FIFTEEN

 

 

WE GET A line from flight control, and it’s heavy. The kind they use when they’re planning on dumping massive files across the net, or running thick encryption. This one’s empty, though. There’s no audio, nothing much of anything once the Juno’s finished handshaking with the Tower nets. A minute comes and goes in silence.

“That you, Bell Tower?”

There’s a crackle, like there’s something blocking the receiver. “This is Bell Tower. Sorry, two-eleven.” There’s another break. “Are you ready to fly?”

We open our lenses. Our ground crew are already in their bays, and the SO stands out front, scraping at something on the deck with the toe of his boot. We ping Salt’s machine, shell-to-shell, and it echoes back.

Saddled and prepped for launch.

“We are good to go, Tower.”

She doesn’t reply immediately. The line crowds with voices, scuffing boots, and warning chimes. Someone is shouting.

“Are you all right, Bell Tower?”

“All clear, two-eleven,” she says, though her voice hints at something else. “I’m trying to get you something to go on—anything more than I’ve got.”

“Let’s have it.”

She takes a deep breath. “All right. All right.” And another. “Recovery flight one-thirty-five put out this morning. Complement of four, plus half of flight one-thirty-four. Plan had them headed for a weather station in the Borders. It got hit sometime last night.”

“Got hit by who?”

“The feed from the station makes it look like Sigurd. They got some silhouettes. Obs tagged Mirai and Corvier.”

My sweat runs cold. “What happened?”

“That’s the problem. We have no idea.” She breathes in, lets it out slowly. “They passed a signal buoy about an hour after they launched, but that’s all we’ve got. The next thing we know, we’ve got two survivors burning hard to get back on board.”

“But?”

“We’ve got one of the jockeys on line, but he’s incoherent. The other isn’t responding.”

“But the shell’s still flying.”

She mistakes it for a question. “Still flying, and a lot of other things too. We can’t decide if it’s on autopilot or not.”

There’s an edge in her voice. She doesn’t think it’s autopilot.

“Where are they now?”

“Berthing block twenty-eight. It’s a few rows above you.”

“Both shells?”

“Both shells. They came down hard. No holding pattern, no pathing, nothing. It was all we could do to get the doors open in time.”

Shit. “They’re on board.”

“Confirmed. Both machines are on board.”

“Any word from the hangar?”

“None. Ground crew and emergency services called in ready to receive, but the whole block went dark after the shells put down.” She swallows, but it’s loud enough that I can hear the cramp in her throat. “Tower Actual has ordered it sealed.”

“Understood. We’re on it.”

“Thank you, two-eleven. Your instructions are to launch and come about, make entry into block two-eight. We’ll open up when you’re on site.”

“And then?”

“Report back to me. Use this channel.”

“What if—?” I stop.

“If anything happens, you are to contain.”

“Contain, Bell Tower?”

“Not my words, two-eleven.”

“Understood.” But I don’t like it.

New message received, says a window in the middle of my eyes. It’s text-only, like the kind you’d send on a tightline, or sneak in under the noise of everything else. The Juno tests it, but it comes back clean. We let it run.

 

Forward Obs. reports: at least one shell haywire. Rec. extreme caution.

—B

 

NorCol is made of people, but it’s the machines that keep it running. Some of them are designed to move when there’s no one at the wheel, and some think for themselves, but it’s always with safeguards in place, backed up with locking-bolts and explosive charges. Made to crack metal spines and destroy mechanical synapses. ‘Haywire’ is what the company calls it when something has come off of the rails, and the safeguards aren’t calling home.

Jockeys have their own name for it. ‘Flying hollow’.

Horizon’s got hollows on board.

If we were anywhere else, Bell Tower might have come right out and said it, but I’d take a bet that Flight Control is as paralysed as the rest of the ship. They can’t understand what they’re dealing with, but instead of trying to solve the problem, they’re sitting on it and hoping it goes away.

Only that hasn’t worked either, so they’re sending a couple of jockeys out to blow it all away. Typical.

