They put the whole inner vault into the castle in a single piece, like force-feeding a PEZ dispenser. And they lock it in place with a set of giant evil doors made of battleship steel.

Like a whole battleship. Like meters thick.

And that is just the start. Inside of the big evil doors on the front at just about every junction that matters there are baby evil doors that see you and do not like that you are there trying to open them. The Kircheisen X8 fully autonomous secure closure is like if a common or garden steel plate door such as you would see in contemporary crime drama fucked the Hulk and they had evil spawn.

To be clear: you do not come at an X8 with your damn tiny plasma cutter. No indeed you do not. Other vaults may have a victim mentality. If you get all up in the grille of a Rubicon 3 or a Holdfast AH1, then sure enough they will phone a friend and wait for rescue. That is not the X8’s jam. The X8 cannot even and it will not phone a friend because it does not need a friend to tell it that you can go screw yourself. The X8 is insulted by the very idea that you would think a plasma cutter or a diamond drill or old-fashioned C-4 are even relevant to this conversation and it will straight-out autonomously fuck your shit up.

Frame by frame Charlie and Rex break down the corridors by the direction of the light fittings and the numbers on the fire control stations. They know each door by location. They give them names. Doc watches. I can see her remembering everything. By the time we land Doc will not need the map.

My people. They are perfect for this. Doc because she is a genius, Charlie because computers, and Rex because construction. Rex is actually in demolition technically but he knows also how things go up. That is where he got his start.

With his brother—now deceased—long story very sad there was shooting not by me. But it was kind of about me, all the same.

Rex puts his finger on the screen.

“These fucking doors,” Rex says.

Doc says, “Amen,” and everyone looks at her because Doc does not do religious language even for effect but yeah she is right. Amen.