I was to meet Corporal Jared Cowper at the spaceport at ten o’clock sharp. It was a relief to be away from The Bunker, where I had spent too many of the previous 48 hours.

Cowper had replaced Canning. Small gave me the lowdown as she dried herself. Canning, she said, had been realigned for his own safety. His badgering of various union reps had given rise to formal complaints and even some direct danger to his person. The National Organisation for Transportation Infrastructure had threatened industrial action unless he was removed. Colonel Brown had been forced to find space for him in Outlet Ambience, whose main function was to approve and circulate playlists for piped supermarket music.

Colonel Watson, Small told me as she wrapped her perfect skin once more in the rough and shapeless uniform, had acted immediately. Cowper had been installed as soon as Canning’s scent had dispersed. Like Lincoln, he was a brand new recruit to the team. I was yet to meet the acquisitive Colonel, but I had begun to feel that our paths crossed each time I took a step.

I arrived at the spaceport slightly early and Cowper was waiting for me in front of the terminal building. He had been deep in conversation with two shuttle pilots and took good-humoured leave of them amidst much back-slapping as I approached.

‘As I live and breathe!’ he exclaimed. ‘The main man! How’s tricks?’

‘Um… fine. Tricks are fine,’ I replied, and shook his offered hand tentatively. He was shorter than I expected, much shorter in fact, and dressed immaculately in a brand new uniform. His hair was speckled lightly with grey and his dark beard could have been painted on. Evidently he found it difficult to keep totally still, and his feet danced a constant dance even while his whole self remained apparently static.

‘About time I got hold of you,’ he said, through an infectious smile. ‘Major Thompson told me I needed to speak to you before anything else, but it’s only now that I’ve found you. You won’t say anything, will you?’

‘I won’t say anything,’ I assured him. ‘How long have you been part of the team, then?’

‘Since yesterday. Colonel Watson swore me in first thing, and I had my briefing with the Major over lunch. Nice place, that Officers’ Dining Room.’

I agreed. Quite spectacular.

‘I understood you were occupied yesterday afternoon, so I made a start on a few of the other leads they gave me. Asked Captain Small to organise our first session. She must have done that, because here you are!’

‘Here I am,’ I confirmed.

‘Do you mind if we walk a little?’ he asked. ‘That way I can take you through some of the progress I’ve made. You can put me right if I’ve gone off on a tangent. Probably still time to change approach if we need.’

We set off, away from the terminal and along the verge between the main southern service road and the fence. Cars tooted their horns as they passed us, and Cowper waved a cheery hand at each, without exception. Presently he stopped and prodded gently at the fence, adjusting his target minutely each time. Finally it gave under his pressure and he pulled open a flap large enough to allow a person through.

‘Got it!’ he said, and turned to me. ‘Still not quite the expert, but a bit of perseverance always pays off.’ He held the fence open for me.

‘You want me to go through there?’ I asked him.

‘It’s the quickest way,’ he said.

‘It’s the perimeter fence!’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it safe?’

‘I suppose so,’ he looked confused. ‘Yes, it must be. Why wouldn’t it be?’

I took him at his word, although I remained unsure, and climbed through the gap. He followed, and replaced the flap of fence carefully, making sure it didn’t stand out against the rest.

‘Is it safe!?’ he chuckled and shook his head as he repeated my words. ‘Of course it’s safe! Come on,’ and he led me toward the runways, undoubtedly the most dangerous sector of the entire complex.

We walked through the untended grass, which covered our shoes and left pollen on our trousers. From our left, shuttles approached, touched down gently and slowed to a halt in the distance to our right amid a howl of reverse thrust and well-worn brakes. From what I could tell, three of the runways were in use at the time, and shuttles landed on each regularly every 90 seconds or so. It was not peak hour.

Ahead of us was a fire point. There were at least two of these on each runway, Cowper informed me, and they were manned 24 hours a day with a 4-man crew. Their job was to respond to any emergency at all on the runway, which normally, although not exclusively, involved flames.

‘Come and stand here,’ he said to me, and dragged me physically to the very edge of the runway. A shuttle was about to land. They were touching down less than a hundred metres upstream of where we stood. It made contact with the tarmac without making a sound and had passed us within a second. I felt the heat radiating from its protective shell a moment before the noise hit us. When it did so, I was frozen inside a sensory delirium.

‘Amazing, eh?’ he shouted in my ear. ‘The first time I stood here, I didn’t know what to do with myself either. The movement is one thing. They land at about 450 miles per hour, these old shuttles. Then the heat, then the noise. Like nothing you’ve ever experienced, isn’t it?’

