I round on it. “That’s not how this works—”

The deal is off.

Good luck.

The displays cut away and the fluorescents sputter and die. Machinery skips and clatters and chokes. There’s a gentle flow of air past my ears, obvious only when it stops. One of the panels stays alive, VINE’s words shivering in the sudden dark.

“Okay, okay. Just—” I pull my helmet up, roll it over in my hands. “Just let me ask it first.”

Hail frowns at that, but doesn’t make it all the way to speaking.

VINE doesn’t hesitate. Ask.

I set the helmet on my head, and watch the pilot-sync climb as its systems feel me settle inside. Even with the Stone’s armour in the way, the Juno and I hit mid-fifties in a moment.

No.

That isn’t right.

The Juno was there all along, riding peripheral connections without the helmet to push my thoughts and feelings across the net. I can feel the edge of the shell, feel steel translated through meat and bone and the little silver netting under my skin.

But that’s impossible.

The shell stirs at the contact from my helmet, but it feels like the machine has been listening all along; watching, and waiting for me to reach out. My visor clutters with queries, systems checking my suit for breaches, leaks, any kind of stress. It feels my heartbeat through the chest-plates, checks blood pressure, blood sugar, oxygen saturation. Feathery augurs run through my brain, checking for concussion, micro-trauma, scaling down from there. It checks to see if I’m feeling all right. The Juno is worried about me.

“We’re fine, old bird.” I hesitate. There isn’t an easy way to ask. “I need you to look at something.”

The shell pushes an acknowledgement across my visor. I give it full access to my cameras, and aim my helmet at VINE’s display, the words still hovering in the open.

“What do you think?”

It offers me a threat-assessment. Inconclusive.

“What if—”

What if VINE is compromised? What if the hollows got here before us? This is a Sigurd facility. All it would take is an infected machine running its fingers along the outside of the hull.

I don’t want to say it out loud. Thankfully, I don’t have to.

The Juno swells across our little net and shows me the full weight of its defences. Twisting firewalls, ciphers deep as the void.

I’ve never seen the Juno like this.

Its systems should be centuries out of date, clunky and predictable, built by some extinct nation-state in a time when that actually meant something. NorCol’s updates should be tacked on where they would fit, forced in where they wouldn’t. They should be just like everything else the company does, muddied so bad you can’t tell the difference between ill will and incompetence.