Next he took the groundcar out again, back into the rain, past the huge shell of the old Goliath Munitions Works, still not restored after the fires that had raged through it five years back. He wondered if they were any closer to getting it back up and running. Surely that must have knocked a hole in the planet’s tithe commitments – Goliath had been a big part of Varangantua’s industrial fabric. Maybe it had been made up somewhere else. Or maybe no one had noticed, or had massaged the figures, and some detachment of Guard somewhere were wondering where all their lasgun power packs were.

He drove through the steady downpour, watching it spot and streak the press of towers around him. It made the street-lumens blurry. He heard a rumble of thunder, a long way off, and saw dirt picked up by the gathering winds, spun around, kicked into the dark. The hordes of people on the railed-off pedestrian ways had pulled their hoods up, and looked like members of a vast religious order making their way to their night-time vigil.

After a while, his destination loomed out of the shadows – a high gateway marked with a neon strip-lit sign. In the holding yard beyond, clots of people milled about in the rain. Beyond them lurked a big rail-conveyer, three hundred and thirty feet long, sixteen high, its tracks spattered with mud, its steep sides steaming with condensation.

Alessinaxa was waiting for him. She was wearing civilian clothes, which was good, but had clearly forgotten to pack a waterproof, which was typical. She looked like a drowned tube-rat, her black hair clinging to her face, her feet twisting against one another, her arms folded tight. As soon as she saw him, she burst into a grin, and hauled up her bags. Zidarov barely got out of the Luxer before she’d grabbed him in a hug and kissed his cheek. She was cold and clammy, like a fish slapped out of the water, but he found himself smiling back. She smelled of her old room – the cheap fragrances she bought from the informal markets, the fraying clothes that she laundered badly in the communal hygiene-station.

‘How was the trip?’ he asked her, reaching down for her heaviest bags and throwing them in the Luxer’s hold.

‘Grim!’ she exclaimed, brightly. ‘Preceptors stopped us at the Riev checkpoint, and they searched the hold. With enforcers! You’d have been pleased to see it. They were very thorough.’

She got in the groundcar, talking all the while. He took the driver’s seat, and powered up the engines.

‘What were they after?’ he asked, threading his way back out of the holding yard and into the traffic.

Alessinaxa shrugged. ‘Migrants, I think. Down from the agri-zone. It’s been too dry, Glavi said.’

‘Who’s Glavi?’

‘Instructor majoris.’

‘I thought that was Volet?’