She grabbed his arm and pulled him away from the rest of the refugees, who had finally realized they weren’t in immediate danger. The rest of the squad kept their weapons raised regardless; terroristas had a habit of hiding amongst those fleeing from the fighting.

A military transport of similar design to the air-ambulances dropped down towards the road that ran parallel to the top of the embankment.

‘Kellogg said you’d run off in the middle of a fucking combat zone!’ Karen shouted at him. ‘I mean, what the fuck was going through your head?’

Nathan found he couldn’t frame an answer, so he remained mute as she tugged him towards the steps, and the beckoning lights of the transport waiting above.

Several minutes and a dozen kilometres later, the same transport dropped down towards a camp that spilled out along the streets lining both sides of Third Canal. Smoke rose from clusters of tents and prefabs where a sea of refugees warded off the freezing cold by burning furniture and anything else combustible. These were the lucky ones, awaiting immediate evacuation; in the surrounding city, there were tens of thousands dying more slowly of starvation or freezing inside their homes.

The transport’s lights picked out the landing pad on the roof of the clinic and began to drop towards it. Nathan glanced out of a window and saw in the distance the great flickering wall of energy that delineated the nearest perimeter of the coreship’s human-habitable zone. Closer to hand loomed the black shape of one of the sky-pillars, a great, carved rock limb that was only one of hundreds supporting the coreship’s outer crust.

‘Hey Nathan, you stupid bastard. Wake up. It’s me. Karen.’

Within minutes of disembarking from the ambulance, he’d crawled on top of a spare trolley in the clinic, and passed out. He groaned and sat up, blinking in the harsh lights and rubbing at a sore spot on his arm.

Karen regarded him with a mixture of scorn and pity. She’d taken off her helmet and matte-black body armour and let her hair fall down to her shoulders. One of the doctors stood next to her, a dark-skinned woman in disposable paper clothing.

The clinic, unlike almost anywhere else currently in Ascension, was warm. The doctor leaned in towards Nathan and pulled one of his eyelids up, shining a bright light directly into his pupil.

‘Seems okay,’ she remarked, her voice brisk. She then took out a hypo and aimed it towards Nathan’s arm, almost before he realized what she was doing.

‘Hey!’ he shouted, sliding off the trolley and out of her immediate reach.

The two women stared at him with almost identical expressions of exasperation.

‘For God’s sake, Nathan,’ said Karen. ‘Doctor Nirav is trying to help you.’

‘Thanks, but I don’t need any shots.’

‘What, you fucking phobic or something?’ she replied in a voice full of scorn.