‘George,’ she whispered. ‘My poor George.’

It was, she imagined, something the Pantopon Rose might have said. If he had been alive, the assistant could have asked George his professional advice: ‘How can a person like me be shaking like this?’

Forty lights down the Beach, EMC’s crack grey ops team was doing a favour for a friend. The Levy Flight comprised a dozen ships, would take on anything. They gave the big No! to the psychopathic conformity of the typical K-pod. Instead they encouraged a shifting membership of ten- to thirteen-year-olds with an interest in Military Collectibilia of Old Earth. Their present mission might seem weird, even unhip, to today’s kids: until you realised that a hundred thousand years ago Panamax IV was inhabited by fuck-off telepathic reptile Aztecs from beyond the universe. That was the draw.

Planetary interdiction would normally require one of the Flight to lay off at the L2 point and from there co-ordinate the operations of the others. The mayhem at Panamax IV discouraged this. There being at least four parties to the conflict not counting the pod itself, fighting was going on in several locations at once, from five lights out in the neighbouring system – catalogued as Alpha 5 Flexitone – to the lower reaches of the Panamax parking orbit. EMC heavy assets thugged it out realtime with the Nastic 8th Fleet in a classic exchange of bumps which had already set fire to a nearby gas giant. Two dozen Denebian dipships mined the local sun. Dissident indigenes were arming scramjets and flying them into partial orbits straight off the factory floor; while a gut-shot Alcubiere battleship – the Daily Deals & Huge Savings, run by a privateer crew of New Men under the leadership of two Shadow Boys who shared the name ‘Fermionic Joe’ – tried to aerobrake its way down to the surface of the planet. That was how half the Levy pod, including Whiskey Bravo, Pizza Night, Fat Mickey from Detroit and Uptown Six, found itself banging about in atmosphere – no one’s preferred medium – at Mach 2 and below, negotiating airspace with one another as well with hostiles. The other half, strung out between Flexitone and the Panamax Oort cloud, ran interference, making all the usual plays through curled-up dimensions at picosecond speeds, flipping in and out of the 3D world as circumstance demanded.

‘—incoming, four degrees over the ecliptic, two lights out.’

‘I have him.’

‘Steady. In contact. Steady, steady—’

‘Right underneath you, Fat Mickey.’

‘All his bases are ours.’