The skies were grey, with a pink blush in the west where the sun was struggling to rise. A thin gauze of transport fumes curled up in all directions, making the outlines of the distant hab-blocks fuzzy. Three big macro-towers loomed up on his right, each rectangular and brutal, their flanks marked with hundreds and hundreds of tiny windows. Below him on either side, down under the shadows of the transitway’s piers, were the shadowy pits of the traders’ quarters and recycling yards, stacked with metals and plas-tech and the blinking lumens of commercial hut-clusters. Huge granite statues of Imperial saints and heroes with clunking, thickly cut features stared mournfully into the murk, some holding up heavy bridges, some brandishing implausibly large weapons, some just looking vaguely lost amid the gouts of smoke and hissing steam vents. The baroque spires of Ecclesiarchy buildings struggled for scarce space and light with the brute carcasses of assembly yards and tooling workshops. Servo-skulls hovered in flocks, dodging the lumbering lifters, their eyes glinting crimson and their tails fluttering with parchment.

It was all dirty, crammed with head-down crowds, clotted with smog, tart with promethium. Zidarov could smell the astringent tang of the refinery operating half a sector away. He could hear the blare and clang of proximity alarms rippling down the crammed viaducts. He could see the gaudy suspensor-hoardings floating down from the high arches, most of them the same ones he saw every day, with the same public information announcements – Eyes Open! Report Any Suspicious Activity! Your Neighbour May Be The Enemy! – or commercial material – Austal’s Elixir! Proven To Remove All Tumours/Cysts/Lesions! Many Testimonials! Ministorum Sanctioned!

He had been a probator within the Bastion’s garrison for fifteen years. He’d started as a junior investigator, apprenticed to an officer who’d earned his spurs in the sanctioners, and who had as a result given him no real practical instruction besides in the numerous ways to crack heads. That had its own usefulness, but he’d had to learn the finer points of his art himself, by listening to the analysers, the command staff, other probators. When his official instructor met his end – some heads proved too hard to crack, even for him – he was promoted soon afterwards. That was more or less the way of things in Bastion-U: dead men’s boots.

And now, fifteen years later, he was still breathing, still working, still drawing his stipend. That was a decent run, all things considered, in what was a dangerous job. Maybe one day, perhaps, his time would be up, and he’d be staring down the wrong end of a laspistol, but for now the cards of fortune still just about turned over in his direction. Lucky Zido.