I stripped off and took my jogging kit out of my bagez. Like every good fitness fanatic I used several layers, from inner skintights to more baggy outers, finishing with a waterproof for any inclement weather. I was only interested in the skintights, which gripped as tight as any wet suit. The top even had a hood, which combined with my sunglasses, covered every square centimeter of skin. Sandjay interfaced with it, and the fabric surface turned a perfect black. As well as being visually nonreflective, it absorbed a vast section of the electromagnetic spectrum should you try probing it with radar or laser sweeps. And that was just its outer surface. Long ribbons of thermal battery were woven into the arms, legs, spine, neck, and skull, which used a web of heat-duct fibers to soak up all my body heat, making me thermally neutral. The ribbons could accumulate ten hours of heat before they needed to pump it out. A gill mask neutered my breath, siphoning out the heat and scrubbing telltale biochemical leaks. Wearing that stealth suit, I was like an empty human-shaped hole in the universe.

Sandjay linced to the fly swarm and sent them streaming down through the hatchway. I sucked in my gut and slipped through after them.

There was a cramped utility compartment running under all the yurts. It was filled with human-built sanitation equipment, which sterilized all the water and effluent from the baths, showers, and toilets above. Chemical and solid waste was separated out and stored in tanks that would ultimately be vented into space, while the clean water was released back into the Salvation of Life’s main environmental cycle. That was the outlet pipe I was looking for.

The compartment’s floor was made from thick carbon slabs, as hard as granite. Agents we’d sent in before had cut the slab that the outlet pipe went through, slicing it into manageable rectangles with angled sides to hold them in place. Pulling them up was a bitch. They were as heavy as stone, and I was crouched over, which is a bad position to be lifting. Eventually I got them clear, and dropped down through the hole into a tunnel carved into the naked rock.

Pipes and cables ran along it, not all rigid and fastened into place like humans would lay them, but twining around like ivy clinging to the tunnel walls. They even looked like they were alive, or at least had been. I thought maybe a plant with hollow trunks, like terrestrial bamboo, that grew along the tunnel, then died and hardened, producing a natural tube. It made a kind of sense, given the way the Olyix liked to integrate their biological systems with mechanical ones.