The Terashova Combine had its fingers in a hundred different industries, some legitimate, some that skirted the margins. They maintained a presence at the off-world cargo terminals, in the ore-processing conveyer units, in the warehouses up along the northern margins of the urban sector. That position had been built up over generations, and it remained very much a family concern. The current patriarch of the bloodline, Mordach, had inherited the competence of his forebears, something that he shared with his wife. People spoke of them as the same entity – Udmil-Mordach, Mordil, the Twain. You had to maintain that energy, that dynamism, or the city would sweep you away, and another would rise to take your place. Maybe the son had been cut from the same cloth. Maybe he’d been too good, or too bad, or just unlucky. Maybe he wasn’t missing at all, but merely lying low for a while. Maybe he’d defected to another cartel. Maybe all this was a lie, or some industrial subterfuge that had nothing to do with him.

Zidarov dabbed at his chin with the waxed paper wrapper. There was nothing much in what he’d got so far – the man had got around, partied, fancied himself as a future player, had the power to travel, to buy pretty much what he wanted, and could have ended up in any part of the city doing almost anything. He would have to start with the basics, build up a picture, see what suggested itself. If he got lucky, a body would emerge sooner or later, making the task simpler. Nothing he knew so far suggested Adeard was a nice man. Those with coin or influence rarely were. It all multiplied the total of possible violent outcomes.

He halted a scrolling list of names. The Gargoza Import Station was a place he’d been to before in connection with another case. It was just one of many hundreds of similar outfits clustered along the High Ledge receiving zone, an industrial subsector of Urgeyena devoted to the warehousing and filtering of goods brought in from the deepwater ports out towards Saltstone. Big mag-transports would grind their way along long rockcrete access channels before reaching the clifflike berths, docking and unloading, and being sent back the way they had come, a back-and-forth passage that operated around the chronoface.

What he hadn’t known at the time of his last visit was that Gargoza was beneficially owned by a holding company called Aeternis, which in turn was majority controlled by a partnership of three entities, all of which, via various routes, were a part of the Terashova Combine. The station, so it turned out, was a small but lucrative part of their immense domain, and one, so Udmil’s data made clear, that Adeard had been given to handle. Maybe they had picked something mundane for him to start off with. Don’t screw that up, son. Bigger things await, when you’re ready. Be patient.