An embroidery of dapples, overlapping in some areas, leaving others in somber darkness, and none of them revealing any activity. The universal indication of human installations dozing through the night shift. It was home only to the basic maintenance crews closeted in the big hangars, tending the myriad machines in readiness for the dawn and its surge of activity. Moving among the inert structures, and even fewer in number, were the Skins—the ones who'd drawn the bad duty—surly inside their private, invulnerable cocoons, resenting the tedium that came from walking the empty perimeter, the boredom of checking with the crews hunched over diagnostic instruments, the frustration of knowing that even when their duty did end they'd be too tired to enjoy the day (as much as any of them could in the hostile capital). Sticking with it nonetheless, because they knew this was the one place that had to remain secure if any of them were ever to get off this godforsaken planet and return home.

The spaceport at this time, then, was a little enclave of doleful and miserable people, serving their designated hours with an efficiency well below par. A time when human bodycycles were at their lowest; the classic time for nefarious raids and excursions. A time of vulnerability recognized as such by every guard commander since before the fall of Troy. And still they remained unable to install any sense of urgency and heightened alert among the men they led.

So Josep, armed though he was with his d-written body and Prime software, kept with tradition and history and used the small hours to make his exploratory foray. The perimeter was easy enough to breach. There was a fence, and lights, and electronic alarms that certainly never suffered from the human malaise during the night, and sentry Skins. Had he wanted to, he could have wriggled through it all like a special forces commando, with even the nocturnal animals unaware of his passing. But, frankly, when there's a huge front gate, why bother?

At noon, he rode his scooter up to one of the eight main road barriers, his little machine jammed between a juggernaut full of biochemicals and a convoy of cars belonging to afternoon-shift workers. He swiped his security card through the barricade's slot and took his crash helmet off for the AS to run a visual identity check. Every received byte tallied to the profile that his Prime had loaded into the spaceport network the previous day, and the red-and-white-striped barrier post whisked upward, allowing him through.

He drove carefully around the small roads linking hangars, warehouses and offices on the northern side of the sprawling glass and metal starfish that was the terminal building. Thallspring didn't possess a huge space program, but the respectable number of projects and commercial ventures it did have were all supported by Durrell's spaceport. Fifteen standard low-orbit (six hundred kilometers) stations circled above the equator. Twelve were industrial concerns, churning out valuable crystals, fibers and exotic chemicals for the planet's biggest commercial consortiums; the three others were resorts, catering to very rich tourists who endured the rigors of surface-to-orbit flight to marvel at the view and enjoy zero-gee swimming and freefall sex (occasionally combined) in heavily shielded stations. A small flotilla of interplanetary craft were maintained, principally to support the scientific research bases that the government had established on several planets. And orbiting a hundred thousand kilometers above the equator was the asteroid, Auley, which had been captured eighty years ago, to which clusters of refinery modules were now attached. Thousands of tons of superpure steel were produced there each month, then formed into giant aerodynamic bodies that were flown down through the atmosphere to feed Thallspring's metallurgical industry. In addition hundreds of other, more sophisticated, compounds that could be formed only in microgee conditions were extruded from the asteroid's raw ores and minerals and shipped down by more conventional means. In total, all this activity had developed to a stage where a fleet of over fifty spaceplanes were required to sustain it.

The Galaxycruisers were an indigenous design, so claimed the Thallspring National Astronautical Corporation, a consortium of local aerospace companies that built them— though anyone with full access to Earth's datapool would have noticed a striking similarity with the Boeing-Honda Stratostar 303 that had first flown in 2120, of which eight had been shipped to Thallspring. Whatever the origin, the scram-jet-powered spaceplanes were a success, boosting forty-five tons to low orbit, and capable of bringing down sixty tons.

Zantiu-Braun had diverted several of them from normal operational duties to lift its plundered assets up to the waiting starships. Given that most of the spaceplanes were already used to support the industry that provided the most high-value manufactured products of all, in the orbital stations, the number that could be taken out of scheduled flights was sorely limited. In any case, there were not enough passenger spaceplanes to lift the entire invasion force back up to the starships at the end of the campaign. So Z-B had brought forty-two of their own Xianti 5005 spaceplanes to augment the indigenous capacity.

It was these newcomers that interested Josep. He ate lunch in the maintenance staff canteen, sitting beside one of the picture windows that overlooked a parking apron. Only two cargo-variant Xiantis were parked there, with Z-B's own crews and robots working on them. The rest were flying. He chewed his food slowly, taking the time to examine the area, note where crates had been stacked, the shortest distance from spaceplanes to a building, location of doors.

After lunch he kept moving, either walking through the terminal or riding between sections on his scooter. People who look like they have a purpose can go unnoticed in the most security-conscious environments. All the time, he was correlating the physical reality of the parking apron layout with the electronic architecture that his Prime had trawled out of the datapool. He even risked sending it into the Z-B AS that had been installed in the spaceport command center to run their groundside operations, including security. Details of the alarms and sensors installed themselves in Josep's vision, a ghost diagram of cables and detectors locking into his visual perception, threading their way in and out of buildings and underground conduits. Schedules, timetables and personnel lists followed. He began to work through them all, slowly reducing options, finding the best-placed spaceplane, best route to it, optimum time, multiple escape routes. Afternoon faded into evening, and the spaceport lights came on as the gold sun sank below the hills fencing Durrell. There were fewer takeoffs now and more landings as the big machines returned home for the night.

By one o'clock all flights had ceased. Josep walked along the rear of a vast maintenance hangar, whose arched roof covered five Xiantis and three Galaxycruisers, and still had four empty bays. Inside, there was less illumination than there was outside; the lightcones fixed to the metal rafters were bright, but their beams were well focused, splashing the concrete floor with intense white circles. Beyond them, shadow embraced over a quarter of the hangar's volume. His path kept him on the fringe of the lighted areas, and well clear of the bays where crews were working. A couple of Skins were inside the hangar, wandering about at random, so he had to be careful there was nothing suspicious about his movements. Keeping out of the lights altogether would have drawn their attention.