Unable to catch the eyes of my colleagues, I let my attention wander through the vast windows across the sprawling city. It had become increasingly uniform, even during my own lifetime, and there wasn’t much to keep my interest. I looked anyway.

I was drawn to the distant aerospace centre, clearly visible from our vantage point: the military headquarters rose high above everything else in the immediate vicinity. The runways were busy, as ever, and the buzz of activity all around gave the scene an air of organised chaos; accidental efficiency. Somehow, goods made it from the shuttles, through the various processing points and out to whatever further transport awaited it. I saw trains creaking slowly up to speed as they left the vast depots, and trucks hauling themselves through security checks onto the potholed roads, heavily armed guards hanging from sides and crouching on tops. Meanwhile, the shuttles were spruced up: hosed down, patched up where necessary, refuelled, remanned and relaunched. Milked, he had said. In that case, what I was watching, from a distance, was the methodical yet agonising squeezing of dry, cracked teats, and a few sorry drops of liquid dribbled into the huge bucket.

I tried to feel hunger; deep, urgent hunger, just to get used to the idea, but it wasn’t possible right then and there.

Major Thompson rose and took his leave, muttering something to Captain Small about having to be somewhere else. When he had disappeared I looked at her, and she smiled at me again. With that sign, our lunch was completed.

As soon as the Major had left the room, a team of waiters stripped our table bare of every adornment save for the ikebana. They returned and hovered, unsmiling and thunderheaded behind the maître d’, who simply cleared his throat, his hand resting on the back of my chair, ready to assist me.

Small was clearly waiting for me to make my move, and I did so straight away. I walked nervously toward the lift, closely escorted by the whole posse of servants. They were as good as propelling me from the hall.

The lift door closed tight on my short foray into privilege. Unsure of what to do, I pressed the button for the ground floor. I supposed I ought to go somewhere else. Captain Small settled into the far corner, saying nothing. We stopped at almost every level on the way down, taking on and shedding uniformed passengers.

She followed me from the building and we were on the street. Apparently we were a team, but there was little in our dynamic that hinted at that. I really had drawn a blank with her up to that stage, and there was much to work on.

Her expressionless face tired me. Her eyes hung quite low in their sockets and they pulled the top of my head down below where I wanted it to be as I was trying to engage them. My neck had started to hurt.

The street was choked with traffic and commerce, as usual. It was a part of our capital with which I had become quite unfamiliar in recent years, but I knew enough to be wary of it. Years of necessity had leached all the organic vitality from it, turning the whole place into an uber-efficient caricature of what it had once stood for. How it managed to combine such stark functionality with undeniable and irreversible neglect, I had no idea. It was the worst of both worlds.

Not far away, according to my hazy memory, was a pub. Given the depressed state of our surroundings, I didn’t hold out much hope for anything great, but it was still an example of our remaining national treasure, and I hadn’t finished drinking for the day. I started along the main road toward it. I assumed that Captain Small would follow me, and she did just that.

We turned down a side-street or two, and before long I found the place. I might not have taken the most direct route available, but we were there. We went in. It was half full. I got myself the largest drink I could find. Small passed. I took a seat at a table in the corner and watched her watching me.

‘I’m a bit surprised, I must say,’ I started. I didn’t discern any movement on her face. ‘The situation seems to be quite serious. I’d say we’ve got a lot to do in a short time. Do you think it’s possible?’

‘We don’t have a choice,’ she said. Her voice was as thin as her lips. It probably wouldn’t have got out otherwise. ‘I think it’s quite clear what we need to do, but there are many strands to pull together. Don’t worry – we’ve got all the best people around who can help us out. I know quite a few of them, and I’ll put you in touch. With their help, you’ll find the right direction.’

She continued, listing some of the main players and their particular areas of expertise. Her knowledge of the personnel was impressive, and I grew less agitated as she went on and my drink diminished. I wondered how long she had been part of the organisation. When she finished, I asked her.

‘About two years,’ she replied. She had a special modest face that she used when talking about herself, her eyes suddenly cowled with heavy lids which had been fully retracted during her earlier professional recital of facts and names. ‘I used to be a schoolteacher, but I gave it up after a few years.’ She looked at me timidly. That was quite a confession. The post of teacher was one of the most respected in our society, which venerated education almost as much as seniority. The military was probably the only comparable career, in terms of social acceptance.

