Date 31/01/2060, Location 41.26861, 31.4384

The team were split into two rooms – Nadia, Marius, Shimazu and Kai in one, Aswon, Tads and Hunter in the other. They'd fallen asleep on the beds, the fold-out bed and in the first room on the sofa as well – at least most of them had. Shimazu laid on his bed staring at the sky in his room, and Aswon did the same in his.

The sounds of a large industrial machine applying hundreds of tons of force echoed through the sky. Then a hiss loud enough to be heard at half a mile. A klaxon. Thump, thump, thump. While the rest of the team slept, Aswon and Shimazu were awake, having caught no more than thirty minutes of sleep the whole night. Every time there was a loud crash, they twitched involuntarily, their nervous system – and temper – on edge after a night of frustrated efforts to get to sleep. The rest of the team were curled up in various positions, many of them with their heads under pillows or with their arms curled protectively over their ears – but they'd managed to get to sleep and were resting easy now.

There was a very brief tap at the door of room two, and then the door opened almost immediately. An elderly-looking man wandered in, clad in dishevelled and stained loose fitting clothes, sweeping from right to left with a battered corn broom that was covered in grease.

Aswon sprang to his feet in a single bound, grabbing his spear and lowering it to point at the stranger, who pointedly ignored him.

"You – out – now!"

The elderly man continued to sweep from side to side, moving the grease and dust around a little. Stepping forward, he leisurely raised a hand to gently move the spear tip aside, as if parting a curtain or shooing away a fly. Aswon pulled the spear back and around the stranger's hand, and then pushed forwards again, until the tip of the spear was mere millimetres from the man's throat. If he stepped forwards – or even leant forwards – the razor sharp tip would puncture his flesh with ease.

"I said, get out. NOW!"

The old man looked up at Aswon, and as he did he straightened up, the back no longer bent by years of manual labour, the head held erect and proud.

"But if I get out, how will I talk to you, and tell you how you can help me?"

Realisation flooded into Aswon – it was the man from the mountain, back in Iran. He didn't carry a yoke and wooden pails any more, instead holding the broom and a feather duster. On closer examination, the broom and duster both had thick wooden handles that were ornately carved, made out of some dark wood that exuded a sense of age.

Aswon lowered the spear and glowered at him for a moment, then snorted as the old man resumed sweeping, seeming determined to finish the little corridor section he had started. He turned and entered the bedroom area, and kicked the bottom of the bed, rousing Tads and Hunter. Once they started to lift their heads and stare at him bleary-eyed, he jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the visitor.

"Our friend is back. I'm going to go wake up the others."

Aswon turned and hunted for something to drink to freshen his mouth before he went next door. The old man saw him, and raised a finger to him, then grabbed an empty glass and filled it from the tap in the bathroom, then handed it over to Aswon. With a dubious look, Aswon sipped at the water – expecting the taste the stale and chemical tang of a third-rate municipal supply. Instead, icy cold pure water washed over his lips, moistening and revitalising them. It tasted like meltwater from a glacier – clean, fresh and about the most wholesome thing he could ever remember. He raised the glass and let the water pour into his mouth, feeling a little shudder down his spine as the icy liquid poured down his gullet. For a moment, he could even forget that he'd had almost no sleep the night before, and he felt fresh and alive, ready to take on the world. Nodding in thanks to the old man, he strode out into the corridor and to the next room, rapping on the door until Shimazu came to open it.

Back in the other room, the old man had leaned his brush up against the wall, and was moving around with the duster, running it over the surfaces of the furniture and humming quietly to himself, whilst Tads and Hunter sat and watched him. A few minutes later, and the rest of the team had filed in, and joined them – filling the seats and beds and watching the old man with interest.

"Ahh, excellent. Well, I have something for you to do for me. Just a little simple task, nothing that will put you in danger, I'm sure." The team sat in silence and waited, though a few sceptical looks came from Hunter, Marius and Shimazu. "It's the right time of year for the inspection by the Ministry of Environmental and Economic Affairs, at the local steel mill. I need you to go and give them their inspection, and make sure they pass. It's essential they pass. But I have this for you, to help you out."

