When you’re that far out, there isn’t much the Authority can do to keep the peace, and the companies will always find things to squabble over. On the frontier, that usually means solid ground. Stable worlds are rare, and even then, they have a habit of being deserts, only just fit for human life, give or take a few decades’ terraforming. There are a few that are shear with ice, and even fewer where it melts for more than a moment every few months or so.

There are temperates, but only two that are anything like the little blue marble that started this mess in the first place. Jotunheim is one, and Sigurd-Lem holds it tight. Kildare is the other, and it’s NorCol’s crown jewel, out of bounds to anyone and everything. A pair of dreadnoughts watches its skies, and a trillion extra stars mark the minefields out beyond. It has two moons, but knowing the company, they’ll be all dug out, innards replaced with anti-orbital batteries so big they’d sink a planet.

It’s a prestige project, and I’d put money on Jotunheim being Sigurd’s version of the same. Held up where employees can see but never touch, like some blue-green kind of heaven.

Shells aren’t built for the crown worlds. There’s no point. Nothing can come close enough to threaten them, not without being turned to vapour a thousand times over. We’re made for the hard ground on their borders, and the places they mean to keep but don’t have the raw firepower to hold. The deserts and tundras and volcanic wastes where their factory-cities live.

That’s where the quirks come in. Each company has its own mix of fire and dust and dirty ice, weather patterns and atmospherics you have to live somewhere to understand. The hardware gets made to match; everything from a whole living shell to the boots its ground crews wear around their hangars, built to take advantage of every quirk and peculiarity.

Once you’ve been flying long enough, you start to notice it. Everything is easier when there’s friendly ground beneath your feet, and hostile skies always seem to rattle you around. It creeps into everything, even the things that ought to be the same. After a while, you start to notice it in the competition as well.

Show a jockey a silhouette, and we’ll probably tell you who built it. If we can’t, we’ll have some handle on where it lives, and the colour of the skies it’s used to flying.

The same goes for the ejector-pod coming into view ahead of us. It’s missing its skin, and most of its internals are spread around it in the dust, but even with all the damage, markings hidden by dust and carbon-score, it only takes a moment in the glare of Salt’s huge lamps.