Even if it leaves her open in the ringing silence that comes after.

The last of the Junos turns away in front of us, plots a course for us to follow. It lines us up as another part of the shield, another part of the platform. Another fucking stepping stone, while Hail blossoms behind us, taking aim at the staggering shape beyond.

We don’t turn. We can’t.

We can’t lose another like this.

We map the air ourselves, push starlight through engine vents. We spend a whole magazine as fast as the rolling bolt will let us, black-tip shell-crackers exploding bare heartbeats ahead of us.

You can’t have them, we growl. They belong to me.

Hostile networks coil around us, struggling for purchase. Plating shivers under the impacts, but it doesn’t give. A hand comes up to shield its eyes, and hydraulics tense, feet locked and finding grip.

The observer stands to meet us.

Take us! Take us, with our little sun ready to tear itself apart.

We spin ourselves on thrust, fists and blade lashing out. We almost crack an elbow at the joint, but land a punch that leaves an imprint in its massive hull.

“Rook!” shouts Hail, but we don’t stop.

We have to be enough.

We nearly break our damn right hand again, but the blade edge holds. It carves through exposed machinery, skips off armour hard enough that the giant shell rattles under shock.

We pound at it, but the flood holds through the next blow, hauls its weight into the next. Our blade bounces off Sigurd steel, hard enough it nearly flies from our fingers. A huge hand snakes around us, grabs our wrist before we can recover. We aim a punch, but it’s too slow, even with our engines flaring behind us. Sigurd’s monster catches us, fist and knuckles wrapped in a massive mirrored grasp.

Behind us, the chamber has gone silent.

We weren’t enough.

The flood rises, but we can’t fight it. It stretches us out, joints strained to the edge of what they can bear.

Six glassy eyes edge closer to our own; two where there is light that moves inside them, where glassy veins have crept deeper in, parting steel to make space for themselves. Changing Sigurd’s monster into something else.

All across its chest and face, around its shoulders and along every guard and deflector-plate, its mirror-skin is damaged, and not just by us. Fine scars mark its face, left by blades and razor-edged munitions.

Behind us, nothing moves, but we can feel charged rails crackling, targets locked. Dark steel has us surrounded.

But the hollows are holding back.

An open connection probes the air. We’re expecting more of the flood’s odd protocols, but we get a file locked in NorCol’s ciphers. A feed from eyes that aren’t our own.