The two destroyers don’t wait to see what comes. They haven’t stopped burning since they came into view, and now they dive, tearing back through the cloud tops. We’ve got just enough magnification to see the strikes against their hulls, but even with the Ali swatting everything in reach, the hollows are everywhere, and they haven’t stopped shooting yet.

But the destroyers have done what they came to do. The Lane keeps heads down and hostile machinery fighting for its existence, too busy pulling gee to watch for a couple of extra shells in their midst. The Ali kept it covered, gained the hard yards with grit and raw steel.

Bor flashes us. Get ready.

A giant pulse turns our eyes back to the sky. At first, we’re expecting another wave from the Lane’s arrays, but these are from its comms. A shriek of pain and surprise, rendered in distress protocols and crowded emergency channels.

We work our lenses, finding the big destroyer just as a pair of hollows come down across its spine. They’ve barely touched it when the ship’s wide engines begin choking in their cones, the scales of its missile-hatches quivering in the light. Its guns roll around in their turrets, choking as their magazine feeds begin to seize. The destroyer is going haywire.

More machines drop in as the ship loses thrust.

But the Lane won’t give itself away.

Fire traces the outlines of its hull as scuttling charges wake, clouding our eyes with static as reactors lose containment, every chamber cracked wide in an instant. A sudden flash takes the place of hull and engine-glow, a few hundred souls turned to vapour halfway between one heartbeat and the next.

Bor doesn’t give us time to think. A tightline rushes in through our receivers, hot with priority codes.

GO GO GO.

WE FOLLOW BOR along a path she mapped in advance, kept open in case Andrade’s crews ever needed a route back into occupied territory. First at a sprint, then on solid thrust when we run out of gangway. It runs through the scaffold grids, too tight for wings, too tight for anything but hope that we can make the turns with just the burn.

Bor sets the pace as only a former Hasei could, gee so heavy that we can hear the groans of the body in our saddle, wheezing under pressure, cockpit systems working hard to keep it breathing through the turns.

We hit open air in seconds, catching turbulence from the rush of thrust and munitions still screaming past. The Lane’s missile swarms have lived longer than their source, and they’re still hunting, cutting through waves of hollow machinery. The little missiles turn and curdle around us, but they don’t reach for anything their mother hadn’t already marked for them to find.