“… monopropellant turbines would work just as well at altitude,” Dawlish was saying, “but if you fly low anybody you run into is likely to be reasonably soft and the shielding will stand the impact. Just imagine hitting a frozen body at nearly a thousand kilometres an hour! The Titanic wouldn’t be …” Dawlish broke off and touched Hasson’s knee. “I’m sorry, lad — I shouldn’t be talking about that sort of thing.”
“I’m all right,” Hasson said sleepily, making the belated discovery that for a man in his exhausted state four Serenix capsules had been too much. “You go right ahead. Get it out of your system.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing.” Hasson sincerely wished to be diplomatic, but it had become difficult to perceive shades of meaning in his own words. “You seem to know a lot about flying.”
Apparently annoyed at Hasson’s tone, Dawlish glanced around him from below sagging eyelids. “Of course, this isn’t real flying. Cloud-running, that’s the thing! You don’t know what real flying is until you’ve strapped on a harness and gone up five hundred, six hundred metres with nothing under your feet but thin air. I only wish I could tell you what it’s like.”
“That would be …” Hasson abandoned the attempt to speak as the conscious world tilted ponderously away from him.
He was three thousand metres above Birmingham, as high as it was possible to go without special heavy-duty suit heaters, at the centre of a sphere of milky radiance created by his flares… a short distance away from him the body of his dead partner, Lloyd Inglis, floated upright on height-maintenance power, performing a strange aerial shuffle … and, just beyond the range of the flares, Lloyd’s murderer was waiting in ambush…