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.
The Skins were still out of sight. Nobody else was outside the maintenance hangar. Josep jogged quickly to the door he'd used on his approach to the spaceplane and slipped through.
There was an office fifteen meters away from the door, shut for the night. He reached it in five seconds, bundled the corpse inside, then checked to see if anyone had noticed. Neither the maintenance crews nor Skins had reacted, and no alarms were screaming into the datapool.
They even had a contingency for an incident like this. Priority had to be given to getting the body out of the spaceport for disposal. No suspicion must be attached to the area.
Josep called up a menu for cargo robots currently in the maintenance hangar.
Camera feeds outside continued to show Dudley Tivon walking across the parking apron. He opened a door into the neighboring hangar and disappeared inside.
* * *
"After eight years of flight, Mozark had traveled halfway around the Ring Empire, stopping at over a hundred star systems to explore and learn what he could in the hope of inspiration. He could no longer see his own kingdom; that little cluster of stars was lost from sight behind the massive blaze of gold, scarlet and dawn-purple light that was the core. Few of his kind had ever ventured into this part of the Ring Empire, yet he felt comfortable amid the races and cultures inhabiting this section of the galaxy.
"Mozark might not have seen any of these species before, but everywhere he traveled he was able to communicate with his new hosts and eventually able to learn their separate philosophies and interests and goals and dreams. In many ways this heartened him, that he had so many ideas at his disposal, all of which he was eventually able to understand. Some he regarded as magnificent, and he looked forward to introducing them to the kingdom when he returned home. Some were simply so alien that they could never be adopted or used by his own kind, although they remained interesting on a purely intellectual level. While some were too hideous or frightening even to speak of."
Edmund immediately stuck his hand up, as Denise knew he would.
"Yes, Edmund?" she asked.
"Please, miss, what were they?"
"The hideous and frightening ideas?"
"Yes!"
"I don't know, Edmund. Why do you want to know?"
"Coz he's horrible!" Melanie shouted. The other children laughed, giggling and pointing at the beleaguered boy. Edmund stuck his tongue out at Melanie.