‘Jesus, Rig, I’m really sorry,’ Carlo said. ‘Hey, we can go lower! How would it be if we went lower?’

‘Get us out of here, Carlo.’

Carlo switched on the f-Ram drivers. All around the Uptown Six, the other ships were torching up. The Levy Flight stood on its stern and ascended through the clouds of radioactive ash at Mach 40. They spent a moment or two in the parking orbit, looking down. Someone up there – someone not so far away, with access to top-shelf assets – had lost their temper: Panamax, as Tanky LaBrom put it, was fucked. High volume X-ray devices quartered the crust, vaporising the first fifty metres on contact, then steadily melting the rest. Surface features higher than a couple of hundred feet were already a kind of geological paste, fairground scarlet at the leading edge and forcing itself across the remains of the landscape like a tongue between your lips. Plate tectonic activity was up. The atmosphere roared and whistled with heated gases. Gaines stared down, wishing he had understood his daughter as well as she had understood him. He remembered her saying, ‘Rig, these people were so old!’ and he wished there could be one single patch of unburnt ground left somewhere down there. As he thought about Alyssia, the Nastic cruiser – on the other side of the planet now, and only 50,000 feet up – switched on its gravity engine and drove itself into the softening crust. Physics ran wild. A huge bulge began to form on the surface beneath Uptown Six.

‘Fucking shit, guys,’ Carlo said, ‘he’s coming all the way through.’

The Levy Flight weren’t going to miss that.

You can originate from a freezer, Impasse van Sant believed, and still make an identity for yourself: but the thing is, you never feel sited. Day after day he hung in empty space, wondering not so much why he had no news from home as where his home had been. He knew there was a war on, but he didn’t know who to side with. That made him feel both unreal and nostalgic. How can you be nostalgic for something you never had? Wow, he caught himself thinking: a war at home! It must be something, to have all your certainties knocked over in that way. He caught fragments of media here and there. Wrecked ships slowly tumbling in hard light; long views of planets he never heard of. Children singing something against a black background. A headline that just said—

WAR