I tell myself it’s all in my head and look the glove over for signs of damage. There aren’t any, and I can move the joints easily enough, but when I do it feels like there’s a loose bone, shattered just like the fist we used to break Sigurd’s machine. I know it isn’t real, and that it’s just an artefact of the operator’s feedback systems working a little better than they should, but that doesn’t help the ache.

I look up at the Juno’s glassy eyes. “I’m sorry, old bird.”

It glances at the stump of its hand. We hit so hard we crushed the fingers flat, fusing them with the rest of the gauntlet underneath. The shell gives a little shake. A shrug, if you know what you’re looking for. And there’s a stream of pilot-status queries, the kind you do before takeoff, or when you’ve lost connection and the machine can’t feel where you are…

Oh.

The big eyes watch me. Are you okay?

I’m not sure I have an answer. Not sure I could put it all together even if I did. It’s been a while since I’ve had to do what I did today.

I’ve pulled bodies out of cockpits full of holes, more air than armour, and I’ve burnt my flesh-and-blood hands in white-hot fires. I’ve done every kind of recovery that NorCol cares to train its S&R crews for, and then I’ve done them again and again until they all blurred together into one long rush of pain and dying. I’ve done things the company’s instructors could hardly imagine, let alone prepare me for.

There’s an informal chatter code among rescue corps: ‘DTW,’ Dead in The Water. It means everything and nothing, all at once. Catastrophic failure of the pressure-vessel, or the lucky pinhole shot that goes clean through. High altitude fragmentation, atmospheric shock, or a whole airframe splattered across terra firma.

It was a DTW that got me sitting here, on the inside of an alien rock, orbiting something nobody’s ever heard of before. Three of them, actually. And there was nothing I could do.

Worse, I was the one that led them into the fire. It wasn’t intentional, but you tell that to your own unit while they’re busy burning up. I was cleared of their deaths, but that didn’t help. The filings in my court martial called what came afterwards a ‘rampage,’ which I suppose is accurate enough.

Christs, my hand hurts.