‘Backgrounds? Addresses?’ I asked Wrex.

‘I’ll run checks,’ she said.

‘So... we have a cult here, eh?’ Midas asked. ‘You’ve got a series of ritual killings, at least one murder site, and now the names of two possible cultists.’

‘Perhaps.’ I wasn’t convinced. There seemed both more and less to this than had first appeared. Inquisitorial hunch.

The remains of the lasrifle discarded by my assailant lay on an evidence tray. Even with the damage done by the overloading powercell, it was apparent that this was an old model.

‘Did the powercell overload because it was dropped? It fell through the roof, didn’t it?’ Bequin asked.

‘They’re pretty solid,’ Fischig answered.

‘Forced overload,’ I said. ‘An old Imperial Guard trick. I’ve heard they learn how to set one off. As a last ditch in tight spots. Cornered. About to die anyway.’

‘That’s not standard,’ said Fischig, poking at the trigger guard of the twisted weapon. His knowledge of guns was sometimes unseemly. ‘See this modification? It’s been machine-tooled to widen the guard around the trigger.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

Fischig shrugged. ‘Access? For an augmetic hand with rudimentary digits?’

We went through to a morgue room down the hall where the man Wrex had gunned down was lying on a slab. He was middle-aged, with a powerful frame, going to seed. His skin was weatherbeaten and lined.

‘Identity?’

‘We’re working on it.’

The body had been stripped by the morgue attendants. Fischig scrutinised it, rolling it with Wrex’s help to study the back. The man’s clothes and effects were in plasteen bags in a tray at his feet. I lifted the bag of effects, and held it up to the light.

‘Tattoo,’ reported Fischig. ‘Imperial eagle, left shoulder. Crude, old. Letters underneath it... capital S period, capital I period, capital I, capital X.’

I’d just found the signet ring in the bag. Gold, with a wheatear motif. ‘S.I. IX,’ said Aemos. ‘Sameter Infantry Nine.’

The Ninth Sameter Infantry had been founded in Urbitane twenty-three years before, and had served, as Aemos had already told me, in the brutal liberation war on Surealis Six. According to city records, five hundred and nineteen veterans of that war and that regiment had been repatriated to Sameter after mustering out thirteen years ago, coming back from the horrors of war to an increasingly depressed world beset by the blight of poverty and urban collapse. Their regimental emblem, as befitted a world once dominated by agriculture, was the wheatear.

‘They came back thirteen years ago. The oldest victim we have dates from that time,’ said Fischig.

‘Surealis Six was a hard campaign, wasn’t it?’ I asked.

Aemos nodded. ‘The enemy was dug in. It was ferocious, brutal. Brutalising. And the climate. Two white dwarf suns, no cloud cover. The most punishing heat and light, not to mention ultraviolet burning.’

‘Ruins the skin,’ I murmured. ‘Makes it weatherbeaten and prematurely aged.’