To prosecute these jobs, the Service usually relied on information from a recent escapee or a traitor in situ. But in this instance, our sources were said to be emancipated servants. And that was unheard of. Unnerving, really. Because criminal clans didn’t release slaves from bondage – they murdered them. Which meant we were dealing here with either a momentary lapse of rigour or some sort of idiosyncrasy. There was a whiff of madness in it. Slaying redundant staff and vassals – this wasn’t just a matter of security and economy for these people. It was culture. Tradition.

  Evil bastards are predictable, in their way. Not all of them, I admit, and not always. But crazy evil bastards? They’re worse than weather.

  I waited. In a funk of disgust and anxiety. And did what I could to hold my nerve. But by then I was convinced that we’d been sent into a situation that was beyond ordinary. Turns out I was right. But it was years before I understood how extraordinary it was.

  That third night, as I stared up at those crenellated slabs near the canyon rim, I concentrated on what a lair on such a scale really meant. What it might have taken to build. The genius behind it. But also, the suffering it embodied.

  A fortress like this. Yes, it was something to despise. But if it was real, you had to acknowledge the prowess of such an accomplishment. The idea of it was daunting. The technical expertise, the engineering required. An entire rock wall – a hundred and fifty metres of it – hollowed out, honeycombed, reinforced, heated, cooled, furnished, victualled. Its existence was almost beyond comprehension. But the means of achieving it – that was even harder to come to terms with. Not just what it must have cost to fuel the great, belching machines that dug this lofty bunker, but the expenditure of bodies that would have toiled, stumbling and coughing in their wake, to get it done.

  And to construct all this in strictest secrecy? To make it self-sufficient? And then to maintain total discretion afterwards? Every bondservant and labourer would need to be slain. If they weren’t incinerated, their bones would have been mortared into the walls. All the talk of blood and treasure we heard about in Basic. This is what it meant. People ground to smuts, unknown, unseen, unremembered. And here is where it went. Into the luxury and safety of criminals. Slavers, poisoners, mass murderers, accomplices, collaborators.

  Once we penetrated this place, if we ever did, I knew it would take grit to contend with what lay within that wall. The endurance required to get here and to wait it out like this was no small matter. But that was just physical courage. What we’d need on the inside was moral discipline. Self-governance. Something of a different order. Because there’d be sights in there that’d rattle us. Not even the most hardened operator was immune to the awe and dread the interior of a stronghold could trigger.

  I’d already cautioned the crew about this. I couldn’t know for certain, but for some it might be a new experience. This object, I told them. He’s a man, not a god. Remember that. No matter what you see in there, remind yourself that there’s no magic in him. For all his marvels and riches, he’s no better than you. What is he but a creature hiding in a hole? He’s not free. He’s bound. By rock, by his past, by fear of the people, by terror at the prospect of justice.

  I told them: you, comrades, you’re still abroad, under the sky. With your crew, on behalf of free citizens. You’ve crossed lands and seas to reach him. You did it willingly, on principle, for the common good, for the honour of it. And once this job is done and he’s mush, you’ll be leaving for home. Free women and men. With your heads up. Compared to you, this poor bastard’s nothing. And his trinkets are nothing. Okay?

  I tell you now, I was sincere. I believed every word of it. And yet I was secretly spooked. Not by this prick’s wealth and power. Or even his odious ancestry – at which I could only guess. No, what made me uneasy was the fearful enigma of his eccentricity. The weirdness he was giving off.

  And yet, for all that, I admit that something about this idiot made me smile. Because if the intel was correct, we were promised a moment of comedy.

