The Quellists meanwhile simply slipped away, disappeared, abandoned the struggle and got on with living their lives as Nadia Makita had always argued they should be prepared to do. Technology has given us access to timescales of life our ancestors could only dream of, we must be prepared to use that timescale, to live on that timescale, if we are to realise our own dreams. And twenty-five years later, back they came, careers built, families formed, children raised, back to fight again, not so much aged but seasoned, wiser, tougher, stronger and fed at core by the whisper that persisted at the heart of each individual uprising; the whisper that Quellcrist Falconer herself was back.

If the semi-mythical nature of her twenty-five-year existence as a fugitive had been difficult for the security forces to get to grips with, Nadia Makita’s return was worse. She was fifty-three years old but sleeved in new flesh, impossible even for intimate acquaintances to identify. She stalked through the ruins of the previous revolution like a vengeful ghost and her first victims were the backbiters and betrayers from within the ranks of the old alliance. This time, there would be no factional squabbles to diffract the focus, hamstring the Quellist lead and sell her out to the Harlanites.

The neoMaoists, the Communitarians, the New Sun Path, the Parliament Gradualists and the Social Libertarians. She sought them out as they sat in their dotage, muttering over their respective fumbled grabs at power, and she slaughtered them all.

By the time she turned on the First Families and their tame assembly, it was no longer a revolution.

It was the Unsettlement.

It was a war.

Three years, and the final assault on Millsport.

I tabbed the second coffee and drank it while Dig 301 read the story to its close. As a kid, I’d heard it countless times and always hoped each telling for a last minute reversal, a reprieve from the inevitable tragedy.

“With Millsport firmly in the hands of government forces, the Quellist assault broken and a moderate compromise being brokered in the assembly,

Makita perhaps believed that her enemies would have other more pressing matters to attend to before hunting her down. She had above all believed in their love of expediency, but faulty intelligence led her to misjudge the vital role her own capture or elimination had to play in the peace accord. By the time the error was realised, flight was all but impossible …”

Scratch the ‘all but’. Harlan sent more warships to ring the Alabardos Crater than had been deployed in any single naval engagement of the war.

Crack helicopter pilots flew their craft at the upper edges of the four-hundred-metre limit with semi-suicidal brinkmanship. Spec ops snipers crammed inside, armed with weapons as heavy as it was thought the orbitals’ parameters would permit. Orders were to bring down any escaping aircraft by all and any means including, if necessary, mid-air collision.