‘Channel 37,’ said Saul, as the atmosphere drained out of the lock, slowly killing his words in the air. As icons flashed up in his visor, he approved them and then shut down exterior applications for inclusion, thus making their radio communications private, at least for a while. Shortly, they propelled themselves out into a tubeway still under construction, at present only a cage of girders curving round and then spearing downwards beside the massive revolving arcoplex cylinder.

‘Mother of God!’ Hannah exclaimed, her voice crackling with interference.

On its outer rim, the station had seemed huge enough, but here, within the wheel, its vastness delivered more impact. From behind, to their left, the inner surface of the wheel’s rim curved almost imperceptibly inwards; while over that way, gazing through the inner structure of the station, they could just see an ore-transit tube foreshortened by perspective. Immediately to their right turned the great curved wall of the nearest cylinder world – the nearest arcoplex extending down to where it connected, at its further end, to the asteroid itself. However, the view of that was blocked by countless intervening tubeways or buildings suspended in the mesh of girders, like insect carcasses trapped in a spider’s web. Ahead and above, where a latticework of girders divided the starlit sky into diamonds, Saul could just see the technical-control building jutting up from the asteroid itself. This entire massive station, he now understood, represented what the Committee had been bankrupting Earth in order to build. There therefore had to be more to it than simply providing a base of operations for the satellite laser network.

Now clear of the airlock, Saul once again linked back into the personal network with his robots, and only on doing so did he spot the flashing of weapons ahead. Next he registered a detonation, though silent in vacuum, as it erased one of the robots from his network, and with human vision he saw a couple of its steel limbs clinging to beams nearby. As they propelled themselves down towards this spot, and to where the tubeway acquired walls, Saul replayed recorded data and saw a spacesuited soldier lurking in the shadows with a carousel launcher – a big weapon equipped with a round magazine, as on a tommy-gun – but the man didn’t succeed in getting off a second round. Saul was still refining the programs, so it wasn’t a corrupted work order that made the next robot tear off the human assailant’s head, but new programming.