“We’ll deal, Bell Tower. Give us a window.”

“Understood, two-eleven. Window on the way.”

Armour crawls across the outside of the hull, plates so heavy that they shake the deck beneath our feet. We balance on our launch-rails, feel them crackle underneath us. We stretch our wings and warm our engines, feel our nuclear heartbeat throb.

Eye-light dawns through the hangar doors.

 

 

WE LAUNCH, TRIMMING our airspeed as soon as we’re clear of the hangars, turning to meet Salt on one of Horizon’s many outcrops. We settle on a spur covered in communications masts, as far from the nearest cloud tops as we are from the curve of hull and armour that holds D’s hangar blocks.

When you’re coming in to roost, lamps and network sigils mark the path back home, warning you when you’re falling too fast or off-centre. When a block is sealed against the weather, and armoured against attack, there isn’t much to pick it out against the patchwork cliffs. It’s even worse when you’ve got narrow eyes like ours.

“Salt? You got eyes on target?”

But his shell is looking out at the cloud.

He leaves me on the line, but sends a call back toward the ship. “Bell Tower? 211-C here. Do you read?”

“I hear you, C.”

“Are you seeing this?” he asks, a marker to match.

I follow it, wishing the Juno and I had lenses half as sharp as his. The thought doesn’t last; it only takes a few heartbeats to find it for ourselves.

A shadow with four wings, four arms, and a curve of massive hull. A slip of Sigurd’s colours, for all its strange geometry.

Just in time to see it fade.

“Negative, C. That vector is clear. No sign of friend or foe.”

“It’s the observer,” I whisper, shell-to-shell. “From before. From the Lighthouse. It’s Sigurd’s.”

The Decatur glances at us. “You saw it?”

“Just for a second.” I switch channels. “You sure you don’t have anything on your scopes, Bell Tower?”

“I have confirmation, two-eleven. Whatever it is, we don’t see it.”

 

 

DARK CARBON STREAKS across the hull, pale paint and silver cracks where something clipped a door. Bell Tower said that they’d put down hard, but I wouldn’t have called it that. They crashed, spitting fire and wreckage as they went.

I find the channel we had open before. “We’ve got eyes on block twenty-eight, Bell Tower. Open up and we’ll take a peek inside.”

“Understood, two-eleven. Doors opening.”

Hazard lamps spin on either side of the doors, throwing orange cones across Horizon’s weathered skin. The armour quivers as machinery wakes beneath it, and fine dust pours out past the seals. We watch and wait, craning for a look through the cracks, but the mechanism seizes before the doors are more than halfway open. We can see where the plates were bent out of shape, mangled under a massive impact. Something hit them hard enough to knock them out of their runners.

The machinery resets, cycling the huge slabs of armour back and forth, spilling silvery debris out into the storm. They start grinding open again.

We work our lenses for a look inside, but the lamps are dead, or Tower has cut them off on purpose; either way, past the line of Eye-light on the floor, the hangar is pitch dark. We flip through filters and vision modes, but the light on the hull around the doors washes everything out.

“Looks like we’re going in blind.”

Salt drops another marker. “Wait. Look.”

I follow the mark, but our eyes can’t see past it. Something drifts into the light, glows like a dust mote. Salt pushes me the feed from his eyes, and I let it run: a Decatur’s arm, shattered at the shoulder, trailing cable and oil.

“Christs.”

The hangar doors stop dead while we watch, less than a third of the way open. We still can’t see past the glare, but we already know what we’re up against. If either of the two shells are still alive, they’ve taken a beating already. We either go in and put out the fires, rescue what we can; or we crush them.

The Juno and I glance back at Salt. “Cover me.”

His shell looks up at the long rails mounted in its shoulder, now tightly stowed. He can extend them in a moment, swing them around in a blur, but inside the hangar, he’ll have barely enough space to bring them to bear, let alone get a shot off. Worse, once he’d buttered the target, whatever it was, he’d also add some new ventilation to whatever was behind it. And his assault cannon isn’t much better.

