We lunched on giant tuna steaks and local white wine, as we had done so many times before. It was so natural to reminisce about the days when we would find ways to keep ourselves busy with the Inter-City Games. The event was fabulously ill-conceived. It might just have worked before the Last Great War, but since that time the Games were doomed to remain no more than a distant dream of a stubborn mind. Violent antipathy between the major centres of population was one thing, but worse was the stonewall refusal of each council to sanction any movement of their athletes outside their city boundaries. They would cite the dangers of physically travelling around the country (in reality, these had mostly been dealt with by that stage – in the aftermath of War the concerns had been genuine enough, but the situation had vastly improved); complaints regarding the sub-standard facilities they would find in other cities; lack of preparation time (although no date had ever been agreed upon, despite months of negotiation); and the fair distribution of gate receipts and television rights. The historical adoption of different units of measurement in each city had been a surprisingly simple one to resolve. I had predicted that would have been the final nail in the coffin.

As a result, our own work was purely academic. We knew the history of our section, and took great pleasure in dreaming up innovative and surprising formats, locations or methods of scoring. Every now and then we would run the latest portfolio of ideas past our management, who would approve them. Then we would publicise them fully and they would be thrown back in our faces among volleys of personal abuse. It was a magical time.

I spent the afternoon back in our building, much of it on the roof with the remainder of a bottle we couldn’t finish over lunch, attempting to straighten my thoughts. Alex hadn’t returned to the office with us: it was one of his ritual days and he had remained at the waterfront. He wouldn’t eat or drink anything for the next 24 hours. Downstairs, I took advantage of his absence and spilled over into his territory, extending my working area by adding another easel alongside my initial work of the previous day.

To the existing picture I added what I had learned in the morning: the urgent need to develop the test zone, the inadequate warehousing, the helium solution Small had dangled, Sergeant Magath. Underneath that name, I noted the importance of locating the bad-tempered Sergeant with the frayed cuffs.

Online, I found a set of articles on the major milestones in our history of space exploitation, which I read with awe. Small’s Sergeant Magath appeared to feature regularly. Reverently, I underlined his name on my sheets, and was just about to pack up and go to watch the sunset from the roof when my phone rang. It was Colonel Brown. I was surprised to hear from him rather than Major Thompson. He wanted me to visit first thing the next day; there was somebody very important I needed to meet.

I arrived at Headquarters early in the morning. For a start, I was keen to avoid running into Farbrace, but I also wanted to give myself a chance of finding the bad-tempered Sergeant with the frayed cuffs. I had to know more about the testing zone. Maybe he had some ideas about how some of the bureaucratic processes could be short-circuited. From our brief meeting the day before, I had the impression he knew a lot more than he had managed to get across.

No doubt finding him would have been much easier had I remembered his name. I had only a vague recollection of the name of his department, too. In the lobby, I studied the board which told who was located on each floor. The names all sounded too similar. I could only discount the 12th and 33rd floors with any certainty.

After 90 minutes I had reached as far as the 6th floor, which was where I was due to meet Colonel Brown and somebody very important. I was impressed: the monotony of the sight of uniformed staff had been ingeniously avoided by the application of an individual aesthetic identity to each level. The third floor, for example, eschewed the more usual layout of long, regular batteries of desks, and provided instead the large circular variety, around which maybe twenty soldiers would settle for the day. The fifth floor had turned over its real estate almost exclusively to conference rooms housing anything from 1 to 30 bodies. The sixth was lighted completely electrically. The windows were covered in heavy tight blinds. The carpet was of a noticeably thicker pile than the other floors. Uncommonly thick, in fact. I almost stumbled on it several times.

How all these environmental differences affected working conditions or the state of mind of those within, I could only guess. The one thing each level had in common, though, was an insufficiency of stations for their population. Throughout, I noticed few empty chairs, despite the early hour, and everywhere busy soldiers thronged in the available spaces: walkways, corners, alcoves, lobbies, vending zones; all doubled as transitory work areas for the eternally mobile. My head swam at the sheer volume of activity, both human and electronic.

There had been no sign on my travels of the bad-tempered Sergeant with the frayed cuffs. My initial fears of a futile search of pre-dawn empty offices had soon been supplanted with the feeling that I was on a hunt for a needle in a constantly morphing haystack. The result was the same.

I found the place where Colonel Brown had asked me to meet him, and went in. The first face I saw upon opening the door was Corporal Farbrace’s. His grin filled the far side of the table. Between him and the doorway were two men I didn’t recognise. One turned around as I entered and closed the door.

‘Ah, there you are. Was hoping you might have been early. Early is good. Never mind. At least you’re not late. We should be grateful for small mercies.’

