Bor crouches on the edge. Watch the sky for me, she sends, engines warming.

Her outlets blink supernova bright, a shock-flash and a sudden rush of heat, but by the time our optics adjust, she’s already curving away. She comes down in a trail of sparks, already fading into the dark of another ravines. We follow, low and quiet as the two Decaturs make the leap behind us.

Hail sends a warning across the tightline, and herds us closer together in the shadows.

What is it? we send.

Her shell aims a finger straight up where our narrow sky begins and ends, just metres at its widest. A hotspot breaks the outline of the plates above us, then another. A pack of hollows, drifting in the currents, blinking as the Eye-light finds them.

We’re made of the same stuff as the plains around us; hard to see if we keep to the shadows, hard to detect if we’re cold and quiet and standing completely still. All that, and it would still only take one stray eye to pick us out—to catch a moment’s movement, or a pale silhouette, or the spot of bloody burgundy between peaks of silver-grey.

The hollows keep drifting, and Bor hustles us as soon as they’re out of sight. She takes us in through a broken loading hatch, back inside the ship, following a line of dead compartments, incomplete or badly damaged, some still open to the wind.

From a distance, Horizon has the look of something solid—the broken bones of planets, dropped into starlight furnaces and moulded into a monolith. That might have been true, once upon a time, but up close it’s all patchwork and scar tissue, bolts and rivets and weld-lines that could almost have been made by hand.

When we clear the hull a third time, it’s along the walkways of an ancient scaffold, welded to the plating around another massive wound, never repaired. From the inside, it’s a cage of piles and crosshatch, lined with scrap and abandoned equipment. We look out at a checkerboard sky, and catch angular shadows where the Eye-light makes it through.

Bor brings us to rest where the grids are thickest, and guides our eyes through the places where we can see all the way to the other side. This is where her squad watched Andrade’s attack on Hangar D—the assault that saved my ground crew, killed a third of his shells and blew two holes between hangar blocks.

Even when he knew he was leading a suicide run, the Werewolf was playing for information. He left a squad on the sidelines, as calm and quiet as possible, to track and tag and learn from all the carnage.

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.