I got lucky. Straight away I secured the perfect place in which to work. A small office building on the far side of the financial sector, backing onto the old port authority complex. I knew it well: I had been based there during my time in the civic events team. My old colleagues had guarded my corner fiercely against potential incomers, just in case I ever returned. I found myself in their debt.

We had been an unlikely bunch, although it turned out that common ground came easily. They were like me: itinerants who had grown tired of moving and needed a period of rest. Finding work in our chosen field was never too challenging – almost the entire world was an enormous, bored conurbation – and we ended up together.

There were four of them: Alexis Hamm-Mann had turned his back on one of the more privileged families in the exotic far east of the continent – he told us that his father was high up in their education department – and experimented for some time with old-style mysticism before settling down, far from home and defiantly alone; Donnie Blackwell spoke quietly but was the most argumentative of us all, and swore blind that his forebears had been aristocracy on a distant northern island whose very existence was far from universally acknowledged; Bernard Robert insisted on stressing the last syllables of both his names, much as the ancient Frenchmen he had read about would have; Chas, the youngest, only had the one name, and we knew nothing of his background.

Our brief had been to design a workable format for the proposed Inter-City Athletic Games. We soon found out that we were the third team to have been assembled for the task since the Last Great War had ended. That knowledge influenced our approach more than anything else.

When we began that job we had been in a great location. Our premises was in the heart of the capital and every conceivable facility was at our disposal. Colleagues were on hand, transport was superb, the food and leisure franchises occupied every usable piece of land all around. Naturally, space was at a premium in the building and we five had set up shop in an old lift shaft at the back of the old air conditioning hall. We had made it nice: there was comfortably space for three to sit and work simultaneously, so two would either have to stand for a while, or engineer a meeting in the windowed part of the office where our superiors worked. But you couldn’t beat the location. Then, inevitably, somebody found out about us. They pulled rank, organised an immediate personnel reshuffle and moved us to a forgotten block near the port while they colonised our lift shaft.

We left reluctantly, but those feelings all evaporated as we came to know our new location over the following weeks and months. To a man, we could not have loved it more. Donnie, particularly, revelled in the isolation from authority. He had a few catchphrases, along the lines of ‘No bastard’s going to tell me what I can or can’t do,’ or ‘No fecking clue, the lot of them.’ We heard them used more and more liberally once we had settled, and Donnie’s mood profited thereby. Bernard and Alex grew close to the fringe community over whom we looked out. Their territory stretched in a thin strip, north along the coast from the broken-down port all the way to the foothills of the Fantasians. The pair of them became accepted, and spent more and more time amongst them. Bernard loved the sexual freedom, while Alex dabbled happily in their brand of mysticism. He described his state of mind to me on several occasions. It had something to do with doors and I didn’t follow it completely, but he was contented. He would build shelters, burn tallow candles, re-enact ancient rituals and eat peculiar food at certain times of the year. There was no harm in it, as far as I could tell.

Chas smiled a lot from the day we moved in, but never told any of us what it was he loved.

I loved it because of the view. Our territory was a spacious corner on the third floor. It was a low-rise area and we all had a clear sight of the ocean and we could see the battered old fishing boats setting out and returning. The state had long since lost any interest in the sea, and in fact considered it a danger; all the government machinery was sited safely inland, behind sophisticated flood defences. This suited the community as much as it did anybody else. They were almost entirely self-sufficient; they grew their own produce, kept livestock and sang a lot. It seemed primitive, but there was much to recommend it.

We had fashioned a crude roof garden directly above our corner of office and, as a team, we would often climb the metal staircase to our sun-kissed retreat. We would watch the fishermen land their sharks or their tuna or their turles, then mill around and tell stories while the giant carcasses were taken off and prepared for consumption.

In fact, I spent more time up there on my own, daydreaming, than with my colleagues. The dreams were never complex, and revolved around nothing more than lying on my back in the salt water, which I had been taught made objects more buoyant than fresh water, and letting the gentle tides wash me in and out. I didn’t have to do anything except float. I never tired of it.

None of the others shared my fantasies of the sea. Probably they hadn’t had a great-grandmother like mine and had spent their childhoods free from elegies for lost summers. Nobody had swum in the sea for years.

Best of all, my location, so I believed, was a total mystery to my new colleagues in the military. Out beyond the flood defences and in a uniform-free neighbourhood, I figured I was a long way off their radar. Even at that early stage, I predicted there would be times when I needed some distance.

