He failed. At a guess he’s shut one engine off, but hasn’t stopped them all. There might be manual shutoffs for the whole thing somewhere deep inside the dreadnought’s engine bays, but there’s no way of knowing exactly where they are or how they work. NorCol is the product of all its accidents, but it isn’t stupid; it seems that even a Werewolf couldn’t strand a ship like this, not all on their own.

And so Andrade did one better, even if he nearly killed us in the process.

The Eye rises across wide canyons, the glow spilling out over cloud tops and pillars of storm, but it’s just one dawn among several. Huge NorCol signal buoys float on the wind: little strobe lights to our optics, barely visible in all the orange and gold, but a massive rush of noise to our passives. They’re probably as old as Horizon’s time in the froth, from before NorCol knew what it was getting itself into out here, made to give the company a chance of finding its dreadnought if, Christs forbid, it lost the damn thing. Andrade’s crews probably woke them up with hand tools and wetware links, pushed them out into the breeze with boots and muscle and whatever else they could find. They flood every channel with the same, short message, locked tight with old Collective ciphers.

Come, sing the beacons.

And grey hulls have answered. They break from the cloud, blaring PHADAR and augur strobes, a roar of warheads and gunnery, armour streaked with condensation.

When NorCol arrived in this place, it brought the biggest ship ever built. It was ready to grind the competition to dust, and tear through anything it didn’t have time to understand. It arrived expecting a fight, but all it found was emptiness. The years have aged its crews, changed company muscle out for scum and hopeless souls, but the fight is here now, and all of that steel is coming back to meet it.

A strike-carrier leads the chorus of fire and tungsten, holds the company’s marks high on its plates.

NORCOL

NCSV TIGRIS

It’s the biggest by a long way—you could lose the others in its shadow—but each has enough mass to earn itself a name: Fencer and Halfmoon and Okula, Sojourner and Salem and Gilead’s Row.

Jockeys burn bright through the air around them, dive into the peaks and crags of Horizon’s hull, fighting in the light of gun-decks still under human control. Survivors pour into the wind, cross-marked shells leaping from bolt holes, breaks and shadows, taking the hollows dead-on. Locked hangars are suddenly alive and open, running flight operations at combat speed.