Now Bor is back again.

She uses tightlines to set a waypoint in our eyes: a pair of smaller dawns in the distance, flickering in and out of sight. Two NorCol hulls break the cloud.

Here they come.

ACCORDING TO ITS silhouette, the shape in the distance is called Astaria Ali, and there’s no way you could miss it. We can feel the engine burn from here, hear its ranging systems clear their shrouds and lock a collar on every machine in sight.

A cloud of hollows falls from the plates above us, rushing to meet the sound, but the Ali crackles and flares, solid slugs zipping past just a little slower than the light of the muzzle sparks that sent them on their way. The destroyer’s gun crews make their first kill right above us; a Decatur reduced to cinders and driftwood so fast our refresh-rate nearly loses the picture between frames.

A second contact rises from the cloud behind the Ali, above and a little to port. It’s less a silhouette and more a statement of intent: the angles of its hull meet like a blade-point, straight and level and coming right for us. This is the Harriet Lane, and it’s a monster. Andrade called it a destroyer, but it barely deserves the title: it would be a carrier if it had flutes or open decks, or a battleship if it had ventral guns. As it is, it’s only a little way short of trading punches with dreadnoughts.

It certainly has lungs like one.

Huge arrays come to life across its hull, filling the air with augur strobes and wideband wash from its PHADAR. A Decatur will make your ears ring if it aims its hardware just right, but it has to catch you first, and put all of its energy into one directed stream. The Lane is everywhere, rippling across the sky and returning giant echoes from the silver-grey cliffs around us. It reverberates around inside the cavern of our skull, and follows every line and chamber in our hull.

For half a second, it deafens us, our systems fighting to recover from the rush of noise and static. Another swell rises just as the first one peters out, and another after that. In less than thirty seconds, three huge pulses map the sky down to vapour trails and dust motes, every scrap of steel for a hundred K singing back for the Lane to hear.

The Ali is already taking hits, holding the line while the Lane gets ready for the next step. Condensing streaks mark the paths of railshot, and tracers follow arcs of auto fire. Hollows crowd the breaks and crags above us, skipping out into the breeze, filling every channel with howls and incoherence. We count a hundred machines in seconds, and that’s just with our eyes and passives.

Exactly as planned.