Working her way across 761st from the north-west, she approached III Corps Headquarters on foot. While it was brightly lit, there were no guard towers, no spotlights, no razor wire or ravenous dogs. It could have been any business park in the pre-Disappearance US. It was just an office complex, really. Not the Death Star.

She opened a link back to Echelon Prime and sent an encrypted data burst from her cell. Just under three thousand kilometres away, a systems operator in the Technical Services directorate received the message he’d been waiting for.

A single keystroke was all that was required to unleash the malware that had been reformatted to attack a specific server in the IT section at Fort Hood. Triple-masked infiltrators, buried within standard data-matching protocols, were now insinuating themselves into the control schemata for the relevant sectors. A micro-second of static and white noise would mark the instant at which local control failed and a remote authority took over. With that, the first layer of defence had fallen. Eight monitors, taking feeds from a random cycle of CCTV cameras around the Territorial Capital Building of Texas, would now have begun playing cached data looped from their own hard storage. The two security guards working the graveyard shift, who wouldn’t have noticed the split second of flickering disturbance on their monitors in the reception hall, no doubt continued their discussion of the best pre-Wave titty bars in Houston, without breaking stride.

Back in the field, the operative’s cell phone vibrated silently to confirm the subversion as she approached Blackstone’s headquarters. Pulling out her lock-picking equipment from a breast pocket – a nine-piece set, strictly old school – Caitlin went to work on a door at the rear of the complex. There was nothing special about the lock on the fire escape she had chosen, and the two sets of pins separated after a few minutes’ painstaking work. Then came the moment she always dreaded when relying on off-site intervention and back-up. If Technical Services hadn’t subverted the building’s layered defences, she would trip an alarm in the next two seconds.

Caitlin carefully pushed open the door . . .

She couldn’t hear any alarms, but that didn’t mean that red lights weren’t flashing and buzzers sounding somewhere else. She doubted the local security chimps would have had the wit to tackle her quietly. They’d arrive with lights twirling and sirens blaring in the night. But having them arrive at all would still constitute an epic fuck-up.

She closed the door behind her.