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other jobs.
    Meanwhile the Mospheiran composites manufacturing facility, despite pleas by the pro-spacers, had lacked the spare parts to keep it functioning, because it couldn't find customers outside the now defunct aircraft plant. Atevi-human relations had been peaceful for decades, and the defense implications of buying the few commercial jets Mospheira needed for domestic service from Patinandi Aeronautics on the atevi mainland just hadn't figured with the legislature against the public frustration with high taxes. Even the humans at the top of the campaign for a human return to orbit had promoted chemical rockets as the way to go, because that was the way humans historically had done it, those were the plans they apparently did have, and because it was easier to sell a
historical
concept to the dim lights of the Human Heritage Party who had fallen into bed with them, politically speaking, than it was to sell the technologically more complex reusable vehicle that depended on the composites manufacturing facility they didn't want to fund.
    So
that
political bedfellowship had concentrated their lobbying efforts and the scarce tax money on their rocket program, for, supposedly, as the Treaty of Mospheira provided should happen, the simultaneous development of a human and an atevi space program. For decades after slow decades, through the paidhiin, the Mospheiran Defense Department had released only the minimal data that the Mospheiran government had to release to atevi to get the industry going that was ultimately going to feed both raw materials and finished goods to the human space effort on Mospheira — and in the way Mospheira liked to have such militarily dangerous exchanges, raw materials were going to get into Mospheiran hands sufficiently early to give Mospheira a running start.
    He should know; some of it had already happened on his watch, brief as it had been. And on his predecessor, Wilson's, before Wilson retired.
    On the other hand, from what Jase said, the ship had questioned Mospheira very closely on that matter and discovered a truth Mospheira had no way to deny:
    Mospheira couldn't immediately or foreseeably launch a damn thing, manned or unmanned.
    Probably the Mospheiran president in recent negotiations had told the truth to Jase's captain and there had never been a secret rocket launch site even contemplated.
    So there they were: atevi had been bothering no one when the petal sails of legend dropped humans in their midst and they'd built their way up from steam engines.
    Atevi had barely been contemplating satellites and manned space last year, sure that the station was unmanned and the only humans were on Mospheira, when a new thunderbolt of human presence in the skies had fallen on the world; and when blueprints guaranteed to work without experimentation had descended electronically from the heavens.
    In the last six months it had become a national mandate to get the pieces of the atevi space program reconfigured — that was the word that echoed through all departments —
reconfigured
. Tabini-aiji was in a race, a race to show results to his own uneasy people, a race to get a foothold in the heavens where atevi could maintain their say over the future of
their
planet — and this particular aircraft manufacturing facility was critical.
    Manufacture of a spacecraft that had much the same materials base and much the same configuration as the planes this facility had built commercially was far faster than invention of a rocket-driven heavy launch system from scratch.
    Testing was on a materials-specifications basis, straight out of very clear records.
    Training programs were already shaping up to teach a hand-picked set of atevi pilots the handling characteristics of the craft they were building.
    As he understood the situation on the island,
human
scientists were running to catch up to the technological dataflood pouring down from the heavens.
    He'd personally discovered the information gap in the