It was dark now, fully night. When the transporter’s engine turned over, the glare of the headlights filled the depths of Amon Street.

Drusher sat up front, beside the Magistratum officer. They drove up through the town, onto the coast highway, and turned south.

The cities of the Southern Peninsula, Tycho amongst them, had been the arena of a savage civil war that had raged for over ten years. The popular separatist movement had finally been defeated by government forces two years earlier, but by then the war had critically weakened Gershom’s already-ailing economy. Strict, Imperial martial order had been imposed throughout the Peninsula and right up through the Bone Coast into the Eastern Provinces.

The civil war had stained the air with smoke, and poisoned the coastal waters, killing off the fishing industry. The cities of the Peninsula were urban ruins where the Martial Order Division worked to re-establish Imperium law and support the impoverished civilian population.

Falken drove for two hours without speaking. The vox-set under his dashboard, turned down, crackled with Magistratum traffic as if it were talking in its sleep. Drusher stared out of the window at the darkness and the occasional black ruin that loomed out of it. This was it, he felt. Gershom was his nemesis. It had lured him in, a bright young man with an equally bright future before him, and it had trapped him like a fettle fly in amber. It had drained him dry, throttled his spirit, made him destitute.

And now this, after all his efforts to earn a crust to live, let alone a ticket off-world, it was going to destroy him. Disgrace. Shame. Perhaps a custodial sentence.

‘I don’t deserve this,’ he murmured.

‘What’s that?’ asked Falken at the wheel.

‘Nothing.’

They began to pass through armoured roadblocks where Magistratum troopers wearing the orange ribbon of the Martial Order Division waved Falken through. They were entering the Peninsula proper, the real warzone. Ghost cities, tumbled and forlorn, drifted past, lit by searchlights and military beacons. The dark landscape outside the transporter became a phosphorescent waste of fragile walls and empty habs.

Tycho was the principal city of the Peninsula region, and when they drove in through its empty streets, four hours after leaving Kaloster, Drusher saw a miserable calamity of twisted girders, piled rubble and smoke-blackened buildings. His face, half-lit by the luminous dials of the dashboard, reflected back to him off the window, superimposed on the ruins. Pale, thin, bespectacled, the hair thin and grey. Drusher wasn’t sure if he resembled the wastes of Tycho, or if they resembled him.

They pulled up outside a mouldering ouslite monolith in the city centre.

‘Leave your bags,’ Falken said, getting out. ‘I’ll have them brought in.’

Drusher followed him in through the towering entrance. Magistratum officers hurried to and fro in the echoing atrium, and limp Imperial flags hung from the roof. There was a smell of counterseptic.

‘This way,’ Falken said.