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realised that the Guards, in their brutal incompetence, were actually going to allow Ingre to die, as they had many others. She could think of only one way of getting more food.

    She wasn’t sexually inexperienced; even the Qax hadn’t been able to extirpate that. Pash was easy to seduce.

    The sex wasn’t unpleasant, and Pash did nothing to hurt her. The oddest thing was the spacegoer’s exoskeleton he wore, even during sex; it was a web of silvery thread that lay over his skin. But she felt no affection for him, or - she suspected - he for her. Unspoken, they both knew that it was his power over her that excited him, not her body.

    Still, she waited for several nights before she asked him for the extra food she needed to keep Ingre alive.

    Meanwhile, in the Conurbation, things got worse. Despite the maintenance rotas the stairwells and corridors became filthy. The air circulation broke down. The inner cells became uninhabitable, and crowding increased. Then there was the violence. Rumours spread of food thefts, even a rape. Rala learned to hide her food when she walked the darker corridors, scuttling past walls marked with bright green tetrahedral sigils, the most common graffito.

    The Conurbation was dying, Rala realised with slow amazement. It was as if the sky itself was falling. People spoke even more longingly of the Qax Occupation, and the security it had brought.

    One day Pash came to her, excited. ‘Listen. There’s trouble. Factional infighting among the Green Guards.’

    She closed her eyes. ‘You’re leaving, aren’t you?’

    ‘There’s a battle at a Conurbation a couple of days from here. There are great opportunities out there, kid.’

    Rala felt sick; the world briefly swam. They had never discussed the child growing inside her, but Pash knew it existed, of course. It was a mistake; it hadn’t even occurred to her that the contraceptive chemistry which had circulated with the Conurbation’s water supply might have failed.

    She hated herself for begging. ‘Don’t leave.’

    He kissed her forehead. ‘I’ll come back.’

    Of course he never did.

     
    The brief factional war was won by a group of Green Guards called the Million Heroes. They wore a different kind of armband, had a different ranking system, and so forth. But day to day, under their third set of bosses since the Qax, little changed for the drones of Conurbation 2473; one set of rulers, it was turning out, was much the same as another.

    By now most of the Conurbation’s systems had ceased functioning, and its inner core was dark and uninhabitable. Everybody worked in the fields, and some were even putting up crude shelters closer to where they worked, scavenging rock from the Conurbation’s walls.

    Still Rala went hungry, and she increasingly worried about the child, and how she would cope with the work later in her pregnancy.

    She remembered how Pash had said, or hinted, that the nano dust was like a plant. So she dug it up again and planted it away from the shade of the wall, in the sunlight.

    Still, for days, nothing happened. But then she started to noticed pale yellow specks, embedded in the dirt. If you washed a handful of soil you could pick out particles of food. They tasted just as if they had come from a food hole. She improvised a sieve from a bit of cloth, to make the extraction more efficient.

    That was when Ingre, for whose life Rala had prostituted herself, turned her in to the new authority.

    Ingre, standing with one of the Million Heroes over the nano patch, seemed on the point of tears. ‘I had to do it,’ she said.

    ‘It’s all right,’ said Rala tiredly.

    ‘At least I can put an end to this irregularity.’ The Hero raised his weapon at the nano patch. He was perhaps seventeen years old.

    Rala forced herself to stand before the weapon’s ugly snout. ‘Don’t destroy it.’

    ‘It’s anti-doctrinal.’

    ‘We can’t eat doctrine.’

    ‘That’s not the point,’ snapped the