Zanthus began to resolve, individual light-points growing, assuming definite silhouettes. The largest was the dormitory, right at the heart. Ten cans, habitation cylinders fifty metres long, eight wide, locked together at one end of a five-hundred-metre boom; at the other end a vast array of solar panels tracked the sun. The whole arrangement was gravity-gradient stabilised, the cans pointing permanently Earthwards.

Floating around the dormitory were the microgee modules, one hundred and fifty-six materials-processing factories arranged in five concentric spheres. The formation was a loose one, a shoal of strange geometric insects guarding their metallic queen. There was no standardisation to the modules; they ranged from small boxy vapour-deposition mesh-moulds brought up by the Sangers up to the fifty-metre-long, two-hundred-tonne cylinders launched by Energia-5. All of them flaunted a collection of solar panels, thermal-dump radiators, and communication dishes, and some had large collector mirrors, silver flowers faithfully following the sun. Red and green navigation lights twinkled from every surface. Abstruse company logos bloomed across thermal blankets, as if a fastidious graffiti artist had been let loose; Greg hadn't known so many different companies used Zanthus.

Three assembly platforms hung on the outer edge of the cluster, rectangles of cross truss-beams, with geostationary antenna farms taking shape below long spidery robot-arms. Greg saw the Globecast logo on the side of one gossamer dish.

Personnel commuters, manipulator pods, and cargo tugs wove around the modules, slow-gliding three-dimensional streams that curled and twisted round each other, white and orange strobes pulsing, marking out their progress. There were spaceplanes moving in the traffic flows, rendezvousing with the five servicing docks, big triple-keel structures that acted as fuel depots, maintenance stations, and cargo-storage centres. The spaceplanes unloaded their pods of raw materials, receiving the finished products from the microgee modules in exchange. Greg counted nine Sangers attached to one dock, staggered by how much their cargos would be worth. Philip Evans had mentioned how much Zanthus's daily output came to, but the figures hadn't registered at the time, silly money.

Greg watched Zanthus expand around them as Jeff Graham eased the Sanger into one of the traffic lines. An errant image of his gland discharging milky fluids. Neurohormones chased around his brain, and he deliberately focused inwards, on himself, letting his mind wander where it would. It was a different state from the one he used to tease apart the strands of other people's emotions. Introspective. He was isolated from the security team's thoughts, alone and strangely serene.

If that peak of intuition he'd experienced hadn't concerned the Sanger, then, he reasoned, Zanthus itself must be the cause. He reached right down to the bottom of his mind, and found the sense of wrongness again. It was too small, too flimsy to represent any danger, but it remained. Obstinate, and ultimately unyielding.