But that was all fine. He wasn’t going home. It wasn’t that kind of night. He got up, pulled his coat from the stand beside his desk and shrugged it over his shoulders. Then he went down-level again, trudging along the wide stairwells with their statues of old castellans, smelling the astringent polish on the floors, the walls, the aroma of well-scrubbed authority.

He took the Luxer northbound, sweeping along the main transit corridor. The first specks of rain from the long-wished-for wet season trickled down his forward screen, and he activated the static repeller field. The moving lights swirled and swooshed around him, coming in and out of the dark, some of them from other vehicles, some from buildings, pocked with sodium strips or neon coronets. The night sky above was starless, blocked by the clouds that had been building steadily for weeks. It was coming. The air was thick with it. People in the streets looked up, feeling the pressure growing, feeling the build-up, the steady increase in heat and humidity. Just when it became unbearable, that was when the deluge would come. Until then, everything was tense.

He pulled off the main route and slipped down into a residential feeder street. The routes here were just like the ones he took to get back to his own hab-tower – rows of nondescript accommodation blocks, each lit just well enough, built just solidly enough, functional, serviceable. A few servo-skulls scudded overhead as he pulled into the final driveway before his destination, scanning scratchily as they went. A large screen owned by the civic defence association stood by the side of the access strip. This week’s chameleon-pict, floodlit more than anything else along the strip, showed a montage of battleships tearing off into the void, each one with a glowing numinous halo. The legend below was typical: The Emperor’s Arm Reaches To All Worlds! Subscribe To Military Bond Issues! Do Your Duty! Fund The Never-Dying Heroes Of The Imperium!