He caught sight of the other’s grin and sent the cat’s cradle of broken wires spinning in his direction. Kumar caught it effortlessly.

“Anyway — even if it is an accident, they shouldn’t be anchoring here. That area’s clearly marked on the chart: KEEP OUT — RESEARCH PROJECT. So I’m still going to lodge a protest.”

Brant had already recovered his good humour; even his most furious rages seldom lasted more than a few minutes. To keep him in the right mood, Mirissa started to run her fingers down his back and spoke to him in her most soothing voice.

“Did you catch any good fish?”

“Of course not,” Kumar answered. “He’s only interested in catching statistics — kilograms per kilowatt — that sort of nonsense. Lucky I took my rod. We’ll have tuna for dinner.”

He reached into the boat and pulled out almost a metre of streamlined power and beauty, its colours fading rapidly, its sightless eyes already glazed in death.

“Don’t often get one of these,” he said proudly. They were still admiring his prize when History returned to Thalassa, and the simple, carefree world they had known all their young lives came abruptly to its end.

The sign of its passing was written there upon the sky, as if a giant hand had drawn a piece of chalk across the blue dome of heaven. Even as they watched, the gleaming vapour trail began to fray at the edges, breaking up into wisps of cloud, until it seemed that a bridge of snow had been thrown from horizon to horizon.

And now a distant thunder was rolling down from the edge of space. It was a sound that Thalassa had not heard for seven hundred years but which any child would recognize at once.

Despite the warmth of the evening, Mirissa shivered and her hand found Brant’s. Though his fingers closed about hers, he scarcely seemed to notice; he was still staring at the riven sky.