I reach for power, which beats in my chest. Our engines burn hot and loud. The rails spark and the starting blocks fire, shrieking as mag-drives hurl us towards the lock.

My suit fights the sudden gee, artificial muscle holding tight as the hangar blurs past on either side.

We hit the wind.

Seven

SEVEN

WE FLOAT.

We flare our wings and cut our thrust, waiting for flaps and stabilisers to bite. The breeze whistles past, and dust patters against our hull. The extra drag is chewing up our airspeed, rattling the cockpit as we cut through banks of cloud.

And then it goes still. We break through the cloud tops and into a sudden canyon between mountains of storm. I can’t tell how big they are from here; there’s nothing to measure them against. They might go on forever.

Between them is the Eye.

From here, all we have is the glowing rim and the strange currents that mark its edges. It feels closer out here, bigger without Horizon’s shields and armour in the way.

The glow catches the clouds, turns them red and dusty gold. We can feel it on our armour, but I’m glad we’re so far away. Incandescent streaks blur the horizon, and equatorial storms tear at each other in the distance. It’s what Hail calls the Storm Border; the break between the hot rim and the cold froth, inhabited by vast hurricanes and swarms of dark twisters. They trail hazy ribbons of cloud, bleeding out across the endless dawn.

The glow dims long before it reaches us: before it even leaves the bubble of lensing, distorted light that hugs the Eye. Even with all of our armour, and the crystalline composites built into the cockpit walls, I’m tingling.

I know it’s just my imagination, but I keep the rad-counters out of sight anyway. The Juno’s got my veins flooded with DeClide strains and Pepper Blue. They wouldn’t stop the gales from stripping me of my skin, but our hull holds that out. The drugs make up for the places where the armour struggles, keeping me from catching tumours, or frying in the particle wash.

We are steel.

I can feel sheet ice on the contours of our hull, and all the warmth inside it. I breathe air past my helmet filters, but not all of the feeling belongs to me. It mixes with the rush of dust against the shell and makes it seem like I’ve got the breeze against my skin.

We let the cold wind carry us.

I work my fingers around inside my gloves. By the Juno’s count, we’ve been flying five hours and change, and my creaking knuckles confirm it.

“Has it really been that long?” I whisper.

A timer in my visor adds another few decimal places, counting the picoseconds now.