I couldn’t have wished for a better outcome. I had an exciting new assignment which promised great rewards, yet at the same time I was amongst my old friends. We would spend less time together than we had previously, but that was to be expected now that we had all been reassigned. Besides, I wanted it that way. I was a little uneasy about sharing too many details or giving too many opinions about what I was learning. This was big stuff and I didn’t want to alarm them. We spoke in general terms about it that first day, but they didn’t push me for details.

Alone in my corner, I started to draw out the conflicting elements I had learned from Thompson, Brown and Small. The size of the shuttles, the unpredictable demand, the properties of the thermosphere, landing velocity, crumbling runways, G-forces, operational chaos, nutritional density, human nature. I drew lines of various construction and shade, joining the thoughts, hoping to find some correlation, some hidden pattern between them all which might lead me to the outline of a solution. To one side I scribbled other words which, as yet, I didn’t know where to slot. Things I had seen or heard but not yet spent any time considering: armed guards, potholed roads and rusting railways, regulatory concerns and Small’s parting shot the previous day about the outlets.

My throbbing head wasn’t helping. I had spent quite some time in my local the night before, flicking through Small and Thompson’s pages, doodling, drinking. And I had skipped breakfast in the rush to claim my place in the office. I squinted at the jumble of thoughts on the paper, turned them upside down, stalked and pounced on them, but no technique I tried gave them any resonance. There was still too much that I didn’t know. I had only had one short day, I told myself. I couldn’t know everything yet. I needed those experts.

Above the storm of ideas in front of me, I wrote the simple words: SIX WEEKS. Next to that I added: 42 days, 1,008 hours, 60,480 minutes, 3,628,800 seconds. Mental arithmetic always calmed my confused mind.

It was another cloudless day. A pair of fishing boats set out to sea. Somebody had lit a fire where the sea wall met the concrete platform of the old lighthouse.

I took Small’s number from my pocket and called it. She answered straight away. She had been expecting my call. The expert was located near her, and I should make my way up there as soon as I could. Military headquarters, 12^th floor.

I collected what I might need: my scribblings, sunglasses, some tutorials on basic aerodynamics I had printed, a couple of newspaper articles dealing with the worsening state of the country’s transport systems. I had no idea if they were grounded in fact, but they were recent and would make a good topic of discussion with Small and the others. I might learn more if I had some background before I started.

The others wished me luck. It was just a meeting, I insisted.

‘Stop that,’ Alex said. ‘You look like a different guy. You talk different. You move different. This is how I remember you. You know, I know all about opening the right door. God knows I tried so many and got so badly beaten up by what was behind them that I was afraid to try any more. Then we get dumped here and I’m flung through the door I was chasing after all along. I’ve found my first ever true home, and I wasn’t even looking for it. It happens. I’ve got a good feeling about this one, my friend. Let it grow. Allow yourself in. It could be beautiful.’

He slumped back into his chair and I left the building. He might have been right. The prospect electrified me.

I walked the couple of miles to headquarters and took the lift to the 12^th floor. I spotted Small straight away, despite the sea of almost exclusively identical uniforms. She was standing beside a long row of desks, in conversation with the two men seated closest to her. Judging by their uniforms, they also held the rank of captain. I watched her. She contributed more words than the pair of them together. Standing there, her legs slightly apart, her back straight, her uniform pristine, her control of the discussion assured and total, I started to see in her the qualities that the Government had apparently already detected.

She saw me and brought her conference to a close. The two captains snapped back to their work. She greeted me like an old friend, gathered her things and got me a cold drink, which I needed.

We headed for an area of glass-fronted conference rooms. At the third room along she stopped and opened the door. A man was already there, slouched in a chair, his feet on the seat opposite. His uniform was the same blue as Small’s, except the ring around the cuff was broken where hers was solid. When we entered, he took down his feet but remained seated. He looked at me and smiled an enormous smile.

‘This is Corporal Farbrace,’ she announced. He stuck out a hand, which I took. He gripped hard and brought his other hand around to clamp mine in an emotional embrace.

‘My man!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s good to finally meet. You’re looking good! Come and sit. I got you a chair.’ All the while he held my hand in his and the grin didn’t shift. I made my way around the table to take the place next to him. He had pulled the chair out. When I sat down he turned his own chair around slightly so that he could sit and gaze at me. After a while I looked at Captain Small, who had sat opposite me.

‘Corporal Farbrace is going to be your main contact from now,’ she started. ‘He’s taking my place on this particular project.’ The Corporal placed his hand on my arm and winked at me.

