Ty bolted down the remaining steps, then burst through a door that led into a ground-floor atrium-style lobby with a reception desk at one end. The bank of elevators was on the opposite side from the desk, and the door of one of them was jammed halfway open. Thick dark smoke billowed from inside it towards the ceiling.

He ran to the centre of the lobby, looking frantically from left to right, but no one else appeared to be around.

Voices sounded somewhere nearby just as his breather gave a beeping sound to warn that the smoke was clogging its filters. He crossed the lobby quickly to where several floor-to-ceiling windows had been shattered, the glass crunching under his feet. He slipped outside through one, and heard sirens in the distance.

He paused there, momentarily indecisive, as the freezing cold wind cut into him like a knife. Where next?

Suddenly a small unmanned taxi pulled up next to him. Ty stared at it uncertainly, then climbed in.

The vehicle performed a U-turn and accelerated back the way it had come. Ty glanced through the rear window in time to see Weil emerge on to the street. He ducked out of sight and prayed he had not already been spotted.

The taxi headed for the city centre, where the buildings rose higher, manifesting the same blocky and severe architectural style as found in any other Freehold settlement. Perhaps ten minutes after picking him up at the Residency, the taxi cut down a ramp into the underground parking area of a building that was just one of several identical monolithic slabs arranged in a row.

He quickly disembarked and pulled the cheap breather off his face just as an elevator opened, chiming softly. He guessed he was meant to get inside.

It delivered Ty a minute later to an apparently deserted floor several levels up. The walls were bare concrete, with gaping holes where electrical and communications systems still had to be installed. He proceeded down a long corridor, checking through door after door until he at last found an office space containing some furniture: a large leather seat and an expensive-looking imager and tach-net data combo. A mound of packing material was still scattered around.

The imager came to life even as Ty stepped towards the chair. It briefly displayed the manufacturer’s logo in iridescent 3D, before that was replaced by the head and upper shoulders of what was obviously a software-generated avatar.

‘Mr Whitecloud,’ began the avatar. ‘Thank you for coming. Please take a seat.’

The voice, too, was synthesized, since there was a discernible pause between each word: as if whoever was speaking to him via the avatar was punching the message into a keyboard rather than allowing his own voice to be processed by the machine’s inbuilt privacy circuits.

‘I represent the Consortium Legislate’s intelligence division,’ the avatar continued. ‘We have brought you here to discuss the artefact you recovered.’