“If there’s trouble on the other side, you fly out,” he growls. “You hear me? No heroics.”

“If there’s trouble out here, you call back. No heroics.”

The Decatur glances over a shoulder at the sky. “I’m a little past that. If that thing we saw breaks cover again, I’m lighting it up.”

We nod. “Sit tight.”

He gives us a massive thumbs-up.

I flip channels. “We’re going in.”

“Be careful, two-eleven.”

I almost smile. “Thank you, Bell Tower.”

We spread our wings and let our engines carry us into the wind. We loop back the way we came, keeping as close to the hull as our wingspan will allow; we could fly a straight line to the hangar, but just because we can’t see in doesn’t mean that the things inside can’t see out. Damaged or not, I’d rather not go flying down their throats.

We level off, following the hull across a hive of hangar doors. Tower probably has them locked down, but we keep ourselves clear where we can. Hovering around in front of a shell block is a great way to get yourself wrapped around another machine, and right now I don’t trust Tower not to fly someone into me.

Twenty-eight stands out from the rest—doors bowed in the middle, corners raised and jagged, strike-surfaces marked with deep gouges where shell bodies clipped them on the way down. If those machines still have their jockeys, they’ll be dead now—killed on impact. They hit so hard they cracked the hull beneath the hangar plates.

We cut our engines as we approach and come down on toes and fingertips, caught on the armour’s cliff face and scraping down its surface. We’re still riding in Horizon’s bubble of inertia, and we keep its perspective; up is where the ceilings are inside the ship. We move like a climber, hand over hand, thrusting when we cross a gap or change grip, slowed to a crawl across the cliffside. We snag one of the doors to twenty-eight and let ourselves hang, trying to get an eye over the side. Even here, right against the edge, we can’t see much of the block behind it.

“Moving up.”

I can feel Salt drop his aim and hear his augurs dim, so our ears won’t ring when we make our way inside.

“I’ll be ready,” says Salt. He doesn’t like it; the only thing worse than going in blind is watching while your wingmate does.

The Juno and I hold ourselves tight against the plating and let our sensors do some work. The doors are stuck fast, but the gap is probably big enough to fit us, assuming we hold our breath. Good thing Salt’s on overwatch; the Decatur’s too big and too heavy, no matter how he folds it. We’re just over half his size, all told, and even we have to tuck our wing-mounts in behind our shoulders.

It feels strange going without them. Naked, like we’d fall if we lost our grip. I can see the froth far below us, cloud-tops dancing in the Eye-light, bright and impossibly deep.

I have to swallow a moment’s vertigo, but the Juno holds us tight and steers a free hand to touch Avery’s sword, bolted into a recess in the small of our back. The grip is solid, and fits our fingers like it’s meant to.

I take a deep breath. “Breaching.”

We press our feet against the hull, pull our grip tight, and hurl ourselves into open air. We float for a heartbeat, maybe less, but it feels like minutes.

I kick for thrust, and our engines throw us like a curveball through the doors. We come down on the deck with a trail of sparks and a shriek of steel. No space for the long-gun in here, and so we reach for the blade again, raising the other hand in a guard.

A broken Decatur rests in one corner, streaks of paint and a trail of shattered armour marking its passage across the floor. Mangled wings prop it up against the wall, one arm twisted in its socket, the other in pieces on the ground. Its chest has been torn open, split around massive rents in the armour. Not bullet holes, or rail-wounds either; if I didn’t know better, I’d say another shell tried to claw its way inside.

We feel something take a step and we spin in place, tearing our blade free of its mounts. A pale shell limps into the light. Another Decatur, missing an arm at the shoulder—missing its head and a chunk of plating where its collar used to be. The top of its spine stands out above its chest, exposing steel vertebrae and heavy-duty arteries that sway as it stumbles across the deck. Whole plates of armour have been torn from their mounts, ablatives and strike-faces stripped down to the matte-grey hull underneath. There are bullet holes, hundreds of them, outlined in carbon and spidery cracks. It looks like it flew into a hailstorm.

