I can hear another shell now, somewhere out ahead. I can hear it measuring its steps, using soft pads on its feet to keep the vibrations down. There’s a moment’s silence, then another footfall, another quiet second just behind. The jockey is choosing their path carefully, stopping to place every step. Sometimes the sound is dulled by sand drifts. But I can hear it.

Whoever’s in the saddle, they know they’re being listened to. They would; there’s no way that they didn’t hear Salt and Lear touch down outside, and there was every chance we’d find our way down here. At least they didn’t get caught out in the open.

Not that it helps. Whatever it is, it’s heavy—heavier than a Spirit. The Juno and I work our way closer, one foot in the front of the other. We don’t have the armour for a stand-up fight, and our rifle needs a good eye to place the shots, but we have something else. The Juno is lighter than any shell built in my lifetime, and then some. Right now, it’s almost silent.

We find them first.

We almost don’t. It’s a shadow against a background of shadows, even in the low-light. It’s tall, almost three-quarters of the way to the ceiling, and it’s full of straight lines; all solid plate, nothing made to break away. It could almost be one of the pillars.

I switch the feeds to infrared and our eyes strain for a moment, peering into a wash of blue and purple and silver-grey.

And yellow.

A tiny patch of it, straight ahead. It’s the outline of a hand, warmth bleeding out between its knuckles, clasped around the grip of something cold. Fingers are always tricky, difficult to cover and even trickier to armour. Even then, this jockey’s good. The machine is only half a degree above the cold—blink and you’d miss it.

We don’t.

We set our sights on it, right where the top of its hull meets the superstructure, turns into a neck and cheekbones. We rest our finger on the trigger. I can feel the massive rounds in our magazine, hot and heavy. Black-tips, made for cracking shells.

Don’t move.

We freeze.

The words hover in the middle of my vision. No voice, text only. It’s a tightline transmission—a thread of light thinner than a human hair, aimed directly at the Juno’s receiver, locked with a NorCol cipher.

“Origin?” I whisper.

The Juno pops a little window across the bottom of the display.

NCH221-107. Captain Hail, C.

I squint into the dark. “Where?”

Locating source...

A marker appears, almost directly behind the machine ahead of us. Another shadow, near-invisible even with my IR working hard. I flip to low-light, then back into thermal again. I can just about see the curve of the Spirit’s bulbous head. Just.