Eleanor followed a big methane-powered articulated lorry down the gentle slope towards the bloated Ferry Meadows estuary, née Park, the Duo's suspension thrumming smoothly on the tough thermo-cured cellulose surface. The A47 turned left at the bottom of the slope, running along the top of a small embankment above the filthy, swirling water. After the lorry rumbled round the bend, she could see a string of ten barges moored across the mile-wide estuary between the base of the embankment and Orton Winstow. Artificial islands of rock and concrete were rising beside each of them.

She watched a crane swinging its load of rock from a barge across to the centre of an island, dropping it with a low rumbling sound. A cloud of dust billowed up. When it cleared, she could see a gang of men swarming over the pile, rolling rocks down on to flat-topped carts so they could be packed behind the encircling wall of concrete.

The idea for an eddy-turbine barrage had been started back when the PSP was in power. They were generators that looked like propeller blades, mounted in narrow nacelles and tethered between the islands where the current spun them as it ebbed and flowed.

Peterborough's post-Warming industrial base had been founded on light engineering and gear production, easily served by the city's electricity allocation from the National Commerce Grid, and supplemented by solar panels. But the explosion of manufacturing had begun to attract heavier industries, pushing the power demand close to breaking point. Then after the Second Restoration the newly legitimised Event Horizon arrived. With its wholly modern industries, Peterborough was the obvious choice to supply the cyber-factories with components once Philip Evans brought them ashore. The already vigorous city went into overdrive. But its expanded fortunes brought it up against infrastructure capacity limits. The eddy-turbine barrage was intended to relieve the now-chronic energy shortage, one of a dozen projects rushed into construction to cope with the excessive demands Event Horizon was placing.

The traffic was snarled up in front of the Duo. Eleanor slowed, and saw a bus in front of the lorry had stopped to let out its passengers. They were all men in rough working clothes, carrying or wearing hard hats. They joined a group of about seventy waiting on the embankment below the road, level with the line of barges. There was a small jetty at the bottom of the embankment. A boat had just cast off, ferrying some of the men out to the islands. She could see a clump of men who'd been left behind on the jetty arguing hotly with a pair of foremen.

"They'll be lucky," Greg murmured as the Duo drove past the crowd milling aimlessly on the embankment.

"Why?"

"Tell you, the eddy-turbine barrage is a council project, right. Unless you're on the city council labour register, there's no way you'll get to work on it."

"Well, why don't they sign on with the council, then?" she asked.