He was right. It was some new kind of daze, and I hadn’t even lifted my hands to my ears to protect them from the din. And yet I felt no adverse physical effects. We carried on towards the fire crew. They hadn’t been required for this latest landing, and they waited patiently in formation. Cowper approached a man who appeared to be the leader.

‘Stan!’ he cried out, and spread his arms wide to receive his friend’s embrace, which arrived as expected. Apparently he was the shift-leader of the ‘Blue Boys’. His team of three kept close watch over two more shuttles as they landed. He and Cowper discussed the details of his shift, which was approaching the halfway point. No major incidents, I gathered. Just a couple of precautionary dampings.

‘This fella anything to do with what we spoke about?’ Stan asked, looking at me suspiciously.

‘Chief Architect,’ Cowper winked. He introduced me with some ceremony.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said. ‘What is it that you spoke about? If I’m going to commit to anything, I might as well know what it is in advance!’ I laughed, and Stan’s face didn’t slip an inch.

‘Sprinkler system,’ Cowper interrupted. I looked at the pair of them, slightly bemused.

‘A long run of sprinkler heads, centrally controlled but with a local override,’ he continued. ‘Allows each incoming shuttle to be lightly hosed down on landing. Would probably prevent around seventy-five per cent of all incidents. We’re looking at, what, about a kilometre?’ he asked that of Stan.

‘A mile, at least. Maybe two ks,’ Stan corrected him with a sniff. ‘Especially for them new shuttles you said about.’

‘How would it prevent incidents?’ I asked Stan.

‘Shuttles are hot when they land. Seriously hot. Don’t take much more than a small pebble flying up and catching the side, the merest of sparks, to set something off. It’s what we spend most of our time dealing with. Pretty rare one escalates into anything really serious, but even a small fire can damage the shell, put it out of commission or a day or so. Repairs are pricey, too.’

‘How often does that happen? That a shuttle has to be repaired, I mean.’

‘Every day there’s one. Some worse than others. Any one time there’s six or seven of ‘em in the shop, having something done.’

‘That’s around 10 per cent of the total fleet,’ I said.

‘You’ve got it,’ Stan told me.

‘And, a canopy of sprinkled water could remove the possibility of that sort of thing?’

‘Simple, innit?’

‘Ridiculously. Why is it not already in place?’ I asked.

‘Ain’t been nobody’s job to put it in place as yet,’ he shrugged. ‘Every time a runway project comes along, we make sure the sprinklers thing gets into their schedule of works. But they keep getting canned. Four or five times it ain’t happened.’

‘I’m sure,’ I said, and looked at Cowper for confirmation, ‘we can get it built into the spec for the new runways. It’s the perfect opportunity, isn’t it?’

‘Told you,’ Cowper punched Stan on the shoulder. ‘We’re with you on this one, my brother. Like I said, anything you want.’

‘Don’t forget the other stuff, will you, J?’ Stan replied.

‘Not a chance. The shifts thing will just happen. Has to. Legislation. Done deal. And I’m taking my man off to the clubhouse site now. Trust me. Now get back to your post, slacker. Your men need you!’

They gripped each other’s hands and bumped heads like a couple of billy goats. Stan refused to release his hold on the Corporal.

‘Love you, J,’ he croaked through tearful eyes.

‘Love you back, you beautiful lump. Go on, off with you!’ Stan’s other hand rose up and took hold of the back of Cowper’s neck for a second or two. The Corporal returned the gesture. Then the fireman turned and was gone. Cowper rejoined me and we continued alongside the runway in silence.

‘We need to cross here,’ he said after a minute or two. ‘We’ll take a direct line across to the unloading zone – can you see?’ I made out a complex of warehouses and heavy machinery around a mile distant. Shuttles were snaking their various ways across the ground, all with that destination in mind.

Another shuttle landed. Cowper held me back with his outstretched arm for a few seconds. A huge blast of hot air followed behind the craft. Once it had passed us, he dropped his arm. ‘Let’s go. Need to run,’ he shouted.

I ran as fast as I could, but it still took an age to cover the whole width of the runway. We were both out of breath when we arrived at the other side. Cowper looked at his wrist. ‘Forty-four seconds!’ he yelled, and jumped into the air, his fists clenched. ‘You’re a speedy one. Dragged me along in your wake. That’s my record!’ I watched him as he repeatedly checked his watch and scribbled something in his notebook. Another incoming shuttle ruffled the pages while he tried to write. Finally he snapped it shut. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘That’s amazing. Of course, we won’t be able to do that with the next generation shuttles. They’ll land at almost three times the speed. Impossible to judge safe distance with the human eye from the ground. I’ve been thinking about that. Probably need some kind of underground tunnel network. But deep. Don’t want it to compromise the strength or the elasticity of the landing surface. Have you guys factored that in?’ I promised him I would talk to Scharf and Magath about it. I was unaware of any compensation for a warren of ratruns in our model.

