Josep reached one of the unoccupied bays and moved forward. Just to the side of the massive sliding doors at the front was a smaller door. He reached it and put his palm on the sensor plate. The lock buzzed, and he pushed it open.

Twenty meters away, the sculpted nose of a Xianti pointed at the maintenance hangar. Solar cones shone far overhead, glinting off the pearl-white carbon-lithium composite fuselage. There was a service truck parked on either side of the spaceplane, with hoses plugged into various umbilical sockets along the underbelly. An airstair led up to the forward airlock.

Josep walked over the tarmac, concentrating more on the icons being relayed from the spaceport network than his eyesight. Four cameras covered the spaceplane. His Prime had infiltrated each one, eliminating his image from the feed to Z-B's AS. Three rings of sensors were arranged concentrically around the sleek machine. None of them registered his presence as he walked across them. No Skins were within five hundred meters.

The airstairs were protected by both a voiceprint codeword and a biosensor that registered his blood vessel and bone patterns. It was an effective security device, but only ever as good as the patterns that were loaded into the system's e-alpha fortress. Josep's codeword and body map corresponded to one of those on file, and the airstair door slid open. He took the steps two at a time. The airlock at the top had a simple manual latch. Pull and turn.

Secondary lighting came on, illuminating the small cabin with an emerald glow. This Xianti was one of the cargo variants. Its cabin was cramped, with minimum facilities and room for up to five seats for the systems officer and payload managers. At the moment there were only two bolted to the floor, with the brackets for the others covered in plastic sleeves. Josep went forward and sat in the pilot's seat. The curved console in front of him was surprisingly compact, with three holographic panes angling up out of it. The two narrow windshields allowed him to see down the length of the nose, but showed very little else. He could understand that. Technically there was no need for any controls or windshields at all. The human pilot would always be fitted with a DNI. And that was only used for efficient communication with the AS pilot, which really controlled the spaceplane. The console and its displays were emergency fallbacks, although many people preferred pane graphics to the indigo icons of DNI. Windshields were there purely for the psychology.

Josep took a standard powered Allen key out of his belt pouch and hunched down in the seat to examine the base of the console. There were several inspection panels underneath. He opened two of them and found what he was looking for. The neurotronic pearls that housed the AS were sealed units buried deep in a service module, but they still had to be connected to the spaceplane systems. He wormed his dragon-extruded desktop pearl into the narrow gap toward the fiberoptic junction, and waited while the little unit morphed itself, extending needle probes into the unit. Prime flooded in.

They might have managed to infiltrate a spaceplane AS pilot through a satellite relay, but the risk of detection was too great. It was a single channel, easily monitored for abnormalities by secure AS's on the starships. Either they attempted to take over every Z-B AS, or they established a direct physical link. The first option wasn't even considered.

The dataflow reversed, dumping the entire AS pilot program into the desktop pearl. They would examine it later, learning the minutiae of ground-to-orbit flight in the strange vehicle. Its communications traffic. Docking procedures. When the time came, Zantiu-Braun would never know that someone and something else was on board until it was far too late.

The desktop pearl card informed Josep that it had copied the entire AS. Prime began to withdraw from the space-plane's pearls, erasing all evidence of its invasion. Needle probes slid out of the fiberoptic junction and melted back into the casing. Josep replaced the panel and tightened it up.

Despite all his preparation, planning and caution, the one thing they all accepted was that there could be no protection against chance.

Josep had already opened the secure door at the bottom of the airstair when his relay from the cameras around the parking apron showed him a man emerging from the maintenance hangar. He was dressed in the loose navy-blue coveralls worn by all the spaceport's engineering maintenance staff. Prime immediately ran identification routines. Dudley Tivon, aged thirty-seven, married, one child, employed by the spaceport for eight years, promoted last year to assistant supervisor, fully qualified on Galaxycruiser hydraulics. He didn't have DNI, but his bracelet pearl was on standby, connected into the spaceport network. Prime moved into the communication circuit, blocking his contact with the data-pool.

There was a moment when Josep could have ducked down behind the airstair, out of Dudley Tivon's sight. But that was an unknown risk. He didn't know what direction Dudley Tivon would walk, or how long he would be milling round outside. Every second spent crouched down was a second of exposure to anyone else who came along from a different direction. There were three Skins currently in the vicinity.

Instead he walked straight for Dudley Tivon. That reduced the outcome to two possibles. Either Dudley Tivon would assume he was just another night-shift worker going about his business, and do nothing. Being seen didn't concern Josep. So far his visitation had left no traces. Z-B didn't even know they had to look for evidence of anyone penetrating their security. Or Dudley Tivon would question what he was doing. In which case...

For a few seconds, as he drew close, Josep thought he'd got away with it. Then Dudley Tivon's pace slowed to a halt. He frowned, looking first at Josep, then back to the foreign spaceplane.

Prime in the surrounding cameras immediately began generating a false image, showing four different viewpoints of Dudley Tivon walking on uninterrupted across the parking apron.

"What are you doing?" Dudley Tivon asked as Josep drew level.

Josep smiled, nodding at the hangar. "Gotta get over to bay seven, Chief."

"You came out of that spaceplane."

"What?"

"How the hell did you get in it? You're not from Z-B. Those things are wired up eight ways from Sunday. What were you doing in there?" Dudley Tivon began to raise the arm on which he wore his bracelet pearl.

Information trawled from the datapool came into Josep's mind. Dudley Tivon's wife had been fitted with a collateral collar.

The assistant supervisor was making an issue of seeing where Josep had emerged, and he could never allow acts of sabotage or dissent against Z-B. It might well be his wife's collar that was activated in retaliation.

"I was just—" Josep's right arm shot out, stiffened fingers slamming into Dudley Tivon's Adam's apple. The man's neck snapped from the force of the blow. His body lurched back, but Josep was already following it. He caught the limp figure as it collapsed and lifted it effortlessly over his shoulder.