The lead trooper agreed that Dolo could take the skimmer if a replacement was sent out. So Luca climbed back into the skimmer alongside Dolo, leaving the harbour village behind them. It did not take long before they were back within the enclosing wall of the Navy compound, with the complex disorderly local world of sea and rock and light shut out. Luca felt a huge relief, as if he had come home.

Dolo directed the skimmer to a cluster of buildings huddled within the wall. These blocky huts had been set around a rectangle of cleared ground, and fenced off from the rest of the Navy base. Once inside this compound within a compound, Dolo and Luca got out of the skimmer and walked across obsessively swept dirt.

Everywhere Luca could see children. They were of varying ages from ten or so through to perhaps sixteen. One group marched in formation, another was lined up in rows, a third was undergoing some kind of physical training over a crude obstacle course, a fourth was standing in a rough square, watching something at the centre. Luca imagined this place must be big enough to hold a thousand children, perhaps more.

‘What is this place?’

‘Call it a school,’ Dolo said. ‘Keep your eyes open; listen and learn. And remember—’

‘I know. I am the Commission. I mustn’t show what I feel.’

‘Better yet that you should feel nothing inappropriate in the first place. But not showing it is a start. First impressions?’

‘Regularity,’ Luca said. ‘Straight lines everywhere. Everything planned, everything ordered. Nothing spontaneous.’

‘And the children?’

Luca said nothing. There was silence save for barked commands; none of the children seemed to be saying anything.

Dolo said, ‘You must understand that children brought in from the wild are more difficult to manage than those raised in birthing centres from soldier stock, for whom the war is a way of life; they know nothing else. These wild ones must be taught there is nothing else. So they will spend six or more years of their lives in places like this. Of course past the age of thirteen - or younger in some cases - they are used in combat.’

‘Thirteen?’

‘At that age their usefulness is limited. Those who survive are brought back for further training, and to shape the others. It helps them become accustomed to death, you see, if they are returned from the killing fields to a place like this, which keeps filling up with more people, people, people, so that mortality becomes trivial, a commonplace of statistics . . . Here now; this is where that pretty little girl from the coast will be brought, when the troopers extract her from her clinging mother.’