Now they were only twenty kilometres from the ground the lights began to resolve into distinct shapes. Inigo could easily pick out the big garden dome at the centre of the human section on the northernmost segment of the inhabited crescent. A lambent emerald circle, playing hub to a dozen black transport tubes that ran out to large accommodation blocks which could have been transplanted from any exotic environment resort in the Commonwealth. From those the tubes carried on across the lava to the cube-like observatory facilities and engineering support modules.

The pocked land to the south belonged to the alien habitats; shapes and structures of various geometries and sizes, most of them illuminated. Next to the humans were the silver bubbles of the hominoid Golant; followed by the enclosed grazing grounds where the Ticoth roamed amid their food herds; then came the mammoth interconnecting tanks of the Suline, an aquatic species. The featureless Ethox tower rose up ten kilometres past the end of the Suline's metal-encased lakes, dark in the visible spectrum but with a surface temperature of 180 degrees C. They were one of the species which didn't interact with their fellow observers on any level except for formal exchanges of data concerning the probes which orbited the Void. Equally taciturn were the Forleene, who occupied five big domes of murky crystal that glowed with a mild gentian light. And they were positively social compared to the Kandra, who lived in a simple metal cube thirty metres to a side. No Kandra ship had ever landed there since the humans joined the observation two hundred and eighty years ago; not even the exceptionally long-lived Jadradesh had seen one, and the Raiel had invited those boulder-like swamp-dwellers to join the project seven thousand years earlier.

A small smile flickered on Inigo's face as he took in all the diverse zones.