She looked ready to punch me. “We would have if this were a military shuttle.”

“It’s not?”

“Does it look armoured to you?” She hit the dashboard with the heel of her hand. “I don’t even know where this piece of shit came from, but it’s strictly civilian, and probably twenty years past its use-by date.” She unclipped her harness and stood. “But that’s one of the simple joys of working for the Reclamation. Everything’s second-hand and nothing works quite the way it should.”

I smiled, remembering the obsolete planes, equipment and personnel I’d had to put up with on Cichol.

“Even the people?”

She glared down at the young medic still strapped into the co-pilot’s seat. “Especially the people.”

“So,” I unlocked my legs and flexed them against the Brain’s comparatively mild gravity. “What do we do?”

“Well,” Clay put her hands on her hips, “we can’t take off without air. A shuttle this size ain’t big enough for a recycler, and we don’t even have enough pressure suits for all of us.” She waved a finger at my carbon-fibre bones. “And even if we did, we couldn’t get you into one wearing that, now could we?”

I looked down at myself. “I guess not.”

“And besides, without stripping down half the systems back there, I can’t tell how much more damage there might be. And I wouldn’t be happy taking her up without knowing what might fail.” She brushed her hands together with finality. “Bottom line is, we’re stuck here until the Dog comes back for us.”

“Stuck?” Preston’s voice had grown squeaky with alarm.

Clay put a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Yeah, well. At least we can breathe on the surface. That’s something.”

The kid swivelled around in his chair. “We’re going out there? What about the guys with guns?”

“They’re on the other side of that wall.” Clay jerked her thumb at the cliff.

“They had aircraft.”

“Yeah?” She reached into an overhead locker and pulled down her Archipelago pistol. “Well, I’ve got this.” She brandished the gun in his face. I had never used one myself, but knew its rocket-assisted slugs would be powerful enough to punch holes through a lightly armoured flyer.

“The main wreck’s about a dozen klicks back down the canyon,” she said. “I say we stick to our original mission, and hike back there and look for survivors.”

Her glare dared us to disagree.

“Do I get a gun?” I asked.

She gave me a look. “I’m not sure I trust you with that suit, let alone a weapon. If I’d had my way, for what you did to the captain, you’d have been eating vacuum in the hypervoid.”

I rubbed my side where Konstanz’s fingertips had jabbed into the wound, rupturing the sutures. “I said I was sorry for that.”