The voice was familiar, I had heard it very recently, but the owner was not. I replayed the last few days in my mind as I stood by the door. Just in time, I found a match in my memory. Colonel Brown’s face became obvious once I realised. His hair had darkened to the colour of the milk stout they still give to the pregnant women down by the port, but his moustache remained untouched in the smoky grey I remembered. I said hello and sat down. Brown’s eyes followed my every movement suspiciously.

‘This is Captain Canning,’ he said, after a pause. The young man next to him raised his eyes and looked at me with a diaphanous smile. ‘He’s been assigned to the program. I imagine he’ll be a very great help to you.’ Canning’s face remained unchanged. ‘He can round up all the people you need to talk to, do some of the legwork, keep track of workstreams, make sure everybody’s concentrating on the right thing. Report back to me. You know the form.’

A fly was buzzing around the room. Brown had already swept it away twice. Now, it seemed particularly attracted to Farbrace’s outstretched palm, and finally it landed there. It folded its legs and settled. In a flash his small hand had clamped shut. I could barely make out the movement, it was so fast, and saw no evidence of the fly’s escape. In another second or two, the Corporal started to open his clenched fist, finger by finger. Once the palm was totally flat once more, there sat the fly. It unfolded its wings, jumped to its feet and resumed its flight, although now safely far away from any of us.

‘That’s excellent news, sir,’ I said to the Colonel. ‘But I thought Captain Small, or now Corporal Farbrace, was taking that role. How does Captain Canning fit in with them?’

‘Small’s not the right person for this,’ he said, completely ignoring Farbrace. ‘She’s more operational, and she’s got her fingers into too many pies already. Canning is your man. His Hansen tests indicate clearly that he’s an end-to-end orchestrator. I’ve checked on Small. She’s a teaser. Not what you need at all.’

Canning nodded sagely. He was clearly very comfortable as an end-to-end orchestrator. I had never taken the Hansen tests.

‘Now,’ Brown continued, ‘I want you and Captain Canning to get to know each other. Pretend I’m not here. I’ve got things to do anyway. If it helps, I’ll turn the other way.’

He turned his chair, faced the blacked-out window and took out his mobile phone. He flicked through screens slowly. Farbrace was composing a pencil sketch of the fly, which was walking across and up the end wall. I struggled to picture how it might have found its way into the room in the first place. His sketch was very, very good.

‘Can you start by bringing me right up to date with where you are?’ Canning asked. ‘I’ve been lightly briefed on the program but I think it would be useful to hear all the latest developments from the horse’s mouth, as it were. I can ask questions as we go along. If that’s alright with you.’

I told him of my experience the previous day, of the thermomechanic-cum-demand modeller and the bad-tempered Sergeant with the frayed cuffs. I related the facts carefully, exactly as I recalled them, especially those relating to the disputed consumption estimates. I even referred to the detailed notes I took. As I spoke, Canning jotted his own notes into a large, unlined pad.

‘This Sergeant sounds like an interesting character,’ he said. ‘What did you say his name was?’

I had to admit my ignorance. Farbrace was equally clueless. He promised to ask Captain Small as soon as he got back to his desk.

‘OK, well that’s a good enough start,’ Canning continued writing as he spoke. ‘Thanks for the background. Can you give me a list of people you need to engage with, across the board? I can make a start on rounding them up, organise some meetings.’

‘I’m not sure I can, to be honest,’ I replied. ‘I don’t know a great deal more than you do at this stage. I’m new to the military, and to the logistics game. My contact book is empty.’

‘Mine too!’ he was still writing, filling the empty cream pages with his green ink. ‘I was hoping to use Captain Small’s experience in that area, but I’ve been asked to leave her alone. She has other priorities, I’m told. But I understood you were fully briefed, so she was effectively superfluous. Is that not the case?’

‘I’m familiar with the situations we need to address, and becoming more familiar by the day,’ I said, ‘but I don’t have Small’s experience and have no history, no relationships. Nobody owes me a favour. How about you, Corporal?’ I turned to Farbrace. ‘Do you think you can come up with a list of people that the Captain here can start to line up? Maybe ask Captain Small to help?’

‘My man, leave it with me,’ he snapped his thumb into his palm with a flick of his supple wrist. Canning wrote some more.

‘I was going to suggest,’ I continued, ‘that we were the blind leading the blind. But it’s even better than that: add Corporal Farbrace into the mix and we’re more like the three blind mice! I wonder who’s playing the farmer’s wife.’

Colonel Brown let his mobile device drop to his lap and turned his head to look at me.

‘What about Project Tardis?’ Canning asked. ‘Who have you reached out to there?’

Project Tardis, he informed me, was a root-and-branch piece of work that had been in progress for something more than two years. It was investigating the most effective ways of improving the size and efficiency of the produce warehousing.

‘It’s one of the largest in-flight military projects today,’ he added. ‘Millions will be invested in the core distribution centres. It’s fundamental. They’re just about to get their hands on the first part of that cash, so that they can run a full study cycle and produce some recommendations. I’ve got names of some of the big players. I’ll pass them on to you.’

