He reached down into the well between the drive controls and the front passenger seat, and snapped a reel-slug into the music player. The reedy tones of Elizia Refo wafted out of the groundcar’s distraction system, competing with the steady thud and growl of the main drives.

‘My heart broke, when I knew he was gone,’ she crooned. ‘He was a liar, my love, but his Star of Terra shone.’

The commercia towers, encrusted with tarnished gold-leaf gargoyles, swept by. The manufactoria, belching fumes, swept by. The rarer recreation spires, flashing and winking from armourglass-and-crystal summits, crammed with surveillance spotters and flaywire to keep the rabble out, swept by. It was messy. Here and there, in the deep gulfs between mighty spires, you could see glimpses of an older city clinging on – wooden terraces, overlooking crooked streets filled with paper lanterns, chock-full of meat-stink from the outdoor broilers. Urgeyena was a diverse sector, filled with a mix of ethnic strains and social castes. The ancient city dynasties still maintained a precarious grip here and there, though they had been largely displaced by immigrant clans from the north and west, where the big industrial powerhouses had sucked in all the coin. At the bottom of the heap were the most recent arrivals, some from beyond the city’s porous borders, slinking in under the eyes of the sanctioners and scraping a living of sorts in the steam and sweat of the under-habs.

Ahead of him, the skyline gradually filled up, swelling with the hazy outline of more imposing buildings clad in dark ouslite and crowned with aquilas. Sector administratum hives squatted heftily next to one another, linked by splayed networks of shielded walkways. Transitways intersected, split, looped above or plunged below, all wrapped in drifting brown-grey curtains. The sky continued to get lighter, and the pink shroud burned out into a dull red that crept like a tide across the overcast sky.

And then, wallowing up out of the fumes, came the Bastion. Like all of Varangantua’s urban-district commands, it was blocky and smoke-dark, built from military-grade blast-resistant rockcrete. Its windows were slits on an otherwise bleak face, its ramparts marked with forests of skeletal sensor-towers and watch-ports. The main entrance was a cavern in its south-facing front – a high gash with the sigil of the system enforcer corps carved onto a block of ouslite: a death’s head surrounded by the Infinite Serpent eating its own tail, surmounted by a five-spiked coronet.

He drove under its shadow, filtered through the rest of the incoming traffic. Noctis-duty staff were making their way in the opposite direction, bleary-eyed and blinking in the weak light. The Luxer shuddered to a halt in the parking bay, and he cut the engines, deactivated the auto-respond defence grid, invoked a pre-recorded mote of thanks to the machine-spirit and cranked open the doors.