“That, commandant, has even less to do with you than it does with me. I have my orders to carry out, and now you have yours. Do you have Wardani in custody, or not?”

But he didn’t look away the way the sergeant had. Maybe it was something from the depths of the addiction that was pushing him, some clenched bitterness he had discovered whilst wired into decaying orbit around the core of himself. Or maybe it was a surviving fragment of granite from who he had been before. He wasn’t going to give.

Behind my back, preparatory, my right hand flexed and loosened.

Abruptly, his upright forearm collapsed across the desk like a dynamited tower and the hardcopy gusted free of his fingers. My hand whiplashed out and pinned the paper on the edge of the desk before it could fall. The commandant made a small dry noise in his throat.

For a moment we both looked at the hand holding the paper in silence, then the commandant sagged back in his seat.

“Sergeant,” he bellowed hoarsely.

The door opened.

“Sergeant, get Wardani out of ‘fab eighteen and take her to the lieutenant’s shuttle.”

The sergeant saluted and left, relief at the decision being taken out of his hands washing over his face like the effect of a drug.

“Thank you, commandant.” I added my own salute, collected the authorisation hardcopy from the desk and turned to leave. I was almost at the door when he spoke again.

“Popular woman,” he said.

I looked back. “What?”

“Wardani.” He was watching me with a glitter in his eye. “You’re not the first.”

“Not the first what?”

“Less than three months ago.” As he spoke, he was turning up the current in his left arm and his face twitched spasmodically. “We had a little raid. Kempists. They beat the perimeter machines and got inside, very high tech considering the state they’re in, in these parts.” His head tipped languidly back over the top of the seat and a long sigh eased out of him. “Very high tech. Considering. They came for. Her.”