We feel something take a step and we spin in place, tearing our blade free of its mounts. A pale shell limps into the light. Another Decatur, missing an arm at the shoulder—missing its head and a chunk of plating where its collar used to be. The top of its spine stands out above its chest, exposing steel vertebrae and heavy-duty arteries that sway as it stumbles across the deck. Whole plates of armour have been torn from their mounts, ablatives and strike-faces stripped down to the matte-grey hull underneath. There are bullet holes, hundreds of them, outlined in carbon and spidery cracks. It looks like it flew into a hailstorm.

I can see the cockpit-pod through the gap where its collarbone used to be. Worse, I can see the jockey, hanging out of a break in the pressure-vessel. The nerve-jacks are still in contact, but they tangle around the body. An ankle holds it up, impaled on a piece of twisted steel.

The shell shivers at us. The jockey dangles, unresponsive.

The Juno and I spread our feet. The sword rules the air ahead of us, and our free hand makes a fist.

DONT LET THEM TOUCH YOU

The pale shell lurches forward a step, then another.

We aim the blade-tip at its chest. “Hold it there,” I send, across every channel. “Stay right where you are.”

It launches itself at us. We skip clear of a grasping hand, knock it away when it suddenly changes direction, rounding on us. We land a jab to its open ribs and a hammerblow across its chest, feel steel giving way beneath our fist, and the machine spins away across the deck, but it lands flat on its feet, jerking around to follow us. It skips forward and aims a punch for our throat, turns the motion into a swipe, claws for our eyes with a fistful of twitching fingers. We catch the grip, watch the fingers squirm just a metre from our face, then turn it back, deflect the next blow on the edge of our blade. It staggers under the force our guard, and we hunt it with the sword.

It drops clear of a thrust, folds itself over at the hips to duck a cut, and rolls away when we bring the blade down and bury it in the deck.

The Decatur stops dead, half a hangar away. Just out of reach.

It doesn’t have eyes, but we can feel it watching us.

I’ve fought every kind of shell—machines with jockeys inside, hollows without, battlefield automata flying alongside human crews—but I’ve never seen anything move like this.

We hold our guard and watch the machine tick and stutter. It’s ruined, taken the kind of damage that would’ve sunk any three other shells. It misplaces a step, over-compensating as its joints skip and jerk and judder. It looks like it’s having a seizure.