They chuckle at that. “Hey, we just drive the bus.”

“He make everyone do it?”

“Naw,” says the pilot. “Most come over with us, wait here while the boss gets through his beauty routine.”

“Or whatever it is he does in there,” says another.

Hail scrapes the smoke off on her boot. “You got our hardware?”

38.57

The smoker looks at another of his crew. “Doors back.”

She nods and blinks her eyes to life. “Aye aye, doors back.”

The cutter shudders and its sides slide open, locking back around the tail-boom. Three shells wait inside, crouched to fit. They’ve got their wings loose in their housings, but folded close to their bodies, ready for freefall.

The Juno swells across the open at me.

45.69

A line of connections to my suit, biometrics and requests for pilot status. A few actual queries open across my visors, yes/no prompts and subjectives, eval-questions to check for shock, trauma, and combat stress.

The touch of its sensors rolling over me like a gentle breeze, tripping receivers in the skin of my suit. It starts in my helmet, moves down through my heart, and spreads from there until it has seen every part of me.

48.41

It leaves me in the afterglow, the last touch slowly pulling away.

I smile into my helmet.

50.11

“It’s good to see you too, old bird.”

Eighteen

EIGHTEEN

THE CUTTER FLIES us out, but Andrade’s crew keeps us to the shallows; the no-fly order is now in effect, nearly twelve hours ahead of schedule. They follow a short circuit between the crags, engines as low as they can manage. They turn us upside down in the shadow of an old weather mast, a huge mass of struts and cabling covered in directional vanes and wind gauges, all worn and tatty. It’s probably as old as the day the ship arrived in this place—relic of a time when the company was more interested in staking claims than understanding what it had gotten itself into.

A dreadnought is power, and not a whole lot else. It’ll give you a death grip on anywhere you care to send it, and it was built with that in mind. It’ll cross any volume of colonial space, traverse the frontier whenever it feels the urge. No borders know its name.

Horizon is more than most. Its keel is thicker than anything laid before or since, and its armour will beat whatever nightmares it may find in the dark. It has guns made for sinking whatever deep-sea monsters lurk in Open Waters, be they human or otherwise, alien obelisks or company dreadnoughts just like it.

All that, and there is one thing it was never meant to meet.

Air.

And so, some long-gone engineering crew was sent out here, hauling tons of steel and jury-rig. They built all of this from scratch, and gave Horizon a way to feel the breeze.