I turn—or I try to, but I can’t feel my feet. I can’t feel anything, but feeling isn’t the point. It’s most of a second before I understand that. I know where my feet are, and there’s a map to plot their movements relative to everything else. I know their angle to the ground and exactly how much of my weight they hold. I know where my centre of gravity is and how to keep it. I don’t have balance—not in the way I’m used to. Up and down are where the gyros say they are, and everything shifts around them, movements absolute.

I lift a foot and place it, shift my hips and turn my hull.

And find another Decatur, watching me.

I’m expecting my heart to skip, adrenaline to wash across my system.

Instead, I see all of it.

I read tiny imperfections in its paint, and measure claw-marks through broken steel. I count a thousand cracks and dents and chips; a thousand thousand; more. Some are almost microscopic, others wide as human hair.

In that moment, I know all of them.

This isn’t Salt. This is the other part of recovery flight one-three-five. The surviving Decatur, if ‘surviving’ is even the right word. Its jockey is dead, and the cockpit cold and airless, pressure lost through the wounds in its chest. There’s a stutter in its power plant, and a hairfine fracture in one of its reactor casings. There’s a lag in its movements, joints seized and snagging as bizarre instructions flow across it. Safeguard protocols are trying to force it down, to fall back, to cut its power and wait for the nearest technician. Telling it to do anything but what it’s doing right now. Courtesy of Tower, if I had to guess.

But the instructions aren’t making any difference. Something swirls through the Decatur’s nets, coursing through the air and clinging to its skin like heat-shimmer. It oozes signal waste, noise and shit and sounds I can’t understand. The machine gibbers at me, howls and shrieks and quivers, speaking words in an alien tongue.

I shut it out. I measure every motion it takes, model every shiver down to fractions of a second. Ancillary systems project them where I can see, and break the whole machine down in amber holographics.

The shell circles me like a predator, giving off a feeling I’ve had before. I don’t feel it now, but I don’t think I could. This is something half-remembered, from the time when I was Rook.

Hungry. That’s the word. It’s hungry.

There’s something else. It’s waiting for something. Watching, as if it expects something to happen.

I change the grip on the blade and spread my feet.