The Cluster sets about doing what he did, but they don’t have to worry about operator strain. Salt and his new machine are running a connection, but he’s just an observer for now. It’s probably better that way; we catch edges of the Junos’ fire-control, working at the speed of thought and tightline flash, huge calculations swimming around the corners of our eyes.

They set to work on the threshold of their old vault. The door is so thick that we can barely hear the hollows knocking on the other side, shell-killing shots reduced to metal shivers.

One Juno sets down on fingers and toes, listening to the deck. Another stands above it, hands pressed against the door. The last waits behind them, watching something we can’t see.

They take measurements from solid steel and insulation, but not through them. They aren’t eavesdropping on the other side—they couldn’t do that any more than we could. They find harmonics in the steel itself, the echoes of echoes. They can’t see the things that make the noise, and so they measure reflected sound and reactor emissions and the ripples from augur probes, mapping hints and whispers along the edges of observable space. Every disturbance is fed back into the Cluster, and three strands weave together, turning half-heard sound into ghostly holographics.

In less than a minute, they do what NorCol has been trying to get right for decades.

You can’t kill what you can’t see. But what if you could see anything?

Hollows move on the other side, outlines blurring as the Cluster updates, correcting their predictions as more information trickles in.

The Cluster arranges us around the door and sets themselves between us. They carry accelerator rails half as long as they are tall. The rails are primitive, prickly and copper-blocked, wrapped in exposed wiring and crusted in ugly cooling sinks. We’ve seen them before, but only on century-old gun-cam footage. They’re slow to load and slow to hit their mark, slower than the sleek things that Hail and Bor carry with them. Not that it makes much difference—a few K per second either way, and one will sink you just as well as the other. It’s the golden rule of fighting shells:

Speed kills.

The Cluster shows us the first few moments of the fight to come, tightlines spun into cables thick enough to carry their massive thoughts. They tangle us all together and show us the reason NorCol tried to bury them.

They loose the locks on the huge vault door, and hollow shapes stir outside. Mirror-black fingers force their way in through the cracks, followed by the rest of a Sigurd-marked hull.