Chapters (41)
- Title
- Indicia
- Steel Frame
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Acknowledgements
- About The Author
- 'Ironclads' by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- 'NineFox Gambit' by Yoon Ha Lee
- 'Grunt Life' by Weston Ochse
The knuckledragger shakes his head. “No luck. We’ve tried magnetising the floor, but the Juno’s old. A lot of freaky alloys in there.”
“Envelopes?”
“No shields yet, and won’t be for a while. Generators are still warming up.”
“That idiot is going to kill us.”
They turn to look at me, but I’m not looking back.
“Tell that jockey to close their fucking tubes,” I growl, waving up at the Decatur. “They’re going to smoke us.”
The beard jerks a thumb at the airlock behind him. “You going to fight that thing, then?”
Hail hauls him short. “Do it.”
He glares at me. “And who is this?”
“One of mine,” she replies, without a moment’s hesitation. “She’s also right. Get those tubes locked, right now.”
“If the Juno decides it’s taking down the doors, this machine is all that’s standing between us and getting pasted, Hail.”
“Won’t do us any good if we’re dead already, Kadi.”
He holds her look for a moment longer, but he’s already sunk, and he knows it. He blinks, and the implant displays in his eyes come to life, irises aglow with orange holographics. He blinks a few commands after that, and listens to someone speak inside his ear. His face contorts. “Then you’ll have to make do,” he tells the short straw on the other side of the line. “Get them shut.”
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.