Finally, he picked up a black, sleeveless jacket and fastened it over his chest It was primarily a harness for several weapons, their power packs and ammunition, although it also had several small gas jet nozzles around his shoulders and waist, giving him a degree of freefall maneuverability.

Denise had also finished suiting up. She was holding a handgrip near the airlock.

"Ready," Raymond told Josep. He and Denise airswam into the airlock. The inner door swung shut. Denise activated the cycle.

"Stand by," Josep told them over the secure band. "We're fifty meters away."

The outer hatch opened. Raymond could see the starship's engine section sliding past, its cryogenic insulation fiercely luminous in the bright sunlight. He gripped the hatch rim and pulled himself out.

The Xianti was heading for the starship's drum-shaped cargo section. A hundred empty silos opened into blackness. The sunlight was at the wrong angle to shine directly into them, though he could just make out a few that were filled with cargo pods. Up ahead, past the silos, the huge doors of the maintenance bay were hinging apart to reveal a rectangular metal crater. Mechanical cradles were extending their mandibles, preparing to grip the spaceplane.

"Go," Josep ordered.

Raymond tensed his leg muscles and pushed off. The jacket nozzles fired immediately, adding to his velocity. He flew fast and true into the end of an open silo. The nozzles fired again, killing his velocity. He closed his hand on the metal grid structure and hauled himself along to the top of the silo. Denise was in a silo twenty meters away. She raised an arm and pointed. He gave her a thumbs-up and began to move again.

Hand over hand they crawled along the cargo section until they reached the rim. Fifteen meters in front of them, the first life support wheel was turning silently, a wall of crinkled foam sliding along quickly enough to be mistaken for flowing water. Then they followed it around and the curves became apparent, shattering that illusion.

They both started to crawl up the side of the cargo section toward the axis. After twenty meters, they were level with the top of the wheel. Raymond's suit had to increase its visual sensitivity, the gap between the cargo section and the wheel was so gloomy. Hardly any light was reflected off the wheel's coating of foam.

Once he had a reasonable field of vision, Raymond fed his location into the suit's function control pearl and then entered the wheel's relative velocity. He let go of the cargo section's metal framework and drifted over to the edge of the life support wheel. When he was barely a meter above it, the jacket nozzles fired again, accelerating him in the same direction as the wheel's rotation. From his point of view, it seemed as if the wheel was slowing as he moved in toward it. There were innumerable protrusions amid the foam: conduits, pipes, even ladders. He grabbed at one, a thick metal loop, and the bogus gravity took hold, pulling him abruptly down onto the top of the wheel. A sixth of his weight had returned, holding him securely.

He saw Denise had landed a quarter of the way around the wheel behind him. She gave him a thumbs-up. Raymond stood, taking care not to make any fast movements. He had a very clear impression that beyond the edge of the wheel was now down. If he slipped, centrifugal force would fling him clear of the starship and into its sensor field. He took a few careful steps in toward the middle of the wheel and examined the structure below his feet with deep senses. Particle resonance located a clear patch, and he took a loop of energy focus ribbon from his jacket. When it was laid out on top of the foam, the ribbon formed a circle about two meters in diameter.

A hundred meters around the wheel, Denise was doing the same thing. Raymond stood away from the ribbon and activated it with a pulsed code. The foam underneath the ribbon flash-vaporized along with the carbon titanium alloy below. A two-meter circle of the wheel fuselage slammed upward, punched by a seething column of air. Bright white light shone up out of the hole. Paper, clothing, electronic modules and wildly oscillating sprays of liquid filled the column of air, hurtling into the darkness of the axis far above.

Raymond waited until the blast died down, then hurried forward and dropped down into the wheel. He was in some kind of lounge, with the detritus from the decompression swirling senselessly around him. Bright red strobes were flashing. The emergency airlock panel had sealed the hatchway. His suit pearl found the wheel's internal network frequency, and Prime poured into the nodes.

He walked over to the emergency airlock panel and used the Prime to override its safety locks. It slid open and he stepped into the chamber beyond. The panel slid shut behind him, and the hatch opened in front. Starship crew were running round in chaos. Prime shut down all other internal communications, then extinguished the lights. It didn't make any difference to Raymond: he could see equally well in infrared and laser radar. He brought up an EC pistol and started killing.

After the i-simulation Josep and Raymond opened their eyes, grimacing against the bright afternoon sun pouring through the botany lab's windows. Josep got up first and stretched elaborately.

"Not bad," he said. "I think we should start running more adversarial versions, though."

"Yeah. I guess so. It is a little easy at the moment"

"We can begin with you being spotted when you leave the spaceplane."

"Oh great."

Josep grinned and checked his watch. "We've got a couple of hours until Michelle gets back."

"How's that going?"

"Fine. Being an activist has sharpened her outlook. She likes courier duty: it makes her feel she's achieving something. How about Yamila?"

"I could never get her involved, not even at basement level," Raymond said. "She's too timid. Even suggesting it would frighten her off and I'd be left looking for new cover."

"Not at this stage, we can't afford it."

"I know. As it is, she thinks I might be seeing someone else. All those nocturnal absences."

"Speaking of which..."

"Yes." Raymond filled two cups with water and dropped a tea cube in each before sliding them into the microwave alcove. "We need the communication keys." It had come as a surprise to them when they analyzed the data from the Xianti. They'd known that the spaceplane communication traffic was encrypted, although they'd never bothered to examine it before. Had they done so they would have found that not even Prime could decrypt it. Theoretically, given enough processing power and time, any code could be broken, but Z-B used a particularly strong four-dimensional encryption technique for its spaceplanes and changed it every time. Even with the resources Raymond and Josep had available, they could never crack it inside the timeframe they needed for a successful operation.