I follow his gaze back to Avery. His cheeks look like they’ve been steam-burned, pink and clammy, ruddy contrast to the dirty pale of the rest of him.

“There a problem, knuckledragger?”

He scrabbles back a pace on hands and feet, mumbles something I can’t hear.

“What was that?”

No answer.

I look up Folau. “What’s his problem?”

Folau offers me a nasty grin and taps his chest. I look down at mine, loose in my bunker-shirt.

I can’t help the chuckle. “What? They don’t have tits where you come from?”

Avery starts. “Uh—” he manages, turns it into a cough. It sounds like he’s got something caught in his throat.

“He used to be Regimentata,” comes the call from above.

I shake my head. “Never heard of it.”

“Planetary militia, old frontier.” Folau rests his chin on the rail. He looks exhausted, but a grin finds its way back across his face. He licks his lips. “Way Avery talks about it, it sounds like my kind of gig. Boys only.”

JUST LIKE EVERYTHING else on Horizon’s decks, there’s a shower hall that the jockeys have claimed for themselves. The full-timers give the cons a hard time, but some things cross the divide. Jockeys come back dripping with sweat and streaked in propellant, faces tacky with the solvents that keep our air-lines clear. There’ll be times when we dismount and find ourselves covered in blood. It won’t always be ours, but at least it doesn’t clog the drains.

The other side of the passage is the hall where the knuckledraggers go, the doors marked with machine-oil and greasy fingerprints.

I cycle the locks on the jockey side, waiting for the seals to let me through. Anyone on today’s rotation is either out on the wind, or doing the chow-hall shuffle. I’m betting on it, actually. My ports are puffy and weeping, still raw where the medics trimmed the skin around them. The heat will help, but it isn’t going to feel that way when the water finds them. At least there won’t be anyone around to hear me when it happens.

I don’t feel the warmth until the airlocks part, greeting me with a wall of steam so thick I can’t see much past the basins. What I can see, head and shoulders above the shower-stalls, is Salt. If he was standing straight, the nozzle would be just high enough to buzz him in the chin, but he’s folded himself over far enough to get his scalp into the water. I can feel how hot it is from here.

Behind the rush is a deep bass, humming a familiar song.

I falter on the doorstep. I’m interrupting.