A woman came to the door - the little girl’s mother? - strong-faced, about forty, with hands grimy from work in a field, or garden. She looked resigned, Luca thought on first impression. Her gaze ran indifferently over the Commissaries, and she turned to the lead trooper.

She spoke a language he didn’t recognise. The artificial voice of the trooper’s translating desk was small and tinny.

Luca said, ‘They must have brought their language with them. This woman speaks a relic of a pre-Extirpation tongue.’ He felt excited, intellectually. ‘Perhaps that aboriginal tongue could be reconstructed. Populations are scattered on this island world, isolated. Their languages must have diverged. By comparing the dialects of different groups—’

‘Of course that would be possible,’ said Dolo, sounded vaguely irritated. ‘But why would you want to do such a thing?’

Now the woman pressed her hand against the trooper’s data desk, a simple signature, and she called a name. The little girl came back to the door. She was a thin child with an open, pretty face; she looked bewildered, not scared, Luca thought. The mother reached down and gave the girl a small valise. She placed her hand on the girl’s back, as if to push her to the troopers.

Luca understood what was happening a moment before the girl herself. ‘We are here to take her away, aren’t we?’

Dolo held up a finger, silencing him.

The girl looked at the tall armour-clad figures. Her face twisted with fear. She threw down the valise and turned to bury her face in her mother’s belly, yelling and jabbering. The mother was weeping herself, but she tried to pull the child away from her legs.

‘She’s just a child,’ Luca said. ‘She doesn’t want to leave her mother.’

Dolo shrugged. ‘Child or not, she should know her duty.’

At first the troopers seemed tolerant. They stood in the sun, watching impassively as the mother gently cajoled the child. But after a couple of minutes the lead trooper stepped forward and put his gloved hand on the girl’s shoulder. The girl squirmed away. The trooper seemed to have misjudged the mother’s mood, for she jabbered angrily at him, pulled the child inside the house and slammed the door. The troopers glanced at each other, shrugged wearily, and fingered the weapons at their belts.

Dolo tugged Luca’s sleeve. ‘We don’t need to see the resolution of this little unpleasantness. Come. Let me show you what will happen to that child.’