He started to laugh, then winced. He forced a smile and rested one hand against the surface of one of the vehicle’s guide wheels. “It’s funny,” he said. “I’m not even sure if it’s one of ours or one of theirs.”

“You know,” I said, “neither am I.” I looked up at its ruptured carcass. The fire inside seemed to be spreading; thin blue and yellow flames were starting to show in the hole where the main turret had been.

The crippled land destroyer had kept its tracks on this side as it had half trundled, half slid into the crater. On the far side, the stripped track lay flat on the crater’s slope, a stride-wide strip of flat metal sections leading up like a ramshackle escalator almost to the hole’s jagged lip. In front of us, huge guide wheels protruded from the war machine’s hull; some supported the giant hinges of the tracks’ upper course, others ran on the tracks beneath. Quilan was trapped beneath their lower level, squashed into the mud with only his upper torso free.

Our comrades were dead. There were only Quilan and me, and the pilot of the light flyer, returning to pick us up. The ship, just a couple of hundred kilometres above our heads, could not help.

I had tried pulling Quilan, ignoring his bitten-off moans, but he was held fast. I had burned out my suit’s AG unit trying to shift the track sections trapping him, and cursed our supposedly wonderful n^th generation projectile weapons; so good for killing our own species and penetrating armour, so useless for cutting through thick metal.

Noise crackled nearby; sparks flicked out of the fire in the turret aperture, rising and fading in the rain. I could feel the detonations through the ground, transmitted by the body of the wrecked machine.

“Ammunition, going off,” Quilan said, his voice strained. “Time you went.”

“No. I think whatever blew the turret off accounted for all the ammunition.”