If the hollows have time to look for us, we don’t see it. We’ve got eyes on a tear in the wall of Hangar D, between blocks 91 and 92, right where Bor said it would be.

There’s a hollow Spirit in the way. It clambers up through the break in Horizon’s hull, using the cracks for handholds, its injured engine sparking and mangled wings flexed, hoping for a way back into the wind. We unfold a hand, control our drag long enough to reach our weapon, but Salt’s machine is already on it. We’re too close to see the slugs, but the impacts are hard to miss. The Spirit’s shoulder explodes as a shot finds a way between collar and chest-plate.

The second slug is right behind the first, slamming in through the machine’s soft muscle and following its back-plate along the inside, tumbling and tearing and splashing out between its shoulderblades. The third shot hits centre-of-mass, dead in the middle of the shell’s hard primary strike-faces, hard enough to knock it loose.

Bor clears the gap just as the hollow falls away, and we follow close enough that we can feel the Spirit’s shattered plating patter against our skin. Hail and Salt hit targets behind us, but we can’t look back.

We zip through the crack where block 91 used to join the hull, the sub-hangar resting on the block below it.

Taking the narrow gulleys at speed, we thread a crowded skyline flipped through ninety degrees and blurring in the corners of our eyes. It lasts barely long enough to think; just as quickly as they rise, they fall away, leaving us in the open caverns near D’s arched ceiling. Far below, past the tops of the sky-scraper blocks, are the monorail yards and giant elevator shafts that lead deeper under the deck.

We spot it first; one huge square, locked to the floor level, and marked with a stencil that reads 10-6 in bright yellow across it, rimmed with hazard strips. We reach for the emergency frequencies we’d chosen exactly for the purpose and drop a marker for the other three to see.

Bor turns immediately and follows us down. The elevator isn’t much more than a piece of mobile deck, made for carrying shells and spare parts up from the foundries under the hangar. We could try to find a way to wake it up, to tell its motors to send it down below, but we’d need to find the right nodes on the hangar’s widenets, and that’s assuming the hollows didn’t own them already.

So we take aim, drop hammerblows alongside Bor’s bright lightning bolts.

Two shots down, and we’ve buckled the platform. Bor’s slugs sever the hydraulics, and the locks that keep the lifter-assemblies tethered to this deck.