The Decatur glances at us.

“You heard me.”

It shifts its grip on the mass of steel in its hands, but locks its tubes.

“That’s better. Look lively.”

It turns back to stare at the door, shifting its feet. The movements are sticky, like there’s a nugget at the wheel.

“Tower wants you to make a call,” says the knuckledragger, eyes back on us. Hail takes a breath to respond, but he waves her off. “I know you’ve got a special arrangement, but that’s why you are the one doing the calling. Either you find a way to shut it down”—he puts a thumb over his shoulder—“or Tower tells him to shut it down for you.”

“WHO WAS THAT?”

Hail unscrews a blackened bolt and hands it back to me. “The beard? That’s Sul Kadi: chief maintenance and technical support, big-boy knuckledragger for this sector of D. In theory, he belongs to me, but he’s professional NorCol.”

“And doesn’t like taking orders from a con?”

The chuckle is bitter. “No, but he’d be a bastard even if I wasn’t.” She tosses me another bolt and leans in to start working on the next.

It’s hot work. We’re crouched in one of the ducts connecting the block to its primary life-support systems. There are six others, and together they’re enough to handle all the airflow the block could need. One by one, the gauge is just wide enough for us to move on our hands and knees, to sit on our haunches maybe, but not a whole lot more. Just a little too tight for prising our way through a filter-grate.

“What happened to it?”

“The Juno?” Another bolt pops loose, five more to go. Hail drags a sleeve across her forehead and offers me the wrench. “It belonged to someone I knew. Beast of an operator. Something of a local legend, so long as you had clearance to know about it. It’s his rep that keeps the machine alive, not mine.”

“How did he die?”

“Bad luck, because it wasn’t skill that did it. A Sigurd machine hit him, rail slug, hole this size.” She measures it out between her finger and her thumb, and aims her eye through the middle. “The Juno didn’t feel a thing, even managed to fly itself back home. The round didn’t damage anything mechanical.”

“But it buttered the jockey.”

She leans back against the duct, catches the next bolt when I toss it to her. “Took longer to wash the cockpit than it did to fix the hole.”

“And you kept it shuttered.”

“Since the moment it got back. I knew it wasn’t for the best, but every time we boot it—” she breathes in, out, holds her hand for the next bolt. “Every time we boot it, it pumps the cockpit with hard audio. A couple of techs got their eardrums burst.”

“It was trying to drown them out.”