Steel canyons spill out across the horizon, warships nestled within. I count six corvettes in dry-dock, and one massive destroyer at rest: Okula, by the markings on its upper decks. A demigod of Open Waters, guns stowed for now. Its hull sparks with welding lights, and its char-black engines gape. Service drones whir and wheel between its masts, swarming around the six-limbed assemblies that climb its cliffside plates.

I don’t realise that I’m staring—none of us do, not until there’s an angry jacket yanking on our chain. Even then, the wardens have to work to get us moving. Salt has lost his song, and with it any chance the rest of us had of holding firm. We are lost without the marching-count, and every movement ends in a stutter or a trip, grazes smeared bloody on the deck. The jackets stamp alongside us, trying to force a little rhythm back into the line, but it doesn’t do us any good, and so they drag us out instead.

Out between the scaffold-limbs of giant cranes, and under a rail-engine that rolls on electromag tracks as wide as I can step. We cross a yard full of flatbed hulks, bunkers full of fuel and one-eighty tonne pallets stacked with munitions. The cranes reach above us, trading monstrous caskets through the air.

After the yard, four lanes of active rail, but the wardens have to hustle to get us across. Huge hauler-engines tear past, forcing us to stagger and choke to clear the path before they catch us. One whips past so close it singes hair and skin in a gale of acid-tinged exhaust.

Halide arrays hang from gantry-tops, arranged like temporary suns, lighting roads and alleys in selective daylight, limning huge hulls in silver. Red strobes mark the legs of the cranes and the bodies of the engine-cars, and add a little crimson to the smog. Nighttime fills the places where the lamps can’t reach.

We drop in and out of huge shadows, and march past lines of NorCol marines in bluegrey battledress, all squared up and waiting for the gunboats circling overhead. We pass pillars of steam, duck through sheets of rain from the clouds brewing near the ceiling. Containers rise in patchwork cliffs on either side, stencilled in the marks of a thousand minor companies, dotted here and there with the crests of the great corporations that marshal the darker parts of human space. The gods of old Steyr and ancient Raytheon, of powder-makers and wars that never end.

We stumble through it all, struggling to find a beat. Our ears ring with all the noise, and our sweat runs thicker in the steam. It’s been a while since any of us has had anything to drink.