I looked at him. I looked back at her.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she continued, ‘but he’s fully briefed on the subject. He knows everything I do, so it’s just as if I were still assigned. And I’ll still be around to assist when required. I’m not going anywhere.’

‘OK,’ I muttered. ‘If you say so.’ I turned to address the Corporal, who still had hold of my arm. ‘I suppose you’ve been around this whole matter for a while, like Captain Small? It’ll be good to still have that depth of experience to make up for me being so green!’

‘Not exactly,’ Small intervened before he could speak. ‘Corporal Farbrace is new to the country. One of the settlers attracted by the Safety in Numbers campaign. He had his naturalisation last week, and we were able to start briefing him then.’

I asked what would be keeping her busy instead.

‘I wanted to be involved closely with this,’ she replied, ‘but the truth is I’ve got too many other projects in-flight at the moment. Mostly real-time operational,’ her face was totally blank while she reeled them off. They all had names, and seemed to revolve around patching up road surfaces, sourcing discontinued parts for the minivans and jeeps used in the distribution, and the like. One was an entire overhaul of the railway points in the new territory to the north.

‘Are we not going to be looking at all that as part of the work we’re doing?’ I wondered. ‘I know so far we’ve been concentrating on getting the shuttle onto the ground, but there are repercussions of even doing that, aren’t there? I saw the state of the transportation for myself and I’ve got some articles here,’ I indicated my papers, ‘that I wanted to discuss with you. It sounds like we need a comprehensive plan to rejuvenate the whole network. I’m not sure a few patch jobs will be of much use.’

‘People will starve if we don’t make these operational improvements,’ she said calmly. ‘They’ll starve right now. Not at some unspecified point in the future, but now. This is vital work.’ They both looked serious. ‘As it happens,’ she went on, ‘Farbrace is assisting me with several of them, so he won’t actually be available for you all that much after this week, but that doesn’t matter. You’re fully briefed and you know as much as he does. Probably more, in many ways. And, of course, he’ll still be available for you to call on if you need him.’ Farbrace’s grin broke out once more.

The door opened. Two men entered. They were both Sergeants, Small told me, although I hadn’t been ready for their arrival and didn’t write down their names. The younger one was our expert, the thermomechanic. He was a serious-looking young man with tanned skin that told of an upbringing far in the south, jet black straight hair, a slightly truncated jaw that gave his head a square look, and exquisitely manicured hands. Small had already told me that he was working on the next generation shuttles. The other was a bad-tempered civil servant. The name of his department meant nothing to me. He refused to shake hands with anybody in the room, although I noticed his cuffs were frayed and one of his Sergeant’s stripes was almost totally detached from the sleeve. He sat and looked at the ceiling.

Captain Small made some brief introductions and invited the young thermomechanic to speak. He took us through a few sets of demand shape projections. He spoke quietly and slowly. I wrote down every word of it.

He predicted a five-peak model of demand for food, much more complicated to map than our current two-peak (or two-and-a-half, in reality) paradigm. Worse still when you factored in the roaming meta-peak, whose timing appeared to depend solely on collective social consciousness. The orthodox peaks were spread fairly evenly over a sliding twenty-hour period, the slide accounting for approximately half an hour a week, which would bring us right round to where we started after one compete cycle of the lunisolar calendar. His projections of total food intake for the next 5 years were based on an initial spike as soon as we got the first shuttle launched, then continuous steady growth at rates higher than we had seen before.

I tried desperately to keep up with the details on how the road system would need to be enhanced. He continued in his unhurried manner, but the weight of information was catching up with me. It appeared that each of our major arterial roads would require at least 14 lanes, and that we would need several thousands more miles of that classification of road. I made some quick calculations, which ended in the physical road surface occupying over 35 per cent of our total land area. It seemed high, and I promised myself I would return to the workings later. I also wrote down everything he said about the warehousing, the rolling stock, food sampling and activity logging.

He stopped talking. I dropped my pen and clenched and unclenched my hand a few times. He cast his eyes down and straightened his pile of materials. Captain Small swept the hair from over her eyes and tied it into a ponytail.

‘Total. Bullshit,’ a voice said. It was the bad-tempered sergeant with the frayed cuffs. Apart from the thermomechanic, everybody looked at him.

He was adamant that the shuttles were massively over-specified.

