“Hard to believe,” muttered Lazlo as we cruised the last few kilometres up the estuary and through Drava’s deserted dockyards. “Four centuries on this fucking planet and we still can’t go up in the air.”

Somehow he’d blagged entry to one of the open-air observation galleries the hoverloader had sprouted from its armoured spine once we were inside the Drava base scanning umbrella. Somehow else, he’d chivvied us into going up there with him, and now we all stood shivering in the damp cold of early morning as the silent quays of Drava slid by on either side.

Overhead, the sky was an unpromising grey in all directions.

Orr turned up the collar on his jacket. “Any time you come up with a way to deCom an orbital, Las, just let us know.”

“Yeah, count me in,” said Kiyoka. “Bring down an orbital, they’d make Mitzi Harlan give you head every morning for the rest of your life.”

It was common talk among the deCom crews, an analogue of the fifty metre bottleback stories charter boat skippers told in the Millsport bars.

No matter how big the bounty you hauled back from New Hok, it was all human scale. No matter how hostile the mimints, ultimately they were things we’d built ourselves and they were barely three centuries old. You couldn’t compare that with the lure of hardware the Martians had apparently left in orbit around Harlan’s World approximately five hundred thousand years ago. Hardware that, for reasons best known to itself, would carve pretty much anything airborne out of the sky with a lance of angel fire.

Lazlo blew on his hands. “They could have brought them down before now if they’d wanted to.”

“Oh, man, here we go again.” Kiyoka rolled her eyes.

“There’s a lot of crabshit talked about the orbitals,” said Lazlo doggedly.

“Like how they’ll hit anything bigger or faster than a helicopter, but somehow four hundred years ago we managed to land the colony barges okay. Like—”

Orr snorted. I saw Sylvie close her eyes.

“—how the government has these big hyperjets they keep under the pole, and nothing ever touches them when they fly. Like all the times the orbitals take out something surface-based, only they don’t like to talk about that. Happens all the time, man. Bet you didn’t hear about that dredger they found ripped apart yesterday off Sanshin Point—”

“I did hear that one,” said Sylvie irritably. “Caught it while we were waiting for you to turn up yesterday morning. Report said they ran aground on the point. You’re looking for conspiracy when all you’ve got is incompetence.”

“Skipper, they said that, sure. They would say that.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”