It came off of a shell, if I had to guess. Thinner than ours, light and curvy where ours runs thick and flat. Whatever it was, it’s long past dead. Trails in the paint show where shrapnel cut through it. Glancing, but hard enough to shatter the join where this plate met another.

We bring it up to our eyes, let our sensors get a taste, but there isn’t much to show. I blink a few snapshots anyway, and skip the plate back to ground to get a better grip on the rifle. We drop to a knee, look out across the dunetops, spread the vents on our back and let the wind cool our engine sinks, trim our noisy augurs back to passive. The hills are cold and silent, and we do our best to imitate them.

But it doesn’t help the tingling in my throat.

We wait in the quiet, eyes on the sky. A minute passes by, then another, just as empty as the first.

I’m about to stand—to push power back into our limbs and our augurs back across the open—when something heavy trips the edge of our senses. A deep echo on faraway cloud, and a shadow against the peaks and Eye-light.

We freeze everything we can spare, but toggle our joints on and off in brief, quiet bursts. We roll huge rounds through our magazine feed, and slowly shift our sights across the sky, steadying ourselves for the recoil to come. We sample engine emissions, catch ghostly returns and a whisper of hostile networking. Our lenses trace a shape I’ve never seen before.

Four arms and a sinuous hull, curving through the currents. Four huge wings, arranged across its spine, ending in fine feather tips that catch the Eye-light glow. A pair of huge vents trail heat and exotic particles and reactor signatures that read like the last moments of collapsing stars.

I kill our ranging, anything that reaches out from where we are and could be followed back. I drive the Juno lower, angle our lenses so nothing can reflect.

We hold our breath.

Even at range, the silhouette must be twice the size of any company shell I’ve flown or fought or seen. Hell, I’ve never even heard rumours of shapes like this, and jockeys like to gossip.

I ping the other shells above us, the signal as tight as I can make it.

“Contact, type unknown,” I send. “REC.” Recommend extreme caution.

Watch yourselves.

Hail clicks back. “Wait for the rain.”

THREE MACHINES BREAK the clouds, full combat drop.