Their flight chitchat was calming to me. I slowly stopped my pacing, stepping up to join Cobb near the central hologram.

“The other day,” Arturo continued, “with that big chunk of space debris. Their attack wasn’t to defeat us, but to destroy it—and presumably keep us from salvaging it. Right?”

“Yes,” Cobb said. “What’s your point, Amphi?”

“Just that, sir, they must have known it was going to fall. They live out there, in space. And so they probably saw that chunk up there, all those years. They could have destroyed it at any time, but they waited until it fell. Why?”

I nodded. I’d wondered the very same thing.

“Krell motives are unknowable,” Cobb said. “Other than their desire to exterminate us, of course.”

“Why have they never attacked with more than a hundred ships at once?” Arturo continued. “Why do they continue to bait us into skirmishes, instead of sending in one overwhelming attack?”

“Why do they let salvage fall in the first place?” I added. “Without it, we wouldn’t be able to get enough acclivity rings to keep up a resistance. Why don’t we attack them in the rubble belt? Why wait for them to come down here and—”

“Enough training,” Cobb said, walking over to his desk and hitting the button that disengaged all of the holograms.

“Sorry, sir,” I said.

“Don’t apologize, cadet,” Cobb said. “You either, Amphisbaena. You both ask good questions. Everyone, helmets off. Sit up. Pay attention. Considering how long it’s been, we’ve learned frighteningly little about the Krell—but I’ll tell you what we do know.”

I felt myself growing eager as the others removed their helmets. Answers? Finally?

“Sir,” Jorgen said, standing up. “Aren’t Krell details classified, only available to full pilots?”

Arturo groaned softly and rolled his eyes. His expression seemed to read: Thank you, Jorgen, for never being any fun whatsoever.

“Nobody likes a tattler, Jorgen,” Cobb said. “Shut up and listen. You need to know this. You deserve to know this. Being a First Citizen gives me some leeway on what I can say.”

I stepped back beside my mockpit as Cobb called up something with his hologram: a planet. Detritus? It did have chunks of metal floating around it, but the rubble belt extended farther—and was thicker—than I’d expected.

“This,” he said, “is an approximation of our planet and the rubble belt. Truth is, we have only a rough idea what’s up there. We lost a lot of whatever we did know when the Krell bombed the archive and our command staff back in LD-zero. But some of our scientists think that at one time, a shell surrounded the entire planet. like a metal shield. Problem is, a lot of those old mechanisms up there are still active—and they have guns.”

He watched the holographic planet—which glowed softly blue and was transparent—launch a group of holographic fighters. They got close to the rubble belt, and were shot down by hundreds of destructors.

“It’s dangerous up there,” Cobb continued. “Even for the Krell. That’s why the old fleet came here, to this old graveyard of a planet. What little the old people remember indicates that Detritus was known, but avoided, back in the day. Its shielding severely interfered with communications, and when facing the old orbital defense platforms, our fleet barely made it through to crash on the surface.