My AES wasn’t as bulky as some space suits I’d worn. For a start there was no need for a radiation layer, nor particle impact armor. The thermal moderator layer was also pretty thin. Basically it was like putting on an overall with an integrated helmet. When I’d slipped in through the long opening up the spine, Sandjay interfaced and the opening sealed up, followed by the collar at the base of the helmet tightening to form an airtight seal around my neck. It took another minute for the rest of the pale-blue fabric to contract around my skin, flushing excess air out. With the suit forming a thick second skin, my freedom of movement noticeably increased. The telemetry splash showed me everything was stable. If I read the display right, the power in the quantum batteries could keep the air recycler module operating for a month.

The helmets cut down on casual chatter, and the reflective coating hid faces from sight, but I could tell from body posture alone that everyone was keen to get going. They would have read the same thing in my stance.

We moved into the sterilization section, with three pressure doors closing behind us. Jets of gray-blue gas sprayed down from the ceiling to be sucked away by the grilles in the floor. The procedure took five minutes before Lankin Wharrier led us into the final airlock.

As soon as they arrived to set up camp, the engineering team and their remotes had scraped the regolith away from around the ship, exposing the bedrock underneath. With that clear, they’d fused the rim of the hangar directly onto the rock before inflating the envelope. A pure nitrogen atmosphere was pumped in, which had slowly been raised from ambient temperature up to ten degrees Celsius to assist the science teams.

We trooped down the ramp into a bright glare thrown by lights studding the hangar fabric. The ship they illuminated was a dark botanical red, like a once-vibrant flower losing its bloom. It measured about sixty meters long and thirty wide. At its highest it rose maybe twenty-five meters above the ground. But those were only the overall dimensions. The fuselage itself was probably fifteen percent smaller, a basic truncated cone shape with a flattened belly. The extra dimensions were made up from protrusions—call them small wings or fins—nearly three hundred of them sticking out from every part of the ship. Quite a few were bent or broken off, showing the kind of damage it’d suffered from its hard landing. From what I could see, it had struck the ground along its port side before coming to rest more or less flat on its belly.

A hatch was open near the front, where three of the stumpy fins had twisted out of alignment to clear a route to it. The hatch itself used electromechanical actuators, nothing too different from human technology.