Or it would be, if it wasn’t also open in places. The froth flows in through massive tears in its hull and out between the girder grids that form its skeleton. Armour peels back from its ribcage, and the upper decks stand ragged where they’ve been skinned, struts and honeycomb air-gaps exposed to the wind. Two of its giant engine-cones are missing, and most of its engineering levels are void and molten decking.

We’ve seen that kind of damage once before, but never on a ship this size. It’ll be Horizon’s offensive magnetics that did it—huge arrays inside NorCol’s dreadnought, used to break the electromag chains that held stars captive inside the Demiurge. The holes are where reactors used to be. Three of them, their casings evaporated along with every deck in reach.

The Demiurge should never have gotten close enough for that. Hell, it should have died ten times over in the first minute of the engagement. The ship should be more air than steel, withered where tungsten blizzards found it, and snapped in half under the weight of Horizon’s planet-crackers.

But instead of engaging the threat, NorCol’s old tub did exactly what we’d expect. The outstations would’ve seen it first: another dreadnought in the water, and heading straight for them. Instead of calling back, though, they did that damned double take reserved for instruments full of ghosts and fluke harmonics. They probably cycled their PHADAR through a full reset, maybe sent a crew outside to clean their receivers.

By the time they worked out what was happening, they’d have had pickets howling at them, and a giant shadow already drifting past their windows. By the time they got a line on Tower, Horizon could probably see it for themselves. Another minute lost to surprise and horror, and a couple more trying to understand what they were looking at.

Sigurd’s dreadnought at full steam, burning so hard it was melting its own skin in the waste-heat. By the time NorCol’s gun crews were on the case, the Demiurge was already blurring in their scopes.

It hit so hard that the two ships fused together, merged at the point of impact. Any survivors aboard the hollow ship would’ve died in an instant, not that it would’ve noticed a few more stains across its walls.

No human crew would fly like that, but no human crew would expect it to work, either.

The dark ship is dead. Its superstructure is cracked in every place that hasn’t shattered, twisted and crumpled in ways its engineers could never have anticipated, let alone designed for.

Horizon is still intact, but its ancient systems belong to something else now. You can feel it in the air, and hear it if you wake your passives for a second or two.