‘Throne!’ he said. ‘Where were you?’

Rubbing her face, she gestured at the floor behind the desk, where Drusher could now see a few seat cushions and a crumpled blanket.

‘You were sleeping on the floor under your desk?’ he said.

She cleared her throat, and holstered the sidearm in her belt pouch. She looked pissed off and weary.

‘Well, you got my bed, didn’t you?’ she snapped.

‘Oh,’ he said.

Macks picked up her boots and shuffled across to the office door. She leaned out and yelled, ‘Watch officer! Two caffeines before I shoot someone!’ Then she sat down on the rug, and started to pull on her footwear.

‘What time is it?’ she asked Drusher grumpily.

‘Early yet. I’m sorry.’

‘What were you doing?’

‘I wanted to check the autopsy files. From the victims. There was something I wanted to look at.’

‘That pile there,’ Macks said. ‘No, the other end.’

Drusher started to look through the files, wincing at some of the more grisly picts he encountered. Macks left the room, presumably to kill whoever it was that was being slow with the caffeine.

When she returned, he’d spread a dozen of the dossiers out on the rug, and was making notes with a slate and stylus he’d borrowed from her desk.

‘Macks,’ he began. ‘There’s something here that–’

‘Get your jacket,’ she said.

In daylight (though daylight was a loose term), Tycho didn’t look any better. From the side window of the speeding transporter, Drusher could now starkly see what had been merely spectral ruins the night before. There had been a melancholy air to the place in the darkness. Now everything was blunt and crass: the scars of fire, the pitting of assault weapons, the water-filled cavities of craters, the shock-fractures on slabs of rockcrete. Weeds fumed the city ruins, thick and unlovely, reclaiming the wasteground between tenements and stacks. The Gardens of Tycho were everywhere now, Drusher thought. The wild was reclaiming the city.

They drove in convoy with two other Magistratum vehicles, rattling down the empty thoroughfares.

‘Fresh kill,’ was all Macks would say. ‘In the Commission of Works.’

Falken was already on site, with four armed troopers in tow. Drusher wouldn’t have been able to tell that the building before him was the Commission of Works. Penetrator shells had caved in the facade, and chewed curiously geometric shapes out of the roof. The rear of the building was a dark cave-system of intact rooms.

‘In here,’ said Falken, shouldering his riotgun, and leading them into the mangled ruins. ‘Routine sweep picked it up about thirty minutes ago.’

They clambered over fallen beams, disturbing the thick white dust. The body lay in a nest of broken floorboards.

‘Civilian volunteer,’ Falken said. ‘He was on a registered night watch here. He had a weapon, but it doesn’t seem like he got the chance to use it.’