‘You’re the best,’ he said, and we carried on at a more leisurely pace towards the warehousing.

Our route took us parallel with the taxiway, the path taken by recently landed shuttles toward their final destination. The area was eerily quiet when compared with the runway. The shuttles converged almost silently on the unloading zone.

Underfoot, we lost the soft grass and I turned my ankle on a pothole in the aged asphalt.

‘Yes, watch your step here,’ he laughed. ‘Apologies, but I brought you this way for a reason. This is one of the old runways. In fact, it was the first one to go. We’ll get to the second one in a minute or two. Next door. Totally irreparable, as you can see.’ He picked up a chunk of the surface, which crumbled in his hand. ‘Impractical to use it as landing real estate any more, but we won’t need to with the new model, since the number of strips is going to decrease massively. But listen,’ he paused and I listened. ‘Still as a millpond, isn’t it?’ I confirmed that it was.

‘I’ve had ideas about this place,’ he continued, turning to face me and walk backwards. ‘Stan sowed the seed, and I worked on it last night. A clubhouse, I thought.’

‘A clubhouse?’

‘The social centre of the spaceport. It’s something totally lacking right now. They have a cafeteria, and there’s a common room of sorts with basic leisure and kitchen facilities. There’s a pub just outside the gate where they end up having to go, but it’s dreadful. We could build it all here. A multilevel facility, proper relaxation areas, a bar, games room, even some dedicated outdoor sports facilities. A balcony! Just look at the space we’ve got!’ He turned a full circle and back again, showing me the space we had with his tiny outstretched arm.

It all sounded feasible enough, especially coming from a man so clearly immersed in the idea.

‘So, you’ve discussed this with Stan already, have you?’ I asked him.

‘Stan and the other shift leaders, yes,’ he nodded madly. ‘They love it. Right behind it.’

‘You also mentioned something else when we were with Stan. Something about shifts?’

‘Yeah, that’s his number one item, apart from the sprinklers and the clubhouse.’

‘What about them?’

‘Shifts now are three engineers and a shift leader. Six hours on, twelve hours off. There are mandatory holiday periods and training windows throughout the year, but they’re not causing any trouble right now. What they want to see is a strengthened team – an increase to four engineers. It would allow for a greater spread of skills and more redundancy. And they want the shifts decreased to four hours.’

‘Four hours on, eight hours off?’

‘No. Four on, but retain the twelve off. That has the advantage of bringing a whole new shift team on board.’

‘And what have you said to them about that?’

‘I told them there’s some legislation somewhere we can use to back us up on the plan. Smooth the path.’

‘And is there?’

‘No idea. Probably not. But we can always tell them that it got rescinded or that some new Act has overwritten it or something. All that legal stuff is just a big smokescreen anyway. Even the stuff that really exists.’

We had reached a busy area, the confluence of four or five feeder tracks which served the first complex of warehouses. Men in fluorescent jackets over their naked torsos were directing the creeping shuttles by hand and with much banter. I was reminded of the view I had from the dining room at headquarters, and the sense of chaotic, accidental efficiency. That distant sense became very real at this proximity. Cowper had left my side and was deep in conversation with one of the traffic officers. I joined them.

‘Self-management, that’s the way to do it now,’ the man waved his orange bats like an artist might a paintbrush. ‘Like I said, enough electronic gubbins on these beasts to run the entire country, never mind a simple traffic gyratory,’ he yelled. ‘Course, none of that really bothers me. I’ll be at home, feet up, if you come through with the new conditions.’

‘You can rely on me, Ken,’ Cowper clapped the man on the shoulder and skipped around him. ‘Catch you later,’ he added as he dragged me through a gap in the traffic. We were heading for the largest warehouse, it seemed.

‘What was that about self-management?’ I questioned him.

‘Their job is one of the simplest to automate,’ he told me. ‘It’s just traffic funnelling. No reason why the intelligence can’t be built into the shuttles, dispense with the men on the ground. They can supervise from somewhere out of the sun. The road people think it’s hilarious: the last car driven by an actual person came off the roads over 50 years ago. And did you learn about traffic lights in school? Priceless!’

‘It’s a good point,’ I admitted. The scene we were negotiating did have a taste of the quaintly archaic about it.

‘Something pretty basic would do it,’ he said. ‘There are off-the-shelf systems on the market we can take and tailor slightly to our requirements. They work perfectly at other spaceports. I read a few papers last night.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ I mused as I watched the flurry of activity behind us. ‘This whole setup seems dated.’