I can see the cockpit-pod through the gap where its collarbone used to be. Worse, I can see the jockey, hanging out of a break in the pressure-vessel. The nerve-jacks are still in contact, but they tangle around the body. An ankle holds it up, impaled on a piece of twisted steel.

The shell shivers at us. The jockey dangles, unresponsive.

The Juno and I spread our feet. The sword rules the air ahead of us, and our free hand makes a fist.

DONT LET THEM TOUCH YOU

The pale shell lurches forward a step, then another.

We aim the blade-tip at its chest. “Hold it there,” I send, across every channel. “Stay right where you are.”

It launches itself at us. We skip clear of a grasping hand, knock it away when it suddenly changes direction, rounding on us. We land a jab to its open ribs and a hammerblow across its chest, feel steel giving way beneath our fist, and the machine spins away across the deck, but it lands flat on its feet, jerking around to follow us. It skips forward and aims a punch for our throat, turns the motion into a swipe, claws for our eyes with a fistful of twitching fingers. We catch the grip, watch the fingers squirm just a metre from our face, then turn it back, deflect the next blow on the edge of our blade. It staggers under the force our guard, and we hunt it with the sword.

It drops clear of a thrust, folds itself over at the hips to duck a cut, and rolls away when we bring the blade down and bury it in the deck.

The Decatur stops dead, half a hangar away. Just out of reach.

It doesn’t have eyes, but we can feel it watching us.

I’ve fought every kind of shell—machines with jockeys inside, hollows without, battlefield automata flying alongside human crews—but I’ve never seen anything move like this.

We hold our guard and watch the machine tick and stutter. It’s ruined, taken the kind of damage that would’ve sunk any three other shells. It misplaces a step, over-compensating as its joints skip and jerk and judder. It looks like it’s having a seizure.

It loses power to its knees and drops awkwardly to its haunches. Its arm lies limp on the floor. The Juno and I circle, inch our way closer.

A mistake.

The pale shell burns hot and sudden, hurls itself into the air so hard it spins out of control. We track it, try to skip out of the way, but it’s too fast.

We look up and its hand closes down on us.

My eyes go dark.

00.00

 

 

I WAKE UP in the black, suddenly numb and blind and empty.

My reactor is cold.

No, not cold. I can’t feel it.

My little sun has been replaced with a dull, broken throbbing in my chest. I am slow, every motion half a second behind where it ought to be. I am weak, massive fists traded out for spindly things that barely deserve the name. I have to work just to keep myself sitting upright in the saddle. How am I supposed to fight when this is all I have?

I blink, but the darkness clings to me. There’s a flash of panic. I force myself to breathe. I have been here before, I know that for certain, but it feels like it was a very long time ago. It’s wrapped up in the memory of steel: meat and bone and water hidden somewhere deep inside. I shouldn’t be like this. Not now.

I have lost my shell.

“Where are you, old bird?” It comes out a whisper.

The cockpit quakes around me.

00.89

00.00

I almost saw it there. A spark in the distance, too fleeting to follow.

The hull thunders as metal meets metal outside. I can hear the joints scream and whistle, hydraulics rumbling around me. I can feel the Juno turn, feel it shift its balance as it brings the sword around.

We aren’t dead yet.

I can hear the sound of our steps, and behind them, the edge of something else. A light step, skipping around us almost faster than the Juno can match. The sword makes contact with something, hits so hard it almost throws me back, and my sweat runs cold.

The thing in the hangar was a Decatur once, but its steps were ragged, dragging along the deck or jerking out of sync. This is lighter than that. More controlled. This sounds like Salt.

My heart stops. We are hollow.

1.13

Not yet.

An ancient display crackles and skips as it finds its way back to life. I recognise it: part of the old control surface, built into the walls of the cockpit when the Juno’s keel was first set. This machine is ancient; it’s easy to forget that. The nerve-jacks and pilot-sync came late in the game, bolted on over things that would let you move the shell around by hand, the way things had been done for centuries. Long-dead jockeys flew it with steel between their fingers and pedals under their feet, the outside filtered in through cameras and fibre-optics.

