‘No, Inspectorate Headquarters. Cell complex A.’
At this the driver did turn to peer at him through the security screen. He guessed that, in another age in Germany, this would have been like finding one of the Gestapo had just got into your cab. Inspectorate officials enjoyed their power and weren’t averse to using it.
‘Certainly, sir,’ the driver replied, very politely, and eased out into the traffic, the Mercedes running on electric until out in the open, then switching over, with only a slight change of tone, to diesel.
The exit road ran down the side of the airport, then up on to a bridge crossing half a kilometre of oily-looking estuary, then over mudflats traversed by numerous pipes from a nearby desalination plant, which stood silent and unlit. Where dirty-looking salt from the defunct plant had been mounded had since become a dumping ground for excess sprawl waste, and upon this roosted hordes of filthy seagulls, pigeons and raggedy starlings. Shacks were visible down below, and half-seen figures moving about in the glow of campfires. Pickings were probably extremely lean now, since even the rankest of food rarely made it as far as a waste tip.
At a roundabout the cab took the second exit, though Saul noted other cabs heading in the opposite direction, and within minutes the road passed through a gap in a long fence still in the process of being erected, and into a GUL section of the sprawl where an attempt had been made at Green Urban Living.
Compressed-fibre tenement blocks rose on either side, interspersed with independent waste incinerators or digesters running tenement-block generators and hot-water systems. It was easy enough to spot the ones still functioning by noting which blocks still had lights shining from their windows. Here and there long garden allotments speared off like side streets, every scrap of exposed soil crammed with vegetables, chicken coops and occasional pigsties. Around these strips rose fences, sometimes repaired with whatever had become available – fibre building board, old doors, parts of the bodywork of cars – though the more well-to-do tenements, perhaps with government employees still in residence, used ceramic-link fencing topped with razorwire. Every allotment was occupied – the participants from each tenement rotating the responsibility of guarding such a valuable food source.
Though certainly not self-sufficient, Saul knew that the system here had worked well enough when the tenements were first built, but as the population continued to rise and what were once single-family apartments absorbed a load of two or three families each, the cracks soon developed. Many of these areas were now considered no-go for the Inspectorate, and even the block political officers were powerless in districts where someone could be killed just for a bag of onions.
After passing the last tenement, the cab drove out again through a gated fence, similar to the one they’d driven in by, though this time it was complete. Readerguns were positioned on either side, and probably unnecessary Inspectorate guards sat in a lit-up guard booth. The gun barrels immediately tracked the vehicle’s progress, a laser doubtless scanning the bar code on the car’s screen, whilst a radio pulse also elicited responses from both his own and the driver’s ID implants. Saul noted how buildings had been demolished to make way for the fence, and to clear a space about twenty metres wide on either side of it. To the left, as the cab entered a more salubrious neighbourhood, he noted a minibus tipped over on its side, its bodywork peppered with holes and blackened by fire. It looked to him like those who had been trying to escape from the sectored area behind might still be inside. Just beyond this point, the driver breathed a sigh of relief.
‘Not your usual route?’ Saul suggested.
‘I normally take the M25C, through the Chelmsford arcoplex, sir,’ he explained. ‘But this is the quickest route to IHQ – though I won’t be coming back this way.’
‘Why not?’
‘Readerguns ain’t reliable.’
‘Why did you choose this route this time, then?’ he asked.
The driver remained silent for a moment, perhaps remembering who his passenger worked for and frightened lest his comments might be taken as some sort of criticism of the authorities Saul represented.
‘No readerguns here last time.’ He hunched his shoulders, clearly not wanting to say any more, but finally impelled to continue, ‘Weren’t no fence neither.’
So sectoring was well and truly under way, and no one wanted to be on the wrong side of the fence when all the gaps were finally sealed.
Saul had studied Argus Station for a year before information about the place became increasingly difficult to obtain. With Janus’s help, during that year, he managed to gain access to hidden files and secret information. He learnt that the station’s population then stood at just over a thousand, and it was a damned sight closer to self- sufficiency than any GUL developments or the green villages of the early twenty-first century. However, right from the start that self-sufficiency had been difficult to assess, what with the frequent changes in staff, space planes running up supplies or bringing down to Earth the loads of bubblemetal rendered out of the station’s asteroid, along with numerous other products that could only be manufactured in zero gravity. It wasn’t a closed system, therefore, and this applied particularly to its nascent ecology.
The station’s rotational arboretum helped keep the air supply oxygenated, and its trees supplied a multiplicity of other products: wood, fibre, resin, fruits and, from just two of the trees, also natural rubber. Both rotational and low-grav hydroponics provided cereal crops, vegetables, soya beans, cooking oils and sugars, whilst the farm provided oddly shaped eggs, the flesh of chickens, farmed salmon and tank-grown artificial proteins that could be flavoured and textured to resemble the meat of just about any animal.
But to maintain this the horticulturalists of Argus were frequently supplied with seeds, eggs, stasis-preserved life and genetic material from Earth – Gene Bank providing that material, which on the station they implanted in gel-eggs to grow in artificial wombs, or multiplied into seed germs. These produced extinct strains of chickens, rare mushrooms, cereal crops untouched by genetic modification, worms to work the soil, and odd parasites to kill off some pest inadvertently brought aboard the station. Only by constantly monitoring and constantly tweaking things had they managed to keep this makeshift ecology running. Separated from a regular supply of the stuff of life, it would fall apart and everything there would die. But perhaps they had solved that problem now, for in the last year traffic to and from the station had ramped up, and every day vast loads of materials and equipment were disappearing into it.
Only later did Saul learn that Gene Bank itself was about to be closed down, its information and resources relocated. The hatchet man for this task, an Exec called Coran, was unknown at IHQ London outside of the Inspectorate database, and therefore working outside the heavy security that usually surrounded such people. Much easier to get to.
‘Anything on Coran yet?’
‘Nothing at all,’ Janus replied. ‘All they know is that an aerocar went down over the Channel, but they haven’t even started to look for it. They have no ID on the car either, since apparently there was some problem with Air
