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.

“I’m not going in there,” she said indignantly.

“Of course not; you don’t have any combat training, for one. But if we do wind up in a firefight, I’d like you to have some protection. We don’t know what sort of weapons Baptiste’s people are carrying.”

Jessika glanced suspiciously at Yuri, who was doing his best not to smirk. The bodywork of the vehicle they were riding in was practically nothing but kinetic armor.

“Thank you, Lucius,” she said dispassionately. “That’s very considerate.”