"Mm, okay, we can turn it up!"

She does. Saturn makes another loud gut-punched sound.

"You're the one who wanted to show off, you know," Pluto tells her, more than a little condescending. "You don't have to do that to endear yourself to me. But if you really want to impress me, you're going to have to do better than that."

Saturn doesn't answer. Not in words, anyway. But there's a flash of bright pink, searing through space, searing itself into the Krun Macula. The electrotoxin in the String of Pearls' claws seeps even through metal.

"--well, alright, I guess I am a little impressed." Another pulse of gravity. "You gonna be good now?"

Those are giant robots. 

They're giant robots fighting each other. 

They're shooting things at each other and Randolph isn't sure he knows what they are. 

What the fuck, this is awesome.

Fuck YEAH they're giant robots. Saturn has had this job for like an hour and a half and she fucking loves it. This is the most worth-it trouble she's ever caused in her life.

Her response to the pulse of gravity is a sound best transcribed as "guhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh."

But after a moment to recover from... all of that... the String of Pearls nods her assent.

"So why are you here anyway," Saturn says. "Because you didn't know Carter was here any more than I did, and as Cradle's Graces' glittering psychic death machine you definitely have better things to do than bully me for no reason."

"Oh, right, Iapetus and the fleet are escaping, aren't they?"

"Hope you don't mind having fallen for it."

"Silly. I know you're more important than that."

"....more important than catching the Celestial Mechanics fleet."

"I knew this'd be fun! And I wanted to see if you knew what you were even doing with that new machine of yours."

Correction: they're people in giant robots.

Randolph wants to fly a giant robot. How do you get to do that. 

"Are you gonna stop me from keeping it?"

Pause.

"...but you don't want to? Hey, stop prying into me, it's rude."

Another pause.

"If you're pitying me I'll make you regret it."

"Winning here isn't the most important thing for me to be doing. You either. And you're still not who I'm worried about."

"You know," Saturn says, and begins to prepare the String of Pearls for launch, "I might still make you regret it."

"Aw, babe, there's nothing you can make me regret!" 

And Pluto turns, and the supermassive Krun Macula offers Carter one of its enormous stigmata'd hands to climb onto.

Okay he will climb onto the giant robot's hands.

He's lifted up towards the cockpit, the entrance to which is on the Krun Macula's neck.

Pluto is sitting in the pilot's chair, which looks out through the top of Krun Macula's single veiled eye. The cockpit has fewer buttons and switches than you'd expect given piloting and mostly is done up like a room; either hanging plants and the color red bear some significance to the piloting of giant robots, or Pluto just really likes them. 

"How do I learn to pilot a giant robot?"

"Depends! I trained my whole life to be able to fly Krun Macula, Saturn stole the String of Pearls a few hours ago but she's been a candidate pilot since we were kids, and the first generation of pilots all learned as teenagers.

You'd probably want to ask Nix when we get back to Ares, she ran the original training program."

"What kind of skills make someone a good candidate pilot?"

Hopefully the answer is imagination, tactics, languages, or an immunity to making good life decisions, because Randolph only has so many skills.

"The things that bring people to space in the first place. Idealism, or not having a place on earth, or wanting a new body so bad you'd rather build it out of plastic than live in your old one."