“Why?” I ask. “Sigurd took a beating here, Hail.” I nod downrange. “Hell, there’s a quarter of their flagship right over there, just lying in the dust. The hollows broke something out of this place, but it isn’t the only one. They’re going to grind themselves up on the next one. Won’t even make it past the pickets.”

“That’s the problem,” she replies, deep as the sea. “They nearly broke themselves on this place.”

“Christs,” mutters Salt. “The fucking scouting party.”

She nods, eyes a little clearer now, and blinks to clear the feed. “Those two Decaturs you fought—they weren’t much of an attack, damaged or otherwise.”

“Didn’t have to be.”

She weighs it out. “All they needed were eyes.”

I take a breath, let it out. “Dammit. Of course.” I wish I could rub my face, force some of the sleep and sand away. “They don’t need to worry about losses when they can just fill the ranks again.”

“And there’s no better place to fill them.”

...than the biggest ship ever built.

Big and old and palsied, but with some of the widest guns ever fitted to anything, and an entire fleet locked away inside its hangars. If the hollows were headed anywhere, that’ll be it.

Don’t let them touch you.

I have to ask, just so someone will say it out loud.

“They’re going to take Horizon, aren’t they?”

Twenty-Six

TWENTY-SIX

THERE’S A SCRATCH just on the edge of hearing—another one, eighty seconds after the last one. It happened eighty seconds before that; and eighty seconds from now, the disembodied Spirit will have another moment’s panic, and send us a little query, desperate for the feel of its jockey.

For the first few hours we were in the air, the Decatur could fill the blanks, dropping recordings of Hail’s heartbeat and blood pressure across the net. Without a pilot to sync with or jacks to handle the connection, it was the best we could do. Close enough to the real thing to buy us some quiet.

But we’ve been radio-silent for the last hundred and thirty-six minutes, and doing everything we can to keep our approach hidden in the froth. We’re passing Horizon’s outstations, and starting to thread the avenues between its long-range augur channels. We keep our burn low and our networks shuttered, sparing the tightline for things we can’t live without.

Another eighty seconds down, and the Spirit sends query one hundred and two. We wait a moment, pretending that we’re getting a line from outside, and then we fudge our hundredth answer. A sample of one of the original recordings, mixed in with noise and static and semi-random variation. The Spirit might be short a body, but it’s smart enough to need tricking.