We tug our weapon from the mounts in the small of our back, and it expands in our hands. TaiBir Strategic, SSG-080-7, 258mm.

My eyes spark, and the weapon’s extra senses hunt through the rush of dust around us. They lay the world out in golden holographics, tracing the curves of sand dunes and the hard stops of distant cliffs, marking red threat-vectors in between. Crosshairs float across the open, following the muzzle of our rifle, and an ammo counter rolls off in the corner—eight huge rounds in the magazine, thirty-two in reserve.

We stare into the murk, but there’s nothing to see.

We hold very still, waiting for returns from the ranging systems. They’re mapping everything they can touch, feeding it back into our projection. A wireframe valley opens across my visor, the real thing still hidden by the dust.

The cockpit creaks as we settle under gravity. We let the engines slack, and they tick and chatter as they cool.

The weapon comes back with nothing.

I let the air out of my burning chest, listening as the breeze whips and howls outside. A minute more, and the currents begin clearing the haze away, the dust running in smoky streamers from the edges of our armour. The sand is thin and powdery for the most part, but it gums around our lenses, reminding me of ash.

The Juno shakes itself irritably.

“All clear?” I ask.

No silhouettes detected.

I nod and we stand straight, folding our wings over on our shoulders.

A little world stretches out ahead of us, bathed in patchy Eye-light and covered in strands of cloud that linger between the peaks like fog. This rock is supposed to be artificial, but it doesn’t look that way. We’ve landed in a shallow valley paved in stone, with little sand dunes piling up across it. A ridge rises in the distance, turning a circle most of a K away.

We chose this spot from a surveyor’s hasty maps, and now that we’re down and walking, I can see we chose well. As far as I can tell, this is the closest thing to open ground for a long way in any direction. Cliffs rise on the horizon, faults in the stone exposed under pressure. All around them is broken land: the cracked surface of the object, flexed apart by tidal forces. Crevasses run through the rock like arteries.

The surveyor who found this thing sent one of his drones into the cracks—a break in the ground maybe a meter wide at the top. It fell for nearly a minute before the signal cut out.

Then he found something else.

Hail showed us some of his video logs: helmet recordings and hull-cam feeds from a bony old man called Aoki. About halfway through, he mumbles something about a ‘Lighthouse.’

I see it now.