He put his head in his hands, and slumped forward. Just reading the header information alone was numbing. He scrolled through the first few pages. Then he applied a filter.

> Refine: victim records

That still left hundreds, but at least he could make a start. He began to scan, starting with reasonably recent reports, then going backwards in time. Most of these were fatalities – the Bastion rarely recorded victim details of those whose bodies weren’t actually sitting in the morgue at the time of compilation.

It took a long time to find her, even then. He almost missed it, amid all the lists and the statistics. Something, a sudden flicker, made him go back, look again, make doubly sure.

> Ianne Ramenev, deceased, age 23 (standard Terran)

He didn’t know the name, but the chronomark was significant. She was listed as female, registered in the same subdistrict that Udmil had been at the time – six months prior to Udmil and Mordach’s sudden marriage. There were no other records of the woman’s existence at all. Nothing to cross-reference with, not even a standard citizen biodata readout, which almost everyone in Varangantua had for Imperial tithe purposes.

He found himself staring at the phosphor runes. Ianne was an unusual name.

He isolated the victim record, and expanded the section detailing what they’d found when the body came in.

> Cause of death [multiple]: dehydration, malnourishment, liver failure, blood loss, bone marrow trauma, repeat cardiac episodes

He’d seen similar reports many times. The first occasion had been after the initial raid with Berjer, the one where he’d had to drink himself into a stupor afterwards just to keep going.

He took a look at the diagrammatic picts, and saw the puncture wounds in her arms, her legs, her torso. He saw the bruising around her mouth, where the tubes had been wedged.

He sat back. He read it again. He checked the dates.

He remembered what she had said to him, back in her mansion, that very first time.

You know the fear. You know what it is when, for a moment, you cannot protect them. You know the certainty you feel when something is wrong.

Yes, he knew that fear.

He took a backup of the record, and sent it to his terminal. He wiped the record of his searches, erased the session ­statistics and closed the cogitator down.

Then he got up, reached for his caffeine, and left the archive chamber. As he went, he made a call over the secure vox.

‘Draj? Tell me where you are. We have to end this.’

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Two

‘I need to get to her,’ Zidarov told him.