‘I know the rituals.’

‘Don’t say anything till I finish either,’ I said. He fell into a silence, half-sullen and half-scared. I suppressed a smile. I knew what it was like to sit in that particular chair. Old Grigor had done exactly the same thing to me when I first saw the inside of a Baneblade. Well, he would learn by watching and doing, the same as I had to, the basic apprenticeship of the Imperial tank man.

I kept talking, ‘There’s been some shonky repairs done on Number Ten’s port-side armour towards the rear. You need to cover for that where you can. Set her down with the starboard towards the enemy where you can and the gunners will traverse the turrets to compensate. Be that way till we can get proper repairs done. The requisition chit is in – has been since Charybdis. Any decade now we will get the parts.’

He nodded again and kept his mouth shut. He was doing all right so far. ‘The number two drive has a tendency to over-rev at low speeds. You need to placate the spirit when it happens. It can be temperamental. Remember that.’

‘Sure.’

‘That’s that then. Let’s see if you can perform the basic rituals then.’

He shrugged. He looked at his control board. It was more or less a duplicate of mine. Hardly surprising really. Redundant controls systems are a feature of the Mark V Baneblade originated on Callan’s Forge. They say that it’s different on the Martian-sourced models but I would not know. I have never been inside one.

Nothing happened when he moved the switches. Nothing would unless the cut-outs on my controls kicked in which would most likely mean I was dead or so wounded I did not care. Or I toggled the switch and asked the machine to hand over control. I watched him. He was a good kid, careful. Everything went back into neutral when he had finished with it.