The old displays are still intact, and they’re waking up again, casting everything in a gentle silvery glow.

Juno, says a brass plaque just below the console.

Mk. 13, no. 11327

Savoi Roth Shellyards, 2219 AD

And Thus always to tyrants, engraved in bold.

The widest display glows brightest, a black mirror that warms into grey, static prickling through the dust on its surface.

 

JunOS

ver. 181.83-31

 

settles in the middle of it, pale-blue letters on a field of charcoal, blurry through a film of oil and grime. They flicker, then disappear from the display.

Boot, says the screen.

Text falls from the ceiling to the floor, flowing like a waterfall of code. It moves so fast I can barely follow, then stops suddenly, with a single letter flickering in the centre of it all. A single symbol, machine-speak shorthand, hovering in the middle of everything I can see.

It disappears. A little red spot takes its place, bloody bright on a field of grey and pinpricks.

Warning, says another part of the display. Hostile command injection detected.

The red spot blooms, spreading out across the displays, leaving new marks like spatter on every surface. Red drowns the silver-blue, replacing familiar shapes with words I don’t recognise and symbols I can’t read.

I can’t help but stare. “What are they?” I whisper.

00.91

They are a flood.

Lines of invasive code wash across my little horizon.

And bump up against something else.

A few short lines, almost invisible in the wash. Words that write and re-write themselves. Whenever the red shapes drown them out, they reappear a moment later, and then they hold their ground.

I reach for them—the little island of silver lapped by crimson tides.

My fingers leave oily streaks behind them on the glass. “What are they?” I ask, but I already know the answer.

00.77

Me.

The red wells and curdles, but always the code resets.

The hull rings out, and another impact rattles me in the saddle. It feels like something is trying to break its way in from the outside, but there’s nothing I can do.

Nothing but watch red blossoms float across my screen.

00.48

It is a flood.

00.31

It—

It—

It

is drowning me.

I can’t stop the panic. The text runs too quickly, too thick and too strange. Even if I could keep up with it, I could only sit and watch. I’m not an engineer, not a tech, or even a knuckledragger. Not a coder or a script-shepherd or a psy-com. Not anyone with any business looking in on the mind of my machine.

00.27

I need you.

The words hit me square in the chest. “I—I can’t. I can’t read it. I don’t—”

00.18

No.

I’m only a jockey.

00.08

I know.

The cockpit rocks heavier than before. I hear something tear.

“Tell me what to do.”

00.07

00.02

Something clicks. The counter flickers.

Carry me.

100.00

 

 

I TRY TO breathe, but I can’t find the air. At first, it feels like I’m pulling gee, like I’m skirting the edge of blackout.

My first instinct is the push-pull they teach you to keep yourself out of G-LOC. You work in three-second cycles, forcing air down your throat as hard as you can, then clenching every muscle you have to keep the blood from deserting your brain and rushing down into your feet. They hammered it so deep that I can almost hear the instructor on the radio.

Breathe in. Out.

Legs, lungs. One, two, three.

Terror swallows me. I pull at muscle that doesn’t respond, and gasp for air that isn’t there. Instinct brings my hands clawing at my throat, at my visor, and sets them pulling at the locks and seals and tubes. My training does its best to save me, reaching for anything that’ll get air in. I can’t find the visor, but then, I can’t find my fingers either.

I’ve done the hard-vacuum drill—I used to have the patch, but I never wore it, no one does. It’s a bad omen.

To earn it, they put you in a box, and pull the air out in seconds. There’s a warning at first; a hazard-lamp to give you a heads-up, and a safety officer with a timer on their wrist and spare air in their hands. On the third try, the lamp stops working, and the vacuum starts at random. Your watcher gets pulled out at number five, and by the time you’re up to ten, they’re simulating a catastrophic containment failure. Good luck, and try not to pop an eye.

