‘Just how many people is this going to take?’ Javier asked.

‘Is what going to take?’ Coulan asked. ‘Exactly what is the aim here?’

‘To get rid of the Captain and the National Council,’ Bethaneve said. ‘Right?’

‘Yes,’ Slvasta said. ‘And then what?’

‘Democracy,’ she said indignantly. ‘Proper democracy, with courts that are open and honest. And government officials who are accountable. That’s for starters.’

‘So we have to physically kick the bastards out,’ Javier said. ‘That’s not going to be easy. They’ll put up a fight. We’d need an army.’

‘Or a mob,’ Coulan said. ‘We’ve just seen how powerful that can be. The Meor was hard pressed to defend the government buildings.’

‘You can’t control a mob,’ Slvasta said.

‘Don’t be so sure about that. A mob just needs the right leader.’

‘But if anyone establishes themselves as a mob agitator, the Captain’s police will pounce on them,’ Javier said. ‘If they’re lucky, they’ll escape with being sent to the Pidrui mines.’

‘So their identities need to be kept hidden,’ Bethaneve countered. ‘That’s simply a question of maths.’

‘Maths?’ Slvasta queried – and maybe a little too much scepticism leaked past his shell.

‘Of course.’ She grinned tauntingly at him. ‘What we need is separate groups of agitators, kept in isolation from each other, but using private ’paths to keep in touch. Lieutenants that don’t know each other, so they can’t betray anyone, and nobody knows us. Maybe some kind of pyramid structure, with instruction coming down from us and relayed through the groups.’ She closed her eyes, her thoughts alight with geometric shapes designated by lines and nodes. ‘Humm, let me think on that.’

‘I like it,’ Javier said. ‘So if we’re group one, right at the top, all we have to do is just recruit the layer of groups below us. After that, the groups we found go on to establish more groups. The layers build up.’

‘Sounds good,’ Slvasta admitted. ‘If only we knew someone who could organize that?’

Bethaneve gave him an obscene finger gesture.

‘We’ll leave that with you, then,’ Coulan said. ‘Our official communications officer.’

‘Not officer,’ she said sharply. ‘Regiments have officers.’

‘Comrade then?’

‘Yes. I like that.’

‘Our biggest problem is going to be motivating people,’ Javier said. ‘There are so many people who just accept the status quo.’

‘Water,’ Bethaneve said eagerly. ‘Everyone knows how badly the water companies maintain the city pipes. It wouldn’t take much to bugger up the pump stations. The Captain’s family owns half of them. We can put it about that the failures are all down to him, squeezing profit out for himself and not spending enough to repair and replace essential parts.’

Slvasta gazed at Bethaneve with a growing admiration. He’d never seen her this animated before; angry with the First Officer and the Captain, yes, but this – this was a whole new aspect of her. He rather liked her fierceness, and how smart she was being.

‘We also need to think about how to get our message out to people,’ Coulan said. ‘A reason why our way is better than the existing system.’

‘Money,’ Slvasta said, determined to make his own contribution.

They all looked at him.

‘Everyone wants more money, right?’ he said. The idea that was blooming in his mind was only just keeping ahead of his speech, so he just let himself flow with it. ‘So we have to show them we can give them that. They have to know that opposing the Captain is going to end in better times, especially money-wise.’ He paused, slotting the aspects together, feeling a great deal of satisfaction at breathing some life into his personal goal.

‘Go on,’ Javier said.

‘There are a lot of people in Varlan on the breadline right now, and not just the ones in the Shanties. And every day there’s more drift in from the provinces in search of work. Well, why don’t we make sure they get that work?’

‘How in Giu’s name do we do that?’ Bethaneve asked.

Slvasta smiled round at all of them as the perfect solution bloomed in his mind. ‘By taking it away from the mods.’

*

It took Javier a couple of weeks to recover well enough to walk. He had to use a cane and support himself with teekay. But once he was able to leave Tarleton Gardens he got Slvasta a job at Coughlin’s stall in the Wellfield meat market. Coughlin was a hundred and sixty-three, so he relied entirely on Javier and two lads, Pabel and Ervin, as well as three mod-apes in their third decade – it wasn’t kind keeping the creatures on that long.

Every morning, an hour before dawn, Javier would take one of the lads with him to collect their meat from the Plessey station goods yard where the night trains delivered it. Along with dozens of other stalls, they’d load carcasses – some fresh, some salted – and cart them back to Wellfield, where the meat would be cut up and packed for their clients. Coughlin had taken some convincing that a one-armed man was up to the task. But once Slvasta had demonstrated just how strong his teekay was, the old man relented.

‘This is a stall suspended in history,’ Javier confided when Slvasta arrived on his first day.

Slvasta took a look around the poky clutter of huts sheltering under the massive roof and thought Javier was being generous: the stall should have been relegated to history and a new one built on its foundations.

*

They had to wake up at four o’clock every morning to be at the Plessey station. So getting up an hour and a half earlier wasn’t too much of a hardship. Bethaneve had tracked down the addresses of the major adaptor stables across Varlan without any trouble. ‘You just have to know which public registry to search,’ she said brightly. Slvasta hadn’t been surprised to find there were thirty-seven stables on her list; and plenty of people had smaller stables, too. There were a lot of mods in the capital.

The Dawa family’s stable was on Hatchwood Road, barely a quarter of a mile from the riverfront in the Oxlip district. A neat block with ten-foot-high brick walls, surrounded by spindly voxin trees whose chaotic black and grey tufts waved about in the breeze. A six-storey townhouse stood beside the main entrance, with a neat little front garden and deftly trimmed pinku vines scrambling up the front. Inside the walls was a traditional layout of barns and two exercise yards. The birthing manger was in the middle, long enough to hold twenty-five pregnant neuts, with the hatchery at one end where their newly laid eggs would sit on clean straw. Two of the barns housed the hundred-strong herd of female neuts, where they were bred with the stable’s ten male neuts. The remaining barns were for the young mods, with specific stalls for mod-apes, dogs, dwarfs, cats, birds and horses of various sizes. Right at the centre was the adaptor stockade, where those with the talent sat for long hours beside a neut whose egg had just been fertilized and used their teekay to bring on the required traits in the embryo.

Slvasta and Javier turned down an alley at the back of the Dawa stables and hurried along it. There were no streetlights down the narrow passage, and the nightly river mist was reducing visibility to a couple of yards. Nonetheless they both clad themselves in a subtle fuzz to deflect any ex-sight that might chance to sweep the alley. Not far from the corner, they found a sturdy little wooden door which hadn’t been opened for years. It was secured with a Ysdom lock – still the finest anti-teekay lock on Bienvenido, with multiple springs and levers designed to thwart the most skilful burglar. You could break it, of course, but the main bolt was solid iron an inch in diameter, so you had to either have the strongest teekay on the planet or bring a sledgehammer along. Either way, chances were that an assault that blatant would be noticed. They’d found that out the hard way during their first couple of attempted incursions.