“No,” she said. She unfurled her decorative wings, then wrapped them around herself for warmth. She stood straighter, chin raised. Her heartbeat was much as it always was. If her breathing was any different from usual, it was because the tower was stealing the air. “I’m not especially worried.”

“Some of the guys called it a space elevator. Which, you know, super cool, except it’s clearly not helping us, and it has defenses to keep us out.”

“No,” Glines said. “Not a space elevator.”

“Jesus, they talk?” the wounded man asked.

“What is it?” Valkyrie asked her shadow.

“A gun. That’s the barrel,” Glines said. He extended his arm to indicate the length of the tower.

“What the son of all fucks would they need a gun that big for?” the wounded man asked.

“Dunno,” Glines said. “But I don’t think the target was important. If I were making a gun that big to deal with a specific enemy, I would have paid attention to targeting. Any attention at all.”

“The target could be so large that targeting doesn’t matter,” Valkyrie said. “If it filled half of the sky as it made its approach?”

“Uhhh,” the wounded man said. “That’s a thing?”

Glines, though, was nodding. “No need to worry about aim if you’re aiming at the broad side of a barn? Dunno. Maybe. But if you were building a gun to shoot the side of a barn, wouldn’t you want enough firepower to hurt the barn?”

“You would.”

“Uhh, please tell me this sky-filling enemy is hypothetical.”

Valkyrie shook her head. “It’s real. But it’s not an enemy we need to worry about again. When they came the last time, they left markers, to ensure none of their kind wasted effort coming to the same places. To go against that procedure and habit would run contrary to their entire being. It won’t happen.”

“You said these guys are building a giant gun to shoot at things on that scale, and this is the gun.”

“No,” Glines said. “I don’t blame you for getting caught up in the attention-grabbing details, but we didn’t say for sure that this is meant to shoot at anything. The ammo they’re using isn’t sufficient to hurt anything that big. The ammo is the point.”

“What’s the ammo?” the wounded man asked.

“Explain,” Valkyrie said.

“The air.”

“Someone built a fucking thirty-one mile long airgun?”

“Technically, I guess,” Glines said. “Less technically, it shoots all of the air. Each shot is one Earth’s worth of atmosphere, gathered up into a ball and superheated.”

The wounded man was silent, his eyes wide.

“One shot, and Earth whatever this is is emptied in about two seconds, everything dies well before it can suffocate, with the sudden atmospheric and pressure shift. The next shot empties the adjacent Earth, probably.”

“Earth Bet,” Valkyrie said.

“Sure. Home, huh?” the shadow asked.

Valkyrie nodded.