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
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?”
“The batteries are designed to handle life support and mindstate continuity in an emergency. They weren’t meant to keep the machine at speed.” She weighs it out, eyes closed for a moment. “It won’t be spending anything on keeping a jockey alive, so I’d say thirty seconds. Maybe a minute.”
I nod, and try to fill my lungs. “All right. That’s it, then?”
“That’s it,” she replies, and puts an eye around the corner. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
“Good.” Hail sets down on knees and fingers like a sprinter. “If that doesn’t work, I want you to run.”
THE JUNO STANDS in the furthest corner of its little hangar, near the heavy airlocks that open into space.