Chapter 35

Chapter Sixteen

‘Beta Gate,’ said Shift Leader Hallen, checking his orders on the small screen embedded in his wrist. The screen flickered green, yellow, green, dead. As usual in these PPA days. He smacked his embedded device sharply, shook his wrist back and forth, and spat on the screen. The orders glowed back into life. ‘Immature supplicant, possibly human. And—what’s this—oh. Howling.’

‘So we need to tidy it up.’

‘We need to tidy it up, correct, Milo. Let’s go.’

The squad zoomed around the perimeter fence. Milo could see that the fence was not quite as strong as it was before the war, or before the PPA. Built after the Great Conflagration, using all that pre-Conflagration material and with pre-Conflagration skills, it should have lasted a thousand years. A million. That’s what he had been ……