The Xeelee nightfighter was a sycamore seed wrought in black a hundred metres across. The wings swept back from the central pod, flattening and thinning until at their trailing edges they were so fine Luca could see starbreaker fire through them. The Xeelee was swooping low over the asteroid’s surface - impossibly low, impossibly graceful, utterly inhuman. Threads of starbreaker light connected it to the ground, pulses of death dealt at the speed of light. Luca couldn’t tell if their source was the ship or the ground. Where the ship’s shadow passed explosions erupted from the asteroid’s surface, and bodies and bits of equipment were hurled up to go flying into space on neat straight-line trajectories.

Beneath the gaze of that dark bird, Luca felt utterly exposed.

There was a fresh crater not metres away, a scrap of shelter. He closed his eyes. ‘One, two, three.’ He pushed himself to hands and knees and tried a kind of low-gravity crawl, pulling at the surface with his hands and digging his toes into the dust, squirming over the ground like an insect.

He reached the crater and threw himself into it. But again the low gravity had fooled him, and he took an age to complete his fall.

The massive wing of the nightfighter passed over him. It was only metres above him; if he had jumped up he could have touched it. He felt a tugging, like a tide, passing along his body, and light flared all around him. He clamped his hands over his head and closed his eyes.

The cherry-red light faded, and that odd sensation of tugging passed. He risked looking up. The Xeelee had moved beyond him. It was tracking over the asteroid’s close horizon, setting like a great dark sun, and it dragged a webbing of red light beneath it as it passed.

There was a brief lull. The light of more distant engagements bathed the ground in a paler, more diffuse glow.

Something moved on the ground. It was a trooper, crawling out of a hole a little deeper than Luca’s. He, she, moved hunched over, looking only half human. One leg was dragging. Luca saw now that the trooper had lost a foot, cleanly scythed, and that the lower leg of the skinsuit was tied off by a crude tourniquet. More troopers came clambering out of holes and trenches, or even out of the cover of the bodies of their comrades. They crawled, walked, flopped back towards their trenches.

But the red light erupted again, raking flat across the curved landscape. The beams lanced through the bodies of the wounded as they tried to crawl, and they staggered and fell, cut open and sliced - or they simply exploded, the internal pressure of their bodies destroying them in silent, bloody bursts.