knives. All this was paid for in kind, usually with a squad of legionaries carrying out some brute-force task – and all beneath the notice, hopefully, of the tax assessors.

But for all the long-term scheming of Quintus Fabius and his senior men, for all the mutterings of the ColU about Earthshine and Hatches and jonbar hinges, the longer Mardina stayed here, and the more she got used to the rhythms of Inca life, the more settled she felt. The more secure. Maybe the sheer fact of getting back a routine, some basic order in her life, after that chaotic period since leaving Terra was good for her.

All the Roman party saw the benefit of the Inca system about fifty days after their arrival in the antisuyu. There was a crisis; one of the big Inti windows was scarred by a meteorite strike, and had to be covered over with a tremendous steel lid while repairs were effected. That meant that a kind of night fell over a swathe of countryside in the region of the habitat opposite the damaged window. Crops failed, and rainforest trees quickly started to die back. The state system, however, swung into action, and some of the legionaries, recruited for the effort, described what they saw. From all around the local area the tambos were opened, and mit’a workers, supervised by the military, rushed to bring relief to the stricken province.

This was where the system of constantly storing excess produce paid off: this was the point of all the organisation, Mardina started to see. In a way it was a distillation of the Roman system in her own history, the bargain an empire made with the nations and populations it subdued: submit to me, and I will keep you safe. Under the Incas’ almost obsessively tight control, you might have little freedom of movement, freedom of choice. But you never went hungry, thirsty, you never went cold, there was medical care when you needed it. And when disaster struck at one part of the imperial body, the rest rushed to help it recover.

But she also glimpsed what happened when things went wrong. In this empire of occupation and exploitation, the most common ‘crime’ was an attempt to evade the mit’a tax obligations. It was a chill moment when the tax assessors came, and worked through their records, manipulating their quipus with one hand. Some, it was said, could work the stringed gadgets with their toes. They saw all and recorded all. And the perpetrators of crime, after arbitrary hearings before the tocrico apu, could be taken away from the ayllu for punishment, out of sight.

Observing all this, in the camp Quintus Fabius enacted his own regime of discipline and punishment, intending not to let a single one of his legionaries fall foul of the Inca authorities.

Worse yet, however, for many families was the forcible removal of the young. There was a kind of ongoing recruitment drive for off-habitat workers, who would man the asteroid mines or crew kernel-powered freighters. But there was also a demand for recruits for service at the Cuzcos, or at another of the great imperial establishments – and the servants chosen were always the prettiest children, those with the sweetest nature. This service was compulsory, not volunteered like other professions.

This was an empire in which everything, including you, was owned by the Sapa Inca. In fundamental ways it was far less free than even the Roman Empire had been, back on Terra. Even so, Mardina could see how the great machinery of state worked to sustain its citizens. She wouldn’t hesitate to grab back her own freedom if she ever got the chance. But no doubt there had been worse empires in human history – worse times and places to be alive, even if you weren’t the Sapa Inca himself.

And then there was the sheer wonder of living here, in this tremendous building in space.

There was weather. There could be days more brilliant than any summer’s day she had known in Brikanti – hotter than Rome, said Quintus Fabius, even before it was a hole in the ground. Or there could be rain, even storms. The tocrico apu claimed that these were all under the control of vast engines commanded by the Sapa Inca’s advisers, but the locals, salvaging their ruined crops after one sudden hailstorm, were sceptical about that.

On warm clear nights, Mardina liked to sleep outside, if she could, sometimes with Clodia at her side, safe within the walls of a community that was slowly taking on the look of an Inca village embedded in a Roman marching camp. And they would look up at the ‘sky’. Of course there were no stars to be seen here. There were very few aircraft, even. The only craft operating above the ground were the government-controlled ‘Condors’ that passed along the axis region of the habitat, in the vacuum.

But the tremendous metal shell above was an inverted world, hanging above them, crowded with endlessly fascinating detail – even if the seeing through this lowland air was poor compared to how it had been on the high puna. The Inti windows glowed like pale linear moons, and Mardina could make out the blackness of forest, the pale silver of rivers and lakes. All this was cut through by the sharp lines of rail tracks and roads, connecting communities that glowed almost starlike against the background.

And sometimes, she and Clodia thought, they could make out shapes framed by those tangled lines. They were like figures traced out of the dense antisuyu forest up there by some tremendous scalpel. There was a bird, there was a spider, there was a crouching human. Maybe it was just Mardina’s eyes seeking patterns where none existed, the way the ancients had always seen animals and gods among the meaningless scatter of the stars of the night sky. Or maybe it was deliberate, a touch of uncharacteristic artistry in the huge functional architecture of this artificial world.

And if that was true, maybe there were similar etchings on her side of the world, great portraits hundreds of miles in extent, yet meticulously planned. Maybe from the point of view of some witness sleeping in the open on the other side of the habitat, lying there pinned by the spin of the cylinder, she was a speck lost in the eye of a spider, or the claw of a bird. Somehow it was a comforting thought to be so enclosed by humanity. Sometimes Mardina wondered if she would eventually forget the wildness of the outside, of the stars.

But there was wildness enough inside the habitat, in the dense green of the rainforest jungle that circled the ayllu village. The deep hacha hacha, where the antis lived.

CHAPTER 45

Mardina and Clodia had their first encounter with the antis on the day the strange mit’a tax assessment party came to call.

Unusually this was led by Ruminavi, tocrico apu, the deputy prefect himself. He arrived with the various inspectors and assessors with their quipus, and the tax collectors with their hand-drawn carts for the produce and samples they would take away – and a larger than usual contingent of soldiers in their woollen tunics and plumed helmets of steel-reinforced cane, and their armour of quilted cotton over steel plate, all decorated with scraps of gold and silver. Their only weapons were blades, whips, slings; just as in the space-going ships of the lost Roman Empire, projectile weapons and explosives were excluded from the interior of the habitat.