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.