‘You can’t put us in there,’ protested Messina.

‘Why not?’ Saul glanced at the man absently. ‘Because of the two thousand corpses inside?’ When Messina had no answer to that, Saul continued, ‘You will of course need to work fast to feed them all into the five digesters inside the arcoplex. You’ll need to strip them of their clothing and remove any metal augmentations that might jam the digesters. Since each digester can only process one corpse per hour, that means, with all of them operating, the whole process should take about seventeen days. By then it’s going to get rather unpleasant in there, I suspect.’

‘So it amuses you to exact such a petty vengeance.’ Messina’s every word was laden with contempt.

‘No,’ said Saul, ‘it would suit me better to feed you, and every delegate here, feet first into a digester while still alive. And that might yet become an option. For now, I am going to leave two of my spiderguns here to ensure you follow my instructions. Please don’t try anything foolish, since that would only result in a horrible mess any survivors would have to clear up.’ He finally turned to Hannah. ‘Let’s go.’

As she followed him, two spiderguns overtook them and headed off at high speed. Glancing back, she found just one of their fellows keeping pace behind – the two Saul had left still amidst the crowd back there.

‘Where are they going?’ she asked.

‘To confront Messina’s troops,’ he explained. ‘It’s time for them to acknowledge the new regime here.’

When Saul delivered his terse instruction to the commander of Messina’s troops, whilst the two spiderguns he had sent ahead strode amidst them, he felt almost disappointed by their immediate submission. But, then, fifteen of the fifty or so survivors were stretcher cases, whilst another twenty were walking wounded. They quickly abandoned their weapons and began heading for a tubeway into the station, from where they would go to join Langstrom’s men in the barracks, and its hospital.

Saul felt a void within him as, with one of the spiderguns still dogging his and Hannah’s footsteps, he approached the airlock into Arcoplex One. He had not been sucked into Malden’s revolution, he had finally got himself up to Argus Station and here defeated Smith, and as a bonus he had decapitated Earth’s government. He had won, yet still that emptiness remained.

Depression? No, he checked the balance of his neurochemicals and they were fine. He checked his own blood: his blood sugar was low because he needed to eat, and various toxins were present, but this could not be the cause of his present malaise, for it was purely intellectual. He dismissed it, suppressed it, then focused his attention on the odd fact that he could now so easily check the state of his own body.

‘There is something you didn’t tell me, isn’t there, Hannah?’ he said, glancing at her.

‘What do you mean?’ she asked, looking slightly panic-stricken.