Helewe Vongella, Sector Commander of Bastion-U, had always been hard to read. Some castellans were lazy, some were efficient. Some took bribes, some were scrupulously honest. Some ran their operations like vladars, cracking down on any signs of independent thought, while some kept a loose hand on the reins.

Vongella seemed capable of doing all of the above, and in ways that were hard to predict. Zidarov knew she had links to at least some of the major cartels, but she’d never given the impression they owned her. She was capable of being distracted for long stretches of time, occupied with projects that he knew very little about, before suddenly being seized by zeal and ordering a crackdown on ostensibly random elements of Urgeyena’s many illicit trades.

Gyorgu believed she had a mental condition, something that affected her judgement. Zidarov didn’t agree. He suspected at least some of the seemingly erratic decision-making was designed to keep them on their toes, so they never got too comfortable. At the very least, it made people wary and attentive, which he imagined she liked. As for the allegations of corruption, it was impossible to run an urban district without dealing with all the major players. Zidarov remembered a big public ceremony some time back, when one of the industrial groups had donated to fund the construction of a Bulwark refuel depot. He could recall exactly which corporation it had been – Jazc, one of the largest – and he also remembered that she had greeted their delegates on the stage like they were family. That’s how you had to be with the gilded, since the money they got from Varangantua’s praesidium disbursers wouldn’t have funded much more than a few mauls and a rack to hang them on.

It had been touch and go whether he got his priority consult. He liked to think he carried a fair degree of water, but nothing compared to the garrison-colonel of the sanctioners. He might well have been ignored, or asked to come back in a week. As it was, the request went through uncharacteristically smoothly, and within an hour of getting back to base he was being shown into her operations room.

He was very familiar with the chamber. He had been ­familiar with it when Vongella’s predecessor had occupied it, as well as the one before. It looked much the same these days as it ever had – none of the occupants had gone in much for ambitious interior design. One wall had a large metal-framed window that gazed out over Urgeyena’s administrative heartlands. Another wall was taken up with a floor-to-ceiling lens display of ­ongoing incidents across a swathe of urban sectors, together with rune-locators for the principal sanctioner squads. Three large steel-embedded lumens hung from the ceiling. ­Vongella’s long, oblong desk took up space against a third wall. Two ­uncomfortable synthleather chairs faced it, both set lower than they should have been.