It’s smaller than I was expecting, head and shoulders shorter than the pale thing standing outside. Where the Decatur was slender and prickly, all jagged edges and deflection zones, the Juno was built to take hits up front. Thick armour lies in bands across its chest, and wide panels cover its shoulder joints. Ablators have been bolted over every flat surface: thick ceramic and moulded metal plates, made to break away under fire.

Some of the plating is new, but most of it isn’t. The hull used to be covered in burgundy paint, almost the colour of a scab, but bullets and shrapnel have cut through to the steel in a thousand places. Dust has ground it smooth wherever metal rises to an edge, and thin scars crisscross its body: a record of glancing railgun strikes.

The shell is staring at its hands.

I glance at Hail, put out my hands, imitating it, frowning.

She’s crouching between the wheels of a flatbed hauler, flipped on its side. She’s about ten, fifteen metres clear of me, but she reads the motion easily enough. She shakes her head helplessly.

I look back at the Juno. A heavy-duty plug clings to the base of its neck like a parasite, the thick cable trailing along the floor and into a massive casket, set into the wall behind it.

That’s the cradle. An empty negative, hollow in just the right shape to fit every part of the machine itself, and able to take its weight while the knuckledraggers shut it down and fiddle with its joints. Ladders and scaffolds run up on either side, and maintenance terminals flicker, flashing warnings.

The power cable runs into the middle of it all, where a matching plug connects to Hangar D’s power grid. I’ve never known a Juno before, never had to work the connections on one either, but I’ve jockeyed on a Volkov. Most of one, anyway. A trainer, gutted down to legs and hindbrain with a saddle strapped over the top. I got my jockey’s patch on that thing, earned all the usual scars in the process. Earned a few other things too.

They say Junos and Volkovs fought each other across the slopes of Olympus Mons, mixed in with Coyotes and Callistos and Ultras and things no one remembers the names of. The fittings are all from the same generation, with the same heavy breakers all painted rustproof red. I know where I’m going.

I swallow and risk a glance at Hail. She’s watching the Juno, but it hasn’t moved from where it was. It works its huge fingers, turning its palms over in the light.