‘Not just that it’s possible,’ Cowper continued, ‘but Ken and his lot would actually refuse to work with the next gen shuttles when they’re launched. Point of principle for them. It’s simplest for us to introduce the electronic system along with the shuttles.’

‘Probably,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a word.’ I watched Ken and his mates for a while. Their synchronised movement was actually rather enchanting to watch. Despite that, nothing gave me the impression it would be challenging to automate. ‘There was something else, though,’ I added. ‘He referred to some new conditions. What was that?’

‘You don’t miss much, do you!’ he laughed. ‘I suggested to their union reps that I could probably get their retirement age down to 50. They love that sort of thing. Cheered Ken right up, that did. You should have seen him before I engaged with them. Face like a topless grandmas calendar.’

I was unsure what to make of this pocket-sized force of nature, but I think I liked him. He had certainly done more good in one day on the job than Canning had managed in his short time. He was the very embodiment of the idea of hitting the ground running.

‘Have you got a history of working in this environment?’ I asked him.

‘Nope,’ he chirped. ‘I’m a doctor by trade. Specialised in dietary science, so I suppose you could say I’ve got some background and interest in what we’re delivering. I understand why we have to get good quality food to people and why we have to do it fast. But then I suppose most people understand that. I don’t pretend it gives me any special insight. It’s just what I did.’

‘You gave up being a doctor, for this?’ I said.

‘Yes. Of course. This is space! A year ago I couldn’t even have dreamed about this sort of thing happening to me. I’ve loved space since I was a kid. The biggest mystery is why I ever became a doctor in the first place. I’ve never been happier than the last couple of months. This latest 24 hours has been even better. I’ve got a lot to be grateful for, and it’s all down to Colonel Watson.’

‘Yes, I really must strike up an acquaintance with the great Colonel Watson,’ I mumbled. ‘But what about all these promises? The sprinklers, the clubhouse, the early retirement, all the other stuff. Can we afford it? What sort of a budget have you got for all this?’

‘Oh, I haven’t discussed budgets. The Colonel wants me to get things moving. We didn’t really talk about the nitty-gritty. I suppose that’ll come up once you’ve put some kind of design together. Then we can look, see if it’s a goer or not. Come on, there’s loads more to see.’

He led me into the warehouse. We passed through two security checks with no more than a wave of the guards’ hands. I watched him interact with those around him and I couldn’t suppress a smile. There was plenty of the loose cannon about the diminutive Corporal, but there was charisma and dynamism, and he demanded to be followed.

We toured the warehouse, unquestioned and unmolested. Cowper showed me Scharf’s auto-lubrication system close up. It was beautiful. We scrambled under giant conveyors and ascended vertiginous gantries. I saw that warehouse from every angle, hanging on Cowper’s every word, and he never let up, not for a second.

‘I’ve done a few early calculations on the basics,’ he said to me. He was leaning on the thin metal railing of a skywalk, a hundred feet above the shop floor. The rickety walkway swayed slightly with our weight and the safety rail gave noticeably if I touched it. So I didn’t. ‘What we’ll need to do to these warehouses, minimum requirements for the roads and the railways, that sort of thing. I’ll take you through them later on. They’re a bit….’ he interrupted himself in full flow and leaned right over the rail. The skywalk listed and sighed. I sunk to my knees and grabbed hold of the railing on the opposite side. ‘Kev!’ Cowper shouted towards the floor. ‘Up here!’ he waved his arms about wildly. I shut my eyes. ‘Wait there! We’ll come down,’ I heard him yell. He tapped me on the shoulder. I opened my eyes again. ‘Come on, we can go and see Kev. You need to meet him.’

By the time I had made it back to the ground, Cowper was deep in conversation with a man wearing a lab coat and flicking absent-mindedly through screens on his tablet.

‘Kev, meet our Executive Architect,’ he announced. Kev nodded in my direction. ‘Kev’s our Head Storesman, Sagittarius Shift,’ he explained. ‘Tell him what you’re looking at there, Kev.’

‘Logging,’ Kev said. ‘Every item that comes through, gets logged. Gets logged at every stage. Moves from the loading bay to the conveyor, gets logged, from the conveyor to the sorter, gets logged, from the sorter to the weigher, gets logged, from the weigher to the pallet, gets logged. All the way until it’s out of here. Everything: time, condition, shape, smell, you name it. Gets logged.’

‘Fantastic,’ I said. ‘You must have extremely rich data on the movement of produce through your facility.’

‘Tell him where you’re going with this, Kev,’ Cowper encouraged him.

‘If he can’t see already,’ Kev tutted. ‘You double the food coming in, you double the logging. More than double. We consolidate it all at the end of the shift, run it through a few systems, reconcile it. Each item gets dealt with six times. We’re at capacity as it is.’

