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‘You stopped there to buy a kilo of sugar?’

Kohn glanced at her. ‘Don’t put it in your coffee.’

They passed through a checkpoint (Kohn paid the tax in ammo clips, which struck Janis as entirely apt) and then they were out of Ruislip and back on the A410.

‘Afghans,’ Kohn said, relaxing. ‘Don’t want to sound racist or anything, but you let them move in and bang goes the neighbourhood.’

Janis looked at the soaring towers of Southall away to their right.

‘It’s hardly their fault that the Indians had better antimissile systems. I saw it on the tel, back home. Manchester. It looked like a horrible firework show.’

Kohn switched to auto and leaned back, hands behind his head. Janis tried to ignore the road-tanker wheels rolling beside them.

‘Never happened,’ Kohn said flatly. ‘There was no missile exchange between the Afghans and the Indians. It wasn’t even the Hanoverians did that damage, another version I’ve heard, including from locals. No, it was the fuckinyouenn, man.’

‘The fucking you…? Oh, the UN! The Yanks.’

‘Yeah, the great Space Defense force, the peacekeepers. Hit them from orbit, not a damn’ thing they could do.’

‘And it got covered up?’

‘Nah! They announced it! Your local tel station must’ve had reasons of its own for lying about it.’ He shrugged. ‘There’s no conspiracy.’

Janis fought down a helpless sense of chaos, a reverse paranoia.

‘How did things get this way? Don’t you people have theories about history, about why things happen?’ She looked at him sharply. ‘Or is your guess as good as mine? Was it all wrong what I learned in school about Marxism?’

Kohn fingered the controls unnecessarily, staring straight ahead.

‘I have my own ideas about the answer to the first question,’ he said. ‘For the rest it’s yes, yes, and probably. We’re in the same ship as the rest of you, burning the same air. Burning it up.’

There was not enough violence on television, Kohn thought as he crouched behind rubble and waited for the order to attack. On television and in films the shots followed the shots, the picture gave you the picture. It was just not good enough, no preparation for the real thing. A bad influence on the young. Most of the time you never saw the enemy, even in house-to-house fighting. Most of the time you were lucky if you knew where your own side was.

He’d fought before, but that had been scuffles, rumbles. This was a real war, even if a tiny one. Somewhere in those burnt-out houses two hundred and fifty metres away were men who wanted him dead. His first fight was against unreality, the what-am-I-doing-here feeling. There was some sound political reason for it, he knew: the Indians were being backed by the government in their dispute with the Afghans, and several leftist militias were fighting on the Muslim side out of conviction. The Cats had joined in for the money.

Johnny Smith, the young Hizbollah cadre beside him, looked up from his computer, poked his Kalashnikov over the rubble and let loose a five-second burst.

‘OK, guys,’ he said quietly over everyone’s phones. ‘Last one dead’s a sissy!’

He jumped up and over the wall, waving Kohn to follow, and sprinted up the street. Kohn found himself, without conscious decision, running after him. The gun was making a hell of a noise. Then he hit dirt behind an overturned car and glanced around to see what the rest were doing. Oh Gaia! They were running on past him! A mortar round crumped into where they’d been seconds earlier. Rubble thudded around him. He changed magazines and ran forward again, firing. This time he ended up slammed into a gutted shop doorway. Another figure hurtled in almost on top of him. Their armour clashed together. They fell apart. The other flipped up a visor to wipe sweat away from her face.

Her face. It was an amazing face and it was grinning like a maniac’s. Kohn suddenly realized that he was too. His cheeks ached. The visor came down.

‘Come on,’ she said.

Kohn saw out of the corner of his eye the corkscrew contrails spiralling lazily in—

‘NO!’ he roared. He caught her arm and pulled, then