That was a fantasy. Her pressure suit reported vitals, and we all had emergency transmitters to activate if we needed rescuing. If Hurl had survived, the DDF would have known. One glimpse confirmed that she’d probably died at the first impact. She was crushed—pinned inside the mangled metal of the cockpit.

I tore my gaze away, cold flooding my chest. Pain. Emptiness. I looked back along the scar in the ground her ship had made while crashing. That long swath seemed to indicate that she’d managed to get her ship horizontal at the end, that she’d gotten close to a gliding position.

So she’d almost done it. With a blown-off wing and a broken acclivity ring, she’d still almost landed.

Jorgen grunted as he tried to climb up. I gave him a hand, but sometimes I forgot how small I was compared to someone like him. He nearly pulled me right off with a casual jerk of his arm.

He scrambled onto the rock beside me, then took a quick glance at Hurl. He went pale and turned aside, settling down on an upper portion of a boulder. I set my jaw, then forced myself to climb into the cockpit and pull Hurl’s pin off her bloodied flight suit. The least we could do was return that to her family.

I looked at Hurl’s lacerated face, her one remaining eye staring ahead. Defiant until the end, for all the good it had done. Brave… cowardly… she was still dead, so what did it matter?

Feeling like a terrible friend for those thoughts, I closed her eye, then climbed out and wiped my hands on my jumpsuit.

Jorgen nodded toward the car. “I’ve got the things for the pyre in the trunk.”

I let myself down with my light-line, and he followed. In the trunk of the vehicle, we found some oil and a bundle of wood, which surprised me. I’d been expecting coal. He really was rich if he had this on hand. We climbed back to the ship, then pulled the bundle up after us with my light-line.

We started packing the wood into the cockpit, piece by piece. “This is how our ancestors used to do it,” Jorgen said as he worked. “Burn the ship, out on the ocean.”

I nodded, wondering how little he thought of my education, if he assumed I didn’t know that. Neither of us had ever seen an ocean, of course. Detritus didn’t have them.

I poured oil onto the wood and the body, then stepped back, and Jorgen handed me the lighter. I lit a small stick, then tossed it into the canopy.

The sudden intensity of the flames took me by surprise, and sweat prickled my brow. The two of us retreated farther, and eventually climbed onto one of the higher boulders.

By tradition, we saluted the flames. “Return to the stars,” Jorgen said—the officer’s part. “Sail them well, warrior.”

It wasn’t the whole elegy, but it was enough. We settled down on the rocks, to watch—by tradition—until the fire went out. I rubbed Hurl’s pin, bringing back the gleam.