A siren went off. Cowper’s head snapped around to the departure gates.

‘Is that Gate 2?’ he asked Kev. The Head Storesman, Sagittarius Shift, nodded.

‘We’ve got to get on it, Kev. I’ll fill in the rest, don’t worry.’ And he took hold of my arm and we ran pell-mell to Gate 2. Kev waved a hand weakly.

I jumped aboard the moving van, at Cowper’s insistence. He followed me. I pulled him through the loading hatch with the assistance of an armed soldier, who then clambered out of the same hatch to take up a position on the roof of the van, which was accelerating like a racing car.

‘Perfect,’ he said as he dusted off his uniform. ‘I wanted to take this one especially. Would have been a shame to miss it. How did Kev seem to you?’

‘I must admit I didn’t form a very detailed picture of him,’ I started, ‘but I did get the impression that he was just about to tell me something potentially very expensive.’

‘Important, though,’ he looked serious. ‘The knock-on effects of the extra capacity are quite considerable. Kev reckons he’d need an extra four or five bodies, just for his shift. More tablets, higher spec, double the processing power probably. And the shift-end systems would have to be totally rearchitected. Otherwise they’d still be processing the information from one shift when the next one finished.’

‘Is that really true?’ I asked.

‘I’ve got to take his word for it,’ Cowper shrugged. ‘His figures look feasible, although I haven’t run them through any of my own tests yet. Still, let’s not get too hung up about it. I want you to meet Jem.’

He scrambled forward, over the mountains of pallets in the rear of the van. The van rattled on the surface of the road like a jar of pills. As a result, our route over the cargo was far from straightforward, but I followed him to the front with only superficial damage to the left side of my body. He slid through a small access shute into the cab. I had no alternative but to do the same. We landed on a bench seat. I was by the door.

‘How’s things, Jem?’ he asked the driver.

‘Same,’ Jem replied.

There was a series of thuds on the cab roof. I looked up in alarm. Cowper placed his hand on my arm. ‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘We got a live one, Jem?’ he asked the driver.

Jem laughed a hollow laugh. ‘What you reckon?’ he sneered.

‘The armed guard,’ Cowper explained to me. ‘A transport this size ought to have three at least. We’ve got one. That’s why he has to shift his position every now and then. Cover all the angles. Best thing is, he hasn’t even got live ammunition. There’s not enough to go round.’

I poked my head out of the window a little and looked up. I could see the end of the barrel of his automatic weapon. It was trained on open land to our left. The van turned hard to the right at a fork in the road.

‘Wouldn’t you have been better carrying straight on there, Jem?’ Cowper asked once he had righted himself.

‘Road’s dead,’ Jem grunted.

‘Dead?’ I said.

‘Unfit,’ Jem looked at me blankly. ‘Bits of it crumbling away. It’s not just the odd pothole here and there. We can handle that.’ He looked directly at me as he spoke. The speedometer read over 100. The road we were travelling by was far from perfect, but nothing to worry Jem, who swerved around the potholes with careless flicks of the wheel. ‘Gets to a stage where it’s mostly one big crater. Even if a van like this could make it through, it’s quicker to go round. We’d probably lose him too,’ he rapped on the ceiling of the cab. The soldier rapped back his response.

‘Couldn’t it be resurfaced?’ I ventured.

‘Could,’ Jem nodded. ‘And that’s all well and good. Thing is, you’re not tackling the core problem that way.’

‘Which is?’

‘The central distribution road. It’s too small, and needs resurfacing itself. You must have felt it when we started.’ I rubbed my shoulder. ‘Means we can only use about half the capacity we need. We can resurface these arteries all we like, but they’d just sit here empty if we can’t get the vans out of the warehouse zone onto them quick enough. Look around you!’ He was right. Barely four more vehicles were visible, and this was meant to be the main arterial route into the east. I would have expected it to be jammed.

‘So why not combine work on the central distribution road with these arterials?’

‘That’s fine, if you want your country to starve,’ he said. ‘You can’t take the distributor out. It’s always in use. It’s the only way out of the spaceport.’

‘So we need a new one?’

‘We need a new one. And now. Don’t reckon the one we’ve got now’ll last more than another few months. I’ve lost two teeth in the last week. If another one goes, I’ll be quitting.’ He smiled at me.

Cowper said nothing, but gave me a knowing grin. We continued a mile or two in silence. A set of railway tracks ran alongside the road. A handful of trains passed us, in both directions, as we followed the tracks. Jem brought the van to an abrupt halt.

