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Janis had been charmed by MacLennan. He might look like a farmer but he acted and spoke like an officer and a gentleman, with fascinating tales to tell of the years of the Republic and the struggle. The one thing he would not talk about, that he instantly and politely quashed the slightest allusion to, was the events of that afternoon and their implications.

The hotel overlooked a golf course so low on the shore that clumps of dried seaweed were scattered on its greens. The bar, where they’d had what was by Moh’s standards a very quiet drinking session, had filled up over the evening with the entire reduced population of the village. Janis had watched incredulously as the locals enjoyed what they considered a few quiet, civilized drinks – four or five litres of beer helped along by liberal shots of whisky – and then gone off to drive home. The vehicles ranged from sports-cars to articulated lorries but were all driven in much the same way.

It was the sound of vehicles in the morning that had wakened them: a slow, revving chug on all the roads. When they walked down to the village after breakfast they’d found the whole place deserted, an eerie clearance complete…

A sheep-track led them through long wet grass and gorse to the top of the Island, where a low roofless brick building stood. As they approached, a head appeared over the wall, and then a young woman came out. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen; dark hair, bright eyes. She wore an ANR jumpsuit and carried a weapon that looked too big for her: a metre-long rocket on a launcher with a pistol-grip.

‘Hello,’ she said shyly. ‘You’ll be the computer people.’

Moh laughed. ‘Have you ever heard of need-to-know?’

‘We all need to know,’ she said, sounding baffled by the question.

‘What do you do?’ Janis asked.

‘Air defence,’ the girl said.

Inside the walls was a trodden area of sheep droppings and earth; a camping stool, binoculars, a dozen more rockets.

‘It’s an old observation post,’ the girl explained. ‘From the last war, that is’ – her brow furrowed momentarily – ‘that is, the war before the last but you know what the old folk are like.’

Moh nodded soberly. ‘And you’re using it for air defence?’

‘Yes.’ She whipped the launcher into position with startling speed. ‘The stealth fighters: they fly low, they can fool radar and instruments, they don’t make a sound but they’re not invisible.’ She patted the nose of the rocket. ‘Tail-chaser. I’ve got two seconds to get down after it’s launched, then the fusion engine kicks in. Voom.’

‘Yeah,’ Moh said. ‘“Voom.” You don’t want to be standing behind one of them. And stay down and keep your eyes shut till you see the flash.’

‘Oh, I know that,’ the girl said. She shuffled and looked at everything except her visitors.

‘Guess we better go,’ Moh said. ‘All the best.’

When they were halfway back down the track Janis asked: ‘How could she see the flash with her eyes shut?’

‘Laser-fuser warhead. She’d see it.’

Moh’s phone beeped. He listened, nodding. ‘OK, right, see ya.’

‘What’s up?’

‘MacLennan’s coming to meet us. Says there’s been some developments.’

A kilometre and a half away, a humvee started up.

Cat slept, lightly curled on her side. Some of the alertness, the knowingness, of her characteristic expression was relaxed away, so that she seemed a younger person who hadn’t discovered sex and violence. Jordan, propped on one elbow, looked at that face over the curve of her shoulder, basked in the skin-to-skin human warmth, his breathing careful so as not to disturb the spontaneous rhythm of hers.

Something in him had changed – some baseline had shifted with that release, that bonding. Until now he’d felt like a fellow-traveller of the human race, a sympathizer rather than a paid-up, card-carrying member. Now, as the bars of morning sunlight from the armour-slatted window millimetred their way across the ceiling, he still had the same ideas but with a different attitude. Still an individualist, but without the edgy selfishness. At a level beneath all