Nothing happened for a while. He scanned further, trying to pinpoint where the access to the outside world was. The building was surrounded on all sides, and the far end of the courtyard was hidden from view. He shifted along the railing, adjusting his sight line, and caught the left-hand edge of what looked like a barred gateway, though the gates themselves remained obscured behind the gable-end of a neighbouring warehouse frontage.

He took some pict-stills, and recorded the dimensions.

‘Now, then,’ he whispered to himself, as the first figure came into view. It was a male, edging into the courtyard through the half-seen gates. He was dressed in worker-drab, bald, mid-thirties, skinny. His scalp was bare, he wore thick-lensed goggles, and his hands were encased in black gloves with metal studs at the fingertips. He went up to the door of the storage unit, and activated some kind of summon-panel. A little while later the slide-doors opened, and three others came out – two females and a male. These were dressed similarly to the first man, but the way they carried themselves was different. Zidarov had seen it many times before – the low-level strut, the assurance of being part of an organisation, on home territory. They were the Vidora.

He zoomed in closer, running the lens over any exposed flesh. It was a hot day even in the shadows, and their necks and forearms were bare. He activated a filter for holo-mark detection, and sure enough all three bore clan-ownership tattoos in filter-reactive inks. All of these were where they should have been – just below the collarbone, able to be readily covered up when out in the open. These were part of the cabal’s Second Circle – bloodsworn fighters, free from slate obligation and protected from unauthorised hits by the Ghaan code, the formal series of conventions that governed underworld activities in the city.

The male member of that trio might well have been Yellow­snake, thought Zidarov, though he couldn’t verify it from this distance. The first man gave him something – a package, possibly slate, or maybe contraband of some kind, or maybe just a food packet. They exchanged some words, but were too far away for Zidarov to record what was said. As they spoke to one another, half a dozen other figures emerged from the storage unit. These were openly armed, each one carrying a projectile weapon – shotguns, plus a couple of autoguns. Those had the look of Third Circle heavies – lower-grade muscle, aiming to work their way up the hierarchy by performing their basic duties as ordered. They were in no hurry to go anywhere, and loitered around the courtyard. A couple of them lit up cotin-injectors, and thin lines of pale smoke curled up in the gloom.