And they get louder with every step we take. The Juno and I stop and settle against a pillar. We level the rifle out, and the feed comes in from our sights. It can handle the brightness a little better, and its eyes are keener than ours—more specialised. It cleans up the feed as we wait, and gives us a look at our target. A mirror-black carapace, covered in silver stencils.

SIGURD-LEM

XIV

REIVER GROUP B

There are a couple of Sigurd’s glyphs underneath, but none I can read. I understand the markings underneath them, though. Kill tallies, scratched into the steel around its throat. Twenty-eight plus eleven. Twenty-eight shells sunk, eleven assists. Whoever’s jockeying that thing is the fucking Grim Reaper.

The marks flicker in the glare of its muzzles, flashes outlines where the Juno and I can see them. We rest our sights where its neck meets its shoulders. Our rifle works through the targeting equations and plots the shot out in amber. A holographic Mirai tumbles, resets as the simulation works out the cleanest hit. The corrections come back, and we adjust. The weapon tells us to spread out feet, and shift the butt against our shoulder. We straighten and take a step to steady ourselves.

Our foot rings against something steel and we freeze.

The Juno risks a glance out of the corner of our eyes, and we find a patch of orange paint in the dust, lit up as another explosion rumbles through the ground. There’s another piece of plating just beyond, about twice the size, folded over on itself. More of them spread out, buried in the sand, mixed in with a trail of ruined machinery and insulation. We shield our face with a hand and flick back to low-light, just for a second.

Oh no.

In the middle is a tangle of fabric and foil. A closer look shows limbs at strange angles and a helmeted head, twisted all the way around. The shapes are wrong, and make the body seem longer and thinner than it ought to be.

The jockey.

Crimson ice spreads out around the body, and the ejector-pod lies where it fell, torn open around massive bullet-holes.

They killed a jockey.

I grind my teeth.

They killed a jockey. Not out on the field, working their machine. Down in the sand, out of action.

We look up and straighten our weapon, but there’s no dark shell up ahead. The Mirai is gone.

Fuck.

We launch ourselves to our feet and shoulder past the pillar, jogging first, then sprinting. We open our passives as wide as they will go, wake a few augurs from their sleep. They all come back with nothing to show. We drop to our knee, and I curse myself in silence.

It saw us. We got distracted, and it saw us.

Something clicks in the back of my head.