I gave him my mobile phone number. He wrote it in a special place at the back of his book.

‘And what about a test environment?’ he said. ‘Have you got one earmarked? Or are you building one? We’ll probably need something dedicated to us for a few weeks, don’t you think?’

‘I do. And longer than a few weeks, I’d suggest.’ I related the bad-tempered Sergeant’s tale of the test zone and its dependence on the various agreements and sign-offs. As I did so, Colonel Brown turned fully to face us once more.

‘It’s an excellent suggestion Canning makes,’ he said. ‘I don’t see how you can do this without some kind of test environment. Otherwise you’re just guessing. We don’t need guesswork from the likes of you. There are people inside this organisation who can do a damn sight better than guesswork. I’d get straight onto that. We don’t have much time, you know.’

I pointed out how aware I was of the time constraints, and outlined the bad-tempered Sergeant’s predictions of how long it would take me to reprioritise workloads and implement the test zone. Perhaps, I suggested, he might be able to lend some weight to the matter and bend a few rules, just to get us moving.

‘No chance of that, I’m afraid,’ he shook his head firmly. ‘You might try Colonel Watson, although I don’t suppose he’ll be too happy to hear the news. Won’t surprise me if you don’t have time to get it all in place, although I don’t see how you’re going to convince anyone of anything without it. But you’re a smart chap. You’ll work something out.’

We, Canning and I, spent the remainder of the time discussing what we considered to be immediate priorities, and arranging to meet again soon. I agreed to come to Headquarters whenever we needed to meet in person. My own working location was not discussed. He had my number, and I was always available for him.

I left the room just before the hour, with Corporal Farbrace in tow. No sooner had we rounded the first corner than I heard an urgent whispering noise coming from behind another door. I looked: it was Captain Small, and she was beckoning us in. We obeyed.

‘What’s up?’ I asked, removing Farbrace’s hand from my shoulder.

‘Wanted to see you alone,’ she said. ‘What do you make of Canning?’

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘I’ve only just met him. He seems reasonable enough. Asked sensible questions. Confident. Colonel Brown likes him, I think.’

‘I’ve been doing some background,’ she snarled. ‘He’s one of those golden boys. His father is some kind of bigwig in sports management. Graduated first in his class in officer school. Highest score for quite some years, in fact. Higher than mine. Thing is, it took me a while to find his results, because I was searching the last couple of years. I couldn’t find him. Then I looked at the year before me, and there he was. I thought it was odd I’d never heard of him if he’d been an officer even longer than I had. And then I found out what happened to his previous company.’

Farbrace and I sat down.

‘He was invalided out of his first tour,’ she told us. ‘His job was to take a bunch of tradesmen and general labourers across the Fantasians to the new territory. This was almost as soon as the War was over. We needed to bring them up to our building specifications: materials, safety standards, density, all of that sort of thing. They had had some interesting ideas about architecture. What you might describe as old-fashioned, if you were being kind. Showy, wasteful, pointless. I saw some of the photos the task force had sent back.

‘Canning was in charge of the whole shooting match. About 200 men. He started with the National Library. I’d say that was an obvious choice, based on what I know. Practically and figuratively it made a good point, but he gave himself a problem. They tore it down and replaced it with a copy of our Central Library. Are you aware of the building?’

I was aware of the Central Library. I had walked past it every morning when we had been in our old place, before we were relocated to the port. It was a perfect 30 metre cube. I had been told that it had taken a week to build, and would stand for around 150 years. It was grey, and almost always in shadow. It was the most straightforward building to clean or to mend or to draw that had ever been erected, it was earthquake-proof and efficient to heat and cool.

‘There was an absolute riot when the people realised what had happened. Seems they were attached to their old library. More attached than anybody realised. We lost 20 men in the clashes over the next night or two, before order was restored. A hundred or so more were injured. That’s more than in the War itself.’

‘We lost men in the War?’ I interrupted. ‘There was no fighting. Was there? I thought it was no more than a formality and we just marched straight in?’

‘Not quite,’ she grimaced. ‘You might as well know, now that you’re one of us. Two casualties were recorded. They had been in the country for some time, sending back intelligence. Their cover had been to become architects, which they did. And it seems they grew a bit too close to their subject. Always a danger when working undercover. They knew full well what would happen, architecturally, when we came in to take over. So they organised a resistance movement. Our own people! It flourished. Probably the best run organisation in the country for years. If everything else had been as efficient as that militia, they would never have got in the state they did and we would never have had to move in.

