The sub-orbital hit a fresh patch of turbulence, lurching like a truck dropping one of its wheels into a deep pothole. Saul drew in a sharp breath and wished he had something to cling on to, as the turbojets grumbled and whined in preparation for the last stage of their descent.

‘And there’s a reason you’re sharing this with me?’ Saul managed to say.

‘Well,’ Sefu replied, ‘I got the impression you weren’t enjoying the flight, for some reason.’

‘Me, I love turbulence,’ said Foster, his eyes wide and happy. ‘It’s like being rocked to sleep by Mother Nature.’

Text, rendered in silver, floated on the lower right of Saul’s vision, telling him that the sub-orbital was now only seven kilometres above the ground, having already dropped nearly fifteen kilometres in the last few minutes. The external temperature was minus seventy, and the air still thin enough to qualify as vacuum.

‘Now Mitchell,’ Sefu continued, twisting around in his restraints to catch the attention of the rest of Hanover’s task force, ‘that son of a bitch was in fucking love with jumping out of things.’

‘Fuck yeah,’ confirmed a woman further down the two rows of seats facing each other on either side the craft’s interior. Her tag read Helena Bryant. ‘I trained with him this one time, when we had to jump from about twelve kilometres up. He got to within maybe a half-klick of the ground before he even started to pull back up. Scared the shit out of me then, but the man was fucking fearless.’

‘Wing-suit, right?’ Saul guessed.

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ she replied. ‘You know what I’m talking about?’

‘Sure,’ Saul replied, assuming an air of false bravado. ‘I even went on a jump with him once, years ago. He’d been daring me for months.’

‘You knew him?’ interrupted another voice over to his right.

‘We worked together way back when,’ Saul replied. ‘Somehow he . . . talked me into it.’

‘Why’d he have to talk you into it?’ asked Sefu. He was still grinning, but there was a shade more respect in his tone. ‘Because you were too chickenshit?’

‘Too sane, I think,’ Saul replied. ‘The dive was made from low orbit.’

That shut them up.

‘Real orbit, or sub-orbital?’ asked Helena.

Saul grinned. ‘Sub-orbital. I’m not that crazy.’

‘That’s pretty dangerous shit nonetheless,’ someone else said.

‘Sure.’ Saul made a point of shrugging, as if to say no big deal. ‘Maybe one in a thousand orbital divers wind up dead, but Mitch and me did it together, from more than twenty kilometres up. We used foam and Kevlar heat shields for the first five kilometres down, then wing-suits the rest of the way.’