It’s a buzz like swarming insects, cut through with shrieks and screams and noise from open channels, death rattles and networked chaos as machines fail and operators die. Emergency bands cut short as whole decks void themselves at once, or seal their doors and drown their occupants in fire suppressant.

We fly through it, slow and quiet, keeping the Eye behind us and the froth around our plates. We can’t see Hail and Salt, but we aren’t looking. The big, hot shell is giving us a head start, and time to trip over anything that Andrade couldn’t fit into his signal. Our little heartbeat means that we were always going first, ready to break and flare if there’s anything out of place. We just have to hope they’d see it if we did.

It’s loud out here.

Sparks light the air above and below, cast shadows across the crags. Shells butcher each other, NorCol on NorCol on Sigurd and things that’ve had their markings scrubbed off altogether. We watch machines chased down by their old wingmates, tackled, pinned and shivering while their jockeys die inside. Gun-blisters rake each other with fire up and down the ship, and some of the old broadside keeps running, mechanical drumbeats running loud and hot as they try to shove the broken dreadnought loose. Missiles streak out into the open, curving back into the cliffs above and below.

Long streams of fire curve and crackle as point-defence batteries defend themselves. The PD guns run on networks of their own, hardened against anything that might slow their reaction times, and so packs of hollows track them down, surround each one in turn and tear them to pieces.

We stay far away. We’re worn from the flight, and bruised from our tangle in Sigurd’s graveyard, on the doorstep of that prison. Even if there was something we could do to help, two shells don’t turn a tide like this. We bury the ache and keep our eyes on the path.

Horizon was built to take a beating, and the flood seems to know that. For all the noise and fury, the old ship is still alive, and still dangerous enough.

Where we can, we run our engines on slow-burn. Where we can’t, we loop and turn and do things that would stall us if we had wings and atmosphere to worry about. We cut our thrust to nothing for a while, letting the wind carry us past a live interceptor block, a nest of barrels all twitching in their sockets. It takes us under a wing of gibbering machines, NorCol’s turquoise flying alongside mirror-black and a few captured Hasei rigs in hot orange, engines so bright that they cast shadows across the crags. Trailing behind them are a pair of Locusts, brown and tan and silver, twitchy just like the others.