By rights, he shouldn’t even have been there. He’d responded to the call from Brecht, whose case this was, as a favour. They both should have waited for a sanctioner squad, but Brecht didn’t want to lose the target. That decision felt like a bad one. Almost as bad as splitting up, trying to cover the exits, before realising just how many of them there were in a huge place like this.

He took the right turn, edging along the fragile railing, ignoring the long drop on either side. Up ahead, he could see a bulkhead with a rusted cog-and-skull etched on it. Beyond that was a heavy iron hatch-plate with a misted-up viewport. The hatch was open, and a faint light bled through the gap.

‘I think I’ve got him,’ Zidarov breathed. ‘How close?’

‘One level up. Believe me, I’m running.’

Zidarov crouched down, edging carefully towards the door. He could hear something from the far side – more than one pair of boots. Brecht’s quarry was close now: Yuri Glav, a mid-league gunrunner, an unstable narc user who’d eaten up the sparse goodwill of both the enforcers and his customers and whose productive career in Urgeyena, one way or another, was coming to an end. Clearly he still had a few people willing to work with him.

Zidarov heard another hatch clang open. The faint light flickered out, and he heard bootfalls running down an enclosed corridor. They were making a break for it, trying to reach the far side of the machine chambers, get to a mag-train or a ground transport.

He shuffled forward, shouldered the hatch open and swung into the chamber beyond, tracking with his autopistol. The cramped space was empty, but the portal on the far side was open. Zidarov ran for it, ducking down as he plunged into the corridor beyond. The lumens were strobing in there, and it all smelled like burned metal. He could hear clear movement up ahead now, echoing down the shafts. They were running, going for broke.

He ran after them, ducking through another hatch before breaking out again. A big chamber opened up, its far end exposed to the night air and whistling with gusts of hot, dusty wind. Lines of struts marched along on either side, holding up a cross-hatched roof of heavy girders and pipework. Tracked loader-vehicles stood in their berths. The deck was high up, and the exposed vantage revealed the distant outline of massive cooling towers, backlit by flares from the gas nozzles. Everything smelled of ash, dust and chems.