“Dang,” Urg muttered.

Molly looked over her shoulder to see that the large Callite had squeezed in beside Scottie. The two of them were leaning forward, peering out through the carboglass at the gigantic ship ahead. Behind them, she could hear Walter continuing to put things away in the cargo bay. She turned back around and concentrated on keeping low to Lok’s grasslands, rising now and then only to clear strips of straggly trees. She couldn’t help but notice the way Cat strained forward in her seat, taking in the view. The Wadi did the same beside her, its neck stretched out, tongue flicking.

“Crazy to see something so invincible look . . . dead,” Scottie said.

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Cat said. She tore her gaze away and glanced around at the dash. “You got any ’scopes in this thing?”

“Like binoculars?” Molly shook her head. “No.”

“I think they set down in the lake,” Scottie said. “That’s a shame.”

As they got closer to the wreck, Molly saw he was right. Lok had no oceans, just a few puddles the locals exaggerated by calling them  “lakes.” The StarCarrier had landed right in the middle of one; the nose of the great ship was buried in a muddy crater and surrounded by pools of water covered in oil and fuel—some of them on fire. A wall of mud and dirt had been thrown up by the force of entry, forming a berm on the perimeter. The resulting barrier and moat looked purposefully built, like a warning to interlopers saying: “Stay out.”

Molly flew over the glistening brown wall and felt sad for the flashes of light twinkling on dry ground—the flapping of displaced swimming things. As she banked around to perform a full circuit of the ship, keeping Parsona low enough to feel safe from the fleet in orbit, she couldn’t help but see the once-powerful craft in the same light as the fish: an animal out of its element with no way of putting it back. A thing dying, if not already dead.

As they rounded the port side, the stenceling on the side of the ship came into view, and Molly lost what little breath she’d been holding.

ZEBRA-9200 “Gloria”

This wasn’t just any StarCarrier, it was the very one she and Cole had escaped from two weeks ago. The realization made her feel like thrusting away from it, as if it still posed some threat to her. She read the hull designation several times, the surge of adrenaline passing as she forced herself to remain calm.

“So big,” someone whispered.

Molly nodded. Up close, the ship seemed even more massive than it had in space, perhaps because the enormity of an entire cosmos wasn’t swallowing it up, providing some sense of scale. It took almost fifteen minutes to do a slow lap around the mountain of metal. There were no signs of life, no lights or movement from survivors. Everywhere along the ground, the ship’s hull was a twisted mess of shrapnel and torn plasteel, entire decks of the carrier crushed and impassible.