Morivarids are the size of a small bird, clean the murk, and look something like a friendly fish — large eyes, smooth form, the kind of thing you are already leaning toward when the first one takes your tongue. They come in threes: one to distract, one to feed, one to watch. Killing the first makes the other two significantly less cautious, which is the worst possible trade.

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.

Crosslander territory in the gruizeyard sits at the edge of the Middlewood, in the thin murk where the organic network runs in patches and disassociated symbiots wander between the dead chassis. The crosslanders do not wear psycmasks and are not on the hive mind — which means the network cannot tell you where they are, and cannot tell them where you are. Whether that is an advantage depends entirely on whether you have a reason to be there.

Among the xin, the women make everything used in war — the powder, the cartridges, the firearms — and when the fighting is actual rather than tactical, they are the reserves who, by Van's account, fight with more intelligence and ferocity than the men. The men specialise in strategy and manoeuvre. This division strikes me as more sensible than the off-world version, though I have learned not to mention it to Van's xin contacts, several of whom are of the strategic type.