Hail’s Spirit strides into the open. It’s sleeker than Salt’s machine, but you can see their shared ancestry. Her legs are a little longer, and her armour a little lighter, but it isn’t made to take fire the way a Decatur is. It’s shaped around clever fire-traps and deflector-surfaces, intended to slip through the storm rather than weathering it. Narrow wing tips fold around her shoulders, and a slender accelerator weapon rests in her hands.

It’s almost exactly the same as the machine I flew with the 1077th, but Hail’s is modified. It doesn’t have a face; no eyes or visor-bands, just a smooth dome, pitted with little sensor-spots. Featureless, but close enough to a human head that you can feel it when it looks at you.

“Clear,” she replies.

“Clear,” says Lear, a second behind. “Where’d the chief go?”

We put out a hand to catch his eye. “Here.”

It takes him a moment to find us.

“You are loud,” we tell him.

His machine shrugs. It’s the same model as the enamel-white shell I met on my first day, just inside the Juno’s hangar block. The same jagged edges stained turquoise at the tips.

This one has a pair of silver rings around its wrists. We all do; they’re NorCol’s bond marks, made to look like we’re still wearing shackles, even out here. It’s a kind of plausible deniability—we’re the dog-hounds brought in for war and not much else, and the company wouldn’t want us confused for actual employees.

If the silver wasn’t enough, massive stencils mark our chests and shoulders, painted black on the pale shells and yellow on mine. A grinning skull with VIII on its forehead. The death’s-head insignia of the 8th Penitentiary.

“You called in a contact,” says Hail.

“I did,” I reply, “but I can’t confirm it. I lost it before you broke the clouds.”

“Maybe we scared it off,” says Lear.

“Maybe I didn’t see what I thought I saw. The more I look at the log—”

“The less sure you are?” asks Hail. “Froth does that. Let me see it.”

I push the signatures across our little net.

“You’re right,” she says, a moment later. “That looks like a shadow to me.”

“But I’ve never seen a silhouette like that.”

“The other companies have frames designed for deep-froth. Big, built for pressure. Surveyors and observation platforms, mostly.”

“An observer, then? That’d explain why it turned tail,” says Salt.

“We are loud,” mutters Lear. His machine shakes itself out, as if its joints were stiff. “Heavy too. Christs-damn, is this thing heavy.”

Salt’s Decatur revs a bicep. “Think muscle, convict. The steel’s got your back.”

Hail cuts across them before Lear can bite back. “Keep everything you collected. We’ll pass it on to Obs for classification.”