“But thirteen it is.”

“That I can reach, and that’ll fly when I ask them to.”

“Walking and flying?”

“Whatever we need. Nine Decaturs, two old-gen Spirits, one Juno, one Mark 18.” He sees me raise my eyebrows. “My machine. Intruder series, variable geometry.”

“Is that all?”

“You don’t pull punches, do you?”

I flex my knuckles.

81.94

We both do. One little fist on my lap, another in the distance.

“Never.”

He breathes deep. “All right. I’ve got thirteen hundred souls and scatter. Of that, two hundred marines and anti-armour, and about half as many pilots and knuckledraggers. Sixteen jockeys. Everything we could pull out of the open decks before Horizon started locking up.”

“You’ve stopped.”

“We don’t have the firepower to keep going.” His eyes turn hard. “I lost six machines just trying to force my way into D. Another two getting your crew clear.”

“And Horizon?”

“What about it? It belongs to the hollows.”

“There are no other survivors?”

“Plenty, we just can’t reach them. There’s another Wolf holed up in F. Our last call said two thousand souls and an unknown number of shells. They managed to cut their networking and drop the siege shutters before the infection found them, but comms are tight and intermittent, and there’s no way they’ll open the doors now. There’s talk of some compartments near the engines as well, but we can’t get a count. It’s door by door, and not everyone keeps calling back. There’s a destroyer in drydock in C, locked down with all its crew aboard.”

“There were a couple of gunships outside.”

“Mine. Six in total, but I’m keeping them in the clouds as long as possible.”

“No shells?”

“Not that I know of. Tower pulled almost everything in after the fuckup in 2-8. I know of two destroyers that didn’t make it back in time. The Harriet Lane and Astaria Ali, but I’ve told them to run and hide until I can work out what to do with them.”

Christs. “That’s it?”

He actually laughs. “What more could you want? There probably are others—I’ve heard rumours of a carrier, too far out to make it back in time.”

“But you don’t know where it is, or how to reach it.”

“Tower might have known once, but there’s nothing left of it.” The smile lingers a while longer, but fatigue weighs on it. “On the upside, NorCol’s professional corps has pulled the plug. Admiralty, Executive, even the Authority reps on board—all of them pulled out during the initial engagement. I am now the highest-ranking officer on this ship. Horizon is a convict-only arrangement, no company to speak of. This ship is ours.”

“If we can take it.”

“What?”

“It’s ours—if we can take it.”

He looks up. “You have an idea.”