I take a breath and inch us towards the break. A second timer is running already, counting down to the fireworks. Lear and Salt couldn’t go quiet even if they tried, so they give us a head start. Time to get our eyes on target, maybe smoke out whatever’s creeping down below. These two are insurance. Twenty-nine minutes and they drop in, all sound and fury, Ride of the fucking Valkyries.

The Juno and I take one last sweep and kill our augurs. The drop is short enough that we won’t need engines to slow the fall, but we pop our headlamps on. Anyone watching’ll see us easily enough with all the Eye-light streaming down the hole; with my torches on, there’s a chance to make it mutual.

“Let’s go.”

We pull our wings close, flex hydraulics, and leap into the open.

We fall for less than a second before we hit dirt and turn on our heels, optics wide and our finger on the trigger. We stand on a mountain of dust, a column of light pouring down around us, our twin hearts pounding.

We spend a few beats getting our bearings, riding overclock and adrenaline, then kill the lamps and run blind into the dark, steering through the memory of what we’d seen, coming to rest in the lee of a massive pillar.

At least, I hope we do.

Our eyes recover, and night-vision systems fill them with greenscale and static. The pillar looms over us; it’s made of the same brickwork textures as the ceiling above.

We set a shoulder against it and guide our weapon through the dark, panning across a vaulted cavern, the valley above us supported by a forest of pillars. Nothing moves between them, but then, all we’ve got is optics.

More of the pillars stand in rows, glowing in the light streaming through the crack above our head. They look like they run forever. Everything we saw on the surface rests on this.

We shift our aim and edge our way deeper. It’s quiet; I’d gotten used to the wind brushing up against our hull, but there’s only the faintest breeze down here. I can hear the Juno’s insides move around me, joints shifting, everything set to the gentle rhythms of its powerplant. The noise of my breathing, the rush of blood behind my ears.

The cockpit is icy, even with my suit doing its best. Our engines are inert, and we shut more of the machine down whenever we stop to check our bearings, leaving joints limp and systems silent until we need to move them again. We can’t spare the heat to do anything more than that, not down here. We’d light this place up in infrared, an orange blossom against the silver-purple sand.

Some parts of us are better at dealing with the cold than others.