‘Not until I can afford to buy them out of the Coalition draft.’

He nodded. ‘As Hily did you. I knew her ambition for you. It’s good to see it realised so well. It must have been hard for you when she died. I imagine you got thrown into a cadre by the Commissaries - right?’

‘I won’t talk to you about my mother, L’Eesh.’

‘As you wish. But you need to keep your mind clear, little Raida. And you might want to think about saving your energy. We have a long way to go.’

I worked with my bone spear and tried to ignore him.

We had to sleep in our suits, of course. I dug a shallow trench in the dust. I couldn’t shut out the crimson light. I slept in patches.

I woke up in my own stink. The recycled gloop from my hood nipples already tasted stale, my skinsuit was chafing in a dozen places, and I felt bruises from that landing that hadn’t registered at the time.

If the sun had moved across the sky at all, I couldn’t see it.

It’s a strange thing, but it wasn’t until that second ‘morning’ that I took seriously the possibility that I might die here. I guess I had been distracted by the hunt, my conflict with L’Eesh. Or maybe I just lack imagination. Anyhow my adrenaline rush was long gone; I was numb, flat, feeling beaten.

Through that endless day, we walked on.

We came to what might once have been a township. There was little left but a gridwork of foundations, a few pits like cellars, bits of low wall. I thought I could see a sequence, of older buildings constructed of massive marble-like blocks, later structures made of what looked like the local sandstone or else bits of broken-up marble ruins.

All of it trashed, burned out, knocked flat.

I squatted, chewing on a glucose tab.

L’Eesh, his suit scuffed and filthy, began poking around a large battleship-shaped mound of rubble. ‘You know, there’s something odd here. I thought this was a fort, or perhaps some equivalent of a cathedral. But it looks for all the world as if it crashed here.’

‘You don’t make aircraft from brick.’

‘Whatever made such a vast, ungainly structure fly through the air is gone now. Nevertheless there was clearly once a pretty advanced civilisation here. On the way in I glimpsed extensive ruins. And some of those impact craters looked deliberately placed. This whole world is an arena of war. But it seems to have been a war that was fought with interplanetary weapons, and then flying brick fortresses, and at last fire and clubs.

‘It’s likely both moons were inhabited. Life could have been sparked on either moon, in some tidal puddle stirred by the Jovian parent. And then panspermia would work, spores wafting on meteorite winds, two worlds developing in parallel, cross-fertilising . . .’