Lawrence, Governor of Lagos, is first out of the hatch.

He feels twenty years younger and he does not hesitate in anything he does.

Above, the blackness of space; below, the deceptively slow scene of Bloodroot’s white clouds and green landmasses passing in rotation. He hasn’t done an EVA in years, but it all comes back when said and done. The dressing, diaper, polypropylene underwear, LCVG for temperature control, the suit over all of this, and the constant checklists for safety. Familiar and reassuring. He is home.

Lawrence shackles himself to the grab rail with a carabiner and clears the space so that Joké can emerge.

A white bag pokes out of the hatch and Lawrence snatches it and hooks it to a tether on his suit. Six other tethers float like worms at different spots on his suit torso. After the bag, Joké comes flying through, casually, carelessly, as if the hatch didn’t lead to the open cosmos. She seems a lot faster and smoother than he. She hooks two carabiners to the hatch, looks back, then thumbs up to Lawrence. Her MCP suit is a lot more manoeuvrable than his.

The movement aft is painstaking, slow, a process of crawling along the fuselage, hooking and unhooking, verifying position. It’s not a smooth aircraft body; the Ragtime is a mess of cables and pipes, panels and tech Lawrence does not understand, though he does not need to in most cases. Arrows and numbers indicate where they are; otherwise, it would be incomprehensible without mission control.

There are tiny particles here and there – ice and the remnants of the section breakaway, no doubt – floating like dust. Bloodroot rolls on, indifferent, like the stars.

Nor are they the only source of movement. There are robots here, all dwarfed by the BDA, Big Dumb Arm, which hulks over Lawrence and Joké when they move under it. Its shadow falls on them when the sun is in the right orientation. The auto-polarising visors distort this.

Lawrence signals a rest. “I swear, this used to be easier.”

“Uncle Hal used to call EVAs cakewalks,” says Joké. “I never understood why.”

“Play on words. Spacewalk, cakewalk.”

“What’s a cakewalk?”

“I… don’t know. Something that is easy to do. Maybe you do the thing and get a cake as prize.”

“For some reason, I imagined walking cakes.”

“No such thing.”

“Umm, you don’t know that.”

“I know that Salvo hasn’t checked in.”

Joké hails a few times, no response. The transmission seems to confuse a few of the scurrying bots.

“These bots should be using ECOSYSTEM right now if the primary AI has failed, right?” says Joké.

“That sounds right,” says Lawrence. He scratches his nose with in-helmet Velcro and sips water.

“ECOSYSTEM favours stereotyped actions. These bots are responding to our presence, Father.”