When you’re coming in to roost, lamps and network sigils mark the path back home, warning you when you’re falling too fast or off-centre. When a block is sealed against the weather, and armoured against attack, there isn’t much to pick it out against the patchwork cliffs. It’s even worse when you’ve got narrow eyes like ours.

“Salt? You got eyes on target?”

But his shell is looking out at the cloud.

He leaves me on the line, but sends a call back toward the ship. “Bell Tower? 211-C here. Do you read?”

“I hear you, C.”

“Are you seeing this?” he asks, a marker to match.

I follow it, wishing the Juno and I had lenses half as sharp as his. The thought doesn’t last; it only takes a few heartbeats to find it for ourselves.

A shadow with four wings, four arms, and a curve of massive hull. A slip of Sigurd’s colours, for all its strange geometry.

Just in time to see it fade.

“Negative, C. That vector is clear. No sign of friend or foe.”

“It’s the observer,” I whisper, shell-to-shell. “From before. From the Lighthouse. It’s Sigurd’s.”

The Decatur glances at us. “You saw it?”

“Just for a second.” I switch channels. “You sure you don’t have anything on your scopes, Bell Tower?”

“I have confirmation, two-eleven. Whatever it is, we don’t see it.”

DARK CARBON STREAKS across the hull, pale paint and silver cracks where something clipped a door. Bell Tower said that they’d put down hard, but I wouldn’t have called it that. They crashed, spitting fire and wreckage as they went.

I find the channel we had open before. “We’ve got eyes on block twenty-eight, Bell Tower. Open up and we’ll take a peek inside.”

“Understood, two-eleven. Doors opening.”

Hazard lamps spin on either side of the doors, throwing orange cones across Horizon’s weathered skin. The armour quivers as machinery wakes beneath it, and fine dust pours out past the seals. We watch and wait, craning for a look through the cracks, but the mechanism seizes before the doors are more than halfway open. We can see where the plates were bent out of shape, mangled under a massive impact. Something hit them hard enough to knock them out of their runners.

The machinery resets, cycling the huge slabs of armour back and forth, spilling silvery debris out into the storm. They start grinding open again.

We work our lenses for a look inside, but the lamps are dead, or Tower has cut them off on purpose; either way, past the line of Eye-light on the floor, the hangar is pitch dark. We flip through filters and vision modes, but the light on the hull around the doors washes everything out.

“Looks like we’re going in blind.”

Salt drops another marker. “Wait. Look.”