‘And I have to work under different rules to you. I have to live within the law.’

‘You can still negotiate from a position of strength. If I land, we’ve lost that. If I stay up here, I am a threat.’

He thought about it. ‘Well, there’s more than one way down, though I can’t honestly say that halo is my favourite form of travel.’

‘In full armour.’

‘As you say, in full armour. Oh joy.’

Ariadne wiped the display and replaced it with the real-time image of north-east Africa, hanging stationary underneath.

‘It scares me when you don’t orbit,’ Benzamir said. ‘It feels like there’s nothing holding us up.’

‘So I flaunt my inertial drive,’ she said. ‘What equipment do you need?’

‘Give me everything. If I don’t use it, it doesn’t matter. If I do, I’ll need it straight away.’ He turned to the people who’d travelled with him and whom he now considered friends. ‘I’m going down. I need to try and persuade them to give up and come with me.’

‘And when they don’t?’ said Alessandra.

‘I suppose I’ll have to make them.’

‘Can’t you just . . . you know . . .?’ She pointed her finger.

‘Yes. I could.’

‘Your course is honourable, Maghrebi, but you lack faith,’ said Va. ‘There’ll be no need to fight your rebels. God will not be thwarted, and it’s His will that the books are returned.’

‘I am not going naked. And yes, I lack faith. I trust in doubt to keep me alive.’ Benzamir watched Va’s face sour, but he was in a fragile mood. ‘I woke up the bugs on the book I gave to the emperor. I expect they’re all in one of the domes below, except the one you lost.’

Va narrowed his eyes and said nothing more.

‘Come on then. If you’re going to lend a hand, now’s the time.’ He led them to the cargo bay – all those who didn’t think armour weakness and weapons wrong. Ariadne brightened the lights and signalled with coloured telltales where the pieces of Benzamir’s battlesuit were stored.

It took a little while to put it all back together. Said helped, as did Elenya and Alessandra. Wahir played with the parts until they were needed, when he reluctantly gave them up.

‘Are you seriously going to wear this?’ Alessandra looked at the result of their work, a huge figure with oversized limbs. ‘It’s so heavy that four of us can barely lift one part of it.’

‘You don’t wear it, not how you think of wearing it.’ Benzamir went round the back of the giant and pulled and twisted two catches. ‘It carries you. Really, you didn’t think my head would go up into the helmet with my feet still on the ground?’

‘Master would have to be twice his height!’ laughed Wahir nervously. ‘But what do you do then? It looks very fierce.’

‘You crouch inside the body.’ He heaved, and the back split from waist to shoulders. ‘Everything is controlled by movement and thought. Like a big puppet. I walk, it walks. I run, it runs. Like this.’ He clambered up until he was balanced on the suit’s back like an new insect inspecting its larva-casing.

He slid in his legs, then eased in the rest of him, arms first, torso, and finally his head.

The back panel closed itself. In the darkness Benzamir waited, cocooned.

Two arterial shunts stabbed into his neck, and the gaps left in the cavity started to fill with warm syrupy liquid. It seeped into his form-fitting singlesuit and clung to his skin. It rose as far as his neck and paused.

Benzamir hated this part. His blood was getting all the oxygen it needed and more through the shunts, but it still felt like drowning.

The liquid reached his chin, covered his mouth, his nose, and up until the only air left in the chamber was in his lungs.

Slowly, calmly, he breathed out. He tried to make his mind blank out, thinking only of the vast void of space between the stars. Slowly, calmly, he breathed in.

‘Everyone panics their first time,’ said Ariadne. ‘This is not your first time. You will live. The sensation will come and go, and you will remain.’ Her soothing words were repeated over and over until every last bubble of air had gone.

‘Are you ready, Benzamir?’

Without speaking, he said: ‘Yes. I swear it gets worse, not better.’

‘Systems check good. Sensors good. Locomotion good. Weapons good. Power plant good, with a tendency to run a little hot, so watch out for that. Coms good. Halo good. You have control.’

Without seeing, he saw four concerned faces looking up at the head part of the armour. Wahir was reaching out to tap the chest with an inquisitive finger.

Benzamir thought light, and the markers on the skin of the armour – fingers, elbows, knees, shoulders, head and feet – glowed red.

Wahir yelped and hid behind Said.

‘This is normal,’ said Benzamir through the external speakers. ‘It’s so I don’t tread on you by accident.’ He selected his camouflage, dialling through a swatch of designs until he came to a mosaic of shades of yellow.

He moved, testing every joint, moving his head around in a complete circle and flexing his weapon pods. Spikes and stubby hollow tubes popped out of hatches and sneaked back in faster than the eye could follow.

‘I’m ready,’ he said. ‘You’ll all have to leave now. Ariadne’s going to open the main doors and there’s no air-lock.’

Elenya took Said’s arm, which embarrassed him greatly, and Wahir’s, which pleased him inordinately, and took them away. Alessandra started to edge back, not wanting to go, not wanting to say anything that would betray her.

‘It has to be done this way, Alessandra. Perhaps they’ll see sense, and we can finish this without a firing a shot.’ Benzamir lifted up his hand and splayed his massive composite fingers. She recognized the salute from his tattoo, and tentatively returned it.

‘Come back to us,’ she blurted. ‘Come back to me.’ She turned and ran.

Benzamir was alone. After a moment he turned and stamped his way to the back of the hold. The lights dimmed, and Ariadne vented the air into space. The high-pitched whistle diminished until he stood in hard vacuum. Then she opened the doors, peeling them apart like flower petals, so he stood on the edge of a vertiginous drop.

The whole world was spread out before him and filled all his vision, from the azure blue of the curved horizon to the sulphurous yellow of the dunes beneath his feet. The ocean sparkled blue, and the forests to the west were rich and green. Clouds collected at the foot of mountains in streamers and over plains as towers of white.

It was then he realized that he loved it, all of it, from frozen north to sun-scorched south. For all the foreboding he felt, it was worth it just to be there at that moment, worth coming the vast distance and suffering the gnawing anxiety that he had in fact chosen the wrong side. Even if he was going to die today, he would go knowing that he had had one moment of transcendent joy.

A dispenser chugged a stream of silver remotes into the bay. They joined him as a shining cloud above his head.

Then he stepped forward, and out into the abyss.

To begin with, it didn’t even seem like he was falling. The remotes fell with him, hanging next to him like drops of water, but the numbers in the corner of his vision gave him the true picture: velocity, height above sea level, external pressure and temperature. When he looked back, Ariadne was all but lost against the stars.

The first wisps of air began to tear at him, initially as insubstantial as gossamer, then slowly building until it was thunder. He was roaring down. The battlesuit locked itself into the foetal position, and the vibrations reached their peak with a sharp snap of sound.

He was supersonic.

The remotes trailed away behind Benzamir, but he wasn’t concerned: as the air grew thicker, he would slow down faster, and they’d catch him up. The ground was huge, swallowing up all his vision. Unenhanced, he could see the patterns of sinuous dunes snaking their way across the desert, the subtle changes in colour of the land, the acid sharp lines of rock that cut through the sand sea, the pounding surf marking the edge of the ocean.