By now the van had parked about ten meters behind. Its driver turned on the parking lights just long enough for the guy with the keys to step up and punch some numbers on a keypad inside the door. This caused a lot of red LEDs to come on. Once the van’s lamps were extinguished, Laks could see up into a volume forty feet long, eight feet wide, and eight feet high, with just enough of that red glow to let people get a sense of where things were—like the combat lighting on the bridge of a warship. Silhouetted were long racks mounted to the ceiling and to the walls, running the full length of the container. Queued up on those were hundreds of skeletal black shapes that he recognized as drones. They were of more than one size and shape. Some were barely larger than the palm of his hand, others as large as a bicycle. It was difficult to sort it out visually because, as he gradually figured out, there were drones mounted on other drones—mother ships carrying several smaller children. The closest analogy from nature would be a cave in which a large number of bats were sleeping all crammed together, wings folded around them. The wings here were rectangular, creased, and folded like fans: deployable panels of photovoltaic cells.