“I don’t know. The hangar door was closing as I walked past. The guards with them stood in the way and made it difficult for me.”

“More than one, though.”

“Three, at least.”

“Uplink stuff? Relay station? The jockeys themselves?”

“I, I don’t think so.”

Petrovitch glanced at the counter again. A little more. “Yeah, those guys will be in some warehouse in Nevada, getting hyped up on battle drugs and heavy rock. No one’s going to put their meat on the line: way too valuable to lose.”

His hand hovered over the cut-off switch. In the distance, a door slammed shut. Newcomen started, but it was just one of the Inuit workers taking a short cut. He had a bag heavy with tools and a metre-long adjustable wrench slung over one shoulder.

He nodded under his furred hood at Newcomen, and then at Petrovitch, as he passed by.

“Real,” said Petrovitch, when the man had gone through the door at the front of the hangar. He flicked the pump off, then began the laborious task of unscrewing the hoses and coiling them back up, ready for the next user.

Newcomen was in an agony of impatience. “Tell me you don’t have to take that back across the airfield.”

“I ought. But I don’t have to. No one’s going to say anything to my face.” He patted the side of the tank. “I’ll leave it here.”

“So you’ll come now?”

“I’ll get my things.” He trooped back up the steps, gathered his bag from the cabin, and on a whim scooped up the axe he’d bought too. He met Newcomen back in the hangar. “Let’s go and see what we’re up against.”

Once outside, Newcomen pointed to the next hangar but one. It looked locked down, no lights showing, no one hanging around. Petrovitch searched for cameras, telltale signs of digital transmissions: they were there, and there, and there too, and those were just the nearest ones. As they walked, images were sent and commands were received, broadcasting from a building the other side of the runway.

He glanced up as a camera’s housing turned slowly to face him. He wondered if Ben and Jerry were hunkered down over the monitor, maybe a coffee in hand, watching him back, wondering what he was doing.

They weren’t going to have to wonder for long.

“This one?” Petrovitch rattled the door.

“They’re not just going to let us in, are they?” Newcomen looked around nervously.

“You still don’t get it, do you?” He dropped his bag in the snow and rolled the axe off his shoulder. The lock was just below the door handle. “We can do what the huy we want.”

He kicked the lock with the heel of his boot. Not only did the door give, it bent. It shuddered back on its hinges and banged against its stops. The cold, dark space beyond beckoned.

Finally there was some activity behind him. He could hear motors starting up: two, three petrol engines. They weren’t going to get to him before he’d had a good look around. He swung his bag through the opening, and held the axe loosely in his left hand.

He switched to infrared as he stepped over the threshold. There were the softly glowing shapes he was expecting, but what he was really looking for was the light switch.

There, the other side of the main doors: a big board, complete with fuses. “Wait here,” he said to Newcomen, and navigated his way over to the still-warm switches.

He clicked them on, one by one. The lights in the high ceiling flickered on in banks, slowly illuminating the scene. When he’d done, he saw that they’d sent thirty-two fully armed and armoured teletroopers after him.

They sat in neat rows, crouched over and dormant. Their heads rested on their massive chests, and their gun arms pointed at the ground. Their reversed knees were bent slightly. Whip aerials extended over their backs, and cooling fins radiated like coral growths from their spines.

“Ugly bastards, aren’t they?”

He walked up to one and looked into its stereoscopic imaging equipment. It looked disturbingly like huge black eyes.

“What are we going to do?” asked Newcomen.

“I thought we’d spray-paint them pink and give them each a girl’s name.” Petrovitch circled the one he was closest to. “Isn’t that right, Svetlana?”

“There are so many of them. I didn’t know.”

“Yeah, I’ll agree with you there. This is a lot of hardware for just us. Almost as if they’re expecting a much bigger party than the one we might possibly throw.” He reached out and laid his hand on Svetlana’s thigh. Her hip was as high as his head, and the joint – every joint – was carefully recessed and protected with interlocking plates. Not enough room to even wriggle his fingers inside.

They were designed to be tough to kill, to take the bricks and the bottles, the bullets and buckshot, even the smaller anti-tank rounds. They could dish it out, too. Rotary cannon and assault shotgun, grenade launcher. Shoulder-mounted rockets, even.

A man, maybe a thousand k away, would sit in a virtual rig and control it all like it was one big video game. Boom. Head shot. Soldiers under fire would find cover, call in an air strike, scramble back to safety, and only rarely press on to their objective. A teletrooper would shrug off the small-arms fire and just keep going. The rattle of shells and shrapnel against its hull would be muted, less it was distracting.

The cavalry finally arrived. Engines roared outside, doors opened and boots clattered. Petrovitch carried on his circumnavigation of the teletrooper, ignoring the fact that he was being surrounded by men dressed in Arctic camouflage. They all had guns, and they all pointed them at Petrovitch.

He watched them watching him through their full-face masks, each of them printed to resemble the same skull that sat beneath their skin. Except the eye sockets were larger, and the grins more toothy. Ghouls. He was encircled by ghouls.

“Step away from the machine, Dr Petrovitch.”

He looked around for the source of the voice. A figure, dressed in bulky, expensive top-of-the-range civilian kit, but still wearing the skeletal mask, stepped through the ring of soldiers. He had a shotgun held loosely in his hands.

“So which one are you? Ben or Jerry?” Petrovitch looked around for Newcomen. The American was being ignored by his countrymen as someone of no consequence, a mere bit-part player to the main act.

The question confused the man. His hidden face flexed the surface of the mask. “I said, step away from the machine.”

“Or what? You’ll shoot me?” Petrovitch’s bag was by the door, but he was still carrying the axe. “I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“For the third and last time, step away from the machine.” Even his voice was disguised, subtly filtered and modulated.

“Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.” Petrovitch switched the axe into a two-handed grip. “Where’s my girl?”

The man, Ben or Jerry, raised his shotgun and fired it without warning. The taser round caught Petrovitch in the fleshy part of his outstretched palm. The impact rocked him backwards. He kept his feet, but he couldn’t prevent the discharge that followed.

No matter that he could block the pain: he had no control.

He swung the axe, but couldn’t see where it hit. His arm thrashed, and the weight of it threw him to the floor.

Someone had modified the taser. The shock went on for far longer than it should. If he’d taken it to the chest, it would have stopped his heart.

It ended, eventually. Petrovitch looked up at the circle of gun barrels and fixed-grin faces. He gripped the plastic body of the shell and pulled the barbs out of his hand. Blood oozed out.

“Step away from the machine, Dr Petrovitch.” The man in the skeleton mask chambered a fresh shell, indicating that he was more than prepared to keep shocking him until he complied. The used cartridge clattered on to the concrete.

The axe had embedded itself in Svetlana’s leg. The blade was wedged in the shin, enabling Petrovitch to use the haft to lever himself up. “I want to know where Lucy is.”