‘That’s perfect, Jem. Thanks, man.’ Cowper took the driver’s head in his hands and kissed both of his cheeks. ‘Come on,’ he said to me. ‘We’re changing trains here.’ We jumped to the roadside. Jem sped off above a wail of burning rubber.

‘This way,’ Cowper showed me. We descended to a sort of underpass. Maybe it was more of a service tunnel. It was claustrophobic and dusty and for a change I wished he would move more quickly. We came to a place where a metal ladder disappeared straight upwards. It looked like an access shaft. To my dismay, my companion started to climb.

The shaft broke ground after a surprisingly short ascent. I emerged into an oasis of parched soil. All around us, railway tracks came together and disappeared in all directions. Overhead wires criss-crossed and I thought of a cat’s cradle. Engines and wagons clacked and shifted their weight and spat sparks from their runaway wheels. Signals and points shifted like they were choreographed. From where we stood, there was no escape in any direction.

‘Bang on time, Jared!’ a voice boomed over the din. ‘I should’ve known!’

Cowper turned and a giant man smeared with oil took hold of both his hands, stood back and looked him over. ‘Still as perfect as I remember,’ he bellowed. ‘I thought I’d dreamt it, but no,’ and he laughed. If it were to have been his last laugh ever, it wouldn’t have been wasted. ‘This your man?’ he looked at me.

‘Principle Architectural Consultant, I’ll have you know,’ Cowper said seriously, and introduced me formally. The engineer’s name was McCabe, I learned.

‘Glad you’re here,’ McCabe said. His eyes and his voice were soft once he approached closely. I found him reassuring and welcoming; more so than anybody else I had met on my travels that day. ‘I know you’re short of time, so I’ll show you our best exhibit before you run off.’

He guided us to the busiest area of the whole junction. Monstrous trains came and went to and fro at dizzying speeds. I watched and listened for a minute or more. It reminded me of a circus act, or maybe a fairground ride. It was so beautifully worked out. McCabe raised an arm toward a signal box above us. A man waved back and flicked a switch. Within seconds the whole area was emptied of trains and no others arrived to take their places. The hush stole in like an imposter.

‘We’ve got about a minute,’ McCabe said as he ushered us forward. ‘We can redirect some of them and hold others. But take this set out for longer than that and we’ll never be able to unravel it. Quickly.’

We crouched over a series of points. It was the single most vital hub of the entire rail network, McCabe told us. The rails we straddled took fourteen times as much traffic as any other set in the junction complex. As a result, fatigue was becoming a factor. Some of the most important joints were simply being eroded. A patch job had been effected on one of the worst areas after a spate of derailments several months previously. The steelwork wobbled under McCabe’s expert hand. He knew the weaknesses better than anybody.

‘Probably got a week, maybe two, left until we’re going to need to do something with this again,’ he frowned at the rail. ‘What we need is what we spoke about, Jared,’ he looked at Cowper with cautious optimism, then at me. ‘The latest in rail technology. Fully synthetic titanium. We’d have to import it, but it’ll last longer than you or I will. Was a time we’d have produced that sort of thing ourselves. Others used to look to us for the latest big thing. But I’m past caring. Don’t care who makes it. We need it, and the sooner the better. There’s only so long you can keep sticking plasters on hardware like this.’

‘How about the wheels?’ Cowper suggested.

‘Yep, the wheels can be done at the same time. Replace the aluminium ones they have now with HIPs. That’s Hardened Industrial Polymers, in case you’re not familiar with the term. Lighter, harder-wearing, come in a range of colours.’

A receiver in McCabe’s pocket started to bleep and flash. He took it out, acknowledged the alarm and waved up at the signal box. It was time to spring the points and let the blockage flow through. We moved back to our central oasis and watched the empty rails fill up once more. A mudflat under an incoming tide.

‘We’ll let you get on,’ Cowper said, and shook McCabe by the hand.

‘We’re ready to move whenever you say,’ the smeared engineer said to the pair of us. ‘Just let us know and I can activate the plan. It’s just waiting for the word.’

‘I won’t leave you hanging,’ Cowper reassured him. We jumped aboard a slow-moving goods train. I turned to see McCabe and two other men squatting over another apparently troublesome stretch of rail. They waved their arms at each other in the way that happy people do not.

‘What do you reckon to his chances of getting what he needs?’ I asked Cowper when we were away from the throng of the junction. ‘Looks like those rails are totally shot. I can’t believe they keep all those trains moving across them.’

‘His chances are as good as anyone else’s, I suppose,’ he shrugged. ‘Can’t just ignore him, though. Did you see his face?’

I had, and the hope inside it was enough to haunt one more superstitious than I was.

