An amber hazard lamp spins in its socket, and a little panel informs me that the hull is back under pressure. I work the lock above my head, and climb the last of the ladder into the cockpit. The inner door shuts without my help, cutting the yellow light away to nothing.

I stand in the heart of my machine, swallowed in the warm and dark. I take a deep breath.

This is home.

“I’m ready.”

Bulbs chatter and come to life: little ones hidden in the walls near my feet, bigger ones hidden in the tangle of cable above everything else. There are three or four directly overhead, giving the narrow cockpit a patchy yellow glow and leaving deep shadows in between. Even with the sickly lighting, the cockpit looks how I would expect, considering what you can see on the outside of its hull.

As without, so within. Exposed metal and chipping paint, every part built dull and heavy and over-engineered, built and rebuilt over generations.

I run my fingers down the wall. “You’re an old bird, aren’t you?”

Chunky welds plug holes in the pressure vessel, probably matched by others even thicker on the armour outside. I count four breaks, all about as big as railgun slugs. Four dead jockeys, if I had to bet.

“And you’ve been through hell.”

The counter spikes, and a log-stream scrolls down the side of my visor. It remembers thousands of operations, keeps the kill tallies from each one. Gun-cam feeds, mission replays, transcripts of everything its jockeys heard and said. Medical records.

Through hell, and back again.

I breathe more of the Juno’s air and feel more of its hull, soft as I can with my fingers numb inside their gloves.

I trace oil stains between clusters of bolts and open ports. The more I look, the more patches I find. Some are just the welds, but others have metal plating fused crudely over the top. Cables run between newer components, and the stand-ins for things that couldn’t be salvaged or replaced: jury-rigged substitutes hanging from cages and cable ties. Air filters jut out from sockets that don’t quite fit them, joined with tape and solder and expanding foam.

In the middle of it all, is the saddle.

It’s a little bubble of calm in the chaos, clean, and if you didn’t know what to expect, completely out of place. It looks just the way it sounds; curved and padded, shaped like it was actually built with a human body for reference. It rests in its own little depression, half a metre below the cockpit floor.