The Decatur isn’t inclined to speak, but we’ve worked with shells long enough to understand: This is what the hollows heard. Of course they came looking.

“Where is my machine?” asks Hail.

The Juno stirs this time. It’s still carrying a line from the Spirit, direct, meant to carry mind-state updates to the little sandbox inside our hull. I can feel the distance on it; a delay between the echoes in the stone and the return calls from Hail’s machine. A couple of K away, if we had to guess. Somewhere near the dreadnought’s shattered hull, and those hollow readings from before.

The Juno offers us the feed from the Spirit’s optics.

I open the link across my visor, look down as a clawing hand fills my vision. A Sigurd machine rears up at me, fingers closing into a fist.

It makes me jump, and nearly costs me my footing, but the view in my visor doesn’t move to match. It rises on a sudden billow of engine burn, swells to show a field of crawling machinery, all rising to meet me. The view shakes and shivers and the picture tears, warnings blaring in the background. Fire-control fills the air with holographics, turning static around the rail at the bottom of the feed.

I kill the window before the shooting starts. Without the sync to make me feel what I can see, it tugs at my stomach and adds a spin to the corners of my eyes.

I have my eyes back in time to see the dust light up across the horizon: the fringes of a stormcloud, now wide awake.

Hail watches everything.

At first, I think we may have to let her drift. Give her half a minute to find herself in all the noise. But her eyes find us, staring past the flicker in her helmet-glass. Our reflections distort across the front of her visor, but she’s still riding the Spirit’s feed, half watching a pair of disembodied hands do work that she’d rather do herself.

“We have to leave,” she says. Her words are flat and distant; not all of her is here.

Her machine is still holding, and will for a few minutes yet.

“Spirit’s buying us time and space to do this properly,” I say. It’s harsher than I’d like, but there it is. We’re one seat short in a three-ass parade, and there’s no reason to cut that down to two. No reason to catch any more munitions than we have to.

But Hail doesn’t give a millimetre. “No. We need to get back. Right now.” She’s standing tall, easy on her feet when she should be swaying.