  According to the brief, this gangster was addicted to tobacco. His weakness had been an open secret in the household for decades. And for years he’d promised his wife he’d quit – for the children’s sake, for the health of the family. Everyone knows that stuff gives you cankers in the lung. Any peon could have told him that. Maybe some had. Not that they should care if he lived or died. Anyhow, by all accounts he’d given quitting the fags a red-hot go. Managed to taper down to almost nothing. And he’d declared to his wife that he’d conquered the habit altogether. But every evening, at 1945 hours, while the missus was occupied with putting the children to bed, he came up through the airlock and the blast door to step out onto his terrace. For a single durrie. As if, for all his need to prove himself a good father and a civilized man, he still couldn’t let go of his last private vice. His secret manly power.

  And this, comrade, was the detail upon which everything hung. The entire operation! The reason we’d crossed continents and seas to be there. And it was funny, afterwards, to think of him. Tangled up in his performance of virtue. For here was a man whose clan and trade and prodigious inheritance had helped asphyxiate half of life on earth. And now, for the sake of love, and clean air for his kids, he’d resolved to give up smoking. Nearly. Mostly. Almost! I mean, fuck me, brother. You don’t find that funny?

  No word of a lie, I was thinking exactly that when, bang on time – finally – he emerged. We all caught his heat signature in our scopes at the same moment. And incredibly, for a second or two, we all hesitated.

  Because his flare was too big. The green flame of him was improbably wide. We all held for a few moments, waiting for the secondary flash of his cigarette, but that never came.

  Then the heat signature split in two. Literally broke in half down the middle. So, now we had two discrete bodies up there. I was nonplussed. I hadn’t anticipated a deviation.

  The green plumes fused again. Jesus, I thought. Are they fighting or making love? Has she caught him out, or is she feeling frisky? Either way, they’d plainly forgotten themselves because they moved out, scuffling or maybe dancing, right to the parapet wall, where they were entirely exposed. Head and shoulders. Hot and clear. Crisp as you like. Looking out over our heads at God knows what. The world they’d left us with, I presume. Or maybe just their own deaths. Which were waiting for them, closer than they could know.

  It was as if we were all mesmerized, even me. But the spell couldn’t hold.

  Our first salvo came in from the right flank, one of the women – Silver Teeth, I think – and that probably did the job on its own. The rest was just noise and mess, to be honest. Noise I hoped only we could hear. And a mess I knew we’d have to clean up in a hurry.

  After about four seconds of engagement, there was silence and the rolling stink of ozone. We followed up with the gas immediately, cartridge after cartridge pooting away. After that I gave the order to secure the place. Two archers sent the graps up, ropes snaking behind them. The vanguard climbers put their masks on and got to work, and once the air cleared we followed to help process the bodies.

  We bagged them, the object and his wife, and humped them down the hewn stone stairs into their lair. At the end of a narrow, blank-walled concourse was a blast door that stood ajar, and beyond that lay the shining halls of the bunker.

  The first level of the installation – the living space – was a series of large, interconnected chambers. No windows or skylights, of course, and yet it didn’t feel like a bunker. The floors gleamed. The furniture was plush, heavy, majestic. And despite the eggy taint of our gas, a characteristic citadel smell persisted. Remember that shiny scent? The otherworldly fug of perfumes, scorched meat and cleaning chemicals?

  Looming from every wall, like views onto a fantastical realm, were enormous pictures. All bore the same peculiar sheen. The colours were fatty. Calorific. The contours soft. Redolent of impossible plenty.

  In every frame, the human faces were pink and pillowy. Most prominent, initially, were the portraits of our object and his family. These were unsettling to walk past. Especially with their disarticulated bodies hanging from our shoulders in bags. Both adults were sleek and fair. Well fed, but not heavy. And very handsome. Startlingly so. With an expression you don’t see much anymore, except in the faces of those whose minds are broken. Satisfied? Content? Serene, I suppose, is the word. The children were rosy, wide-eyed, and fair like their parents. No sun scars, no white scab, no lesions. Teeth like milky, polished quartz.

