Out into sudden, blinding sunlight on the far side of the city. It seemed they had escaped, and even the petrified Pennyroyal cheered in the sudden rush of happiness that united them all. But the Green Storm did not give up so easily. The Jenny swung through the fog of exhaust smoke which hung behind the city, and in the clear air beyond the two remaining Fox Spirits were waiting.

A rocket slammed into the starboard engines, the blast blowing out the flight-deck windows and flinging Hester to the floor. She scrambled up to find Tom still crouched over the controls, his hair and clothes frosted with powdered glass. Pennyroyal was slumped against the chart table with blood trickling from a gash on his bald head where one of the Jenny ’s brass fire-extinguishers had struck him a glancing blow as it fell. Hester dragged him to a window seat. He was still breathing, but his eyes had rolled up until only two half-moons of white showed under the lids. He looked as if he was studying something very interesting on the inside of his head.

More rockets struck. A buckled propeller-blade hummed past, whirling down towards the snowfields like a failed boomerang. Tom was still heaving at the controls, but the Jenny Haniver no longer obeyed him — either the rudders were gone, or the cables which operated them had been severed. A fierce gust of wind, howling through a gap in the mountains, swung her towards the Fox Spirits. The nearer of the two made a sudden move to avoid collision, and collided with her sister-ship instead.

The explosion, barely twenty yards to starboard, filled the Jenny ’s flight deck with a lurid glare. When Hester could see again the sky was full of tumbling litter. She could hear the rattle and crash as larger fragments of the Fox Spirits bounded away down the mountainsides into the pass below. She could hear the grumble of Novaya-Nizhni’s engines a few miles astern, the squeak and thunder of its tracks as it hauled itself southwards.