My knees wobbled too badly to run. I could walk, one arm draped around Hao's waist, she taking most of my weight. The port was getting closer.

  So were the cruisers.

  Not rapidly. They were dropping tail first, those flares being the wakes of their warpstone engines ripping the atmosphere to plasma. Wasteful but impressive.

  "What are they doing?" I said, stumbling along. "They must know there's a war on. Shouldn't they be firing at each other?"

  "What?" said the Knife.

  "The Syndic cruisers," I clarified, slurring my words. The desert was blurry, the naked, brambly bushes indistinct greyish shapes. That last shot had taken a lot out of me.

  The Knife stopped, turned on me. For a second, I thought he was going to slap me, like Riina sometimes threatened to do when I'd said something inexcusably stupid. His eyes were huge, the whites plate-like.

  "Don't you know who those cruisers belong to?" he said, his lip trembling. "Those are the Invisibles."

  I faltered, my legs slipping in the sand. His words were like a punch in the gut.

  Suddenly, it all made sense. Why no one had talked about the cruisers in our planning. Why he hadn't thought they'd come down and blast the desert to glass when I'd downed that first quadcopter days ago. Why only the Kylians had reacted when I mentioned the fleet.

  Invisibles didn't do anything without pay. It was their creed. They could walk through a warzone and ignore every casualty, every shot fired, unless it was directly aimed at them.

  Stolen story; please report.

  They hadn't been paid to intervene against ships leaving. They'd destroy the port authority's missile packs, then hang around fulfilling their original contract.

  But now we'd started a war. And the Invisibles had been paid to hunt down whomever started wars. That's how seven clans managed to co-exist on Remba.

  There was a very big stick hanging over their heads, waiting to blast them into rubble.

  The missile packs were likely there as a precaution against the Invisibles taking out all the clans. Not that they would, unless there was enough helion involved. Then all rules were forgotten. As long as no one remained alive to complain, even Invisibles could be bought away from a contract.

  Those descending sparks, those warp-wake flares boiling away the atmosphere, were a warning. We see you. We're coming for you. Better put down your guns.

  And the clans would. They'd take as many shots as they could at their opponents, doing maximum damage before the Invisibles came to enforce peace.

  There would be no war. It would all be over in minutes, with only the mopping up to do. Then the clans would turn on the wave of sneaks and diggers coming up behind us.

  Blowing up the Void Orb armory and fusion plant had been a mistake. It had brought down the Invisibles. I'd blown our best chance, our only chance, and the Knife hadn't objected to my plan.

  "Why didn't you say anything?" I said. "You knew about the Invisibles."

  "I didn't know you didn't know," he wailed. "Everyone knows about it. I thought you'd figured them into your plan, that you were going to make sure the com center raid would succeed. You said they had a mage on overwatch!"

  I had. It had been a stupid thing to say, a way to boost the Kylian's and her bloods' morale. And the Knife had interpreted it like I knew what I was doing.

  There would be no missiles launched. Nothing to take down the cruisers. We'd need to fire every missile pack together to bring them down. I'd counted on destroying them, using the rifle's razor wards to cut the connections to the fusion engines.

  Except they didn't have fusion engines. Those were chemical missiles. Fire and forget chemical missiles. The Void Orb com specialist had told me.

  A sliver of a plan coalesced in my mind.