Ant-kinden, he would never understand them or their communal world. Or how Marius had managed to leave that world and not look back.

The hatch went suddenly dark. A Wasp soldier forced his way in, the dance of his wings dying behind him. One open hand still crackled with the fire of his sting but he was now leading with his sword. Stenwold was lurching backwards even as the man’s shoulders cleared the entrance, hurling the first thing that came to hand, which happened to be a mechanic’s hammer. It thumped into the Wasp soldier’s shoulder and knocked him half out of the hatch. Then Stenwold was upon him, grabbing for his sword arm with one hand, lunging with the other. He never got hold of the man’s sword, but his right hand somehow managed to draw his own, and he rammed it up to its narrow guard in his adversary’s armpit.

The Wasp spat at him and he recoiled in shock, then recoiled again as he saw the blood stringing across the man’s lips. Then the dying soldier was falling out of the flier, the weight of him taking Stenwold’s sword from his suddenly nerveless fingers.

He had just killed another human being. There’s a first time for everything.

One of Marius’s soldiers now reached the hatch and cast the wooden case inside. Marius himself and three of his men were still inching their way back, painfully slow.

‘Tisamon!’ Stenwold called out. ‘Tisamon!’

He saw him then, the Weaponsmaster, moving in and out of the Wasps as they tried to corner him. But he stepped through the golden energy of their stings, their crossbow bolts that fractured on the hard earth of the airfield.