It’s several hundred decks tall, resting with its keel in the dust and its side against a cliff-face. The decks are exposed, every one of them open to the wind. Something monstrous cut through it, breached the continents of its primary plate, pierced through the secondaries, air-gaps, tertiaries, honeycomb insulation, and hull. Through everything Sigurd could think of to keep its ship afloat. We can see all of it from here, opened up like a blossom.

There’s a glint in the middle of it, and I have to do a double take.

It’s a dreadnought’s spinal column, made visible for the first time since it was forged. Huge ribs run down around it, showing where the ship’s skin peeled away, hangars big enough to hold destroyers and compartments emptied into the currents.

I know what it is, but that doesn’t do much to help. I’m looking at something impossible.

It is the tip of Sigurd’s broadsword, shattered nearly half a K behind its point, and left where it fell. Abandoned by the rest of its monster body, barely a fifth of what it must have been when it was whole. You can feel that mass. Even as wreck and scatter, it’s tall enough that some of it’s still hidden in thicker currents above us, casting a shadow across the cloud tops.

It cut through the cliff at an angle, made a valley of its own where it fell. It was moving at speed when it did: fast enough that it drove through the stone, left cracks and crevasses so deep that you’d never find the bottom.

The Juno and I zoom closer, piggybacking off the other two machines, and we all stare together. The prow itself is facing the other way, but it seems to still be intact. Not for lack of trying.

It’s covered in a web of scars, bright silver where rail-shot carved through the paint and ablatives, luminescent blue where stranger weapons struck.

The front of it still curves how it ought to, the lines of the hull coming to at a point. The keel is still straight, the blade’s edge still perfect, but it was always going to be. The universe would die its heat-death before the forward armour failed.

SLS 676—

reads a giant stencil across its upper decks, written hundreds of metres tall. The number ends suddenly, the remainder still attached to the rest of the ship, and nowhere to be seen.

Another word stands out beneath it, printed across the heaviest plating, still glistening in the Eye-light. It ends just as quickly as the ship’s number does, cut short by the same nightmare thing that broke the dreadnought’s back. Only the first few letters survived, but we don’t have to see the rest of it to know what it used to say.

DEMIURGE

And all around it is death.

Twenty-Three

TWENTY-THREE