“It succeeded. Once they were clear, it slammed the locks on its hatches and went dormant. It took most of a week just to beat the locks, and longer to get it shut down properly. I wanted to start it again, but without a jockey—”

Somewhere up ahead, metal shrieks as it bends. Huge footsteps shake the ground, and something spills across the hangar floor. We can hear rivets forced from their sockets, spat out like shrapnel.

Hail helps me roll the last of the bolts, our hands locked together on the wrench. We’re both panting by the end, but her gaze is full of fire. She’s back at the grate in a heartbeat, prying at it with her fingertips.

I catch her arm. “Why are you doing this?”

She glares at me. “You heard Kadi. They’re going to kill it.”

I don’t let go. “Why? Why this machine?”

She deflates, but you wouldn’t know it from the look in her eye. “Juno was a strange series. They were built in the earliest phases of the Cluster Trials.”

Before we realised that putting consciousness into war-machines was a bad idea.

“It’s insane.”

She shakes her head. Shakes all over. “No, but that’s the problem. It knows exactly where it is, what it is, and how far it’s come. It remembers everything.”

“It remembers him, doesn’t it? That operator of yours.”

“It does.”

“All right.”

“All right?” She stares back at me. “Why are you doing this?”

“A knuckledragger just threatened you, out in the open, and didn’t split his lip on the deckplates. Can you think of any boat where the jockeys would watch that go down? From a ’dragger?” I almost laugh, but it’s too bitter for me. “Ever served on a boat where you wouldn’t have to drag someone off him?”

“There’d be a riot.”

“Exactly.” I meet her gaze. “I’m part of your flight now, right? I have to live here, in all of this?”

“You are. You do.”

“I have to live with fucking Sul Kadi?”

That earns me a smile. “You do.”

I nod. “I’ve got your wing.”

Steel slams into concrete, hard enough that we can feel the impact. The ducts rattle around us. Hail is back at the grating in a flash, but I’m with her now. We inch our fingers around the corners, lift it out into our hands. We flip it over on its corners and feed it back the way we came.

Hail risks a glance around the corner. “Ready?” she whispers.

“What’s the plan?”

“I try talking.”

“And if that doesn’t work?”

Her smile is grim. “That’s where you come in.”

“Power supply?”

“The reactor is stone-cold, so it’ll be running on a hard connection to the ship.”

I take a breath. “Where does it connect?”

“The Juno’s storage cradle. You run for that.” She points. “If you can’t reach that”—her fingers turn, ninety degrees—“you try for the maintenance boards. Whatever you can get to first.”

“How long after that?”