It’s our hundredth lie. We brushed the first requests away, but a shell’s first priority is its operator. Eighty seconds after every response, we get another ping, twice as loud and just as insistent. It knows that she’s still out here, and still a very long way from home. This is all we can do to keep the volume down.

Ninety-eight times, we’ve thought about pulling the plug and leaving the damn thing to drift, to bother the wind with its insecurities. We’ve filled the last two requests without a fight.

Truth is, we’d miss the company.

Part of us would, anyway. Other parts have done this all before. We might be making for a hollow dreadnought, charging down the barrels of Horizon’s guns, but this is just another fire in the distance, more sparks and pain and noise in a history so thick with them that it almost blurs together. Almost.

We’re uncomfortable in the quiet. Hail and Salt weren’t saying much before we cut our comms, but it’s worse now that the best we can do is sterile light and plaintext.

Any other day, and they’d probably be sleeping anyway—trying to get a few hours in the dark before the sky lights up again. They aren’t, or rather, Salt isn’t. His shell hasn’t registered a switch to internal logic yet, and the machine still shifts and corrects like there’s meat at the reins.

We can’t get a read on Hail, but she’s sitting somewhere near the back of Salt’s cockpit, cooped in a nerve-dead seat and isolated from anything that might interfere with his pilot-sync. Sharing thoughts between machine and jockey is hard enough without another mind looking in.

There’s another scratch, not from the Spirit.

The Decatur drifts into view, froth rolling from its plates. It aims its lenses at us. You feel that? it asks in tightline flashes.

We do, but only just. A signal pitched so the reach was wide, but with volume just enough to beat the background noise.

I’m collecting, we send back. It’s messy. Looks like cipher output.

Even through the gibberish, we can feel NorCol’s fingerprints all over it.

Salt’s already thought of that. Doesn’t translate through the standard crypto, says the Decatur. Changing to unorthodox.

But he’s wasting his time.

No need, we reply. It’s one of the oldest tricks in NorCol’s book, even if most jockeys never see it used. Normally, you can tightline a message you mean only one person to read, aiming that little thread of light directly into their thoughts, but that means line of sight. In Open Waters, that’s easy.

In a place like this, you need to get creative.

How far out are we?

Two hours, he replies.