It’s most of a minute before I can keep my breathing steady. A window opens on my screen, and sketches my trembling heartbeat across it. It’s the Juno’s way of asking Are you all right?

I hold cold air in my lungs, let it out slowly. “I’m okay. I’m okay.”

The window lingers for a moment more. If you say so.

But I’m not watching it. Or anything.

I can feel what the machine around me feels, translated one for one. I can feel footsteps.

I blink through a systems check one last time. Our vents are open, our engines cold; you wouldn’t know us from the dust.

We take a gentle step together, and then we wait, listening for the echoes in the stone. We adjust, spread our weight, placing our feet down heel-to-toe. It’ll do.

“Let’s go.”

We pull our weapon close and push deeper into the dark.

HUMAN SPACE IS full of shells. Clumsy loaders on every dock, hauling luggage or supplies, working the lines that carry fuel and water. Spidery things that spark and flicker out beyond the airlocks, weld-light picking them out against patchwork hulls. Industrial hulks that live where cities turn to factory blocks, metal hides tanned by furnace glow.

Most people have never seen a machine like mine. Not colonial citizens, nor company employees. They might catch one in passing, see a shell flight lining up for transit, but it would always be from a distance. Always in peacetime. We are military-grade. Even little Juno is three or four times heavier than any of its civilian relatives, and that’s without the weapons systems and the slabs of armour plate.

With all of that, we creep, our steps almost silent. We have to be. For as long as machines have done the fighting, war has been a game of hide and seek. The Juno’s ancestors perfected it on Martian soil—the Knights of Argyre, fighting Coyotes and Vandals and Volkovs in the bloody-orange mist.

Back on the chain gang, Salt told me stories about the tracked monsters that fought in the time before that, when Unification was still a couple of lifetimes away. Back before the second Apollo, when the entire species was still stuck on the same rancid ball of dust. They jousted across Earth’s ancient streets, hunting each other through the ruins of a planetwide city.

But none of it was new. The machines inherited it from us; tens of thousands of years hunting each other in the undergrowth, across the tundra and savannah, through the rubble. Holding our breath and trying hard not to step on anything that might give the game away.

Always listening.