Fire and Iron

[Unseelie]

"Huh..." Joffrey Dieterville's stride dropped off, and finally fell short. His guide, Annabelle Marlborough, turned and glared.
"What now? You coming or not, Hacker?"
"Aren't they supposed to be red? I mean...they're always red in the pictures..."
"Its the Bretonian suns...Most people assume the pictures of them landed are before they're painted or something, but in all honesty, the only color on a Dunkirk is the gold leaf..well, there's a bit of red, too...but its all just highlights. Most of it is white, you get used to it."
"Used to it?" They were walking again now, steadily approaching the stripped out skeleton of a Dunkirk.
"Insides are white too...almost reflective...makes it easier to light."

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Under Marlborough Pile, Planet Leeds, three kilometers below the surface, in chambers carved by a sunken sea flowing around deposits of niobium for eons under the influence of an elliptical moon, floated thirteen hundred platforms, many not much larger than the average Cambridge house, dotted with a few that stretched on for city blocks, all of them laced with their own spiderweb of luminescence in the lightless deeps. Here, and in many other similar grottoes, the second line of Dunkirks were being manufactured, their systems tested, their crews trained. A Dunkirk II, further along than any other, and a bit further behind, perhaps, as far as its development, was nearly ready for launch.

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