“If Tower has any details—any feed of what happened in there—all they’ll see is those things jumping me.”

“And you beating them to a pulp.”

“It was almost the other way around.”

She watches me, but I can’t read the look.

“Sigurd’s message was right, Hail.”

Don’t let them touch you.

“They hit me hard and early, but there was some kind of transfer when they made contact. Some kind of—” I blink. “I don’t even know what to call it.”

She raises an eyebrow. “A virus?”

I shake my head and regret it almost immediately. “Hostile code injection, but way more aggressive than anything I’ve ever heard of. It cracked into our behavioural platform and started changing lines. It was re-writing us, Hail.”

She shifts in her seat. “That shouldn’t be possible. Once you’re in, behaviourals are untouchable.”

“It was re-writing us, Hail. I watched it.”

But she holds her ground. “No one has cracked a company shell in decades, and even then, they barely made it past the peripherals.”

“Whatever was in those hollows, we caught it. We were this close, Hail.” I measure it out between finger and thumb. “This close.”

A strange look passes over her. “But the Juno is fine. I—”

“Checked?”

She spreads her hands out on her knees. “Just in case. Folau and I combed through it.” There’s a pause. “Don’t hold it against him, it was an order.”

I shake my head. “I don’t blame either of you. I’d have done the same.” The tray is feeling heavy now, giving me pins and needles. I’ve done far less damage than I was expecting to, but I’m not hungry any more. “Mind helping me with this?”

Salt hauls it off without a word.

But Hail is still leaning in. “What happened?”

“Exactly?”

“Exactly.”

I shrug. “We fought it off.”

“We?”

I flinch at that. It wasn’t what I was planning to say, but it’s out in the open now. “We.”

“Who is ‘we’?”

“The Juno and I. You’re the one who kept it around. You know as well as anyone else does, Hail. The Juno series were awareness-testers.”

“But those were the early trials. Any machine that wasn’t locked away was lobotomised after the original clusters failed.”

“Not this one.”

“You’re saying that the Juno pushed it out.”

“It did. Not some firewall or anti-intrusion routine. The Juno did. I took the reins. What happened in the hangar was all me. The Juno was busy—”

—fighting whatever that thing was.

We sit a while longer in the quiet, Salt studying his feet, Hail staring into the distance.

“Those two shells; do you think they caught it off of Sigurd?” she asks.

“I don’t.”

Salt chips in. “Tower said that they’d hit a Sigurd patrol. It could be some new kind of weapon.”