THE MACHINE IS on its feet faster than you can blink, faster than you can think, movements hidden in the moments between refresh-frames. It’s on top of us before we have time to jerk away, on Salt’s toes before his engines have gone from spark to fire. He can’t bring his arms up in time to deflect the blow, pays for it with an eye, sliced from brow to cheekbone on the tip of a glassy finger.

The alien machine stutters, joints seizing for a second. Long enough for it to stumble through his backwash. It shivers and sputters and locks up in spasm, black tears running thick down its cheeks.

Hail and I draw a bead all at once, levelling weapons and flooding the air around us with holographic fire-control and glowing calculations. Her shot rings first, loads the next before we’ve pulled our trigger. The Spirit has a lock, tallies the shot before it even hits, but the glassy thing finds its rhythm again.

It goes from flatfoot to stop-start fast, too quick to follow. The rail shot should be dead-centre, but it finds an angle instead, pings away and finds the stone behind the shell. The strange machine doesn’t have time to dodge our bullet as well, but it’s already factored that in. It rides our shot out on its forearm, emerges from the smoke and flash in time to catch another round from Hail.

We watch the slug splinter, turn to sparks and wash around its skull. More silver flickers as Salt lands one hit from somewhere above us, then misses with the second, finding earth where the glassy shell used to be.

It’s between us, already too close. We shoot at point blank, muzzle-flush, but our refresh-rate is too slow to watch the reaction. We’ve got just enough to see a handful of sharpened fingertips cut the air, trim our barrel three metres down, and thin all of the outer plates across our shoulder.

We nearly tear something trying to turn, to avoid the sharp edges cutting back towards our throat.

But Hail is right next to us, her own movements a blur. She lands a shoulder-charge against the glassy, alien thing, engines blinding, hits with a clap of vacuum, leaves a tail of froth condensing in her wake. The Spirit spins out in a cloud of its own plating, still trailing fire and white-hot flare.

The glassy thing turns the impact into a roll, finds its feet in time to slide. It stands, one arm limp in its socket.

And Salt hits it right on the shoulder, pinpoint, nearly through-and-through, spraying glass and strange internals across the sand. Blink, blur, and he can’t make the follow-up shot.

Little Juno’s in the way.