We copy it across our shells. Inside is a taste of the original distress call, an ID code, and a few of Sigurd’s glyphs. There’s a message encoded underneath them: a bounty for the information, paid in the company’s crowns, hard commodities, machinery, or any combination of the three. Below that, instructions to its competitors, and threats to anyone thinking otherwise.

VINE adds a little of its own thoughts, a grid-map localised to a couple of weather systems and the theoretical centre of the Eye itself. It isn’t much more than a general sense of what we’re looking for, but we were never going to do any better.

“Is that everything?” asks Hail.

Everything I have, replies VINE, words crawling across a damaged screen.

She turns on her heel. “We’re done here.”

And not a moment too soon.

Neither of us would admit it, but we’ve been staring at the place where Sigurd’s dreadnought is supposed to be. A hollow shell is one thing, but a dreadnought is another. Horizon might be our prison, but I wouldn’t want to try living anywhere else in this place.

We do one more check, run through the files to make sure they’re intact. When it’s done, Hail goes back for the knuckledragger’s ugly spear and takes the ragged tip to VINE’s manual interfaces. It doesn’t take much to meet our end of the deal; most of it wasn’t working to begin with. Five minutes, maybe less, and VINE is the only thing with any say over the station. It seems happy enough.

Don’t forget, it flashes as we turn to leave.

“How could we?” I growl.

Salt’s shell is waiting for us when we hit the airlocks. “Took your time,” he mutters, ferrying us in handfuls to our machines.

“You didn’t miss much,” says Hail. “We’ve got some flying that needs doing, so I hope you got some shut-eye.”

“Hardly.” The pale shell aims its lenses past us, at the mass of curling fire peeking through the cloud. “How does anyone live around a thing like that?”

Hail sounds like she wants to spit. “If I knew, I’d tell you.”

The Juno warms around me, waits while I find my way to the saddle. I’m expecting to have to fight to find connection, to force ‘me’ back into ‘us,’ but it happens without me noticing.

The pilot-sync is running high already, but it bumps for a moment, just as the jacks are about to bite.

98.51

There should be a sudden, spearing heat as the needles make contact, as one set of nerves joins another and the conductors start to set, but I don’t feel anything. Instead, the Juno pulls me out, and together we watch the body in the cockpit, see it shiver and tense, listening as its lungs exhale.

And then the Juno drops me back.

97.00