You lose that once you’ve been jockeying a while, though. Your machine has gyros and reactive masses and terrain-modelling software, entire subsystems dedicated to keeping it upright and mobile. It rubs off on you after a while, and you start forgetting the habits that made it so easy when you were the only one doing the work.

Whoever she is, she’s been at it a long time. She’s twitchy, and her skin’s so pale it’s translucent, her platinum hair buzzed on either side around the metal plugs above her ears. You need surgery to get them installed, boreholes drilled through your skull, but they’ll give you a clean feed past anything.

She’s got rank, too. A captain’s marks on her collar, and a pair of ace’s pins on her lapel. Ace and double-ace.

It’s probably the only reason she wears the coat. Without it, the NorCol grunts wouldn’t know when they were supposed to be saluting. A strip on her breast reads Hail.

She takes a moment to focus on us, like she’s waiting for her optics to adjust. “There are three jockeys on this line. Please put up your hands.”

And there it is.

Moustache got first pick, but he was always going to, just on the off-chance they’d snagged an engineer. Real skills are worth their weight in blood and tungsten. Folau’s not an engineer, but the company will take what it can get. There’s a lot of money in the shallows, and safety too, so most greasy fingers don’t travel any further than Rimir. Wherever we are, I’d take a bet that we’re a long way out from there. Open Waters, definitely. Frontier country.

A jockey’s worth less than the chance of finding someone with qualifications, but we’re more expensive than pilots or gunnery, and almost triple what you’d get for a ground-pounder.

I put up my hand. Salt and Lear do the same.

Salt nudges me, catches my eye and sends it down the line.

“Ha.”

There are two others, right near the front, waving their hands like idiots.

Hail sighs. “Three jockeys.” She looks us over again, and decides to start at the front.

The first one up is a con called Todd, and I recognise him in an instant. He’s been trying to walk like a jockey for as long as he’s been on the chain. He’s got the unfocussed look, the hand-eye delay, but he doesn’t understand what they are. He seems to think he should swing wide and out of sync with everything, stuttering like the jockeys in the flicks. He doesn’t know what it’s like to concentrate on everything you do, just to be sure that you’re the one actually doing it.

Hail marks him in a second, shoots him down. “Next,” she says, already coming about.