It feels like I’m back in that box. Like I’ve just had the rush of air out through my sinuses, sucked out of me by the sudden change in pressure. I try to exhale, to release as much as I can before it puts tears in my lungs, but I can’t even do that. There’s nothing to hold onto.

There isn’t any air, and no lungs to breathe it with.

At first, I expect my head to feel like it’s floating off without me, and a surge of acid in my throat. I’m expecting the deepest parts of my brain to be screaming at me, and demanding another breath. You are going to die, jockey.

Or maybe I’m dead already. Maybe the Juno turned on Salt when he put down, and forced him to defend himself. One shot from those rails, and he’d have holed our hull in an instant, probably splashed me out the other side. Even if it didn’t—even if the Juno’s plating held it up, the shock could be hard enough to crack me against the side of the cockpit.

I can’t feel a heartbeat, I can’t hear and I can’t see. I must be dead.

My thoughts settle on that, and leave me in the quiet. Only, it isn’t quiet. Something is humming.

I follow the sound, but it doesn’t seem like something I can hear. I can’t quite feel it either, but that’s the word that seems the closest. It’s a bit like standing too close to an electrical line. It builds, pulsing around me until I can’t tell where I end and the static buzz begins.

I know this sound, this feeling. It’s always there, under the saddle and in the air around me, climbing up through my boots and in through my flight suit. The reactor.

It takes shape around the thought, forms a little sun to light my darkness. I look around, but I can’t see much. I’m not sure that I have to; I know this shell, and I’ve known others like it.

And I’ve steered by the stars before.

If the reactor is there, then—

that is an eye.

Lenses uncover, and light falls across my sensors.

I can see the remains of one pale shell, split down the middle, huge fissures where its chest used to be. Its jockey lies on the floor nearby, missing everything below the left knee. The rest of the leg hangs from its hook, the ankle impaled, muscle and bone torn away at the top of a ragged shin.

I reach for more of the Juno. At first all I have is memory, and as much of a map as I can imagine. With everything I find, still more fills in behind it. Banks of hydraulics are heavy and power hungry. Lines of magnetic drivers hiss and crackle, easy in their shafts.

Something moves behind me.

I turn—or I try to, but I can’t feel my feet. I can’t feel anything, but feeling isn’t the point. It’s most of a second before I understand that. I know where my feet are, and there’s a map to plot their movements relative to everything else. I know their angle to the ground and exactly how much of my weight they hold. I know where my centre of gravity is and how to keep it. I don’t have balance—not in the way I’m used to. Up and down are where the gyros say they are, and everything shifts around them, movements absolute.

I lift a foot and place it, shift my hips and turn my hull.

And find another Decatur, watching me.

I’m expecting my heart to skip, adrenaline to wash across my system.

Instead, I see all of it.

I read tiny imperfections in its paint, and measure claw-marks through broken steel. I count a thousand cracks and dents and chips; a thousand thousand; more. Some are almost microscopic, others wide as human hair.

In that moment, I know all of them.

This isn’t Salt. This is the other part of recovery flight one-three-five. The surviving Decatur, if ‘surviving’ is even the right word. Its jockey is dead, and the cockpit cold and airless, pressure lost through the wounds in its chest. There’s a stutter in its power plant, and a hairfine fracture in one of its reactor casings. There’s a lag in its movements, joints seized and snagging as bizarre instructions flow across it. Safeguard protocols are trying to force it down, to fall back, to cut its power and wait for the nearest technician. Telling it to do anything but what it’s doing right now. Courtesy of Tower, if I had to guess.

But the instructions aren’t making any difference. Something swirls through the Decatur’s nets, coursing through the air and clinging to its skin like heat-shimmer. It oozes signal waste, noise and shit and sounds I can’t understand. The machine gibbers at me, howls and shrieks and quivers, speaking words in an alien tongue.

I shut it out. I measure every motion it takes, model every shiver down to fractions of a second. Ancillary systems project them where I can see, and break the whole machine down in amber holographics.

