Presumably at Ariane’s behest, they took a circuitous route to the aitrain station, swinging wide around the hangar with the big Q on its roof. The caravan collected itself in an unmarked hangar on the edge of the military zone, which Ty viewed as a classic example of the “not quite Survey and not quite military” style. There were no human personnel, just two copies of a specialized kind of grabb posted at each of the wingtips of a big glider, nominal capacity ten. Adequate room for a Seven, or so Ty thought until he climbed aboard and found it preloaded with mysterious equipment cases.
Kath Two made a slow walk around the glider and then climbed aboard, pulled the door shut, and crawled forward onto the couch where she would spend the journey resting on her belly. Everyone else looked away politely as she got her urine collection system squared away. In front of her was the glass dome, more than a meter in diameter, that served as the aircraft’s nose. Beled and Bard took opposite window seats in the back row of the passenger compartment. Doc sat in the front row, on the aisle, where he would have the best view forward over Kath Two’s backside and out the dome. Memmie sat in the window seat next to him and Ariane grabbed the seat across the aisle from him. Ty had his pick of a few seats in the midsection. He had noticed Ariane’s preference for always sitting next to Doc. Were he a jealous sort, or the kind of person who liked having long conversations with eminent scientists, he’d have resented the way she monopolized him. Instead he just found it kind of interesting, and wondered whether Doc would shoo her off at some point so that he could at long last talk to someone else.
The glider began moving around, presumably because Kath Two had told the grabbs holding its wingtips to take it somewhere. The nose tilted down as they descended a ramp into the flynk barn. This was a noisy warren in which thousands of identical robots were hustling around in a manner that looked chaotic and organized at the same time, much like the impression you’d get staring into a beehive. For an earthbound loop system like this one, the flynks had to be aerodynamic, so their inner skeletons were hidden beneath thin plastic fairings, making them into blunt-nosed cylinders, like large bullets, with a little waist in the midsection to give the universal joint freedom to bend this way and that. Each of these flynks was about half a meter in diameter and two meters long and weighed about twice what a large human weighed. Lying on the floor, they were helpless, and so grabbs moved them around by getting them aimed in the right direction and then rolling them about like barrels, creating a scene that looked a little like a swarm of dung beetles going about their work. The general point of the operation seemed to be to channel the flynks in the direction of troughs where they would naturally line up. This enabled them to couple themselves together into short segments of chain. The troughs had roller bearings that made it easy for chain segments to slide forward and back, like trains in a switching yard, and in this manner chain segments could be added to or subtracted from the aitrain while it was operating. Which was to say, while the system was shooting it straight up into the air at high velocity and sucking it back in on the down leg.