‘They don’t need to be anything like the size they are, and the weight can easily be kept down, too,’ he said. ‘For a start, your consumption estimates are ridiculous. They’re based on an arbitrary figure which is probably nowhere near accurate. And we can bring in much lighter, and more nutritious, food quite easily. Those who hold that we’d need an agronomic revolution are talking rubbish. We can phase it in quite quickly, even without Government backing.’

He stared angrily out of the window behind me. The thermomechanic studied his hands. Small and Farbrace looked at me.

‘I see,’ I said. ‘Well, where did we get initial arbitrary figure from?’ I offered. ‘If that’s the root of the calculations and it’s just guesswork, didn’t we ought to do whatever we could to improve it? Otherwise the margins of error just grow with every subsequent calculation, don’t they?’

‘Total nonsense,’ he replied. ‘That figure was dreamed up by someone who understands neither global food consumption models nor mathematics. It was plucked out of the air with a butterfly net. It was based on a flawed premise. There’s no way you can hold me accountable for it.’

‘Hang on, you were the one who gave that figure?’ I asked him.

‘Not in any true sense,’ he protested. ‘I was told what to say, and I told them what they were determined to hear. They had to start somewhere. In the end I couldn’t convince them of anything else. They love that number. It fits their communication plan so well.’

Nobody in the room had anything to add. He carried on.

‘But some of what he says is right,’ he jerked his head at the thermomechanic. ‘The transport system isn’t up to it. Needs upgrading to allow the food to move more freely, especially in the light of what’s happened recently. Nothing like his 14 lanes, though. Can you imagine that? This is what happens when you start in the wrong place, facing the wrong way, and keep running.

‘Whatever happens, though, your runways are too short. The shuttle doesn’t need to be anything like his lot reckon, but it’s still going to be bigger and heavier than what we’ve got now. If it’s going to stay in the air all the way to the landing strip, it’s going to have to really move. It’ll move right off the end of our strips and into the long grass. Or is it a housing estate behind most of them? Not much long grass around, is there?’ He smiled for the first time. ‘And the warehouses. Under current usage, they overflow every six or seven days. We have to manually clear everything out that’s spoiled, just to allow new stuff in. That would happen every day with the larger shuttles. Gets worse every time a runway goes out of commission. Those are the things you need to look at right now.’

Silence once more. I broke it again.

‘Ok, I understand. We need to prioritise roads, railways, runways and warehousing. And you say that the Sergeant’s figures are overstated. If that is the case, can you give us any indication of how far these facilities need to be expanded? Do we need to double them? More than that? Less?’

‘Double? Yes, double everything if you like. It certainly won’t make things any worse. No guarantee it’ll make them better, either.’ He spoke directly to Captain Small. ‘You know what I’m going to say next, don’t you?’ She nodded and turned back to face me. ‘Nobody knows. Nobody can know. It would just be guesswork. You’ll never know exactly what you need until you do some meaningful testing. There are no reference sites. Nobody else out there is doing anything like we are. Believe me, I’ve looked for them.

‘The only option is testing. Proper testing, not the stuff they’ve been doing underground. We have to build a fully specified test zone. It doesn’t have to be the size of the real thing, but it has to have at least one of every part so you can see how they all work together.’

‘Are you telling me we don’t have a fit for purpose testing environment?’ I asked.

‘Am I telling you that? Yes I am! What you’ve got is a mish-mash of some of the components we use today. But it’s not even representative of what we have now. It’s not kept pace with changes made to the actual model. And it certainly won’t do for what we’re going to be providing in future.’

‘Well, can we start by getting a test zone in place? That might allow us to come up with more trustworthy estimates, yes?’ I suggested.

‘Genius!’ he threw up his hands. ‘If only I’d thought of that one already!’

‘I take it you have,’ I said.

‘I’ve procured the land, got the materials, got agreements in place for the provision of specialist machinery we’ll need, developed a detailed plan for the build. It’s all waiting.’

‘Waiting for what?’

‘Waiting for everything. We’ve not used that type of asphalt before, so we need quality control to ratify it. There’s still no sign-off for the demolition of the disused industrial units so that we can extend the runway. That’s with Environmental Control. And, even if we get those clearances, we don’t have anyone who can build it.’

‘We don’t have anyone who can build it?’ I looked around the room while I repeated what he had said. Small and Farbrace were both composing messages on their handhelds. The thermomechanic was gazing defiantly at his cuticles. ‘What about our engineers? We have hundreds, don’t we?’

