When we were test floating it, it sat pretty low. It was heavy. But with the engines on it just hung there, barely above the water, with the water underneath skittering around madly, trying to figure out whether it was supposed to get out of the way or not. The engines were meant to push off things, not to make the crawler float through the air, that it why it was called a crawler. If you were lucky, you could survive ending up under one of those engines while it was holding the crawler up in a way you couldn’t if you ended up under the crawler itself, but they still pushed things down and around in weird ways.
“Take her to the test site,” Rimares said, and then climbed top side through the hatch above us. I stayed in the cockpit, taking in all the equipment and blinking lights. Birch got to take us out because she knew how to drive most anything with a working nav. Her already intimidating eyes always had a disturbing look of seeing things no one else could see. Though the nav, she could do just that.