At first, I expect my head to feel like it’s floating off without me, and a surge of acid in my throat. I’m expecting the deepest parts of my brain to be screaming at me, and demanding another breath. You are going to die, jockey.

Or maybe I’m dead already. Maybe the Juno turned on Salt when he put down, and forced him to defend himself. One shot from those rails, and he’d have holed our hull in an instant, probably splashed me out the other side. Even if it didn’t—even if the Juno’s plating held it up, the shock could be hard enough to crack me against the side of the cockpit.

I can’t feel a heartbeat, I can’t hear and I can’t see. I must be dead.

My thoughts settle on that, and leave me in the quiet. Only, it isn’t quiet. Something is humming.

I follow the sound, but it doesn’t seem like something I can hear. I can’t quite feel it either, but that’s the word that seems the closest. It’s a bit like standing too close to an electrical line. It builds, pulsing around me until I can’t tell where I end and the static buzz begins.

I know this sound, this feeling. It’s always there, under the saddle and in the air around me, climbing up through my boots and in through my flight suit. The reactor.

It takes shape around the thought, forms a little sun to light my darkness. I look around, but I can’t see much. I’m not sure that I have to; I know this shell, and I’ve known others like it.

And I’ve steered by the stars before.

If the reactor is there, then—

that is an eye.

Lenses uncover, and light falls across my sensors.

I can see the remains of one pale shell, split down the middle, huge fissures where its chest used to be. Its jockey lies on the floor nearby, missing everything below the left knee. The rest of the leg hangs from its hook, the ankle impaled, muscle and bone torn away at the top of a ragged shin.

I reach for more of the Juno. At first all I have is memory, and as much of a map as I can imagine. With everything I find, still more fills in behind it. Banks of hydraulics are heavy and power hungry. Lines of magnetic drivers hiss and crackle, easy in their shafts.

Something moves behind me.