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.

Eleanor always hated coming to Mucklands. It infected aspirations and dignity like a cancer. You could never rise out of Mucklands, you could only fight. The Trinities exploited that ruthlessly.

She caught glimpses of people lurking among the workshops, walking between the towers. All urban predator types, leather jeans, camouflage jackets, and AK carbines. Even though she had a Trinities card, she always called in advance, waited until there was someone to escort her in.

"Do the kids here go to school?" she asked Suzi.

"Yeah. Father makes sure they do. It's a pain, some of 'em make good scouts. Who's gonna suspect a nine-year-old?"

"You'll cope."

Suzi gave her a glum look. "I know what you're thinking. Get 'em out, fill 'em with smarts, break the poverty cycle."

"That's right."

"Brilliant. Then who's going to carry on the fight?"

The fight against their nemesis the Blackshirts was everything for the Trinities, the reason for their existence. Blackshirts were the remnants of the People's Constables with whom they had fought a running war for nearly a decade along Peterborough's cluttered frantic streets. And the two were still fighting as if nothing had changed, as if the PSP was still in power. There were too many dead, too many old scores to settle.

"You can't fight for ever," Eleanor said, knowing it was a waste of time. Trinities lived for combat, lived for death. It was sequenced into their genes now, unbreakable.

"Try me," Suzi growled dangerously.

Two guards stood outside the tower's door, saluting sharply as Suzi walked through. Eleanor didn't even feel a reflex laugh coming on, it was too sad. The inside of the tower was kept meticulously clean, a sharp contrast to the external atrophy.

Suzi knocked once on the door of the old warden's flat and went straight in. The far end of the room was lined with dilapidated metal desks supporting a range of communication gear; six Trinities, all girls, were operating the systems. Seven flatscreens were fixed to the wall above them, showing images fed from cameras which had to be perched on the top of the towers. Five of them displayed a panoramic view of Mucklands Wood, scanning slowly; while the remaining two were zoomed in on Walton, two kilometres away on the other side of the Al5, a dense conurbation of rooftops and chimneys, interspaced with the tapering tops of evergreen pines. The quagmire of the Fens basin was just visible in the background, a grubby brown plain vanishing into the distorted haze line which occluded the horizon.