  Eerie to behold, naturally, but not nearly as discomfiting as the views of waterfalls, forests and corals that followed. These were dangerously discombobulating. Huge gleaming sea creatures. Beasts of the savannah with enormous, glistening eyes. Everything in view was prodigious or so close you felt as if you’d fallen into the image by some dark magic. Gigantic insects spread their many legs over foliage so intensely green it made you queasy. There was an image of a plant with leaves as big as dinner plates, and from those convex pads hung glistening pendants of moisture that brimmed with gentle light. All these stood in glass sheaths three or four metres tall. I hadn’t seen stuff of that order since Induction and Basic. And never at such scale and proximity. It made my head swim and my feet heavy. And I wasn’t the only one. The whole crew had come to a gawking, blinking standstill.

  Enough! I barked at myself as much as the others. Clock’s running!

  I sent four operators ahead to find the sleeping quarters while the fifth helped me survey the office space, the library, kitchen, dining hall and a freezer full of meat, documenting the tech and collecting docs. I found two comms devices, but they were beyond my ken, so I bagged them out of precaution and pressed on. It would have been faster work – and safer – with a set of blueprints, or even a basic floor plan, but our intel had not extended that far.

  By the time I got to the sleeping quarters the children had already been located and bagged. They’d died in their beds. The gas. Their rooms were bristling with toys whose polymers were bright and glossy. Their walls were covered in images of legendary creatures and windswept beaches. To prevent anyone getting moony, I hustled the crew out in search of the installation’s disposal facilities. But I needn’t have worried. Compared to the fixtures and devices, the kids were of small interest to them. As they left in search of access to the lower levels, I reminded them of the standing orders on looting.

  I stood alone for a moment in the opulence of a bathroom. I didn’t feel the impulse to take anything for myself. But I’d have forsaken all the swag on offer in that place for half an hour in one of those black marble tubs. To lather up with the soaps that smelt of my growhouse. To lie back in hot water. Or pick blisters off my feet in peace. But there wasn’t even time for a change of diaper.

  When I caught up with them, the crew had found the inner concourse. At the stairwell, we surveyed the level below. The physical exercise facilities, the provisioning cells and the enormous growhouse which used a soil-free system like Sun’s, only on a scale and a level of sophistication beyond anything I’d encountered before.

  Then, still humping the body bags, we were down to a third level – the service spaces – in search of the disposal facility.

  I’m sure you were in remote outposts like that. There was always a compactor, right? And sometimes an incinerator. Thankfully, this place had both. As you know, the Service required some objects to be expunged entirely so that nothing – no relic or fetish – could be made of their remains. This case was one of those. On this point, our orders were insistent. And I guess that should have alerted me to the high likelihood that this was no ordinary job. But by then I didn’t care who we were turning into bricks of ash that day. I just wanted to get it done and get out.

  It was quick work. The easiest part of the job. Four hot, mealy ingots. Two large, two small. Which we dumped onto the floor like failed loaves. And left.

  From there we fanned out to scope the rest of the services level as ordered. We needed to confirm the absence of subterranean egress, though by that stage it seemed to me there was little point in having such information. We moved through ventilation. Water supply. Power.

  And then we found a hatch in the floor the size of a bed. My hackles went up. I ordered full readiness. And we stood back as two operators slowly, carefully, prised it open.

  I didn’t know what to expect. And we had to be prepared for anything. But gas is heavier than air. It sinks. And that hatch had no better seal than any other in the facility. So it hardly seemed possible anyone could be holding out down there. But this installation was a labyrinth. And although it was only home to four, it was large enough to shelter eighty souls. If there were others holding out, this was where they’d be. But surely they’d be dead too. Wouldn’t they?

  We tilted the trapdoor back. Peered down carefully into the cavernous vault. It was lit. We called out. Heard nothing. I considered dropping in more gas. But waiting for it to disperse would cost us time we couldn’t afford. So I sent Silver Teeth in. And Spanish to back her up. Within seconds they gave the all-clear. There was no one down there, dead or alive.

