“Hey, kid!” Miz shouted, turning round.

“These are your apparences?” Elson Roa asked as he climbed into the half-track behind her. Sharrow was hugging Zefla; the others were dressed as she was in dark prison overalls. Miz blew her a kiss; Cenuij tutted and patted at a cut forehead with a handkerchief and Dloan sat massively, grinning at her.

Keteo, the driver who’d taken her and Roa into Aïs City a month earlier, was sitting in the vehicle’s central seat, clutching the wheel. He turned round, saw her and closed his eyes, making a humming noise from beneath his magenta and white-painted steel hat. His combat jacket was bright pink. A body-painted Solipsist-naked except for a beret-sat to Keteo’s left, clutching a microphone.

“Yes,” she said, smiling at Roa and still holding Zefla. “They’re my apparences.”

“Oh, thanks,” Cenuij muttered.

“Then we’d better take them, too,” Roa said, frowning.

Keteo turned round, looking annoyed.

“Molgarin didn’t say anything about-” he began.

Roa slapped him on the top of his armoured hat. “Drive,” he said.

Miz stood up from the half-track’s rear seat, wanting to hug Sharrow too, but was forced to sit back down as the half-track lurched off across the grass. Sharrow and Zefla were thrown back onto the seat, laughing. Roa clutched at the half-track’s roll-bar, which held a small holo-screen, a pair of heavy machine guns and an empty, soot-smeared rocket launcher.

The half-track thumped and crashed over the uneven ground, heading down the valley towards some trees. Roa studied the holo-screen, then tapped the body-painted Solipsist in the front seat.

“Tell everybody there are aircraft coming,” he told the shivering man.

“Attention everybody!” the body-painted man shouted into the microphone. He paused. “Watch the skies!” he screamed, then he threw himself down into the footwell, leaving the microphone on the seat.

Roa shook his head.

A Solipsist dressed in violet and lime, dragging a long, black box, ran towards them, waving. Roa banged Keteo’s tin hat again; the half-track skidded to a stop, ploughing turf with its tracks and sending everybody sliding out of their seats. Roa went, “Oof!” as he was thrown against the roll-bar. He glared at the back of Keteo’s tin hat, then reached down to pull the long, black box into the half-track. He tapped Keteo’s helmet again and hung on grimly as the half-track leapt away.

Sharrow hung onto the radar mast behind the seat, looking back to watch the Solipsists run from the wrecked Land Car and tumble into their half-tracks. The two garishly painted light tanks were already bouncing across the grass, following Roa’s vehicle.

“You all right?” Miz shouted to her over the noise of the machine’s engine.

“Yes,” Sharrow said.

An aircraft screamed overhead. She ducked instinctively. They all watched the sleek grey shape disappear over the sunset-rouged summits of the hills to their right. Another three planes flashed across the valley, higher up.

“Oh shit,” Cenuij said.

Roa readied the twin machine guns.

The half-track skidded off the grass onto a narrow wheel-grooved track leading down through a small forest. Dust tumbled into the air behind them.

They heard the noise of the jets again, then a series of flat, crumping sounds. The half-track’s radio made squawking, screeching noises.

The track steepened and started to twist as it followed a rocky gully downwards. Keteo avoided a large boulder lying at the side of the track by a centimetre or so, skidded and almost sent the machine over the edge of the ravine, then hauled it straight again and gunned the engine.

Roa turned round and looked back up the track to where the first light tank had appeared in its own cloud of dust. A series of sharp explosions came from behind it. Keteo drove off the track and along a stretch of grassy bank to avoid a dead bird lying in the road.

“Interesting driving technique,” Miz shouted to Sharrow, nodding approvingly.

Cenuij closed his eyes. “I felt safer in the fucking Land Car.”

Behind them, smoke rose into the dark-blue sky above the trees. The track left the forest and ran along the side of a wide grassy valley crossed by stone walls and bisected by a stream that appeared from a small side valley. The end of the valley was about half a kilometre away.

“Oh-oh,” Dloan said, turning to look behind them.

Cenuij was looking suspiciously at the long black box by Roa’s feet.

Roa reached under the roll-bar and lifted the microphone off the front seat. “Hello, Solo-” he said.

A great roar of noise slapped down on them; they all ducked again. Sharrow saw the jet tear overhead. Roa threw the mike down, grabbed the machine guns and fired at the already distant aircraft, scattering cartridge cases into the rear footwell.

“Where are the missiles?” Roa yelled.

“Under the seat!” Keteo yelled.

The air filled with a humming noise. Sharrow glanced at Dloan; he’d put his hands over his eyes.

There was a flash of light from behind them. Sharrow half-heard, half-saw a blur of movement to one side as something fell into the grass by the side of the track. Then the half-track’s long hood exploded.

Everything stopped. Silence, as the wreckage tumbled out of the sky around them and what was left of the half-track ploughed into the track in a wave of dust and small stones.

Sound came back slowly; her ears began ringing. There were several other muffled explosions in the confusion as the broken half-track crashed to a stop. She was in the footwell, picking herself up; Roa was above her, looking stunned, his face bloody.

Smoke everywhere.

She saw Miz; he pulled her to her feet, shouting something at her. Dloan helped Zefla down from the vehicle. Cenuij sat, blinking, looking surprised.

Then she was out on the grass, staggering and running. She thought she’d left the satchel behind, but it was there, flapping against her hip. She followed Dloan and Zef; Miz ran at her side. Further back up the track the two light tanks burned fiercely, pools of bright orange fire beneath bulb-headed columns of smoke.

Another plane screamed overhead. Explosions crackled through-out the valley. She kept her head down, hearing shrapnel zizz through the air and plunk into the grass.

They ran towards a small stone animal-pen by the side of the stream. Dloan and Zefla dived over the pen’s stone wall. Cenuij vaulted; she jumped, falling into the grass circle within. She looked over, back to the wreck of the blazing half-track. Miz was helping Keteo carry a long, heavy-looking kitbag. She wiped sweat from her eyes and looked up.

In the sky above the hills, a large plane flew in front of red, sunlit clouds. A line of ruby-tinged shapes fell from the rear of the plane, becoming dark as they fell into the shadow of the hill, and blossoming into parachutes before they were hidden by the hills themselves.

“Definitely safer in the Land Car,” Cenuij muttered.

“Excellent response time,” Dloan murmured.

“Recognise them?” Zefla said.

“No,” Dloan said as Miz and Keteo-limping heavily, face covered with blood-heaved the kitbag over the wall of the pen and then collapsed over it.

“Who we dealing with here?” Miz said, breathing hard.

“Just saying,” Dloan said. “Contract army; couldn’t recognise them.”

“Where’s Roa?” Keteo asked, wiping blood from his eyes.

Zefla looked over the top of the stones towards the wrecked half-track. “Can’t see him,” she said. She looked back at Keteo. “What about the radio guy?” she asked.

Keteo shook his head. “No more,” he said, then knelt, looking over the stone parapet. Miz was tearing the kitbag open, in between glancing up and around.

“What hit us?” Sharrow said.

“Down!” Miz shouted. The scream of a jet came almost instantly. The ground pulsed beneath them and rocks tumbled off the pen wall. They waited for the pattering debris to stop falling, then looked up. A crater had been blasted in the river bed twenty metres upstream; water was pooling into the steaming, smoke-shrouded hole.