She couldn’t stand the children, she told me. ‘It’s one of the things you’ll never think will be a problem,’ she said, ‘but it was for so many of us. Other people’s children. Too much so for me. I converted on the accelerated officer’s course. If you’ve been a teacher, half of the syllabus is waived. Then I got assigned straight to logistics. As it happens, the deck you saw at lunch was the first thing I worked on, together with Terry. Major Thompson, I mean. So I’m pretty familiar with the challenges.’

Was nobody free from their share of responsibility? So far, everybody I had met was only too well aware of the perilous fate facing our country.

Captain Small folded her small, unadorned hands on the table. Despite the changing times, there was still something unsettling about seeing somebody in a pub without a drink. Her uniform seemed to strengthen the feeling in me. And she was the one person I had on my side. I wasn’t sure how much support I would be getting from Major Thompson. I sipped my pint and set it to one side so that it didn’t interfere too much with our initial discussion.

‘How did you enjoy lunch?’ I asked her.

‘Lunch?’ she said. ‘Lunch was fine.’

‘Have you eaten there before?’

‘Once or twice. Major Thompson is there more regularly than I am, but I find myself there sometimes. The views are very wide. Really, it’s a bit old-fashioned for my liking, but the senior officers like it very much.’

I let a long pause develop as I studied her. There was something scrupulously honest about her face and her manner. Like she was incapable of telling a lie. ‘I’m not totally sure where to start,’ I began eventually, ‘but I suppose that’s what we have to decide. Why don’t we try and apply some logic and start at the very top?’

‘Good idea,’ she said, and offered no more.

‘The atmosphere,’ I continued. ‘These new shuttles can’t get through it without burning up, am I right?’

‘Correct,’ she confirmed, without taking her eyes off me. She had not the slightest interest in anything else that might have been happening around us.

‘I’m no expert,’ I went on, ‘but I’m not sure we can do an awful lot about the chemical or physical make-up of the atmosphere. So we’d probably have to do something about the vessel and the path it takes. Can we slow it down, change its trajectory, remove some weight? Anything that might make it less likely to burst into flames before we’re even started? I don’t know. I’m thinking out loud. What do you reckon might be possible?’

‘You’re on the right lines,’ she said. ‘Good suggestions, considering you’ve only just come on board. They’ve certainly put some thought into making the whole package lighter. Apparently they’ve shaved off about 10 per cent of its weight in the last release.’

She stopped. I had expected her to carry on.

‘So, has that made a noticeable difference?’ I prompted. ‘Ten per cent sounds like a significant amount. Does that remove some of the danger?’

‘I don’t know,’ she shrugged her padded shoulders. ‘It’s not actually possible to test it in a realistic environment. Like Major Thompson mentioned, they can’t get the thing launched, so they’ve got no idea how it’ll re-enter.’

‘They have no representative testing setup?’ I asked.

‘No. Not for years. We operate a fix forward model instead.’

‘A what?’

‘Fix forward,’ she repeated, as blandly as anyone ever had. ‘We rectify any problems in the live environment. It’s quicker and more cost-effective than performing extensive testing pre-launch.’

‘You mean you suck it and see, and if it fails, you make modifications until it’s right.’

‘Well, the way you put it sounds quite basic, but that’s the process, in a nutshell.’

Facts, I told myself. Concentrate firstly on the facts and not on the implications. Only once I had the whole picture in my head could I decide whether or not it had aesthetic merit.

‘Do the designers think they can make the shuttles any lighter, or is this ten per cent as far as they can go?’

‘Hmmmm,’ she cocked her head onto one side. It was a quirky thing to do and I liked her for it. ‘They’re always trying. It’s the way they’re trained. Iterative improvements. But I wouldn’t have thought they could get much more off it. It’s at a pretty advanced stage of development, and it must be well optimised by now. Having said that, it’s impossible to know. And they can’t tell us.’

I continued my line of enquiry. My logic was leading me along several screaming, attention-demanding paths all at once and I had to prioritise and silence the most vociferous as quickly as possible. ‘Are we the only people having trouble with this?’ I asked. ‘I mean, there are other countries in the world who grow their food in the same sort of place, and need to transport it back here and to their people. What do they do? What do their shuttles look like?’

‘Oh, I know all about that,’ she chirped. ‘I’ve got cousins living in some of our neighbouring countries. And most of the officers I started here with. They’ve moved away, but I still speak to them.’

‘Go on,’ I encouraged her.

