Hail replies with a little marker, resting on top of the image where one of the hip joints ought to be. Where the outer plates have gone dark and pockmarked, and the hull underneath is slick and deformed, covered in the same tarry mass.

If I had to put a word on it, I’d call it rot. She nods to the one on the ground, picks out a few things we hadn’t noticed before. Beaded threads running just below the skin, little weeping blisters and odd curves where the hull has gone to bloat. Looks like some parts fail faster than others.

But this one’s just as bad. Look at it; it’s riddled with the stuff.

Salt shakes his head. It’s clear of the essentials, though. Nothing in the head, only a little in the chest. The Decatur turns on the spot, nudges another glassy form with its feet. A shallow tumour near the collarbone and ugly streaks around its chin. Dark pits where its eyes used to be. Seems ‘essential’ is relative, though.

So they outlived their parts? we reply. Christs.

Hail shrugs. They’ve been here a while.

Machines don’t rot.

Not so you’d see it. Everything rots, if you give it long enough.

How long is ‘long enough’? I want to laugh, but I don’t have the parts for it. Longer than time?

At first, I don’t think she’ll have an answer for it. Probably, she sends, after a moment. And whatever they were watching was just as old. Maybe older. Come on. Let’s go see what Sigurd bought.

More corpses, for the most part. Alcoves with dissolving statues, missing cheekbones and jawlines and whole limbs, the joints eaten away muscle and nerve. The tarry rot runs down between their feet and along the stone, pools in the dust below them.

It meets together, forms rivers and tributaries, flowing downhill through sand and fields of shrapnel. It worms between a line of glassy shells, killed where they stood. All around them, or bulldozed up against the cliffs, are wrecked shells of every shape and description, all in Sigurd’s dark mirror-paint.

The rot rolls past the carnage and collects at the base of a massive stone staircase. Not quite the size of shell-steps, but taller than a jockey standing on her feet.

Above them, an open doorway leads deeper into the stone, the frame cast in what looks like black iron, half as tall as we are. The end of the cavern, and the thing Sigurd fought all this way to reach.

Next to it, sitting with its head slumped and its back against the wall, is one last glassy shell.

It sees us.