He reached into his robes and pulled out an old fashioned stamp, with a dark wood handle, and a small ink blotter, set into the same dark wood. The face of the stamp was marked in intricate detail, though it wasn't possible to see what it said from the quick glance at the reverse image.

"So, the mill know they are about due for their annual inspection – but these things are always unannounced. Get in there, inspect the place, and give them a clean bill of compliance, and authorise their documentation with the stamp. Should be simple for people as talented as you…"

Aswon was the first to speak, though Tads looked to be a fraction of a second behind him.

"You want us to go into the cess pit, and sign them off as being environmentally compliant. You want them to be able to carry on polluting and tainting the land. Why? I mean…. Just why?" Tads nodded vigorously. She'd looked over at the steelworks as they arrived, and seen how twisted and polluted the land was. The leeching of toxins and pollutants into the soil and water, belched into the air or generated by the processes had twisted astral space almost to breaking point. It was a toxic hell-hole, which she didn't want to enter at all, let alone encourage. Casting her spells there would be very difficult as she tried to strain pure mana that she could use from the filth of the area. She certainly didn't want to call on the spirits of the land - it was likely that what she would get was likely to be a toxic monstrosity that she might not be able to control.

The old man just nodded, though, without a care or look of concern. Aswon stared at him for a moment then shook his head – not in defiance but in a lack of understanding. Tads folded her arms and looked rebellious – the idea of polluting the land or enabling those that did obviously stuck in her craw. The old man looked at them, and for the barest moment there was a flicker of emotion, but it vanished as soon as it had appeared.

"Sometimes a surgeon must cut, to cure. Sometimes you have to cause, or allow a little harm, to prevent a greater one." Aswon started to speak, but the old man flicked a glance at him, then continued. "Sometimes, you need to create a dark and dirty environment, where the lice can feed and multiply freely, where they grow fat and lazy – so that when they are exposed, there is no escape, no getting away, and no turning back. When the proof of their deeds is so widespread and obvious, that it cannot be denied. Then you can kill it, rather than just driving it back, or underground."

They didn't appear happy – but there was at least understanding on their faces, if not acceptance. The rest of the team had been quiet to this point, letting Tads and Aswon carry the conversation – but now Kai spoke up.

"So, can you help us get in then? Do you have any IDs?" The old man sighed at him a little, then reached into his robe again, and pulled out what looked to be an old-fashioned passport, and handed it over. Hunter and Marius could read the gold leaf text on the front, the ornately-serifed text proclaiming membership of the Ministry.

"Oh, and one more thing. They'll almost certainly offer a bribe. It's the accepted thing… it's the reason why there's a problem in the first place. You should accept it – otherwise it's out of character. Feel free to be a little greedy in fact. It should cover your costs and your time. Now, unless there's anything else I can help you with?" he said, with a little irony inflected on the end of the sentence.

Shimazu looked up – either unware, or uncaring of the sarcasm.

"Don't suppose you have any earplugs, do you?"

The old man smiled, and once again reached into his robes, pulling out a set of bright yellow and blue earplugs on a cord and passed them over to Shimazu, who smiled and nodded in thanks. Without giving anyone else a chance to speak, he turned and swept his way back down the corridor and out of the room, disappearing from view.

The team looked at each other, and had a quick discussion. They were on a job, on the clock already – they really didn't want to take this job on, it was quite clearly only going to delay them and add risk. But they didn't want to annoy the strange old man, who was quite clearly some otherworldly creature of some kind. They passed the ID over to Marius, who examined it closely, checking the weave of the paper, the embossing of the letters and the minor marks around the stamps and signatures.

"This is either a real document, or one of the most convincing fakes I've ever seen in my life," the German announced. "I've seen a fair few forged transport orders, or doctored cargo manifests in my time – but this is… convincing."

Someone's stomach rumbled, reminding them all that time was marching on. Kai looked over at Marius.

