Hail flashes a response. On our way.

She and Salt creep as best they can, but we don’t have to look around to know they’re rolling up. They hold off for a second once they catch up, crouched and quiet, listening for any sign that someone has their collars. Our passives come back clean; if there’s anything watching, we won’t know until it’s too late.

It’s enough for Hail. She waves us close together, into the lee of a gunship shaped like an axe-blade, wings mangled when it found the ground. We inch close enough that our shells can set a little network and start trading whispers, readying weapons just in case. Salt and I watch the front, and Hail settles down with guns on the way we came.

The Decatur offers us a connection to its lenses and we let it run, looking out through another set of eyes. “All right,” says Salt, panning our borrowed line-of-sight across the distant rockface. “What am I looking for?”

“Cliffside,” I reply. “Ten o’clock high.”

The feed shoots across the open as he works the magnification, suddenly fixed on something roughly a K away. Without his eyes, it’s dark stone with a darker smudge down the middle, outlines blurred by dust and smoke and heat-shimmer. As Salt goes to work, the feed runs clear and crisp, picking out an archway and a pair of pillars, carved into the stone about halfway up the wall. It’s an alcove, just deep enough to keep its contents out of the wind, if it still had any. An outline marks the wall behind it: the shape of one of the strange, glassy shells, rendered in negative.

“What do you think it is?” he asks.

“I know what it looks like,” says Hail, but then, I do too. If it wasn’t for the stone, it could be one of the caskets that hold our machines when they’re down for maintenance, or lock them up when they’re not in use.

Salt zooms a little closer, shifts the picture just a little to the right. The angle is worse, but he can see another shallow archway like the first, almost invisible between the crags. Another pan to the right, and he’s found a third empty alcove, then a fourth, all arranged in a line. Behind that, a steely glint, glowing in the Eye-light.

“What’s that?” asks Hail. “Two, three degrees back. You had it a second ago.”

The Decatur has to fight for it now, working the magnification back and forth, picking odd details out of the crags as the depth of focus shifts. Back again, and he’s got it.

Standing tall, only just visible behind an alcove’s edge, is one of the glassy shells.