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.”

“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.”