‘What I can’t get my head around,’ I said, ‘is how you’ve had time to make all these contacts. You’ve been on the job for one day now, you say?’

‘Just over,’ he looked at his watch. ‘Twenty-eight hours now. I don’t like to be idle. I’ve never been very good at handling dead time. I expect that comes from my Dad. He came from a line of horologists. My brother’s one now, as it happens. Dad worshipped time like it was one of those old Gods they used to have. Man’s unbeatable foe, he would call it. The most powerful force in the universe, he considered it. His whole life was a homage to the fourth dimension. We grew up knowing nothing of unoccupied moments. It was a crime to waste even a second in our house. So I suppose I’ve always taken that approach. Time to me is less of a constriction than it is to others. I’ve learned to use every available drop. People are often surprised at how much I can do in a short period of time, but everyone has it in them. Just takes a bit of practice and some self-discipline.’

Our train meandered slowly through industrial installations and functional residential compounds. I had looked outside in an attempt to find an antidote to the terrifying vision I was building up of Cowper’s childhood, but what I saw did nothing to calm me.

‘I don’t expect to be a Corporal for much longer,’ he continued. ‘I joined the military as a Lance Corporal eight weeks ago. Worked in van maintenance. I got to know a few of the drivers there. We developed quite a nice new system for turning them around in less than half the time it was taking before. Not much to it, to be honest, but Colonel Watson got to hear, and he made a move for me. I jumped at it. I didn’t join the military to work on vans. I wanted to be where the rockets were. Still, I insisted on a promotion to full Corporal. Watson moaned a bit, but not for long. I know what this lot are like. Same in medical circles. I was a consultant in no time, simply because I refused not to be. They don’t care in the end – they need a certain number of every rank, they’ve always got vacancies up their sleeves and they’re definitely not going to argue with someone who makes a few demands. More trouble than it’s worth.’

I would have to take his word for it. I made a quick review of my history and failed to locate a single episode in which I had been granted a defined rank or title. I knew I had never sought after such diaphanous veils, but, just then, it became strikingly apparent that they sought me just as little. Cowper attracted them with a gravitational pull comparable to a black hole.

‘Why a Corporal, though?’ I asked him. ‘You were a doctor. A consultant. Shouldn’t you be an officer? I expect you’d make Colonel in the time it takes most people to decide what they want for their lunch.’

‘You’re right – they tried to get me on to the officer track, but that’s not what I want. I need to be occupied. I need to have something to do. In the Other Ranks I’m much more likely to get involved in the stuff I dreamed about.’

The train came to a stop at a kind of station. Cowper beckoned me to the window where he stood. The station served an enormous supermarket. My mouth fell open. I lived in the capital and had no need for or experience of an outlet of this type. I had visited towns smaller than that supermarket. At the front, almost half a mile from where we stood at the endless platform, a queue stretched out of sight into the urban sprawl. I pointed it out to Cowper. It was a direct result, he explained, of the previous day’s lost shuttle. The whole logistics ecosystem was so finely balanced, and was more vulnerable than ever to incidents.

At the rear of the store, the produce was being unloaded from our train and ferried in as quickly as possible. The only hold-up was a checkpoint just outside the doors of the loading bay. A team of harassed operatives were checking every item against some kind of printed manifest. Every now and then one would remove an item and place it in a holding area.

‘What are those guys doing?’ I asked. ‘More logging?’

‘They’re the fraud checkers,’ Cowper corrected me.

‘Fraud checkers?’

‘Yep. Fascinating stuff they do. They’ve formed models of consumption. Each town, each community, each street, each family, each individual, they all have a profile. You do, too. What kind of food they order, how much, when they consume it, wastage figures, all that sort of stuff. Those guys know exactly what ought to happen. And if anything looks out of the ordinary, they intercept it.’

‘What might happen out of the ordinary?’

‘It’s normally somebody getting hold of somebody else’s ordering identity. They don’t have long until the victim notices, so they tend to go crazy. The more calories they can stockpile quickly, the more powerful they become. Black market is thriving nowadays – just look at that queue. So, our fraud guys are trained to identify suspicious patterns and intercept them.’

‘And they do all this at the point of unloading, by hand?’

‘Yep.’

‘Wow.’

‘Average lifespan in the frontline is about 4 weeks. They’re totally shot after that. The lucky ones get moved into the back office and work on the modelling, but there’s not room for everyone there. More of them have to take their chances wherever they can. If you were looking for a thankless career, you’ve found it.’

‘There must be better ways of checking for fraud?’

‘Hundreds. But the system they use was once state-of-the-art. The modelling is superb. 98 percent accurate. And they’re trained to know exactly how to interpret it. Problem is the same as we’ve seen elsewhere: they haven’t grown or developed along with demand. Ten years ago we were pioneering this system which was five years ahead of its time. Now it’s still in use and it’s five years out of date. That’s time for you: blink and you miss it.’