The shell circles me like a predator, giving off a feeling I’ve had before. I don’t feel it now, but I don’t think I could. This is something half-remembered, from the time when I was Rook.

Hungry. That’s the word. It’s hungry.

There’s something else. It’s waiting for something. Watching, as if it expects something to happen.

I change the grip on the blade and spread my feet.

Whatever the shell is watching for, that isn’t it. It bunches up behind a fist and drives it at me like a lance. I read the movement before it’s even taken a step. This thing is sick, slow, out of its mind.

I am steel. I step clear, and catch its hand in mine. I turn and twist, clamp down around it, splaying turquoise fingers between my own.

The Decatur recoils, trailing an arm that ends in a mangled stump. I can see the things that move in its nets, fading in and out of sight. They’re glassy things that move like snakes, curling around hull and broken armour. They screech, make sounds that aren’t sounds, but I hear them well enough. They weren’t expecting resistance.

I step in close before the pale shell can catch its balance, so close I’m inside its guard, trailing my sword and barely a heartbeat away. I claim the rest of its arm with a blade-tip, and then I shatter a shin. I cut through its shoulder, take the collar-bone and joint, some of the ribs below.

It’s still falling, fighting to find its balance, and I ride its surviving leg to the deck. When we hit, it’s hard enough that I leave a footprint in the floor plates. I drop a hammer-fist from on high, splitting its head apart on the ground.

I’m not angry, and I don’t scream at it. I don’t shout or whoop or anything. I’m not sure I could.

I mangle every limb and destroy every sensor. I blind it, and then I grind its armour away, driving fractures deep into its bones.

I’m not angry, but that doesn’t stop me doing what I need to do.

I must break this thing.

Good thing the jockey isn’t alive to feel it.

 

 

THE OPERATOR’S LOCK hisses clear of its housing, and I follow it out. Moving hurts, like I’ve got bruises down to the marrow. There’s a pulsing ache in my head, and the kind of tired like you’ve flown for days, and worse. My legs hold the first step well enough, but shake through the next. I don’t feel myself falling; part of me wonders why the hangar is tilting. I feel a rough grip on my shoulder as one of the ground crew hauls me up and shouts to someone I can’t see, distant shapes through the fogging corners of my eyes.

“Easy,” I tell them. “I don’t need—”

One moment, it feels like I’ve got enough grip to keep myself walking; the next, my muscles run slack. It feels like I should be able to force my joints straight, but everything is slippery. The harder I fight to keep myself together, the faster I fall apart. Another knuckledragger rises into focus and pulls herself under my arm. She links hands with the first one, and we rise together as she takes my weight. They haul me across the hangar deck, down a line of wide eyes and wringing hands.

I don’t understand.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” is what I want to say, but it comes out limp and awkward. My head rolls loose on my shoulders; the hangar feel like it’s rocking in a storm. “I just need a second,” comes out a little clearer than before, but only a little. My feet drag on their toes, and my heels knock together.

“Let me go,” makes its way past my flapping lips. “Let me go,” again, and firmer this time. “I’ve got this.”

I try to shake the knuckledraggers loose, twisting in their grip. I get enough of a boot on the deck to force myself up and out of their hands. They round on me, trying to keep a hold, but they’re too slow.

My legs have punched out already. The floor pitches underneath me, and the ceiling spins, crowding with faces looking down on me. I hear someone calling for medical, others trying to get Tower on the line. I’m not listening to what they say, and I can’t find focus on their eyes.

I’m too busy staring up at the Juno.

It looks like it’s walked through a furnace. It’s missing paint in a hundred places, scratched away by clawing hands, burned where I drove my thumbs through a Decatur’s reactor case. I lost one eye to shrapnel, and another to a hooked finger. I lost feathers in both wings, and a band of solid armour across the chest. The right hand hangs loose at the wrist, a few narrow linkages all that’s holding on.

“I’m sorry, old bird.”

No, says a whisper in my ear. We will fly again.