A little before midnight, Isa cut loose of Reach traffic control and Brasil took the con from the fairweather cockpit. By then, conventional fireworks were already bursting, like sudden green and gold and pink sonar displays, all over the Millsport skyline. Pretty much every islet and platform had its own arsenal to fire off, and across the major landmasses like New Kanagawa, Danchi and Tadaimako, they were in every park. Even some of the boats out in the Reach had laid in stock—from several of our nearest neighbours, rockets trailed drunken lines of sparks skyward, and elsewhere rescue flares were put to use instead. On the general radio channel, against a backdrop of music and party noise, some inane presenter warbled pointless descriptions of it all.

Boubin Islander bucked a little as Brasil upped her speed and we started to break waves southward. This far down the Reach, the wind carried a fine mist of droplets thrown up by the maelstrom. I felt them against my face, fine like cobwebs, then cold and wet as they built and ran like tears.

Then the real fireworks began.

“Look,” Isa said, face lit up as a bright cuff of child-like excitement showed momentarily under her wrappings of teenage cool. Like the rest of us, she’d come up on deck because she wasn’t going to miss the start of the show. She nodded at one of the hooded radar sweeps. “There go the first ones. Liftoff.”

On the display, I saw a number of blotches to the north of our position in the Reach, each one tagged with the alarmed red lightning jag that indicated an airborne trace. Like any rich man’s toy, Boubin Islander had a redundancy of instrumentation that even told me what altitude the contacts were at. I watched the number scribble upward beside each blotch, and despite myself felt a tiny twist of awe in my guts. The Harlan’s World legacy—you can’t grow up on this planet and not feel it.

“And they’ve cut the ropes,” the presenter informed us gaily. “The balloons are rising. I can see the—”

“Do we have to have this on?” I asked.

Brasil shrugged. “Find a channel that’s not casting the same fucking thing. I couldn’t.”

The next moment, the sky cracked open.

Carefully loaded with explosive ballast, the first clutch of helium balloons had attained the four-hundred-metre demarcation. Inhumanly precise, machine swift, the nearest orbital noticed and discharged a long, stuttering finger of angelfire. It ripped the darkness apart, slashed through cloud masses in the upper western sky, lit the jagged mountain landscapes around us with sudden blue, and for fractions of a second touched each of the balloons.

The ballast detonated. Rainbow fire poured down across Millsport.

The thunder of outraged air in the path of the angelfire blast rolled majestically out across the archipelago like something dark tearing.

Even the radio commentator shut up.