The airship was a dromond, the largest class of noncargo vessel. It was 
divided into four classes. Hackworth was second from the bottom, in third. 
Below that was steerage, which was for migrating thetes, and for sky-girls, 
prostitutes of the air. Even now, these were bribing their way past the 
conductors and into the third-class lounge, making eyes at Hackworth and at the 
white-shirted sararimen who tended to travel this way. Those 
gentlemen had grown up in one crowded Dragon or another, where they knew how to 
generate a sort of artificial privacy field by determinedly
ignoring each other. Hackworth had arrived at the point where he frankly didn't 
care, and so he stared directly at these men, front-line soldiers of their 
various microstates, as each one primly folded his navy blue suit jacket and 
elbow-crawled into a coffinlike microcabin like a GI squirming under a roll of 
concertina wire, accompanied or not by a camp follower.