So he pulled himself together, restarted the engines, drove back the way he’d come, then headed out towards Mergev. He visited the supervisor there, and gave him the same instructions he’d given the first one. He checked records on the sanctioners’ comm traffic to see if anything had come in. There was nothing there. After that, he checked to see if anything had come back from the trawls he’d done of her known acquaintances. The list of these was short, and it made him wince to think how little he knew about her life outside the confines of the hab-unit. She’d wanted it that way, of course, but it made him feel powerless, just when he needed to be the opposite.

One contact flashed up, though – a woman named Gertuda, whose details he’d pulled from an old record scribbled back at the hab. He voxed her, and she was willing to meet him, so he headed up to the place she worked – a nondescript textile operation stuck down in the Vostoka grade-sixes. Somehow she managed to slip out of her shift, and so he took her to a quiet refec-house and bought her a hot drink and something to eat. She was a slip of a girl, skinny and with sallow skin, so looked like she could use both.

She didn’t know anything about Naxi going missing or where she might be. She hadn’t even realised she was back from the feeder academy.

‘I envied her, to be honest,’ Gertuda told him, smiling self-consciously. ‘She got out. We all cheered her on for that.’ She sniffed, and rubbed at her arm absently. ‘There’s nothing left back here, if you don’t manage to get out.’

Zidarov frowned. ‘Not that bad, surely?’ he said. ‘You have a function. You have a stipend. You have a life ahead of you.’

Gertuda laughed. ‘Yeah. What a life.’ She shook her head. ‘I have a life on an assembly line. I have a life stitching together regulation fatigues for the defence forces. That’s all I’ll ever know. One day, I suppose, I’ll enter a legal coupling, and they’ll make me produce for the Imperium. More workers. More hands to make more guns. And then I’ll die, having never travelled beyond Urgeyena. Naxi got out. Throne, we loved her for that.’

And then Zidarov remembered what Naxi had said, and the way her eyes had lit up, talking of starships, duty and conquest. Perhaps he, too, would have felt like that, once. When had he stopped?

‘I’ve got to find her,’ he said, quietly. ‘You’ve no idea where she might have gone?’

‘No. No idea. But…’ She stopped, and suddenly looked unwilling to say anything more.

‘If you know something, you have to tell me.’