‘But they’re still functioning. I can see they’re intercepting the odd item. Are they keeping up?’

‘Sort of,’ he looked at me. ‘They get less than half a second to make a decision. Some decisions are easy, and half a second is plenty. Most are more difficult, and they’d just be guessing.’

‘What do they do if they’re still deciding and half a second has passed?’

‘They let it through. They have to.’

We jumped down from our freight train and walked the short distance to the passenger pick-up point beside the supermarket. Within a minute a high speed train back to the capital had arrived. We settled ourselves into a first class carriage.

Corporal Cowper pulled out his tablet device from an inside pocket.

‘Let me show you the figures I’ve got so far,’ he said, and he called up a freeform memo filled with handwritten scribbles. ‘We know we’ve got to think bigger. Question is how much bigger, and where is it most important? Look at this.’

I joined him in his hunch over the swimming figures and notes. He rattled through their meaning, pausing every now and them to make sure I was keeping up. Each time I flashed him a smile to let him know I was with him, even though the truth was not quite so simple. I understood the basic logic behind everything, but I was growing increasingly disturbed by the numbers’ tendency to multiply like bacteria. The longer one spent inside the sea of calculations, the greater the inurement to their meaning.

I used his breaks as opportunities to place his conclusions into perspective. His recommendations would demand a military expansion of such proportions that around 80 percent of the population would have to be drafted. The tax burden required to pay for his minimum suite of proposed improvements would sink around half of all working-age people below the poverty line. But he sounded so completely credible. His innocent, unimpeachable logic shined like a beacon until such time as reality darkened the equation. He stopped and fixed me in his sights once more.

‘You’ve seen the problem, haven’t you?’ he said. His very eyes drooped under the weight of the tragedy. I felt ashamed to meet them. ‘We don’t have enough space,’ he continued. ‘We need to acquire.’

‘What?’

‘It’s a simple equation! Can you not see it? There are so many people, and we need more, but as long as they need somewhere to eat, to sleep, to live, that doesn’t leave us enough space to build the infrastructure we need!’

He flipped a page on his tablet and showed me a map, of sorts, which clearly centred on our own country but sprawled largely south and east to take in neighbouring states. He explained the concept of dormitory territories and how they radiated around a central hub, dedicated to scalable infrastructure and uncluttered totalitarian government. His understanding of the military action required to effect such a vision was frightening in its detail. If this was indeed a plan cooked up in the last 28 hours, I was undoubtedly talking to a deranged genius. His commentary grew faster and less coherent as our train hurtled the last few miles into the heart of the headquarters of his horrific Utopia.

Our parting at the terminus assumed greater significance because of what he had confided in me during the final leg of our journey. I wondered: did Colonel Watson have any idea of the nature of the man he had fast-tracked into his mushrooming organisation? The man who now pressed his head tight against my chest.

‘What can we do tomorrow?’ he spoke directly into my arm. ‘Maybe,’ he pulled back to look me in the eye again. ‘Maybe we can go and see some of the new titanium rails? Would you like that? I’ve found someone down south, where they’ve got them installed. Upgraded the entire network last year, they did. Let’s go and see them. I can set it up no problem. We can take a car down there first thing. Two or three hour trip, that’s all. We can work on some of the numbers on the way. Waddya say?’

I was truly lost for words. Earlier in the day I had been relieved to escape from what I considered the madness of The Bunker. Reality had started to blur at the edges and I needed some perspective. Now, under Cowper’s puppydog stare, the day we had just spent together rang in my ears like a fever. I would have fallen to the ground had I not been able to steady myself on his shoulder. He took hold of me once more.

‘Watson was right. You’re the main man. We’re brothers. We can’t fail. Hey!’ he clamped my limp head in his hands. I stood up a little straighter. I had found some strength. ‘Why don’t we do a bit of a recce while we’re there? It’s the first place we’d need to invade. If we accidentally wander off into restricted areas, or ask a few leading questions, nobody’ll suspect a pair like us. We could get the ball rolling right away. Perfect! I’ll run it past Watson now. What are you up to now? Want to come with?’

I excused myself, pleading a prior arrangement with my team in The Bunker. I wondered if it was time for a swim. I promised to give Cowper a call that night or in the morning.

‘You’re the best, man. Love you,’ he shouted after my retreating figure across the concourse of the terminus. Genuine tears ran down his cheeks. I waved a half wave and walked briskly toward the exit. Once I had turned the corner I ran as fast as I could and didn’t stop until I could smell the sea.