They turn together, thirteen machines as one, with more of them converging as they follow Horizon’s hull. If we didn’t already know that every jockey was dead, we’d see it now: they don’t move like a flight of shells. But then, they don’t move like a flight of anything. If they had humans riding saddle, they’d shift and correct, or come about when instructions changed, when units merged or fissured. These things don’t.

They swarm.

They move as though around a second Eye—but there is no endless dawn, no storms or wind-walls. Instead, our lenses find a sinuous shape standing near a massive breach in Horizon’s topside plate. Four arms stretch and four wings guide the wind. Mirror-black armour trails streamers of froth. Massive steps carry it through the ruin where Tower used to be.

The observer.

It seems to stir at the feel of our optics. A huge head turns.

Shit.

We feel the augur first, thrust before PHADAR locks can follow. We dive back into the cloud, burning as hard as we can manage. Hollow shapes fling themselves from the steel cliffs above us, break away from the coiling swarm. We make thirty contacts in a moment, all bearing down on us.

We could take one or two in the haze, but the froth isn’t thick enough to hide us yet. We pull our rifle clear, for all the good it’s going to do us. We can feel the locks on our hull already.

So this is where we die.

The froth parts around a hot streak, the cloudy haze cut to open air and heavy metal. The first slug goes wide, but the second skips right past our head, burning acid copper-blue. It scalps a ’Kustar shell, spraying the contents of its skull out in a cone of sparks.

The hollows turn as one, rounding on a pair of NorCol gunships, but the little boats are already diving back into deeper cloud below us, guided missiles and cluster-shot spreading in their wake. Warheads blossom around us, and flak fills the air with hot metal, catching the hollows as they fight to make the turn. If the jockeys were still alive inside, they’d be G-LOCked and waiting for their brains to suffocate.

The gunships earn half an ace in a single salvo, sinking three machines in the chaos. The hollows turn and jink and sputter, but they can’t keep up.

Horizon might be lost, but the company’s crews can still give as good as they get.

A tightline: Quickly!

We trace the flash, but it takes us a second to get our eyes on the sender. A pair of Decaturs, looking out from a break in the ship’s primary plates. They’re standing in the throat of an access shaft, hidden where the armour overlaps but doesn’t join.