Action And Barbarism

"The Snows of Ganymede."

The Planetary Engineers fight and escape in a stolen rocket but are pursued, fired at and forced to crash-land after which the survivors have to trek across the frozen surface of Ganymede. Comic strip sf used to consist of similar action although Dan Dare and Captain Condor did not lose so many comrades in combat.

The surviving Engineers encounter "Outlaws" who, despite sounding like Western fiction villains, are space-suited barbarians living inside a mountain behind a cannibalised spaceship airlock. Can barbarism be combined with space tech? Probably not indefinitely. There is a similar setup, but in orbit, in Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination.

The Engineers have had to break their own rules by intervening in Jovian politics but it turns out that they are supposed to do this discretely when necessary in any case just as the Time Patrol changes history when necessary and also really exists to counter not only time travelling criminals but also temporal chaos. Series state their premises up front, then reveal more later. A good sequel says, "There's a lot that we did not tell you before..."