There should be five wrecks to match the five powerplant units, but I’m not sure I could point them out. Even with Hasei’s bright colours and Sigurd’s mirror-black, it’s impossible to tell where one machine ends and the others begin. The companies aren’t in the habit of colour coding the insides of their shells, and what’s here has been carved up, spread wide. Give us a week and we still wouldn’t find it all.

The reactors didn’t fare much better than the shells that carried them. Two are still intact; one of Sigurd’s little suns, one of Hasei’s silver supernovas. Two more are almost there, but hairline cracks run across them, their contents haemorrhaging into the cold. One has lost containment, both heart-chambers compromised 60-70%. It doesn’t hurt us; our skin is thick and our parts are sturdy, but that doesn’t stop the strange sparks across our eyes.

Putting a hole in a reactor-case is difficult, breaking one more so. Easier to kill the flesh and blood riding in the saddle.

If the cores are out in the open, casings cracked and shattered, then—

“What happened to the jockeys?”

The Decatur aims a finger, raises markers on the net. “Two Sigurd ejectors. One—and two.”

The first is almost close enough for us to touch. “Clean break. No damage.”

Salt marches on the other. “More of the same. Hatches sealed. No squealers.”

No emergency beacons, no radio, not even a strobe light. Nothing. An ejector can keep a jockey alive for days, assuming nothing leaked or was damaged in the fight: but it’s the last ditch. They have to survive everything else dying around them, and the chances are they haven’t. And if they have, someone still has to find them.

Ask a jockey how they’d like to die, and most will opt for hot and fast and flying. If you weren’t a jockey, you’d assume it was an ego thing; that’s what we signed up for, right? A blaze of glory, rendered in burning steel and exploding magazines. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. No one wants to burn to death, even if it’s what we all expect. It’s just better than the alternative.

Every so often, a patrol will turn up an intact ejector, a mummified jockey still resting inside.

Fallen pods are where we keep our nightmares.

“It’s cold.”

Salt rumbles. “Hollow?”

“I’d put money on it.”

Hail hangs back, watching. “Any orange?”

“Over here.” Salt’s words turn to a growl. “Christs. Tally one.”

“It isn’t a tally if someone murdered them,” says Hail. Her voice doesn’t have Salt’s distant thunder, but that almost makes it worse. “We’ve got five cores and three pods. Find me the other two.”