Fly, float, scrabble across a hundred meters, less. Fire your weapon if you can, anything to engage the Xeelee guns, and try to ignore the stitching of fire all around you, the way the ground beneath you is constantly raked up by miniature explosions. When you find shelter—a pock-hole in the dirt, a chance heaping—let the inertial belt pull you down as hard as it can. No time to rest. Head above the lip of your cover, start firing again immediately, to cover Cohl’s crew.

This close to the factory, the ground was littered with bodies, tangled up and frozen, a carpet so deep you sometimes couldn’t see the ground at all. Frozen solid, there was no way of knowing how long they might have been there. There was no decomposition here, no smell; it wasn’t even a human enough place for that. Pirius wondered how many had died here, how long this desperate battle for a desolate piece of rock had gone on.

Three, four hops, and he was still alive. Their laser beams were invisible save where they passed through kicked-up dust; the starbreakers glowed with their own light.

At last he found himself in a foxhole fifty meters from the emplacement. The Xeelee structure was a squat, plain box, unbroken by windows. Starbreakers spat from vicious-looking mounts on the roof. Those pale blue rings on their pillars gleamed, set around the structure.

Bilin tumbled after him into the trench, laden by the heavy surface-to-surface weapon.

“Those hoops,” Pirius said. “We’ll take them out.”

“Why?”

“Enemy comms.” It was probably true. The cerulean hoops were another bit of Xeelee technology. They appeared to use spooky quantum-inseparability effects to allow instantaneous communication. No human scientist knew how they worked; you weren’t supposed to be able to use quantum entanglement to pass meaningful data.

Bilin, now that he was in action, had shed his petulance and uncovered a kind of steely doggedness. He could make a good soldier some day, Pirius thought. He nodded and said, “Three, two, one.”

They lunged over the rim of their foxhole and blasted away at the sky-blue hoops. The emplacement’s own starbreaker mounts spat back ferociously, but fire was coming in at the structure from both sides now; the survivors of Cohl’s team were mounting a simultaneous assault.

When the last hoop had exploded, the enemy starbreakers continued to fire, but wildly.

Pirius nudged Bilin. “Take it out.”

With practiced ease, Bilin pulled his surface-to-surface over his shoulder, rested it on the asteroid ground, sighted. When the weapon fired there was no recoil. A bright blue monopole shell shot across the ground, less than a meter above the dirt, tracking a dead straight line.

The shell hit the emplacement. That construction-material wall buckled and broke, like skin bursting. Inside the structure Pirius glimpsed hulking machinery. All the troopers poured their fire through the breach in the wall, until the machines slumped and failed. Still the starbreaker mounts on the roof continued to fire, but they spat erratically, their aim ever more wild.