Eventually he reached the expanse of warehouses that served the Colossus platform. They were brute boxes, thrown-up metal skeletons covered in flimsy plastek panels, ugly giants that marched off towards the horizon in a jigsaw of over­lapping pitches. As with everything in Urgeyena, little planning had gone into their construction – the space was filled with a chaotic mix of building, demolition and rebuilding. Some of the smaller warehouses were on a comprehensible scale – little larger than major hab-blocks. Some of the larger ones almost defied belief, and soared into the gritty air like barren cathedrals, their insides stacked with cog-emblazoned void-crates and aquila-marked container-capsules that formed their own strange, temporary cityscapes.

Much of the labour here was semi-automated, driven by servitors slaved to tracked lifters following dedicated rail-lanes. Plenty of menials still swarmed through the narrow transit capillaries, though, most in fluorescent environment suits and basic rebreather masks. They bore the liveries of each warehouse on their backs, the feudal marks of their allegiance, picking them out as members of the Terashova Combine, or the Remortha Brotherhood, or the Jazc Corporation, or one of a hundred others. It was a strange twilight realm, even in the middle of the day, overhung by the steep warehouse sides or the comms-towers, throwing everything into a poorly lit shadow­land of perpetual skittering movement.

Once close, Zidarov got out of the groundcar and went the rest of the way on foot. The route given by the machine-spirit in his locator was convoluted, and he had to rise up three levels on open rockcrete stairways, then down two more, then out across a cracked viaduct that spanned a deep ravine where a mag-train line had been cut. At all times he was surrounded, jostled by workers hurrying from one task to another, or servitors limping under heavy loads, or whining cargo-gurneys clattering to receiving berths.

Eventually he reached a place where he could get a clear look at Warehouse 94. He leaned against the chipped railing of the walkway, hooking an elbow as if taking a break from a punishing work-shift. He scanned the buildings ahead, ignoring the constant press of people and machinery passing by. The warehouse wasn’t one of the monsters, but it was still big enough. Like many of them, it didn’t carry an obvious corporate sigil. There were no windows that he could make out, just a series of loader-doors, all shut. It was protected by a high flaywire fence, and he could make out the telltale bulge of security scanners lodged under the high guttering. Nothing remarkable.

He started to walk again, following the long perimeter of the building. He managed to gain a sight line into the storage yards outside the main covered area, and saw nothing waiting – no crates, no loaders. There were no security personnel either. ­Tracing a convoluted route, he managed to circum­ambulate about a third of the site’s edge, and caught sight of nothing much out of the ordinary.