“Where does the name come from?”

“Story goes that there used to be a statue in the middle of it. I’ve never seen it, never met anyone who has, but the original coordinates were named after it.”

“Who does it belong to?”

Hail smirks. “The froth, for the most part. NorCol controls about a hangar’s worth of soil: a little pile of rubble they call OP Sinai.” She shrugs. “Same goes for the competition, though. Everyone has a claim on a piece of it. Esper’s is the biggest, but the Locusts fight dirty enough that they’re catching up. You probably couldn’t tell, though, by looking at it.”

“Five different claims on the same piece of earth? I’m not sure you could tell anything just by looking at it.”

She chuckles. “Five gangs of jockeys, fighting over nothing.”

“Sounds familiar.”

“Oh, it’s exactly as bad as you’d think.”

I cross my arms. “What’s the bar for ‘bad’?”

“When there’s nothing left to fight over.” She rolls a shoulder. “This is worse than usual, though. Apparently there was a city once. Only thing like it in any volume human beings have ever seen.” Hail sighs. “Domes and biome-shelters so big you could fly a destroyer in one side and out the other. Towers a couple K tall and so narrow you could wrap your arms around the middle, solid stone swaying in the fucking breeze.”

“And you can’t even make the foundations out?”

“You’d be forgiven for doubting there were any to begin with.”

“Definitely sounds familiar.” Something catches my eye above her head. “What’s that?”

Hail turns to follow my finger, picks out the blue shadow I’m seeing. “VINE is still working its way through the spectrum.” She closes her eyes for a second. “If I remember right, that’s the Pacal. One of ’Kustar’s strike-carriers.”

I frown at it. “Why is this contact bigger than the Fisher?”

“The Fisher is made of the same dust that’s clogging the Stone’s arrays. The Pacal is all hot mass and metal, plus a couple of carrier-class reactors.” She skips her eyes across the displays, finds an even bigger shadow on the other side. “See that?”

I do.

“Look familiar?”

It’s huge. “Horizon?”

“Not the ship itself, exactly. A mix of displacement-ripple, ranging returns, and best-guess feeds from the PHADAR.”

“The same as any other ship could see.”

She nods. “With some work, yes. Horizon is moored to a couple of stones of its own, constant altitude and orbital period. The same goes for the other dreadnoughts; I don’t think any of them have moved off-track in decades.”

“Probably collared each other the moment they hit the froth.”