We fall, plummet past battle-damaged things: the survivors of Sigurd’s graveyard. Past pristine machines, perfect and terrible. And all too slow.

They reach out from the shadows and the shattered decks, but they’re arranged to beat an assault. Gun-lines and ambushes, formations for battle. If Andrade’s survivors tried to grind their way inside, the hollows would be ready for the fight. We aren’t fighting, and they might as well be trying to catch bullets.

We fall through the dark, flying by instruments and stolen secrets.

We come down in sparks and buckling plate. The Cluster maps it all in a moment, feeds it out on a heavy-duty net. We stand in a cave of steel and ash, rimmed with hollow eyes and arcing wires. In the middle, a curve of hull in mirror-black, coiled over on itself. It turns that oblong head to see us, four too-long arms unfolding, four strange wings stretched wide.

The observer.

Bor is up first. She spins in a sudden flare of engine light, waking warheads and screamers made to blind and scald. The rest of us are ready, sensitive optics already set to adjust. The first shots roll in from the galleries, but the Cluster has picked its targets, intercepts the shots actually coming in on target. Salt lopes next to us, blade extended, cleaving through banks of Sigurd steel. We cut through one, take out another’s leg, all to buy the Decaturs a straight line on the target. It costs us feathers and fingers, but we batter our way through, and dive to the side as Bor’s ranging systems echo through the space.

She stands tall, crackling like a stormcloud. Huge impacts find the sinuous thing, opening flash cones in the dark, tracing its outline in the burning cinders of its own skin.

The Cluster’s model works on movement, always spinning, engines always a moment from open thrust, even in space too tight to move. Bor turns away and a Juno follows at her flank, shielding her from the fingers that reach from the dark. If you’ve got time to shoot, you’ve got time to die, and so the Cluster plays its odds. The crimson shell grinds sparks beneath its feet, landing knuckles and blade swipes, Bor and her Hasei-branded reflexes taking snap shots as she turns to clear the way.

Two Junos line up, shoulder to shoulder, old rails level. We work to give them space, spend plating and ammunition to keep the hollows blind and reeling. Two more spears, and they knock the observer machine back through broken decking, stumbling as it loses a hand and half the plating on its chest.

We keep turning, about to take our place on the rolling gun-line the Cluster has built for us. Behind us is Hail, her weapons charged past their margins. She has the best chance of killing the thing, and the Cluster will do everything it can to give her the shot.