"You're good with the local lingo, let's go find a café or restaurant or something, get some breakfast, and if it's discreet, we can work through the plan, look at the ID, do a little thinking and research, and see what we come up with."

They headed out of the room, stopping as they reached the door as they heard a sound like a chainsaw getting stuck in a log. Turning, they saw the form of Shimazu laid out on top of the bed, fully-clothed and with the brightly-coloured earplugs jammed into his ears, snoring like he wanted to wake the dead. They decided to leave him, and wandered out of the motel and up the road, soon finding an establishment that seemed a mix of café and restaurant. They didn't do takeaway food, but they had plenty of seating and were otherwise empty, so the team colonised two tables shoved together and ordered a hearty breakfast. Thick and strong coffee was served to them in large cups, then "Sucklu Yumurta" was bought out – which seemed to be sausage and eggs mixed together, along with a selection of bread, jam, cheese and several varieties of hazelnut and chocolate spreads. They tucked in for several minutes, charging up on energy for the day. Once they'd satisfied their hunger, they started to pick at the problem, piggybacking their matrix connections off of Marius' sat phone. They queued up searches on the steel mill itself, the owners and operators and started to do some research on the actual environmental code and laws surrounding pollution and industry, downloading endless dry and dull documents from the Ministry of Justice portal that went into intricate detail.

Hunter and Nadia sat for several hours in the restaurant – ordering more coffee and food and tipping well, and the staff seemed happy to just leave them be. Slowly the information searches came back, and they gathered some sense of scale on the mill. It was huge, covering several square kilometres with vast ore deposits forming small hills, and some of the production lines being a kilometre long in massive triple-storey structures. It was by far and away the largest mill in Turkey, producing over five million tons of steel each year. The town used to have a thriving fishing port, as the main source of income – but that had been long surpassed by the steel mill and the jobs dependent on that industry. They also found reference to a unit of the armed forces being based here – and with some more research found out that the Turkish armed forces pension trust had a forty-eight percent stake in the business.

Kai, Marius and Aswon went shopping, picking up some props to use in their subterfuge such as clipboards and electronics probes, along with a couple of cheap suits of Turkish manufacture. They also listened in on the local language – Aswon picking up on the structure fairly quickly using his skill with linguistics to assimilate the dialect. Kai listened and with prompting from Marius, gathered the basics. As they were wandering through the marketplace, they became aware of a group of four men trailing them, trying to be subtle but not doing a great job of it. Marius pulled out his burner phone, and called the local police, and in fluent Turkish explained that there were men in the marketplace, and he was sure he saw them with a gun hidden in their jacket.

Barely a minute later they heard sirens blaring and the sounds of angry shouting approaching them. They sped up suddenly after taking a corner, shook their pursuers and evaded, and soon heard the shouting of the police as the men were arrested and cuffed, all the while protesting their innocence.

By lunchtime Nadia and Hunter felt they had a good feel for the size and scope of the mill, some information on the processes and copious extracts from legal texts detailing pollution, safeguards, fines and punishments, and felt they were about ready. They left the restaurant and met up with the others, headed back to the motel and woke Shimazu who now felt vaguely human after six hours sleep, and checked out. They drove the truck to a piece of nearby waste ground under the elevated highway and parked up, deciding to walk up to the entrance gate – driving up to the mill in a Russian truck would cause more problems for them, and they decided to say they'd been taking samples of the air from the perimeter first, if asked.

Aswon dressed up in his tribal gear, and Tads put on her travelling clothes, whilst Nadia and everyone else put on suits. They grabbed pistols or submachine guns for some of the guys, making sure to take off their silencers to fit in more with the "bodyguard" stereotypes they were trying to fill, and when they were ready, headed out in a group toward the main entrance to the mill.

Kai led the way, mentally rehearsing the lines he and Marius had been drilling. As they walked along the wall, he concentrated for a few moments, and his skin darkened in tone as the melanin reacted to his commands. Muscles twisted and warped, and his eyes became more oval, and seemed to protrude more from his face, and his jowls and chin subtly reshaped. He no longer appeared to be eastern Asian in origin and could now pass for a native of Turkey. He marched up to the window in the guard house, rapped on it sharply and then took a step back. As the window opened, he presented the identity papers with an outstretched arm.

