On the house smartsilk screen you couldn’t get that full-sensory drop from orbit or the sense of walking like God over the water but in the house, even with Mom in her distracted fold-laundry state, it wasn’t smart to use the buddy-lead. Anyway, Kyle didn’t want to give her more to worry about. Three days in Alterre was more like three million years: still water water water whichever way he turned the point of view, but the Mansooris had evolved. High above the blue Atlantic, fleets of airships battled.

‘Whoa,’ said Kyle Rubin and Salim Mansoori.

In three days the jelly-fish balloons had become vast sky-going gasbags, blimp-creatures, translucent airships the size of the Boeing troop transports that brought supplies and workers in to the secure end of Varanasi airport. Their bodies were ridged like the condom Kyle had been shown at the back of the bike rack behind the school; light rippled over them and broke into rainbows as the air-jellies manoeuvred. For this was battle, no doubt about it. This was hot war. The sky-jellyfish trailed long clusters of tentacles beneath them, many hanging in the water, their last connection with their old world. But some ended in purple stingers, some in long stabbing spines, some in barbs, and these the airships wielded as weapons. The air-medusas raised or lowered sail-flaps to tack and manoeuvre into striking positions. Kyle saw one blimp, body blotched with black sting-weals, vent gas from nose and tail and drop out of combat. In a tangle of slashing and parrying tentacles Kyle watched a fighting blimp tear a gash the length of an army hummer down an opponent’s flank with its scimitar-hook. The mortally wounded blimp vented glittering dust, crumpled, folded in half in the middle and plunged into the sea where it split like a thrown water-balloon. The sea instantly boiled with almkvists, spear-fast scavengers all jaw and speed.

‘Cool,’ both boys said together.

‘Hey now, didn’t you promise you’d let your folks know as soon as the network was up?’ said Mom, standing behind them. ‘And Kyle, you know your dad doesn’t like you playing that game.’

But she wasn’t mad. She couldn’t be mad. Dad was safe, Dad had called in, Dad would be home soon. It was all in the little tremble in her voice, the way she leaned over between them to look at the screen, the smell of perfume just dabbed on. You know these things.

~ * ~

It had been close. Kyle’s Dad called Kyle in to show him the rolling news and point out where his company car had been when the bombers hit the escort hummers.

‘There’s next to no protection in those things,’ he said over jerky, swooping flash-cut images of black smoke boiling out of yellow flames and people standing and shouting and not knowing what to do; pictures taken from a passer-by’s palmer. ‘They used a drone RAV; I saw something go past the window just before it hit. They were aiming for the soldiers, not for us.’