“To a degree, not that it’s much use to anyone; it takes one dreadnought to kill another, and no one’s risking theirs. Besides, the froth makes auguring at distance almost impossible. This is somewhere between hope and estimate.”

I keep walking. “Where would Sigurd be?”

She turns, working the angles in her head. “Right about…” She peters out, frowning at the screen.

I follow the look. “Here?” All I see is open space.

Hail glances back at the little box that holds the station’s intelligence. “VINE, where is the Demiurge?”

No contacts found, says a window. But I remember where it was.

“Show us.”

Displaying last known location.

A little marker flickers to life on one of the screens, acid-green on gold, right where Hail was looking a moment before. We edge closer.

“See that?”

Hail peers at them. A pair of dark spots, each a single pixel wide.

She taps at the screen. “There should be a shadow.” She stands back. “There should be a shadow, right there. Big one.”

I shake my head. “It’s the same signature as the Fisher. Those are stones.”

“Christs,” mutters Hail.

I’ve worked it out too. “The Demiurge has cut itself loose.”

SIGURD’S BEACON DOESN’T take much finding, and it’s a good thing too. There’s a monster in the clouds, and we’re itching for our saddles.

It takes VINE ten minutes to find the whisper, a few more to pin it down to something certain. The pod was cold by the time we reached the Lighthouse, but the locator frequencies are still alive, somewhere in the deep-froth; you just need the right ears to hear them. The source-signal rumbles out through hidden speakers, heartbeat-slow and crawling in through the bottom of my skull.

On the displays, it looks like ripples on water, quicksilver and turquoise. Hail and I measure it out by eye and overlay, a hundred and eighty thousand K from the Storm Borders. Crushingly deep, by the froth’s standards.

We trade a glance as it comes into focus, look back as its edges blur, chewed up by the currents. It doesn’t move, but we watch it just the same. Just in case it’s not there when we start flying. Wherever it is, it’s got solid ground to hold it steady.

We count off another minute, just in case. Then another. We watch the displays cycle through a fresh batch of calculations, the pixelated storms shifting as new readings filter in. VINE narrows it down, plots the false echoes off a cloud bank. The beacon shifts and skips.

This is the best I can do, it decides, and offers the reading to Hail’s net.