THE CLUSTER FLIES the way it fights; with margins inhumanly thin and corners cut to the millimetre, lightspeed predictions flickering between each machine and all the others, playing every variable for advantage.

One corkscrews as it takes a corner, dumps raw thrust too fast and too hot, making a full 90 between one hangar block and another, but throwing embers where it clips the steel. A human jockey in the saddle, and you’d think they’d overshot, or gone for broke when they couldn’t handle the lateral. But the Cluster doesn’t make mistakes.

One Juno sacrifices a few layers of paint and a few metres per second, slides along the wall with fingers dragging sparks, so that the Cluster can do something that would otherwise be impossible. The other two map the turbulence, read all of the extra dirty thrust that the first one blew between ravines. They use the little storm for drag, biting into the backdraught with flared wings and open flaps, and take the same turn with that little extra grip, moving tighter and faster, spilling out in coiling contrails and gee so heavy that they’re trailing condensate. One shell bleeds airspeed, but the Cluster as a whole is faster for it.

They fly as parts of one machine, boundaries uncertain. In the signal skips and parallel frequencies, you can almost hear them humming, three Junos carrying something that sounds like it once belonged to Salt.

We fly through their residual networking, catching calculations as they spiral away into nothing. It’s enough for us—we are small and quiet and hard to pin, and the Cluster maps us a path to match. We tear through exhaust-wash and hostile augur spikes, past bright blurs that could be shells, could be heat-ghosts or exploding warheads, but nothing can collar us.

The body in our saddle is wrapped tight against the shock, artificial muscle keeping it steady and forcing blood through chemically armoured arteries. The rest of us is running almost too hot to bear, our little star forced through shrieking outlet vents.

We don’t see the hardshot raining down on us, or the muzzle flares that reach into our line of flight. We’re flying too fast to see anything but a deep-field blur of sparks and lightning, to feel a rush of PHADAR pulse and sensor returns that break away as we take the next turn, trade one narrow passage for another, hurl ourselves down another stretch of steel-faced cliff.

We’ve come out on the distant edge of D, and there’s flying to do before we reach the wind again. Longer now, with all of the extra angles added in.