The location soon became obvious – the major suborbital landing fields. Urgeyena did not possess its own true voidport. Varangantua’s minor Navy anchorage was a long way north, and he’d seen it only once – a gigantic forest of spurs and piers, buzzing with tenders and materiel lifters on their way to the armed platforms in orbit. That place could accommodate a line frigate, they said. Possibly even a cruiser. There was constant talk of expanding it, promoting Alecto into the circuit of worlds that could service an entire battlegroup, but nothing ever seemed to come of it. The slate needed would be astronomical.

That still left plenty of commerce coming down from the void-lanes. Varangantua’s majoris districts had their own receiving ports, where true-orbital craft could touch down and unload. Those places were much less grand than the Naval facility, but still huge, still sprawling, with daunting maintenance costs and landing fees.

Urgeyena relied on a halfway-house solution – a cluster of receiving dishes large enough to take the Slovo VI suborbital conveyers, which in turn docked with void-stations placed at the very edge of the troposphere, from where the true spacegoing leviathans could take over. Those dishes were old and had been heavily patched over the centuries. They rose up on a lattice of rockcrete stilts from the teeming clutch of processing stations beneath. The entire region was known as the suborbitals, despite the fact that the term truly referred to the swollen vessels that made use of the landing discs. Such places were honeypots for both legitimate trade and organised criminal work, given the volume of goods passing through in both directions. It was where Borodina had been active, though she was just one of many probators assigned to maintaining the balance.

He pulled off the arterial and slid down towards the first of the great scything discs. A Slovo VI sat on it, vents steaming, turbines winding down, its sloping flanks the height of a twelve-storey hab-block. Its access hatches were open, floodlit from within, and mechanised haulers were bustling around it like insects. It would be on the ground for less than two hours, if they stuck to the schedules, its cavernous innards stripped bare and replaced with outgoing transit-crates, its tanks pumped full of promethium and its flight captain grilled by the preceptors. Then it would be boosting off again, heading back into the endless rotation, the pick-up and put-down, the grind and churn of the sector’s lifeblood.