‘A Jovian void officer who speaks Chogorian, keeps a gyre-hawk and serves Terran spice tea on a table of cedar wood. You are a strange example of your kind, admiral.’

‘Perhaps, but are those things truly strange, my lord? I grew up in ships, in orbital shoal habitats, in corridors and spaces of metal where there was no sky, and trees lived only in tales.’

‘A cage,’ said the Khan, raising a finger and stroking Kelik’s crest. ‘You lived in a cage of ideas. You broke its bars and now find more comfort in reminders that life is more than iron and stone, and death in darkness.’

‘I like things that are different from what I knew.’ She shrugged.

‘But after this time is past, after your rest is done, you return them to their cage. You put back the ideas and oaths and become the warrior that you were made into. You go back to the small spaces you ran from.’

Su-Kassen felt herself frown. The thread of this conversation had flowed and turned in just a few moments in ways that made it difficult to follow. It was as though there were something that the Khan’s words were circling but not touching, some end which she could not see.

‘The first reports from Uranus arrived just after you left the command chamber,’ he said, and glanced at her, then looked back at the gyre-hawk. Kelik flicked his wings and opened his beak wide. Su-Kassen had the sudden impression that the bird was smiling.

‘A beautiful creature. Too beautiful to be in a cage. Keep one like this from the sky and it will go mad. You let him hunt, though, I can tell.’

‘When I can, I take him up to the parapets, and let him fly.’

‘And he always returns?’

‘Yes.’

The Khan smiled, then his face darkened, the expression like cloud passing over the sun.

‘The sirens sound outside, on and on. At Actinus Hive, an hour ago, ten thousand people took their own lives by sealing a zone of the hive and cutting off the air that kept them alive. The last message from inside the zone said that they could hear the howling of wolves when they dreamed and when they woke. There are others, too, smaller in scale but multiplying by the hour. Mars has fallen silent. Fire and fear spreads and spreads. Just before I knocked at your door, I was told that there have been pleas from Triton and the moon colonies of Neptune. They can see the battle-light from Pluto. They are asking for the ships taken from their orbits to be returned. They want help. They want the Praetorian of Terra to save them.’

Silence filled the moment.