Viewing the Flight’s efforts – which, in quotidian time, came to him as little more than a coloured dapple of flat-plane lightning across hologram images of empty space, a few quiet voices in an FTL pipe, a historical record of things that had happened a million nanoseconds ago an astronomical unit away – R.I. Gaines was impressed by their calmness and skill. There was so much work for them out there, you got the feeling they were embarrassed. The quiet rhythms and stresses of their exchanges returned language to something reliable. By contrast, the embedded journalism AIs, their commentary piped in by the pilots themselves from commercial routers, were reporting: ‘There’s no let up for the Levy Flight. These boys wouldn’t want one. They want to work.’

‘Levy Flight are here to work,’ Peat Teeter told Tanky LaBrom. ‘Work improves the way they feel about themselves.’

By any measure they were too late. Alyssia Fignall’s hilltop dig had been vaporised before they arrived. Her house, too, was blowing around in the clouds of oily black grit produced by large-scale thermobaric exchanges. The fountain, the stone arches, the long cool spaces and luminous grey shadows of the cloister: all gone and maybe Alyssia with them. Below him now lay his last chance of finding her.

The town had aged since Gaines last saw it, like a photograph of a ruin subsiding into coastline. Somewhere upstream a dam had burst, forcing a million tonnes of water through La Cava in an hour. The karst system had fallen in on itself: the town had fallen into that. He couldn’t see how anyone could survive down there. But Carlo the K-captain had manoeuvred Uptown Six to within fifty feet of the greyish-brown turbulence, so Gaines gave him the respect of searching every remaining nook of stone. Right and left, other elements of the pod edged nervously about, trying not run into one another, so low they were dashed with spray. They looked wrong – like a lot of executioners at a birthday party, with an intense interest in people’s weight or how muscular their necks were – but they were doing their best to help, a class of behaviour that did not occur naturally to them. Daylight came and went suddenly and without reason. Incoming gamma would light up the local sky, take the top off a hill, dig a trench a kilometre long; then it would get dark again. At moments like that the K-ships shivered and hunted, outlines blurring as their stealth options cut in, weapons extruding with a kind of sluggish ferocity. Incoming gamma was more their kind of environment.

‘It’s mayhem down there,’ Carlo remarked. Then he warned one of the other ships, ‘Tanky, you’ve still got me off your starboard stern. Ten metres and closing. Keep up.’

Gaines watched the floating junk bouncing off buildings and bridges on its way down to the sea. ‘There’s nothing left here,’ he was forced to admit.