She smiled grimly. ‘Since you enjoy this kind of thing. We find the ones who did this. Who knows? You might even get your hands on the one you were after. What was his name? Yellowsnake, I think you said.’

Zidarov looked back over to the medicae wagon. The doors were closing, and its roof-lights were strobing blue. It would be moving soon, racing back to the medicae-bay, trying to get Borodina into a stable state. That is, if she was still alive.

‘I’d like that,’ he said, with feeling.

This time, the arrangements went through more quickly. Cases were pulled, sanctioners reassigned. The Bulwarks were prepped and fuelled, and three of the Bastion’s nine Zurov turbine-gunships were switched from long-standing vigilance operations. It was impressive how fast things could move with the right set of motivations behind them.

Vongella had said that they had always danced around one another. That was true. The enforcers knew a fair bit about the personnel and the main operating bases of the organised criminal cartels. Not everything, to be sure, but a lot. Most of that was never acted on, due to lack of hard proof, or lack of resources, but mostly to keep the all-important balance in check. In return, it was rare for a serving enforcer to be killed in the line of duty by one of the Ghaan-compliant operations. No one profited in a time of war – it was the psychos and the narc-heads and the gutter-filth who risked pulling a weapon on a sanctioner, because they didn’t matter, and they had nothing worth protecting to worry about.

But when the balance was broken, it had to be reset. All the intelligence held in central archives could be pulled up, and favours called in, and leave periods cancelled. The Bastion, when it wanted to, could be scary as all the hells.

The raids were coordinated, and all took place before dawn. For one horrible moment, Zidarov thought Vongella would send him in with Draj again, but even she wasn’t that sadistic. He was attached to a sanctioner squad he’d never worked with before, headed by a Sergeant Onorova and filled out with the usual soft-spoken complement of artists and intellectuals. As he got in the Bulwark’s cab, she shot him a poisonous look before yanking her helmet on.

‘I heard this was all down to you, probator,’ she said, grabbing the wagon’s control columns and kicking the engines into growling life.

‘Don’t flatter me,’ Zidarov said, strapping in. ‘You love this stuff.’

Then they were driving, rumbling down the ramp, out into the weak first light, with the haze of morning rising like fog. The sanctioners in the back suited up, clicked home magazines, checked their sights, clanked their armour plates tight.

‘Where are we going?’ Zidarov asked.