‘Anyway, when it became clear that the invasion was imminent, the Resistance assigned the two architects, our spies, to a team that was looking after a strategic bridge over the Winton Valley. There’s a first tier of mountains, then the valley to cross before scaling the second set. Like series of shark’s teeth, they are. There were only three safe places to make that crossing. The bridge was one of them. As soon as they were alone on duty there, the Resistance blew the bridge to smithereens, and our spies with it. Turns out they were desperate to be invaded. The whole country was a mess, and they didn’t know how to sort it out. That same night our army marched in over one of the other bridges and took the surrender. We have to count those two as our casualties of war, even though they were fighting against us at the time.

‘So, Canning’s company got caught on the hop, and 20 men didn’t make it. But they dug in, called for some reinforcements and started again. It wasn’t like the plan said, though. Everywhere, they met with difficulties. Petty sabotage, irritating blockades, the odd sniper. Like low-level buzzing-fly guerrilla techniques. They thought they could handle it, but the organisation, and violence, increased and they started to lose more men. Then one night they were ambushed just outside one of the large eastern cities that was known for its historical housing. Totally torn apart. Half of them were butchered, and Canning himself was only saved in the nick of time from the lynch mob. They sped back here. He had lost the movement in his right arm, and was suffering from almost total amnesia. Stress-induced, they recorded.’

‘So, what happened to the rebuilding program?’ I asked. This was not information shared outside military circles. I had always been led to believe that the invasion was clean and simple.

‘It took a year or so to get back on track,’ she said. ‘The Government mustered a much more well-equipped force, twice the size, half construction and half defence, and it went pretty smoothly that time. We lost plenty of subjects, though. Many of them emigrated during the hiatus, while they still could. Couldn’t bear to see their home standardised to our specification. That’s their choice, although it was a disappointment that we didn’t inherit as many people as we’d expected. One northerly district ceded completely and moved to a neighbouring state. They’ve been granted their own autonomous enclave. And they moved lock, stock and barrel: actually dismantled most of their public buildings and carried them across. Just so they could preserve their way of life. When our troops got there, it was totally deserted. Not just of people, but of everything. It took a while to piece together what had happened.’

I suppressed a giggle. The idea of moving your entire life in order to preserve it was an extreme one, but worthy of respect. ‘What about Canning, then? He seems to have recovered.’

‘He was eventually discharged from hospital, took a sabbatical and spent some time on television, presenting a cookery show. He’s an excellent cook, by all accounts. And then recently he was cleared to return to the military. This is his first posting back.’

‘What is it, then, that you don’t like about him?’ I asked.

‘He’s a classroom officer. I’ve seen them all over. Perfect in the exams, inept when it comes to reality. He managed to lose over half of his men doing some non-combat clean-up work after a war which cost us barely a single life. Who knows what might happen here. You need to be careful. If he asks you to do anything, anything at all, run it by me first. There may be consequences. He’s supposed to be trained to anticipate them, but I wouldn’t take any chances.’

‘If you say so,’ I said. She seemed very agitated about Canning. I was happy enough to fall in with her plan.

‘Good,’ she sounded relieved. ‘I’m glad we’re agreed on that. There’s probably nothing to worry about, but it doesn’t hurt to be careful.

‘Now, there’s one more thing, too,’ she continued. ‘I forgot to mention it yesterday, but it needs dealing with. It’s about the outlets.’

I remembered her throwaway comment when we had parted on my first day. I had even scribbled it on my worksheets, but I had no details. She explained. The supermarkets, mostly, were struggling with the changing models of demand. For years they had been operating under the daily two-peak model, and they had it taped. Their delivery schedules, storage and retrieval techniques, staffing models and financial planning was all rooted in the model, and had been for as long as anybody could remember. But the changes in consumption habits were starting to cause problems. Many of the major outlets were now overstocked at certain times of day, and food with a short shelf-life was spoiling. This meant that at new peak times there had been shortages. There had been quite severe shortages, in fact. Small riots had broken out at some of the more remote stores, as the knock-on effects had led to whole days with no food available for a hungry public.

The supermarkets needed to adjust the fundamental manner in which they operated. They would have to become more flexible. That wouldn’t be easy for an industry that had been so grooved into its long-standing rhythm, but there was no option. They would have to respond to the changes in the environment, no matter how painful.

‘Surely,’ I said, ‘this change in demand is a purely sociological phenomenon. It doesn’t actually have anything to do with the new shuttles. It’s already happening.’

‘You’re right. The transition to the five-peak model is organic. But let’s not forget that we’re exacerbating it by bringing in all this additional food. We have to take responsibility. It makes sense. You’re going to need to make sure that Captain Canning has it in his scope.’

I made the familiar journey west once more. The supermarkets, Project Tardis and rudimentary cartoons of three blind mice, still possessed of their tails, took their places on my ever-expanding easelscape. I stood back to take it all in. I approached once more. In the top left-hand corner I wrote the word “CANNING??” I pondered for a while. In the opposite corner I wrote “SMALL??”