We walk for a while in silence: we have to focus on keeping our boots from sliding in the ooze, or sticking fast. It isn’t long before we hear the first rumbles in the distance, and not much more before we can feel them through the deck. They’re deep, like the shock of impacts on armour, but there’s a rhythm to them that’s impossible to miss. A drumbeat in the steel.

“What was that?” I whisper.

Salt frowns at me. “You don’t know? I thought you’d been on a big boat before.”

I have. Cruisers and strike-carriers, for the most part. Quick and sharp, made for nipping at heels and striking at hearts. “Nothing like this.”

“The companies like it fast and light, I suppose.”

The floor throbs, and vibrations climb my spine.

Salt watches me. “Nothing with broadsides, then?”

“No. Why?”

“That,” he times the word to distant thunder, “is a gun-deck.” Something lights his eyes.

“What is it?”

“I have an idea.”

I DON’T KNOW how Salt runs in this stuff. He moves as if there was solid ground beneath his feet, leaving footprints like impact craters right through to the metal underneath. Me, not so much. There’s grime so deep I could lose a finger in it before I found the decking, and so I skip between the tracks he leaves behind, working hard to match the length of his stride. It’s the only way I can keep up.

We pass two more maintenance drones on the way; they climb away as Salt comes into view, tasks interrupted, and watch us from the rail-top with glowing eyes and discontent.

We travel in and out of the glare of hazard lamps and alarm systems, through automated voices on decks above and below, general quarters, general quarters, droning on forever. The chaos on the network bubbles on, even all the way down here, but the longer we walk, the more it turns to static. We’re all alone, and following a path only Salt seems to know for certain, but it doesn’t slow him down. We make just under three K in half the time it would take me to do it on my own.

He stops without warning, and at first I think he’s waiting for me. I catch him up, breathing ragged, and trying to keep from emptying my stomach out on the floor. My late night has kept pace with me, dogging my heels all the way from the showers. My head is unspeakable, and my lungs feel swollen and fleshy. It feels like I’ve frostburned the back of my throat in the cold air, and it sounds that way too, once I finally manage to speak.

“What is it?” The last word snags, turns into a cough.

“Shh.” Salt tilts his head.