Dammit, if this had been a stand-up fight, NorCol versus Sigurd-Lem, there’d still be Collective boats out here with their catch-poles straight and their shell-flights running circles, working every kind of A and R they could manage. They’d be patching the holes they’d made just an hour before, pulling NorCol-brand shrapnel out of Sigurd-branded flesh. No one kills ejectors, or leaves them floating either.

Or at least we shouldn’t.

No one has come for these corpses. It’s a butcher’s shop, silent and terrible, filled with hollow eyes and empty vessels.

THE WRECKS THIN away, down from whole flights to handfuls, then to scattered stragglers and the few that bled to death. One more of the strange, glossy machines and the stream ends, replaced by a gentle patter of dust on our hulls. It’s a relief.

“I thought that was never going to end.”

Hail chuckles bitterly at that and lights up my horizon, bright contacts marking things the Juno and I can’t see. “Don’t be so sure.”

We trade a trail of steel for a stream of dust, open air for red-grey land. Another of the froth’s strange islands, eclipsing Eye-light and trailing cloud. One moment, we’re looking over storm banks and deep shadow, the next we’re watching solid ground as it pierces the cloud tops. It starts with ragged ridgelines on either side, but they climb quickly. The open plain below us turns to a funnel through canyon walls, rimmed with talus and glittering scrap. The froth skips over the edges, turns the channel cloudy around us, so we bounce our augurs off the cliffs, flying by instruments.

Salt gets a read on it first.

“Slow down.”

“Wha—?” Hail doesn’t finish the word. “Christs. Slow down, slow down.”

We cut our thrust and flare our wings, use the dust and bubbling currents to drag us down to something near a stop. I open a net to speak, to ask what we’re waiting for, but the froth stutters for a second and I see it.

Curved hull stands tall in the distance, trailing streamers of cloud condensing on its plates and dark smoke from the fires still smouldering inside.

At first I don’t even recognise it. You’d think I would; I’ve seen civilian boats run aground, flown over military metal of every shape and description, damaged in all the ways you can imagine, and a few you’d have to guess at. None of it makes me ready for the massive shape creeping into focus.