I’M THE ONE who made the offer, but it’s the Juno who remembers the way. We backtrack across lines of heavy footprints—our own, already disappearing in the little breezes that creep across the floor.

The Hasei wreck is where we left it; there’s a deep furrow where we set our knee and used the dead shell for cover. Now that I’ve got the time to look, it’s worse off than I remember. It was killed in a stand-up fight, withered by the steel wind. There’s a little body heat left, but only just enough to show in infrared.

There’s something else, behind the warmth. Something that sparks and tingles on our skin.

“Reactors are bleeding,” says Salt, just behind me. “They hit it hard.”

Hail peers past him. “Any sign of the pod?”

The Juno looks over to where the Mirai had been before we lost it.

I have to turn our head. My first instinct is to point the way, but our damaged right arm cramps at the thought and our left hand’s full of rifle, so I blink a quick marker instead. I don’t want to look too hard. “Over there. Look for Hasei’s colours.”

Hail vaults the wreck and follows our faded footsteps between the pillars. The pod flashes into view under the Spirit’s lamps, fading again as she turns to look for the jockey. Or what’s left of them.

“Christs,” she whispers.

The line is silent for a moment.

“This is what you saw, isn’t it?” The Spirit clenches a fist. “You were here”—it looks over its shoulder—“and we were over there.” The angle changes. “Which puts that Mirai at twelve o’clock. Maybe half a K.” Her shell looks down suddenly as it hits something in the sand. An orange plate skips away into the dark.

“We kicked foot that same piece of scrap.” The Juno and I roll up behind her, adding our headlamps to the scene. “And this is what we saw.”

An ejector pod, opened up by massive gunshot wounds. They’re close-range and methodical.

Hail breathes deep. “Lear wasn’t the first.”

“Not even the second,” growls Salt.

I’m expecting his pale shell right behind us; the helmet adds a vector to his voice—tweaking levels to give direction—but always keeps the volume high enough to hear. When we look back, there’s nothing to see. Infrared brings him into view a few hundred metres clear. Five reactor-cases light up around him, warm sparks on a field of purple and grey.

Salt stands in the middle of a wasteland. Carbon streaks mark the stone around his feet and draw little glassy circles where burning munitions baked the dust. The pillars around him are still standing, but worn down from thick trunks to narrow cores by a gale of hypervelocity shot.