  This is how we finally confirmed the lack of escape routes. And how we found the ancient generators and boilers entombed like forgotten hostages. They were enormous. The size of small houses. Surrounded by gangways and ladders. All their joints and moving parts still gleaming with grease. Rivet heads like fists. Cables as thick as an operator’s arm. They were sinister looking. Also breathtaking. To stand beneath them in that great crypt was menacing. The whole place stank of something noxious and oily. In a separate bunker, through a blast door, we found the reservoirs. Steel cisterns marked DIESEL. Others stamped LPG.

  I wanted to document all this, but we couldn’t linger. Heading out, I thought of the tech that had replaced these behemoths. The batteries upstairs were magnificent. Massive H-packs. Beyond anything available to us. It seemed a shame, almost a crime, to destroy them. There wasn’t time now to go up and inspect the size and quality of the solar array, or even the landing pad, but it was clear the kit here could have powered thousands of hamlets and cooled countless compounds.

  On the way up, passing back through the services level at a jog, we almost missed the piggery. Whose existence explained the vast store of meat preserved in the freezer room on the floor above. The door to the animals’ chamber was sealed against odour and noise. Nevertheless, the pigs had not survived the gas. They were heaped in a pyramid at one end of the room. None of my operators had ever seen a pig before.

  So there was plenty to think about as we worked our way back to the habitation level. This was a citadel of great age. And what we’d seen confirmed our intel. The place and its denizens had undergone a recent change in circumstance. An innovation of some sort had taken hold.

  The piggery suggested an unusual degree of self-reliance. And confirmed what Intel had told us. In recent months there’d been no resupply to this place. No provisioning by air. And no defensive posture at all. Every bit of which was hard to credit. And yet the evidence was right here before us.

  This place – I was only guessing, but it seemed possible it had been built before the Terror. Perhaps long before. Clearly, it had stood for many generations. And over that time hundreds of cartel types and vassals – probably thousands – had lived and been born and died here, in safety or in servitude, all of them in seclusion. The clan could only have survived because of its vast wealth, its far-reaching networks, and a culture of unyielding ruthlessness. And this is what was so confounding. Within these adamantine walls, someone had changed course. It was as if this object and his wife had spurned the succour of their own bloodlines and tribal webs to go it alone. Was this a kind of moral surrender? A symptom of exhaustion? After all, liberty of this sort was hardly different to incarceration. Or had this bloke decided he was immortal? Maybe he’d simply lost his mind.

  I was fascinated – troubled, really – but I didn’t have time to think it through, because, level by level, I had to oversee the laying of charges and keep the crew moving upward toward our exit point.

  Back in the living quarters, we provisioned as we could, taking only food and water. With a thirty-hour hike ahead of us, we were down to just a handful of protein stems. Needless to say, no meat was taken, nor any other edibles we couldn’t safely identify.

  Then, with the last mines set, I mustered everyone back up on the terrace for the rappel down the cliff face.

  The exit went smoothly.

  It was dark out there. The rock face was cooling rapidly.

  Once we set down and broke clear, unburdened by ropes and climbing kit, we were lighter across the ground. We ran as hard and straight as we could but, even with night glasses on, the footing was unstable and getting clear quickly was no easy matter.

  We were halfway across the canyon floor when the charges went live. The shockwave scraped us off our feet. I went skidding forward like a tumbleweed. Bounced once, twice – slammed into boulders, other bodies. Picked myself up. And as a hail of grit rained down in the dark around us, I counted heads. All good. We set out for the canyon mouth, the watermaker, and hopefully a clean extraction.

  By night’s end we were away from the canyons and out in gibber country. Tired, slowing a little, though still working our evasion patterns with discipline. I felt we were sound. Was glad we were moving. But knew we were basically unsafe. Bad enough to be out in the open, without cover or air support. But the ground we were traversing was low. The sky was muddy. I worried about weather. I didn’t want to drown out there.

  When the light came up, it looked bad. Sullen sky. The creepy feeling of being watched. And the knowledge that our extraction window was closing.