WE KEEP LOW to the ground and quiet, trading tightlines and hand signals in case we aren’t the only ones out amongst wreckage. The Juno and I are the lightest, so we walk ahead, sending pings back to the bigger shells behind us.

If we were anywhere else, we’d have to trim our heat and watch our steps. In here, all we have to do is shut up and keep from tripping. The dust is still warm in places, baked full of cracks by muzzle-wash, covered in slow burning fuel. Without compression, it’ll keep smouldering forever. The cliffsides turn spotty in our infrared, lighting up railgun slugs buried in the stone. Cooking munitions add a rumble to the ground, interrupted as reactor casings lose containment, digging new craters and spraying hot metal across the sand. Even without the extra noise, the feeds through our feet wouldn’t do us any good: there’s a tick and sputter whenever we stop to listen, of shells knocked out but not yet dead, convulsing as the last of their systems fail.

Any Sigurd jockeys will be keeping just as quiet, but we keep our passives open just in case, hunt for any sign of hostile networking. Optics could pick us out if they were watching just right, but we don’t give them the chance. We skip between the shadows, dropping down behind Sigurd corpses, following the line of the dreadnought’s shadow. We’ve been lucky so far; every eye we meet is empty and sightless, shattered in its socket.

Hail and Salt have to work a little harder. Their thermals blur every time they pass a power plant or engine that’s still got fire inside. So they keep to their operations manuals, dumping heat whenever they can and masking their steps where the sand runs thick or ash-drifts dull the sound. Even then, they’re struggling to keep out of sight.

The Juno and I come to a stop and wait for them to catch up. They’re maybe a K and a half behind us now, and a little further with every step we take. We settle behind a dead Aral, its spidery frame opened up around a gash from hip to shoulder. Our weapon can’t feel anything ahead, but our eyes do a little better.

We’re going downhill. The walls grow taller in the distance, and working our lenses, we can see where the canyon-cliffs begin to curve at their tops, meeting together right on the edge of focus. At first, I thought we were threading an ancient valley, but now I see this is a mouth to a tunnel.

The Juno shifts our aim, works its lenses on something else. Something I hadn’t noticed: a blur against a field of shadows, too far away to be anything more than haze.

We look over our shoulder, and aim a tightline at the others.

I need eyes.