As soon as Joaquin had given them the location, Lucius and the paramilitaries got back into their vehicles and drove through the deluge of warm rain to the docks. Yuri had to grip the sides of his chair, the vehicles slid and skidded so much on the wet asphalt. He simply wasn’t used to ground transport, and the motion was making him feel queasy.

“The rain is hindering our drones,” Lucius complained. “Especially the microdrone flocks.”

“But on the bright side, it’s covering our approach, too,” Jessika said.

“We need to be certain,” Lucius said. “If Joaquin gave us the wrong information—”

“He didn’t,” Yuri said, recalling just how hard Joaquin had pleaded to be believed at the end.

“Okay,” the tactical squad captain agreed. “We’ll go with it.”

Jessika peered out through the windscreen as the wipers flashed back and forth. “Must be getting closer,” she said. “I can see the hangars.”

Yuri looked out over the inundated road. Squatting on the horizon were four massive airship hangars. As well as maintaining the algaox barges, Bronkal’s docks supported the airships that circled for months at a time over the ocean beyond the plateau’s cliffs. They all had ten-meter portal doors fixed underneath their hulls, which were twinned to portals carried by ice harvesters pushing inexorably across the frozen ocean of Reynolds. At forty-three AUs out, Reynolds was the most distant planet orbiting Pollux—a planet with a Mercury-sized rock core coated in a hundred-kilometer mantle of ice. All of Althaea’s water had come from there, arriving in colossal streams of ice shards that poured out of the airships to splash down and melt into the new seas. He stared at the big gray buildings in bemusement, remembering the first time Connexion had trialed icefalls in the Australian outback—now a lush savannah.

“Wonder what Akkar would make of this,” he murmured.

“What?” Jessika asked.

“Nothing.” They were speeding through the outside rank of dock buildings now. Yuri checked the map Boris was spraying over his tarsus lenses. The bioreactor complex and the airship hangars were positioned at opposite ends of the docks. A small purple star was shining in one of the reactor complex buildings—number seven, an old three-level warehouse and office block, which was registered to an independent maintenance company. Drones were orbiting it, keeping a safe half-kilometer distance. Through the heavy rain, their visual image was very low resolution. Normally they would release a flock of microdrones—biomechanical flies that would swarm through the target area, sending back detailed information via secure comlaser. But Lucius hadn’t launched them; this rain would knock them out of the air.

“They’ll know something’s wrong,” Jessika said. “Our Turing’s taken solnet offline across the complex.”

“She’s right,” Lucius said. “We can’t do a stealth insertion. This is entry by the front door, all alarms screaming.”

“Very likely,” Yuri said grimly. “So I’ll need some body armor.”

Lucius handed a bag over without comment. It contained a bulky jacket and thick overtrousers along with a lightweight helmet. “You as well,” Lucius said, holding another bag out to Jessika.