I roll my eyes, and the helmet picks it up, tracking the movement across my internal displays. “Very clever,” I say, but the Juno knows better. I don’t quite bury the smile.

The cockpit shivers, and I look up, just in time to catch the edge of something solid in the cloud. I can’t place the shape, but we have more than cameras and lenses. Our ranging systems read the change in density, flicking augur-strobes and PHADAR through the dust and converting the echoes into a shape I can understand.

The nerve-jacks sting, and I ask for antiflam. I blink my saddle through a reset, and let the jacks go to work. The painkillers numb it down, but there’s a flash of sensation through the haze. Just for a moment, I can feel gravel beneath my feet and sand between my toes, course and cold and a little bit tacky.

They’re both hallucinated and exactly real, translated from the ranging suite into familiar forms and feelings. Other systems report, filtering in through our eyes. There’s solid ground out there. An island in the sky, the size of a small moon, its edges lost to cloud tops.

We’re here.

“All right.” I breathe deep. “Let’s get dirty.”

We push stabilisers out against the wind, shuddering as the plates fight the drag, and our windspeed plummets, giving us time to work our hands and legs free of their flight configuration. My visor reads the change in sync; we’d let it rest in the sixties for the flight, but now it climbs back past ninety. That kind of score is high for any jockey; high for me, and I’m the one doing the flying. I could probably cross my arms and let the Juno run on just my thoughts. I’ve known a few jockeys who worked like that—some of the best in the business, but a couple of mediocre ones too. Sometimes it’s a skill, sometimes a knack.

I can feel how the Juno listens to me. Skill, knack: whatever it is, it’s closer than anything I’ve had before.

For now, our limbs come alive around me, suddenly loose and responsive. I spread my arms. Outside, a pair of red fists move as if they were my own.

We throw them out for balance as the ground comes screaming closer, loosening our legs up to take the hit. The flaps close, and our engines spit thrust to counter the stuttering wind.

The sand rushes up to meet us.

We flare our wings just a moment before we hit and burn so hot it turns the stone glassy beneath us. Touch down’s hard enough to rock me in the saddle, but light enough we don’t lose reaction time. We kick pressure back into our legs and skip across a desert the colour of rust, engines glowing and ready to pull us back into the sky.