There is no engine inside a Gruizer - only bioengineered muscle fibre, packed into the bay and fed nutrient solution from filling stations along the Hellsborough margin. What you feel through the decking when one runs at speed is not vibration: it is muscle working. Van calls the fuel juice and says the feeling passes, with the tone of someone who has had to convince themselves of it.

Hexikid were engineered by the nascenti as street cleaners, road clearers, and heavy-duty dray vehicles for virtually any purpose requiring massive force and bulk — a brief that they execute at the size of a bin lorry. They are, the files note, an intelligent species with access to the hive mind, though their remit involves little need for creative thought, which is a sentence I have also seen applied to several middle managers.

A gruizer is a living vehicle, and this took some time to understand and considerably longer to accept — Van described his first encounter in terms of ships, and then mentioned, almost as an aside, that the craft were alive. Hull plates overlapping like scales, an organic drive that throbs through the decking, and a flank that flinches when struck by funget fire. Field note: speak to it before you touch anything. It responds to voice before controls. The alternatives are not good.

Seven sky gruizers sailed over the xin camp the first morning Van was there — long, gray-green craft, each the size of ten gruizers lashed together, banners from stem to stern and folk crowding the decks. The xin disabled the sighting equipment on every one before the formation finished turning, and sent the fleet back limping. Van describes this as the first morning he understood what the xin were for.