He landed softly on the balls of his feet.

His chin low to his chest, Manuel let himself move forward in a kind of loose-legged trot, remaining upright, checking his momentum as he separated himself from the canopy. The others, meanwhile, had come rustling to the ground on either side of him. Most of them were also on their feet, but one or two had dropped a little harder, tumbling onto their backs and sides in fluid parachute landing falls.

And then they were up and slipping free of their harnesses. They hurried to recover their bags and collect the equipment inside them--grenades, plastic explosive charges, and upgraded FAMAS rifles like those that would be used by the extraction team. Exchanging their jump helmets and goggles for combat helmets with optical display units, they donned dark special-purpose visors, coupled the electronic gunsights on their rifles to the helmet-mounted displays, lowered their monocular eyepieces, and then stealthily moved out at their leader's command, splitting into three groups of four.

If the information they had obtained was correct, it would only be seconds, at most minutes, before their presence was detected.

Along with other things of vital interest to their employer, that information would be well tested as the night ran its course.

The employees at the facility mostly called them "hedgehogs."

Rollie Thibodeau, who headed the night security detail, preferred the term "li'l bastards," grumbling that the way they responded to certain situations resembled human behavior a bit too closely for comfort. But Rollie was technophobic to an extreme degree, and being a Louisiana Cajun, felt an inborn obligation to be both voluble and contrary.

Still, when he was in a generous mood, he would acknowledge their value by adding that they were "smart li'l bastards."

In fact, the mobile security robots weren't very bright at all, possessing the approximate intelligence of the beetles and other insects that hedgehogs of the living, mammalian variety preferred to dine upon. And while they could function as surrogates for human beings in performing a host of physical tasks, scientific experts of an Asimovean bent would have contended it was improper, or at the very least imprecise, to even define them as robots, since they were incapable of autonomous thought and action, slaved to remote computers, and ultimately monitored and controlled by human guards.

True robots, these experts might assert, would have the ability to make independent decisions and act upon them without any help from their creators, and were perhaps twenty or thirty years from actual development. What existed now, and what laymen wrongly considered to be robots, were actually robotlike machines.

These conflicting definitions aside, the hedgehogs were versatile, sophisticated gadgets that had been put to effective use patrolling the four-thousand-acre ISS manufacturing compound in Mato Grosso do Sul. Through a rather complicated agreement with the Brazilian government and a half-dozen other countries involved in the space station's construction, UpLink International had managed to win administrative and managerial control of the plant, simultaneously assuming blanket responsibility for its protection--something the Brazilian negotiators had been finagled into thinking was an expensive concession on UpLink's part, but which had actually pleased Roger Gordian and his security chief, Pete Nimec, to no end. If their experience operating in transitional and politically unstable nations had taught them anything, it was that nobody could look out for them as well as they could look out for themselves.