‘Well, of course they can’t tell me too much, but I know the basics,’ she started. ‘It’s peculiar,’ she chose her words carefully, I thought. ‘There doesn’t seem to be much of a pattern, at least not one I can make out. Some of them use enormous shuttles. Great lumbering things, they are. I have no idea how they get them through to the landing strip in one piece. Must be some clever trick they use. And then some others use much smaller versions of the same sort of thing. If we could come up with something that small we’d be fine.’

‘Why are their shuttles so much smaller than ours?’ I asked, involuntarily.

‘Could be a few reasons,’ she nodded as she told me, sagely. ‘They have fewer people to feed, of course. We have over twice the population of anybody else, since the war and the land gains.’

She was referring to the Last Great War, which had lasted for about a week during the last hot summer we had known, three years previously. I had only just arrived in the country. The neighbour directly to our north, on the leeward side of the Fantasians, an awkward and mostly impassable range of mountains that seemed far higher than they really were, had hit rock bottom. Drought, a plague of advanced bureaucracy, mass emigration and a chronic failure to control organised crime had, between them, left the country on its knees. Our forces were in no position to not pounce and annexe the ailing state. They called it a war, but in reality it was no contest. The token resistance lasted a few days, until our troops advanced far enough to have them in their sights, at which point the white flag was raised. It acquired the title of the Last Great War since it was abundantly clear to everyone that there would never be another war worth fighting, if those were the spoils.

But it was too late: we had won the war, and were forced by convention to accept the results. Our population almost doubled, crime rates soared, school standards slipped and the expense of scrapping the entire physical and political machinery of that doomed nation came as close to bankrupting us as anything ever had. We were just emerging from that difficult period as I sat in the pub with Captain Small.

‘And because of the huge population, we have unique problems to solve,’ Small continued. ‘I know for a fact,’ she said, ‘that some of those to the east are experimenting with much lighter crops. They hardly have to compromise on nutrition at all, I’ve heard. The advances in farming and in the physiology of their people mean that they can survive on around one quarter of the weight of feed they did two years ago. Quite amazing.’

Now we were getting somewhere. This sounded like the sort of solution we needed. I wanted to hear more, and I leaned forward with my pint in my hand.

‘And people eat this food and live quite happily on it, do they?’ I asked

‘Yes, they love it, by all accounts. You wouldn’t have believed it ten, even five years ago. But they’ve adapted really well, in a kind of collective effort across the board. I suppose they had to. It’s certainly headed off any production and distribution problems they might have been worried about.’

This was perfect, unless I was missing something. Other countries had identified and attacked the same sustainability problem and, it seemed, come up with a beautifully balanced solution. If we were to go down the same route, we could halve the size of our shuttles. Maybe reduce them even more than that.

‘Well, can we do the same sort of thing?’ I overflowed.

Her face tightened noticeably. She started to laugh an unconvincing laugh.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

‘We’ve got about six weeks. You’re trying to stretch that out to three months. Even if you manage to get anyone to agree to that, I don’t think you’re going to change the whole agronomic model, much less convince our people to change their diet so radically. You’re talking about a five or ten year re-education programme. And around the same to introduce the new growing conditions. That’s once you’ve convinced the farmers it’s a good thing. They don’t take well to change, you know.’

I turned a page in my notebook. I had hardly written anything on the first leaf, but turning to a virgin sheet gave me a feeling close to control and a fresh start.

‘Alright,’ I muttered. Small remained unmoved: her hands were still folded on the table, the left one on top of the right. I would have arranged them the other way. Outside, the rain had started, but she ignored it. Most of the pedestrians were totally unprepared for it, although some were visibly enjoying its cooling effect. It hardly rained any more, and very few people owned an umbrella. It was a far cry from the days, with stories of which my dead Grammy had entranced me, when rain held a significant part in the national consciousness. I owned an umbrella. I owned it purely to keep her memory alive.

‘Let’s leave aside the problem of the atmosphere for a while. I think I need to organise my thoughts on it,’ I said to Captain Small. ‘Can we investigate another part of the solution? How about the airstrip? Sounds like that could be an area we need to look at, too.’

‘Hmmm,’ she pursed her entire face. ‘That’s a nasty one. Probably your biggest challenge. I’d say you need to address it first. Before anything else.’

‘Can you outline what exactly the concern is? What would happen if we tried to land our new shuttle on the current runway?’

‘Land a next generation shuttle on the current runway??’ she giggled. ‘Excuse me for laughing, but it’s the first time I’ve heard somebody suggest that. Tickled me.’

I drank, slowly. I wanted to like her.

