“Not for long.” Hail locks one boot, frees the other, and kicks the door, nearly spilling herself across the floor. “Maybe not,” she manages, only just saving herself from the floor.

A little drop of silver pops clear of the doorframe. I catch it before it floats too far, and hold it up to the light. It’s a hardround, mangled when it hit the steel. I can see a few of NorCol’s markings down one side.

I flick it over to Hail. “This from the Werewolves?”

She nods. “They wanted in.”

“Bad, by the look of it.”

“At first. They tried to force the door, but it wouldn’t move.”

“You locked it?”

She aims a glare at me. “Three of us against a crowd of Werewolves and NorCol spec-ops, and you think we locked it? No, we didn’t lock it. There was a malfunction with the pressure seal; we couldn’t have opened it if we wanted to. When they got tired of threatening us, they tried blowing their way in.” She takes the ruined doorframe in with a sweep of a hand. “You can see how well that went.”

“So what? They gave up?”

She aims a finger at something I wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t pointed it out. A little break in the bulkhead, about the size of a fingertip. Smaller. “They drilled a hole.”

“And put an eyeball through?”

She nods. “A little one. Scouter. They got its wings working, and buzzed the room a couple of times, but they found exactly what I told them they’d find.”

“What?”

“Scrap, mostly. Took them a minute to put it together for themselves.”

“What was the first clue? That there was a nugget holding the fort?”

“A nugget and her scrapheap shell, don’t forget.” She thumps a fist on the wall. “And that’s before you count the doors that don’t close, the doors that don’t open, and a reactor that kept switching on and off. I couldn’t hold this place when the Werewolves came calling, and the techs couldn’t get this thing open. Even with us pressed against the wall, they thought we were stalling. By the time they turned around, they realised this place was just as much of a joke as it seemed. Scrap and driftwood.”

I watch her. “But they took you.”

“I might have asked them to.”

HAIL COMES BACK with a length of battered metal in her hands. It looks like something belonging to a knuckledragger: a long tool made for levering shell parts on and off, or knocking heavy bolts into place. But someone took a cutter to the head, shaved it down into a nasty, jagged edge, like a spear. A hack-job, quick and dirty.

I say as much.