Saul eyed him steadily, and began frantically accessing station data. What he found there surprised him immensely. When Janus had originally gathered data regarding this station, the population was about a thousand; now it seemed to have climbed to four thousand. The numbers of the workforce, along with security and political monitoring personnel, had initially doubled, then a surge of a further two thousand had arrived. Most of these newcomers were located in Arcoplex One, and as he checked the relevant data the true situation began to emerge. The Committee, or some part of it, had already begun the process of relocating here. Delegates now occupied the arcoplex cylinder – including names he recognized – along with political staff, all their families, and others whose presence here he suspected was due simply to powerful people they knew. But all of these he would have to deal with later.

‘Whatever,’ he said, expressionless. ‘Just try and keep your people safe.’

He carefully turned his chair away from them as more chatter suddenly started becoming accessible to him. It seemed that the security hole Smith had recently closed had reopened in the barracks where Langstrom was located. This had to be some sort of trap, surely, involving deliberate misinformation.

‘We have more serious challenges to respond to right now,’ said Smith. ‘We can discuss your rather minor problem once we have nullified the current power instability here within the station.’

‘Well, there we have a problem. I want to discuss this now,’ replied Langstrom.

Three other soldiers were with him and, checking records, Saul noted that they were all sergeants. They all wore the pale-blue uniforms of Inspectorate enforcers, but specially adapted for the near-weightless environment. No one here was clad like an Earth-bound enforcer as the net broadcasts had shown – those broadcasts were either seriously outdated or had simply been falsified. Checking further, Saul began to discern the true shape of the hierarchy here.

Smith and his Inspectorate execs were the arm of government in overall command of security, political oversight, and ensuring that everyone did what they were told and thought what they were ordered to think. However, someone in the Committee had realized that, where survival depended on science, the scientists and technicians must be allowed independence, therefore authority over technical issues within the station had been handed over to someone called Le Roque. This situation had not lasted too long, for apparently Le Roque now languished inside one of Smith’s adjustment cells. Langstrom’s soldiers, who reported to Smith and his execs, were military-wing Inspectorate enforcers, and the best – as far as the Committee was concerned – that ‘service’ had to offer. Which probably meant that they were all utter shits.

‘The space planes will arrive on-station in just half of one hour,’ Smith insisted.