Ranging systems lead, and PHADAR crackles against the stone around me, echoes a thousand channels wide. Invisible and silent to human senses, a wash of noise and strobes to the machine. I pick my flight out, their outlines blurring as they pass in front of the Eye. The Juno puts up a hand to shield me from the glare, mechanical reflexes dimming the feed as light streams in between its fingers. Not our fingers; not just then.

For a heartbeat, the shell is all its own. We relax the hand together, and set it back on the rifle’s grip.

The new arrivals circle. They’ve taken the long way round, keeping to prevailing storms and deep-weather cells. Now they drop with the Eye at their backs, little specks against the fire, using the glow for cover as they fall.

It’s the trade-off. Decaturs have guns so big it would take two Junos just to lift one off the ground, and massive reactors to power every shot. Our own power plant isn’t much bigger than my little fleshy fist, and it’s quiet even by those standards. It’s what you get when you’re building shells in the middle of a civil war: cheap and compact, stripped down to whatever will do the job.

The new machines are different. They’ve got three hundred years of prosperity behind them, and alien secrets plundered from the dark. They come down faster than I can follow, throwing up dust and sand around their engines, vents glowing cherry-red inside. Spines and wings and stabiliser flaps open as they fall, but they don’t have to wait for the wind. They descend on solid thrust, buoyant for a second before they hit the ground. We catch edges of them through the haze; yellow flashes of reflective hazard-strips, and armour full of angles in the light.

Our augurs pick a Decatur clear of the murk. It’s a menacing assembly of ablative plate and thrust-vector blades, the prickly silhouette outlined in amber holographics. As the dust clears, it steps out into the Eye-glow, weapons level.

I can see down the throats of open missile tubes. A pair of assault cannons makes up most of one arm, barrels peeking out above its left hand. The right arm doesn’t carry anything, but it isn’t made to. A pair of crackling railguns is mounted on the shoulder, sweeping out ahead.

Its sensors howl into the distance, scouring sand and sky. Even the returns are deafening.

“Clear?” asks Salt, his footsteps rumbling through the stone, in through my jacks, up through the soles of my feet.