From the window of the crumbling tower, I could look far across the Great Desert to the green mountains at the back of Government City – two hundred miles of barren expanse, impossible to cross on foot. Under a nearby hill, the Apparatus training camp sprawled, an ugly collection of ramshackle huts. "Camp Endurance" they called it in the directories: "Camp Kill" was what it was known by locally. It was supposed to give privation training to recruits, but actually it existed to excuse the sometimes heavy traffic to Spiteos and to serve as a reserve guard. The real complement of it was wholly made up of Apparatus guard thugs and the only recruits that ever got there were creatures not even the Apparatus could use – and they never left alive. The towering, black basalt walls of Spiteos were supposed to have been erected by some long gone race that had inhabited the planet a hundred and fifty thousand years ago, a race that could only work stone and had perished in a single breath of guns in the first wave of the Voltar invasion.
