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the long and uncomfortable journey continued.
    They drove north out of the town, shortly heading into the flat countryside of Cambridgeshire. Tarent tried to see what he could through the window. After two hours the drivers pulled in at a depot to recharge the vehicle’s cells and to take on more biofuel. The woman in the row in front of Tarent climbed down to the tiny service bar beneath the passenger compartment. She brought back two styrofoam cups of coffee, one for herself and one for the man she was travelling with. She did not look in Tarent’s direction.
    Thinking ahead to the need for food at lunchtime, and like the other passengers rather unwilling to try clambering down the steep steps while the Mebsher was in motion, Tarent went down to the service area and took some sandwiches and a vacuum-sealed salad from the chill box.
    He returned to his seat and stared again through the narrow pane of armoured glass. From the position within the recharge dock he could see at least a dozen fallen trees, which must have lined the side of the road before they fell. Maybe they had been struck by the storm Melanie’s parents had mentioned. Their root balls stood perpendicular, great ragged discs of soil and root material. There was still a carpet of leaves, smaller shrubs, branches and other debris spreading across the dock forecourt and into the main road. With interest he regarded the many tonnes of timber and vegetation he could see in just this short stretch of the road and from a restricted viewpoint. The whole of southern England must be similarly wreathed in torn and broken vegetation because of the storms. He wondered what would happen to the valuable material when at last it was cleared up.
    His interest in the recycling of timber and other vegetation had been sharpened by the last photographic assignment he went on, two weeks before the start of the ill-fated visit to Turkey with Melanie. This had been to central Spain. Here he had covered the PCVE,
Proyecto Carbón Vegetal Españolas.
The Spanish authorities had set up a vast network of carbon-negative power generators based on the bulk creation of charcoaled biomass. The residue, when buriedin the ground, restored the waste carbon to the soil, not to the atmosphere. As a long-term measure it would also return fertility to the hundreds of thousands of hectares of the country that had turned to desert since the beginning of the twenty-first century.
    At a time of ever-worsening ecological catastrophe, the PCVE had induced in him a feeling of optimism, that something was at last being done. Looking at the fallen trees around him, Tarent hoped and assumed that people in Britain would not be so shortsighted as to incinerate the organic debris from this or any other of the recent storms, or to pile it somewhere to decompose. The Spanish charcoal biomass project was still the only large installation in Western Europe, but immense complexes of biochar electricity generators, coupled with carbon reclaim, had been established in China, Ukraine, Russia, India, Brazil and Australia.
    He knew, though, that in many parts of the world the climate was so extreme, and the urgent re-use of waste so little understood, that the old and wasteful methods were still being employed.
    He settled down on the thinly padded seat as comfortably as he could to endure the inevitably long hours of travel that must still lie ahead. Boredom was an enemy because of the mental blankness it created, allowing in the thoughts that normally he could guard himself against. It was still only a few days since Melanie had died. They had been together for more than twelve years and in spite of everything that had gone wrong he still did not yet know how he was going to get by without her.
    Obviously it had been a mistake to travel with her – from the moment they arrived at the field hospital he realized he was at best superfluous and at worst in the way of the clinical work. He busied himself with his