We look each one over, saving snapshots and taking readings, but we can’t find a single through-and-through. There are no hard kills; no giant holes or catastrophic failures. We can’t even tell how all of them died. Most still have their hulls intact, still have their heads and arms and legs. A few seem to watch us pass.

All around them are dismembered Sigurd shells. New-gen Corviers, cut right down the middle. Mirais and Arals and a few rusty Caspians, each as bad as the last. Salt spots an ancient Talan shell-destroyer, built when Sigurd’s ancestors still had factories on Martian soil. Younger than the Juno, but not by much.

We fly through the history of Sigurd’s military-industrial complex, several hundred years deep, shells cut apart like surgical specimens, reduced to hindbrains and skeletons and exposed cockpit casings. They died clean, and so fast they don’t have any defensive wounds. A jockey’s first instinct is to throw their hands up, and then their wings. They’ll spend fingers and feathers before they lose a head, sacrifice as much of the shell as they can before anything hits the hull.

These have lost whole arms at the joints, and heads at their shoulders.

We have to watch our flight-paths as they pass, ducking past clouds of unexploded ordnance. Some of it is still wrapped in magazines, cooking off as the machines keep smouldering. Reactors spit and spark and bleed, or worse; their casings float past, cold and empty.

A few ejectors tilt and roll in the froth, but most of those are still intact. Some are pristine: missing the black streaks where their rockets were supposed to burn. I’ve spent a long time pulling people out of cockpit pods, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that still had all its paint. Something carved the shells away, whipped their plates from their bodies, but barely scratched the little capsules at their cores.

Salt reads each one as they make it into range, tags them in our field of view. “What do we do?” he asks.

Hail doesn’t hesitate. “Keep clear, and don’t touch anything. We don’t know if they’re hollow or not, and we’ve still got flying to do.”

“There might be survivors, Hail.”

“Even so, we leave them be.” We can’t see her, but we don’t have to. Her words have teeth. “We can’t help.”

I want to fight her, but I can’t. “We don’t have the equipment, and we’re a long way out from anything that does. If there are jockeys out here, they’re better off in their pods.”

“For now,” growls Salt. “So we’re going to wait for them to choke?”