When he was finished, he emailed the file down to Houston. Then he tried to go back to his memo, but he became distracted when the Situational Awareness Monitor flashed up a red BREAKING NEWS banner and began to show footage of indistinct flashes against a dark background. Some sort of hostilities had broken out on the ground in French Guiana, between the perimeter of the spaceport and the beach. The French Foreign Legion was participating in what might be the last battle ever fought. But the television news cameras couldn’t get anywhere near the action, so the coverage mostly consisted of journalists interviewing each other about how little they knew.