His first call was at Adeard’s hab in one of the superficially flashier areas of the district – Havduk, the kind of habclave with enough grit to be fashionable, just a little of that cesspit magic that Udmil had talked about, but not enough to be genuinely scary. The towers loomed up tightly here – dirt grey, slate dark, as new as anything got in Urgeyena, kitted out with flashy cladding and bearing the sulphur-yellow sigils of the major legitimate trade houses. The narrow streets at their bases were packed with people, some in worker-drab, most decked out with smarter bodygloves and ostentatious augmetics. Household servitors lumbered through the masses, dumbly following the strides of their unconcerned owners. The groundcars were sleek and polished, the mag traffic whisper-quiet, and the chameleon-screens were of a higher order than the main-run – rejuve treatments, security details, concessions on off-world contracts for untold luxuries.

He pulled up at the hab-tower containing Adeard’s unit, and left the Luxer in the street. The frontage was overdone – a mess of silver decoration and neon amid a confusion of stacked columns. The entrance portals were vast, each crowned with baroque pediments and dazzling lumen-banks. Once through those, the inner chambers were no less grand, clogged with people who seemed to have nothing better to do than lounge around looking expensive. Security was ratchet-tight, and before he got anywhere close to the elevator wells he was showing his holo-seal to a guard carrying the kind of heavy kit a sanctioner might envy.

‘Looking for the occupant of hab six hundred and seventy-three,’ Zidarov told him. ‘You wouldn’t have seen him recently, I’m guessing.’

The guard checked the biodata against his records. Nothing for the past few days. Just as expected.

Zidarov rode the elevators up the main central shaft, got out and used codes given to him by Udmil to gain access to the hab-unit. He spent a little while looking around. The place was big – a few dozen interconnected rooms, all of them decked out in expensive but tacky furniture. It was a young man’s place – black silk drapes, silver edges to the chair armrests, highly reflective floors, whole-body holo-entertainment rigs hanging up in soundproofed sensory chambers. Adeard had put large static picts up on every wall, mostly lurid or ugly. The lumens were deep reds and blues, glowing in neon strips under the matt-black surfaces.

Zidarov didn’t expect to find much there. A less fortunate resident might have had fixed-terminal vid-emitters or scheduler devices in place, things that could be studied for evidence of future plans or meetings, but Adeard would have had an iris, keeping everything bio-private, leaving his place of residence for his straggling collection of baubles, his faux-satin bedsheets, his over-perfumed hygiene-chambers.