From somewhere south, a second set of balloons reached altitude. The orbital lashed down again, night turned again to bluish day. The sky rained colours again. The scorched air snarled.

Now, from strategic points all over Millsport and the barges deployed in the Reach, the launches began. Widespread, repeated goads for the alien built machine eyes overhead. The flickering rays of angelfire became a seemingly constant, wandering pointer of destruction, stabbing out of the clouds at all angles, licking delicately at each transgressive vessel that hit the four-hundred-metre line. The repeated thunder grew deafening. The Reach and the landscape beyond became a series of flashlit still images.

Radio reception died.

“Time to go,” said Brasil.

He was grinning.

So, I realised, was I.

THIRTY-ONE

The Reach waters were cold, but not unpleasantly so. I slid in from Boubin Islander’s dive steps, let go the rail and felt the jellied cool pressing me all over through the suit’s skin as I submerged. It was an embrace of sorts, and I let myself sink into it as the weight of my strapped weapons and the Anderson rig carried me down. A couple of metres below the surface, I switched on the stealth and buoyancy systems. The grav power shivered and lifted me gently back up. I broke the surface to eye level, snapped down the mask on the helmet and blew it clear of water.

Tres bobbed up, a few metres away. Raised a gloved hand in acknowledgement.

I cast about for Brasil.

“Jack?”

His voice came back through the induction mike, lips blowing in a heartfelt shudder.

“Under you. Chilly, huh?”

“Told you you should have laid off the self-infection. Isa, you listening up there?”

“What do you think?”

“Alright, then. You know what to do?”

I heard her sigh. “Yes, Dad. Hold station, keep the channels clear. Relay anything that comes in from the others. Don’t talk to any strange men.”

“Got in one.”

I lifted an arm cautiously and saw how the stealth systems had activated the refraction shift in the suit’s skin. Close enough to the bottom, standard chameleochrome would kick in and make me a part of whatever colours were down there, but in open water the shift system made me a ghost, an eyeblink twist of shadowed water, a trick of the light.

There was a kind of comfort in that.

“Alright then.” I drew air, harder than necessary. “Let’s do this.”

I took bearings on the lights at New Kanagawa’s southern tip, then the black stack of Rila, twenty klicks beyond. Then I sank back into the sea, turned lazily over and began to swim.