We skip across the cloud tops, skirt coiling monsters full of spark and thunder. We follow deep chasms between the cells, spend several thousand K flying by instinct and instruments in the dark. We watch heavy shapes loom from cloud canyons, float in the wash of noise where the Eye dawns through the fissures. We bask in the light, turn through shadows, feel the warmth of sun-cinders tumbling in the currents.

For a few, short hours, I have it all to myself.

Salt’s Decatur intrudes on my thoughts. The jockey is still sleeping, but the shell has caught something on long-range augur, and it’s looking for consensus. There’s no immediate threat, no sign of engines or hostile networking, and as far as it can tell, all of the friendly jockeys are asleep; it’ll leave us there until it finds a reason to wake us up.

It pings the Juno and the Spirit, and pushes a bearing across the net, along with a projected range and focus-depth. Where it wants us to look, and how closely. We follow the marker, but however hard we squint, our eyes aren’t sharp enough to see it.

The Spirit chimes in. Query: is this it?

We watch the two shells piece their feeds together, two different angles on a single point of light so small that we can barely see. The details roll in.

The crescent form of something massive, one side covered in mirror-black sheen. It breaks above the cloud, and then disappears.

They trade readings again. Driftwood?

But the Decatur can feel a little more.

A field of contacts opens up on the winds beyond; some are cold metal, but others show power sources. Probable debris cloud, and the heat-ghosts of battle. The machines listen, but there aren’t any NorCol beacons in the mess, and no known competitor frequencies aside from the one we’re hearing already.

The two shells fill each other’s blindspots, with the Juno taking notes. Soon, our own scopes manage a glimpse, and we add our feeds to the steadily growing map. Fifty, sixty, seventy: then a hundred—a hundred dead shells tumbling in the breeze. Some of them are still sparking, reactors haemorrhaging into the cold.

The wind carries them closer, and our machines track clouds of depleted heavy metals, streaks of propellant residue, bubbles of radiation. The currents have spread it out, strewn dead and dying machinery for hours—no, days downwind.

The Decatur keeps feeding us readings, while the Spirit and the Juno build a model, plotting tracks back through the currents. Right back to where Sigurd’s beacon ought to be.

The machines convene.

Threat assessment?

Low-moderate. Division-scale engagement, resolved ~150 hours ago.

If there’s anything still alive, it’s bleeding out.

No sign of actives. No augurs or networking either.

Bleeding out, and blind.

Who are they?

Belligerents:

– Sigurd-Lem Corporation.

– Unknown.

– Unknown.

– Unknown.

– Unknown.

– Unknown.

Operator input required.

We’d better get them up.