Something orange catches our headlamps. Dammit, I really want to look away. “Got number four over here.” The Juno pulls us away, aims our eyes at something else. I let it. “Jockey tried to run on foot.”

Hail doesn’t let me drift. “Just need number five.”

I take a deep breath, and the shell matches the feeling, the little ember of our reactor warm inside our chest. We pick through the wrecks, but it looks exactly the way I’d expect.

Hasei and Sigurd tripped over each other in the dark and tore each other to shreds. We find dead missiles, and a couple of live ones too, tipped from their tubes. Piles of unusual brass, and a few of the rounds themselves. Long tracks from railgun shots. Armour in sheets and fragments, whole limbs and severed fingers. One of Hasei’s hammerheads, still intact, wide eyes peering up at us from the dust. But no ejector.

“I’m not seeing anything.”

“Keep looking. It has to be around here somewhere.”

“I’ve got it,” says Salt. “One moment.” We watch as he traces something we can’t see. His shell is hot and loud, but it’s got eyes like nothing else. “Dead and cold, just like the others,” he says, but: “You’ll want to have a look at this.”

Eleven

ELEVEN

ONE MACHINE SHOULD look just the same as any other; after all, the wind doesn’t care what badges you’re wearing so long as there’s a point in your snout, a curve in your wings, and enough fire in your engines to keep you up and flying. You’d think the companies would all just find the meanest shapes they could, build them over and over, pausing only to change the paint scheme.

They don’t. NorCol’s design bureaus like slopes and crags, tips like beaks and spines like feathers. Sigurd rounds its edges, fits everything into brutal frames that look like they could break you down by hand, and covers them in that strange mirror-finish that hurts your eyes. Hasei likes bright colours, and silhouettes that don’t make sense until they’re upside-down and pulling twice your gee.

There’s a reason for it: adaptation.

The Articles give the Colonial Authority final say over any volume of space that happens to contain a human being—at least, that’s the theory. They’re supposed to be what keeps us all in line, the biggest stick in human space, but they can only reach so far. The companies all keep colonies of their own, so far from the shallows that they might as well be a different species. Cities staffed with citizen-employees, managers who run their own boroughs, and governors with seats on the companies’ massive boards.