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flaws in the blueprints he had pored over one evening at Ed’s small cottage.
    Carter initiated his digital scope and peered down its barrel. The Sentinel tower sprang into focus and Carter stepped the range back, allowing his gaze to fall on the doors of the building. As usual, the portals were flanked by eight heavily armed Nex. Carter watched as a truck drew near, engine huge and belching, to disgorge another Nex squad who entered the building through smoothly sliding electric doors.
    Carter watched the Nex for a while. Several JT8s appeared, roaring off in a 4x4. Carter timed the exit and entry of patrols and watched for anything out of the ordinary, any individuals he might recognise, any activity that he found out of character. After all, the Nex were creatures of habit. They had the predictability of insects; of machines.
    He watched for an hour as the sun emerged from behind towering white clouds and the temperature began to rise. He was just about to withdraw and call it a day, when something—a commotion—caught his attention. He moved the scope’s sight to the nearby harbour-side. Five Nex had surrounded two people—a man and a woman. One of the Nex struck out, its Steyr TMP submachine gun butt smashing into the man’s head and dropping him instantly. The woman was kicked to the ground and the five Nex set about the couple, pounding them into bloody heaps as a group of JT8s arrived with huge black shaggy dogs on TitaniumIII leashes. The beasts, drooling and straining to reach the two civilians lying broken by the white harbour walls, heaved so hard against their leashes that even the heavily muscled JT8s struggled to restrain them.
    He swept the scope from side to side. No crowds had gathered—because to gather in a crowd was to incite further suspicion. People hurried by, heads down, eyes averted, just hoping to hell that they would not become involved.
    The whole incident left a sour taste in Carter’s mouth. He withdrew with care and moved towards the shade of the olive trees. As he approached the KTM, something slid into his soul, like a bad injection of heroin. His head tilted. Over towards the farm of Tomas and Mary, he heard the powerful rumble of a distant FukTruck engine.
    Carter moved on up the slope. As he reached the top of the gentle ridge he dropped to a crouch so as not to reveal his position against the skyline; then he angled to the left between a small copse of olive trees and stopped. Again, his head tilted. He could hear the shrill young voices of two girls. Children. He could not hear what they said, only identify the panic in their hysterical tone.
    Feeling cold inside, Carter crested the rise and crawled between low scrub bushes. The landscape fell away ahead of him, rolling down into cultivated fields before climbing again to distant conifer forests. A stream ran glittering from the far slopes of a steep hill, and below, nestling in the valley, sat the sprawling farm that he had visited on many occasions. The main building—old and white and fallen into disrepair—was a long low farmhouse with white walls, grey in places where painted rendering had dropped away. The roof was red-tiled, but with several broken tiles gaping rudely; many had been replaced with grey mismatches.
    Beside the old white farmhouse was a more modern addition: a big three-storey brick house—obviously destined to become the replacement dwelling, joined directly to the old farmhouse and still without a roof or even joists. Holes squatted where window frames had yet to be fixed, and the doorways were shadowed rectangles of rough-edged brick. Carter could still see marks on the ground where footings had been laid, and the project was far from complete.
    To one side of the white farmhouse stood several small wooden buildings with thatched roofs and open fronts—one was a wood store filled with hunks of axe-chopped timber. And to the far right there was a large barn with double wooden doors. Outside, hung against