This predator was smart. Very smart and very able. It knew all about misdirection. It could out-think any regular human, and then split him open. It understood military tactics because that is what it dealt in. It had been programmed. It had been given orders.

Breathing hard, Drusher edged around another shattered arch, his weapon braced. His pulse was racing, but this felt entirely odd. This wasn’t about his trained skills any more. This wasn’t about an animal, whose habits and behaviours he had been schooled to understand. This was the opposite.

So he did the opposite. Facing any hungry predator, the last thing a magos biologis would want to do is step into the open. But he did so, turning a full circle, his pistol aimed in both hands.

On the rubbled floor before him, he saw Roderin. Roderin was dead, just like the others.

Drusher circled again, weapon tight.

The killer flew at him.

Drusher pulled the trigger and kept it pulled. Eight, nine, ten rounds, the full clip boomed out of Macks’ borrowed sidearm, and hit the killer head-on.

It fell, burst open, broken, puffed pink intestines spilling from its punctured torso. A man, but not a man. A product of the civil war. Augmetically strengthened, augmetically wired, its eyes a black visor, wires stapled into its flesh, its palsied hands curled over to expose the whirring chainblades sewn into its wrists.

The chainblades whined as they came together. Despite the rounds he had put into it, it got back up. And leapt at Drusher’s face.

His gun clicked, dry.

‘Down, Valentin!’

From behind him, Macks fired her riotgun, and the killer’s head burst like a tomato. The impact knocked it sideways. When it landed, its chainblades were still whirring involuntarily.

‘All right?’ she asked Drusher.

He nodded.

‘You were right. As ever.’

‘Glad to be of service.’

‘Seriously,’ she said, leading him out of the ruins as Falken and Edvin fired shot after shot into the killer to make sure it was dead. ‘Seriously, Drusher, I owe you.’

‘A week’s pay, you said. I do what I do.’

He began to walk away, picking his path through the rubble.

‘Valentin, I could put it down as two weeks, no one would know.’

He shrugged. He looked back at her.

‘What about a ticket off this rock?’ he said, with a thin, sad smile.

‘Can’t afford that,’ she said. ‘Sorry. Budgets and all.’

‘I had to ask,’ said Drusher. He sat down on a chunk of bricks.

‘Look,’ said Macks. ‘You’ve seen how stretched things are down here. The Martial Order Division can barely keep up. We can use all the help we can get, particularly sharp, educated minds with a thing for details. What do you think?’

‘How would that work?’ Drusher asked.

Macks shrugged. ‘Not sure. I could probably second your services on a temporary basis using the emergency powers. It’s not much, I know, but…’