‘Why is that so laughable?’ I asked. ‘What would happen?’

She gathered herself into her usual tidy package of implacability. ‘It’s difficult to be totally sure,’ she mulled. ‘But it’s unlikely the physical runways would take the impact of landing. These new shuttles are so huge that they’d probably cut through the surface like it was butter. Even today, some landings cause damage. The structure of the runways is deteriorating: they’re quite old now, and don’t have the elasticity or resilience they once did. We have dedicated teams on standby for running repairs.’

I swallowed hard.

‘And,’ she continued without prompting, ‘it’s most likely that any shuttle that lands safely will overshoot the runway. They’re only eight miles long. That’s way below what the designers are recommending. About half of it.’

‘Sixteen miles long?’ I queried even as I wrote it on my new sheet. ‘That does seem a lot. Are you sure?’

‘These shuttles need to keep up a certain speed. Otherwise they’ll just plummet out of the sky. Simulations suggest that they’ll need to land at around Mach 2.’

I stopped writing and sat back in my seat. We were constantly returning to the same problem. ‘Can you explain to me, in simple terms, why the shuttles absolutely have to be that size?’ I asked her. ‘I understand the issue with the huge population, and I also understand that we can’t make any fundamental changes to the foodstuffs we provide, at least not straight away. But is there nothing else we can try? How about making twice as many shuttles of half the size? Would that do the trick?’

‘Let me set up a meeting. I’ve got some good contacts within the shuttle design team. I’m not the expert in that area, but I can get someone to explain fully. I know it’s got something to do with critical loading ratios, and flight hours for the pilots. Regulation is a big consideration for us nowadays, especially now we’re so big. And,’ she paused for a second and looked as if she were trying to drag something out of a deep recess within her memory, ‘I’m convinced there’s something to do with velocity. If I’m right, I’d say that a smaller or weaker shuttle will literally fall apart at the space-speeds it has to keep up. Don’t forget: this new moon is a lot further distant than our current one.’

We sat in silence for a while. I tried to represent the problem in diagrammatic shorthand form in my pad. It was a defence mechanism I reverted to when I had no idea which way to turn. I thought that, if I could only describe the impenetrable situation in a more stylish or ingenious form, I had gone some way to solving it. Furthermore, if something became a work of art, it ceased to be purely an intellectual challenge. This one was proving difficult even to define artistically, though. She watched me work, then sat up and began talking again.

‘One of the major sticking points,’ she started, ‘is the unpredictable pattern of demand. It’s difficult to tell when shuttles might need to be landed.’ I looked up slowly from my book. I realised I had doodled a sort of eternally spiralling cigar whose ends met in five different dimensions. I was glad she had started talking again.

‘The food has to come in as soon as it’s requested. That’s a given. The kind of crops we’ll be growing on the new moon are much more sensitive in their make-up, and they demand to be consumed whilst fresh, or else kept in an atmosphere that we have here on the surface, but can’t recreate on the moon or in a craft. The benefits are quite significant for the consumer, too. It’s how we used to grow food when the current moon was young, although we haven’t been able to do that for a while now… Anyway, one way or another, there’s almost no shelf-life. And if we have small shuttles, never mind all the other issues, we might have to land multiple in the same window.’

‘And we can’t land multiple shuttles, is that what you’re telling me?’ I scribbled the question on the page as I was asking it.

‘Probably not,’ she mused. It wasn’t an outright negative, and I looked up at her. ‘We have 25 runways today, which we use for the current delivery regime. But we can’t carry on that way. Operationally it’s exhausting. Like I said, we’re experiencing more and more deterioration on many of them, and each strip is taking increasing effort just to keep in service. The staffing levels for repairs, inspections, reporting, cleaning and all that related business are growing all the time. Our costs for wages and overtime are now greater than those for rocket fuel.’

I was writing furiously in my book by now. She gave me the name of an analyst who had done some cost-benefit work with interesting results. I made a note to speak to him soon.

‘Mind you, I say we’ve got 25 runways, but five of them have fallen out of service, and we can’t do anything about them. Another four are reserved for other military purposes – propaganda mostly – so we’re really only talking about 16. It’s one of the main reasons we can’t get enough food in. The 16 are completely overrun. When Colonel Brown told you that the moon had grown sterile, it wasn’t quite the whole story.

‘But the point is that we have to keep the number of runways to a minimum. Ideally, we’d have no more than two. We’ve identified six that are possible to upgrade to the required specification, and we don’t want to use all of them. It simply wouldn’t be worth it.’

