“Welcome to the new world!” Rove called out as soon as the roar of the helicopter had subsided. “Welcome to your new world!” He strode down the line of them, Lucas stomping in his wake and making damn sure every ambitious young bastard saw he was the boss’s second. They were all so painfully clean and bright, men and women with barely a patch of acne or an ounce of melanin between them. It was one thing to suspect that one’s employer’s prejudices ran in a certain monochrome direction, quite another to see it in action.

Rove stopped in the centre of the line and turned smartly towards his soldiers. “You have all been vetted for your heritage and ambition, selected from countless fellows, chosen to carry forwards the flag of our nation under these trying times,” he said. “You saw clearly enough to understand that the world we knew had no future. Now you’ve taken the great step of accompanying me to another world, a world that can accommodate our destiny. A world where we can be strong—without the weak pawing at our ankles and bleating about their rights!”

He was just getting warmed up, so Lucas tuned him out, standing to attention like everyone else as Rove’s rhetoric washed over him. He was aware that his boss wasn’t quite the rabble-rouser he probably thought he was. Towards the end of his speech, Lucas could see all the familiar signs of people who were bored but striving not to show it, recognizable to anyone who’d come up through the ranks and had had to listen to one too many long-winded colonels.

Rove handed command back to a boy with perhaps three more hairs on his chin than anyone else there and marched towards one of the storehouses. Lucas made sure he was right on his chief’s heels.

Inside it was mostly boxes, each one immaculately labelled. But Rove headed straight towards the dimly lit back of the building, where there was…an eight-foot robot coffin. A dim reddish light glowed under the clear Perspex lid, and within he could see a woman. She was mostly naked, cadaverously thin and pierced by dozens of tubes.

“Of course, we’ll have to break it to them gently,” Rove said, looking down at the sunken face within.

“What now?” Lucas asked.

“Our troops outside don’t know the complete story, of course. It would have muddied the waters to give them full disclosure. They might have had second thoughts. For all that, if they’d changed their minds, they’d not even be dust now.”

“Speaking of full disclosure…” Lucas prompted. “This is…” The woman’s face was familiar, now he came to look. “This is the woman on the boat?”