The Cluster spins ahead, engine-constellations arranged and rearranged across our slender sky. Hail’s wide throats blare ahead of all of us, bathing everything in supernova light, dawn to dusk as she makes another corner, and a brand-new sunrise when we find the turn ourselves. The hollows feel her coming first and hurl themselves into her path, but they’re always too slow. She washes them all away, incinerates clawing fingers and howling masks. She rides the wave of the Cluster’s consciousness, the first moments of their calculations, angled offsets and manipulated sheer, precise and vicious. She is the morning star.

Behind us rises Bor.

We don’t have time to turn and look, but we catch stop-motion snatches, shadows blurred between refresh-frames. She is an aberration, twisting her humanoid machine into impossible shapes, spinning feathers and vector-blades into backlit fractals, dark blossoms edged with razor tips. Her shell pulls tight through the corners, formed into crystalline points and speed-warped geometry, flaring back into barbs and bristle. She works Hasei’s black magic through the places where the storm is thickest, her shell right on the edge, pulling velocities that should be impossible, bending rules that should be ironclad.

But there’s no way she can keep it up. No way any of us can—not like this. Around us, Horizon picks up speed, forcing us to twist and overcompensate, the steel walls closing faster with every second the dreadnought’s engines burn. The Cluster’s calculations grow tighter with every hollow drawing a bead, its margins quickly closing into error.

All we can do is hold on—

We come about and draw level with the tears in the hull of Hangar D, but the only path to open air is clogged with steel and hollows, taken machinery climbing up through the cracks. They’ve blocked our way out with their bodies, forcing us to fight when all we can do is fly. The Cluster makes a judgement: we can’t push our way through without losing machines, can’t blow holes fast enough to keep velocity. If you have time to shoot you have time to die, and we don’t have time for either.

The Junos change our course, take us back between the blocks. We can hear the edges of their thoughts, sacrifices measured in blood and iron.

They can keep Hail flying a little while still. She has the muscle tone to keep a grip on her machine, and to match the Cluster’s calculations as they roll in. Anyone else, except maybe Salt, and she’d have strained something by now, lost control and gone down tumbling. She has enough to keep herself clear of the things that coil around us, but she’s swinging a little wider on every turn, her shell singing out as shrapnel finds its plates.