‘They’re fully utilised. They’ve got a pipeline of work that stretches out to long after you and I will be gone. Over 90% of their workload is scheduled to finish after the time that has been identified as critical for our continued survival.’

‘But this is probably the single most important piece of work we need to do,’ I contended. ‘Is there no way of changing priorities?’

‘Of course there is. You can make a case for it. Submit it through the usual channels and it’ll get reviewed directly by the portfolio director. That’s probably Colonel Brown for something like this, or maybe Colonel Watson. I haven’t worked out where all today’s changes leave everyone. If everything’s in place and you’ve done it all properly, you should get a revised priority within eight weeks. Then you can start lining up engineers.’

Captain Small cleared her throat. ‘That’s our time, gentlemen. Thank you both for your input. I think we all need to be somewhere else now. I know I do.’

I checked my watch. It was three minutes to midday. The two experts left the room together. I followed them as they returned to the lift lobby. They were ranting at each other, waving their arms around. The bad-tempered sergeant with the frayed cuffs took hold of the thermomechanic’s sheaf of papers and flung them to the four winds whilst screaming what I presumed to be obscenities over his shoulder. The younger man collected everything together diligently, and took the stairs instead.

We had a minute or so left before the room was no longer ours.

‘Useful?’ Small asked me.

‘Useful? I suppose it was interesting to hear their views, but I’m actually worried that I might know less now than I did an hour ago. And what about this testing zone? Surely that needs to be top priority? We can then do some proper dry runs. I mean, we won’t solve the demand modelling problem, but at least we can see how much of an increase we can handle with any solution we design.’

‘It would be a real bonus, yes,’ she agreed.

‘Bonus?’

‘Yes, don’t you think? Actually, Major Thompson is very keen to see it implemented. It was supposed to run concurrently with the build of the new shuttle over the last 24 months, but there have been hold-ups. You heard about some of them from the Sergeant.’

‘Hold-ups?’

‘I know what I’m going to do. The Major will be delighted. I’m going to recommend that you bring the build of the test zone under your umbrella. All it’s lacked up to now is someone to really take ownership. I just haven’t had the time. Now that you’re at the beginning of everything, you’re in the ideal position. And you’ll be moving so much faster than anyone else has been able to. It’s perfect.’

‘Perfect?’

‘Maybe it’s something you can get Corporal Farbrace involved in?’

Farbrace nodded. He grinned. He had not taken a single note during the entire meeting.

We left the room and I followed them back to their homes. Captain Small turned to me as we walked.

‘Oh! I know what I meant to say to you. There’s an initiative you ought to get closer to. It’s already started, but it might benefit from being brought under your control, too. I think you’ll find it interesting. It’s to do with the atmosphere.’

She stopped by her desk. I knew it was hers because it was so efficiently managed. There was so much unused space when compared with the sea of other workspaces. Her certificate of entitlement to marriage stood proudly next to her phone. She must have broken the news. Farbrace continued past and sank into his seat opposite.

‘We’re working on a way of thinning the atmosphere, particularly the thermosphere,’ she told me in a quiet voice, although she made no special effort to conceal her words. ‘They can pump vast amounts of helium into it, or something, and it becomes much easier for the shuttles to drift through. They naturally decrease their speed and they don’t get so hot either. It works well, by all accounts.’

‘It sounds too good to be true,’ I said. ‘If we can get away without re-engineering the shuttles, it takes away the whole atmosphere problem. How can I find out more?’

‘I’ll get Sergeant Magath to come and see you.’ She spelled his name for me. ‘He’ll give you all the details you need. Probably more than you need. Absolute genius, he is, and the brains behind it. It’s expensive and it’s dangerous, but it works a treat. Just so long as the security services don’t poke their noses in too much.’

‘Security services? Is it illegal?’

‘Not exactly, but it does introduce a couple of weak points. Magath will explain much better than I can. We don’t need that lot meddling, though. We can use this solution right now, and it’ll help. Even the current shuttles are facing the same challenges: they’re getting heavier and increasing speeds.’ She lowered her voice properly now. ‘We’ve had incidents already.’

‘Burnouts?’ I whispered. She nodded once.

‘And whatever you do,’ she continued whilst taking her seat, ‘make sure you include Farbrace in everything. Meetings, workshops, any documents you produce; he’s my eyes and ears here. This,’ she took in the beaming Corporal and me with a wave of her hand, ‘is the team.’

I smiled at my new partner. He punched the air. I left for lunch at the port. If I was quick I could grab the boys before they went out.