But it was a tiny human gesture lost in a monumental panorama.

Pirius could see his crew, in their own blisters: his navigator Cohl, a slim woman of eighteen, and his engineer, Enduring Hope, a calm, bulky young man who looked older than his years, just seventeen. While Cohl and Hope were both rookies, nineteen-year-old Pirius was a comparative veteran. Among greenship crews, the mean survival rate was one point seven missions. This was Pirius’s fifth mission. He was growing a reputation as a lucky pilot, a man whose crew you wanted to be on.

“Hey,” he called now. “I know how you’re feeling. They always say this is the worst part of combat, the ninety-nine percent of it that’s just waiting around, the sheer bloody boredom. I should know.”

Enduring Hope looked across and waved. “And if I want to throw up, lift the visor first. That’s the drill, isn’t it?”

Pirius forced a laugh. Not a good joke, but a joke.

Enduring Hope: defying all sorts of rules, the engineer called himself not by his properly assigned name, a random sequence of letters and syllables, but an ideological slogan. He was a Friend, as he styled it, a member of a thoroughly illegal sect that flourished in the darker corners of Arches Base, and, it was said, right across the Front, the great sphere of conflict that surrounded the Galaxy’s heart. Illegal or not, right now, as the flies rose up and people started visibly to die, Hope’s faith seemed to be comforting him.

But navigator Cohl, staring ahead at the combat zone, was closed in on herself.

The Claw was a greenship, a simple design that was the workhorse of Strike Arm; millions like it were in action all around the war zone. Its main body was a bulbous pod containing most of the ship’s systems: the weapons banks, the FTL drive and two sublight drive systems. From the front of the hull projected three spars, giving the ship the look of a three-pronged claw, and at the tip of each prong was a blister, a clear bubble, containing one of the Claw’s three crew. For greenship crews, nobody else mattered but each other; it was just three of them lost in a dangerous sky — Three Against the Foe, as Strike Arm’s motto went.