"Please get me the plant manager. I am here from the ministry, for your annual environmental impact assessment." He managed to get the words out without stumbling, and then made an obvious and conspicuous movement and started the digital stopwatch on his pad, holding it so the guard could see the numbers ticking upwards.

They waited, and barely two minutes after they had arrived, Aswon heard a high pitched whine, getting louder and louder. He subtly warned the others, and they were all turned and facing towards the main building when an electrically-powered cart slid around the turn at breakneck speed and drove towards them – the driver pushing the cart to the limit of its speed. It slid to a halt and a middle-aged man climbed from the back. He was slightly shorter than average and had a pronounced squint, with thinning hair and a florid complexion. His suit looked old but well made, though it was tight-fitting around his waist.

"Good morning, I'm Bahri Pollat, the plant manager. I'm sorry I wasn't here to meet you – we weren't expecting you until next week?"

Kai nodded and listened, though he barely made out half of the words of rapid fire Turkish. He theatrically hit the stop button on the timer, freezing the display at 135.19 seconds. Rather than responding, he trotted out the second of his memorised lines.

"We will continue this inspection in English, in deference to our two guests. This is Doctor Ngyu Umbango from Nigeria, and this is Natalya Kaishcovsky from the Ukraine." He switched from Turkish to English, speaking slowly and enunciating clearly. "Doctor Umbango is from the Nigerian Ministry of Mining, and is acting as a liaison for a new initiative they are working on with the Ministry of Economics, where we may be providing technical expertise and steel to assist their efforts. Ms Kaishcovsky is an environmental officer to the UN, and is here to observe our methods and audit our quality control and ensure that we receive appropriate tariff and customs discounts for maintaining our high standards."

As he introduced them, Aswon and Tads bowed and then shook hands with the plant manager. The manager had a broad smile on his face that was no more than skin deep. He swapped to English, proving to be reasonably fluent.

"Of course, and welcome to our country. I hope that we can provide you with all the information you need." The guard came out of the shack and passed over the ID to the plant manager, nodding at him and spoke a few words in Turkish. Bahri nodded and dismissed him absently, still starting at the group with the fake smile on his face. He called out as the guard turned to leave, asking for another cart to be bought around.

As they waited for the second vehicle, Hunter decided to add a little more pressure and up the ante somewhat. He waved the probe around, and sniffed at the air. The gas spectrometer built into his nasal cavity sampled the pollution and fed data to the analyser built into the back of his neck via the high speed router, and spat out the data onto his display link.

"Picking up high levels of Chromium Dioxide, Nitrogen Dioxide and nearly thirty-seven parts per million of class IV carcinogens."

"Really?" asked Kai. "Oh. Oh dear." He made a series of notes on his pad, ticking several boxes and highlighting some areas in a vibrant red. "Well, I'm sure there's a perfectly good explanation for this, isn't there, Mr. Pollat. I'm sure the filters are just being changed on the air scrubbers. It's always so hard to stop all the pollution, isn't it? I think we'll have to check them of course, rather than just go with the log reports from the SCADA systems, but everything will come out ok, I'm sure."

He beamed at the plant manager with a wide smile, and saw the sickly smile return – along with a few beads of sweat forming along his hair line. They listened while Bahri stammered his way through some explanation of how they had new staff on the maintenance team – apprentices, part of the continuing effort to enhance the education of local workers – but that sometimes mistakes were made. But he would be sure to look into it, and deal with it as necessary.

A second cart arrived, and the team were loaded into the vehicles, and taken – at a much more leisurely pace – round to the office block. It was a three-storey building, made out of stark prefabricated concrete blocks, harsh and ugly – but entirely in keeping with the rest of the facility. A wide set of steps led up to triple sets of double doors, and Bahri raced up the stairs to pull open the doors and usher them into the foyer, to begin their tour…