‘So how come the demand is so unpredictable?’ I asked. ‘I don’t doubt that it’s better all round to provide everything as fresh as possible, but we already feed the nation. When do they eat now? Don’t we know?’

‘What we know now doesn’t matter, according to our analysts. Habits are changing. People are eating more little, more often. It’s a more efficient way to process food, the experts are telling them. Especially now that they’ve got wind of the fact that it’s possible to ship in fresh supplies in a matter of minutes with these new shuttles. It’s exactly what they’re seeing in other countries who are using this model. Mealtimes are spread more evenly across around a 20-hour period of each day now. It’s true liberation from the constraints of yesterday’s supply chain.’

‘Yet we’re unable to match our tomorrow’s supply chain to such unconstrained demand? What about these boffins? Has nobody managed to map out even a rough prediction of the demand, given what we already know, from ourselves and others?’

‘I can help there,’ she smiled. ‘I’ve got us a meeting tomorrow with one of our analysts. Well, I say he’s one of our analysts, but he’s actually more of a talented amateur. His speciality is thermomechanics, and he’s been involved in designing the new shuttles, but he’s done a bit of work on the side that ought to show us how demand is going to look. It should give us some ideas. We can base most of our recommendations on that work.’

I snapped my book shut. I had written enough. There was so much to consider already. Nothing was clear, but if Thompson and Brown had such faith in me, it was only right that I started off in the same frame of mind. I had to remain positive. I was also encouraged by her manner, which had become much more animated and friendly the more I drank.

‘Why don’t we talk about something else?’ I suggested. She looked unsure, but I carried on. ‘It looks like we’re a team, whether we like it or not. I’m sure it would help if we knew a bit more about each other. Where do you come from? What did you study at school? What do you do when you’re not in uniform? What are your plans? Tell me something. Tell me something that isn’t something I then have to fix.’

She looked down at her hands for a minute. I had probably made her feel uncomfortable, but if I was going to trust her, and it looked like I had no alternative, I had to like her, even if only a tiny bit. And, once I’d got her to open up, I could try and find out some more about Major Thompson.

‘I’m sorry to put you on the spot,’ I said, ‘but I need a rest from rockets and runways for a while.’

‘It’s OK. It’s just I haven’t told anyone yet, because I only found out today,’ she started. And she stopped.

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘You have to tell me, now that you’ve gone that far. And it’s not as if I know anyone you know, so I can’t spill the beans before you get a chance. What is it?’

‘I suppose it can’t do any harm,’ she said. ‘I’m getting married.’

‘You’re getting married,’ I repeated. ‘You?’ It wasn’t meant to sound derisive, but up to that point I hadn’t thought of her that way. Only a limited percentage, I believed around a third, of the adult population were cleared for marriage, and a subset of those ultimately allowed to breed. To be sexually active, above board, was a very great privilege. She was on the brink of the seriously elite.

I congratulated her, as a reflex action. A foreigner myself, I was ineligible for marriage and children unless I naturalised, which I had no ambition to do. Still, I recognised the importance of her news. She even shared her plans to apply for children within the next few years. That truly would cement her place at the pinnacle of society. I wondered if Thompson was aware of her ambitions.

My impression of her had changed radically in the last few minutes. She had become a very different sort of mystery. I drank up and told her I was off home to get some rest and see if I could put my newfound knowledge into some kind of order. I meant knowledge concerning the rockets, but I could as easily have been referring to her. And she had arranged for us to spend some time the next day with someone who might have the sort of information I craved. That was encouraging.

She left the pub with me and accompanied me along the road, although she didn’t speak. The thought flashed into my head that she might follow me home, and it was an intriguing possibility in many ways. She stopped at a crossroads.

‘I go this way,’ she indicated with a military thumb. Apparently she knew that I didn’t go that way. Of course she did. We agreed to talk in the morning. I needed to find somewhere to set up shop, and thought I had the ideal place. She didn’t ask me where I might be, but wrote down her number for me.

‘Get some rest,’ she advised me. ‘We need to talk about the outlets and how they’re going to handle the new flexible design paradigm. Interesting challenge.’ She turned and disappeared into the crowd of military uniforms.

I didn’t go straight home, but headed straight for my local. Her parting words hung around my thoughts throughout the evening, which I spent in an increasingly productive artistic frame of mind. Much later, once I had learned that to look back could be as productive as ploughing forward, I was to come across those pages in my notebook once more.