Draj kept watch, and Zidarov went inside, leaving the room’s lumens unlit and using his iris to pick things out in the gloom. He took a look through the crates. There were some parchment bills, some legal-looking documents. None of them had any names on them – just standard paperwork for the Regio Custos, referencing to the warehouse loc-ref but listing non-controversial goods – foodstuffs and raw materials. They would need such things for shipments of stem-culture, though the false contents listings made them poor as evidence unless a mistake had been made somewhere. He took static picts of them all, just to be sure, then closed up the files again.

The fixed comm-unit was active. He ran analysis of recent usage, checking the receiver data against the Bastion databanks. None of the calls registered, and it looked as though the routing tags had been scrambled. They were being ­careful – nothing in the system would give away who had been called. The unit had been used often, most frequently during diurnus hours, and mostly to a single node on the network. He took a note of it all.

Then he turned to the desk. As he did so, Draj gestured to him from the open doorway.

‘Movement, and coming closer,’ he whispered. ‘We need to get out.’

Zidarov kept working. He rummaged through some loose leafs of parchment on the desktop. These were anonymous enough – the kind of thing any storage facility would use. He scanned the headers, looking for something – anything – that would link to ownership or ultimate control.

‘At the base of the stairs,’ warned Draj, now sounding a bit agitated.

Zidarov made to move away from the desk. As he did so, his ­fingers grazed across a slight indentation in the desktop. He felt his way back to it, pressing against the faintest of edges. He applied more pressure, and a holofield glimmered into life over the surface.

Draj swore, seeing that they weren’t going anywhere soon, and slipped inside the doorway, pulling the door closed behind him. From outside, Zidarov heard the distant clunk of boots on metal. He worked faster. The holofield was a passcode requester, linked to a machine-spirit lodged with the desk body. He used a tumbler to cycle through the possible combinations, suppressing any internal checks on maximum attempts.

The sound of bootfalls grew louder. They were on the landing outside. Draj withdrew from behind the doorway, pressing himself up against the inside wall with his pistol trained, then staying stock-still.

The tumbler hit gold, and the holofield flickered out. A section of the desktop slid down and back, exposing a narrow gap within. A few scrits, papers and dockets lay inside, and Zidarov clicked picts of them all.

The sound of the guards’ movements reached the other side of the door. Their lumens made the narrow crack around the door light up.