“Well, yes,” says Hail. “We like breathing. Same goes for the ground crew.”

Andrade shrugs. “Well, in my line of work, we like our hangars wet.”

He pushes past us, the narrow lock forcing us to shuffle up against the walls. On the other side, Andrade blinks his eyes to life, and starts working through something we can’t see. We can’t hear the bolts moving around in the walls—there isn’t pressure to carry the sound. We can feel them, though.

A green light clears him to open the door, and he shoulders past it. My suit reads the kind of cold you’d find outside, maybe even colder, and ultra-low pressure without the wind pressing in. I’m waiting for a berth like the ones that hold our machines in D, or a tinderbox like they use on the smaller shell-boats on carriers. Something worth calling a hangar.

Instead, we climb a narrow flight of stairs and pass through another airlock. But these doors are nothing like the first. They have all the usual seals and locking-bolts, and they unlock exactly the way I’d expect, but they don’t look like they were made to keep the atmo in. Oversized hinges jut out on one side, huge bolts and buffers show on the other once we’ve pulled it clear, four or five times bigger than they need to be. Solid-cast, like they were meant to survive something.

Blast pressure, judging by the dark sheen of the metal on the other side.

Behind them, a walkway suspended over open air and not a whole lot else, backlit as the compartment begins to wake, assuming ‘compartment’ is even the thing to call it. It rises up and away, the ceiling so dark and distant I’m tempted to look for stars. It falls away below us, giving no sense of its depth, mirroring the reaches above. An old silo, then, or some stranger part of Horizon that no one remembers how to use.

I don’t see Andrade’s shell, not at first. Not until the lamps find it.

The walkway circles around an odd shadow—the under-frame of a Decatur, but with huge plates of armour curving across its chest, each one cast as a single piece. I can’t see the joints through all the extra cladding, and I can only just make out its narrow eyes. Ten of them, arranged in a pair of fives down its brutal face.

I’ve never seen a surveyor’s machine before, but I’ve never had any reason to. There isn’t much need for them out in Open Waters. Anything a shell can do, wideband PHADAR can do better. At least, that’s the way it works outside, where the skies aren’t trying to run you blind.

All that, and it looks exactly the way I would expect. Exactly like the place that holds it. Pitted deep, and polished to a fire-touched black.