He’d never considered himself a brilliant operative. He’d never pushed for promotion to senioris, with all the power plays and slate-transfers that implied. He’d found his level, he always thought. The job was dangerous, on occasion, and far too all-consuming when trying to keep a family unit intact, but it suited him. Better to work at the Bastion than labour on some assembly line, hammering out bullets for some far-flung war under the gaze of a dead-eyed supervisor. Or so he’d always told himself. Perhaps assembly line drones had it simpler. They weren’t shot at as much. They didn’t have to make many choices.

Zidarov finally drew into the Bastion’s medicae-bay reception, leaving the Luxer in a slot marked Emergency Assets Only, and went inside. He forced his way through a gaggle of orderlies pushing blood-plasma rigs, and slipped past the closing slide-doors. The interior was nothing like the municipal medicae facility where Milija worked. He’d brought her here, once, and she’d been both impressed and appalled. Impressed that the corridors were half-empty, that the equipment gurneys were full, that there were no random screams or vagrants staggering through the wards. Appalled that the walls were bare rockcrete, and that the cots had shackles on them, and the medicae personnel looked more like industrial servitor-wranglers than humans. The Bastion made even less effort than the city facilities to sucrose-coat what they were up to. This was a repair yard – a place to get stapled up, infused, given a brace of stimms, and then sent back out to work.

It smelled the same, though – that mix of cleaning chems and human waste products, the cocktail that stuck in the back of your throat and stayed there for hours. All medicae-bays did, and Zidarov hated it. He hated everything about the place. It made his flesh creep, reminding him of the times he’d been under the knives, the times he’d stared up at the overhead lumens and thought he’d seen the saints coming for him with their wings of ivory and their spears of gold.

Borodina had been put into a solitary, high-intensity medicae-chamber. He had to use his holo-seal twice to gain access – first past a set of grey-skinned gun-servitors, then past a sanctioner stationed just outside the door. Once he got inside, it took him a moment to work out what he was looking at. Borodina was almost entirely hidden under lengths of translucent derma­wrap, and the few exposed bits of her body were punctured with tubes. A status column next to her cot bleeped intermittently, ticking out a set of weak biomarkers. An artificial lung was doing her breathing for her, and Zidarov guessed the mass of boxy equipment piled up behind the cot was handling other less obvious bodily functions.