It was not loud in the way people expected.
It was loud, but the thing that came through the reinforced glass first was not sound — it was a flat concussive push against the whole pane, arriving about a third of a second after the flash on the monitors, that made everybody in the observation block feel it in their sternum before they heard anything at all.
Eight hundred metres away, the barrier went.
The monitors had it and the men on the tablets had the numbers and Pembroke, watching the eight-hundred-metre camera feed, had the only version that mattered visually: the panel of projected light held for a fraction of a moment, went white across its whole area, and stopped existing.
And the thing that had done it did not stop.
