Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

My God, is this what regeneration is bringing us back to? Traffic jams and yuppies?

At least none of the vehicles was burning petrol. Not even Julia could take that short cut. Energy generation and supply was becoming a problem again, countrywide. Worldwide, from what the ‘casts said. Solar cells simply couldn’t meet industrial demands, coal was out of the question. Hydro dams were one possibility for England, given the increased rainfall, but the country’s chronic land shortage all but ruled them out. Tidal barrages were a viable option, but they were big, their construction time could be anything up to a decade. England needed the electricity now. Peterborough had its eddy turbines in addition to its quota from the beleaguered National Commerce Grid, but even that fell well below the level demanded by Event Horizon, the kombinates, and the plethora of smaller light-engineering companies nesting in the suburbs.

Eleanor couldn’t think how Julia intended to power the tower and cyber-precincts she was beginning out at Prior’s Fen. It couldn’t be fusion; the JET5 reactor at Cullham had passed the break-even point a year ago, but commercial applications were still seven or eight years away, and looked like being at least as expensive as fission. Perhaps Julia was planning to ship it in using old oil tankers converted to carry giga-conductor cells. They could be charged up in equatorial ports; the power would be there if she spread a few hundred square kilometres of solar cells over the new deserts in Africa and Asia. Her Prior’s Fen project was certainly pitched at that sort of macro-scale.

The channel breakfast newscasts had devoted a lot of time to reports of Julia pouring the first footings of her new headquarters building. Eleanor and Greg had watched it in bed, eating toast and sipping tea, enjoying the quiet period of togetherness. Because she damn well knew it would be the only one they’d get today.

The traffic began to quicken, her three helmeted outriders opening some distance. She drove past the entrance to the Milton park estate. Normally she used it as a short cut into Bretton, but at this time of day she would have to fight her way through the traffic in the Park Farm industrial precinct. Quicker to stick to the trunk road.

A comet’s tail of red brake lights flared up ahead.

Bretton was a hive of construction activity. Neglected through the PSP decade as the vivacious new developments flourished in what had once been the green belt, it was now back in demand with property developers despite its strategically disadvantaged position sitting between Mucklands Wood and Walton. Housing and industrial units tussled for space in old parklands, streets were parking yards for the lorries of various building contractors.

Eleanor parked behind a low-loader carrying a pair of factory-new dumper carts. The first thing she missed were the children. Bretton used to be swarming with them.

Rounded up and carted off to school, most likely. And a good thing too. There was so much catching up to do. The one thing she always regretted was not having a formal education; all the kibbutz had given her was the basic reading, writing, arithmetic, and databasing lessons, then they put her straight into animal husbandry courses. She had enjoyed them at the time, because it meant that for three nights a week she went into Oakham to the sixth-form college. Two hours just sitting down and not having to work. Heaven.

The adult courses, or at least getting out of the kibbutz and seeing there were alternative ways to live, had planted the seeds of rebellion which ultimately resulted in meeting Greg that night two years ago. She knew all she needed to run the groves with Greg, although she still toyed with the idea of going back and picking up some more qualifications. One of those warm misty daydreams which helped life slip down a little easier, a what if which was slightly more than idle fantasy. Now, of course, education for children was a New Conservative priority, and a real one, not just a manifesto declaration. One of the reasons for the current bout of inflation was the amount of money the Treasury had to print to pay for repairing schools and providing them with up-to-date equipment. So Julia always said. But then it was Julia who was so insistent that total education be implemented as soon as possible.

Only because she needs computer literates to work in her cyber-factories. And what Julia wanted, Marchant granted, so went the opposition chant. And why am I being so cynical this morning?

“You were dead ten paces ago,” a gravelly female voice said in her ear.

Eleanor turned. It was Suzi.

The Trinities girl only came up to the base of Eleanor’s neck; she was slim to the point of androgyny, with spiked purple hair and a bony face. She wore a pair of tight black jeans, and a brown singlet under a new leather biker jacket which had the Trinities symbol stamped on the right breast-a fist closed round a thorn cross, drops of blood falling. Her age was impossible to pin down, though Greg said she was in her mid-twenties. In a girlie summer frock she could have passed for fifteen.

She was grinning up at Eleanor.

“I saw you skulking about as soon as I got out of the Ranger,” Eleanor said, making it as condescending as possible. “I just didn’t want to hurt your ego, that’s all.”

“Bollocks!”

Eleanor laughed, and scrupulously refrained from ruffling Suzi’s hair. For all her butch swagger, Suzi could get very touchy about her lack of centimetres.

She had met the Trinities girl back when Greg took his first Event Horizon case. It was her first, and please God last, experience of hardlining. Both of them had been hurt during the mission, although Suzi had suffered by far the worst injuries.

Eleanor still wasn’t quite sure if they were friends; Suzi had a very frugal social behaviour pattern. Relationship wasn’t a word or concept which featured heavily in an urban predator’s mental lexicon. But there was certainly a degree of respect, which was a big step; non-urban-predators were universally regarded with complete contempt.

“What have you come for?” Suzi asked as they walked up the slope towards the Mucklands Wood estate.

“I need to have a rap with Royan.”

“Yeah?”

Eleanor grinned at the blatant curiosity. “Greg’s working on a case again.”

“No shit. I thought you weren’t going to let him do that again.”

“I wasn’t. But Julia asked him to.”

Suzi chuckled delightedly. “Christ, that girl bypasses their brains and plugs directly into their balls. What’s she got that I haven’t?”

“Ten trillion pounds and a medieval virgin princess’s hairstyle.”

They laughed together.

As they approached the housing estate Suzi drew a large Luger maser pistol from a shoulder holster, carrying it quite openly.

Mucklands Wood always reminded Eleanor of old Soviet-style cities in the last century. It was a cultural and architectural throwback to prudent realism: low-cost council housing, the PSP’s contribution to the refugee crisis, a magnet for the underclass who couldn’t hope to get into one of the overseas-funded projects. Rich with the nutrients that bred resentment, the starkness and dejection of lives condemned to the dole.

Fifteen identical tower-blocks, twenty storeys high, sheer concrete walls hidden beneath a scale of cheap, low-efficiency solar panels. Crushed limestone covered the ground around them, sticky with a tar of mud; weeds and nettles grew in defiant clumps, the only vegetation. A few small single-storey workshops had been built by the council, earmarked for PSP skill-training projects. But they were all empty shells, burnt out, breeze-block walls already alarmingly concave; another couple of years would see entropy and vandalism reduce them to rubble.