Agents of the ESA : 3 Solo Goes SOLO

The rain had been falling since dawn, which in itself was nothing new. What was new was that nobody was doing anything about it. Once upon a time Ulysses would have flagged the weather patterns hours in advance, rerouted pedestrian traffic, adjusted street drainage systems automatically. Now the water simply collected where it liked, running in dark rivers along the gutters of what had once been one of the most monitored cities on the planet.

Solo Camilleri pulled the collar of her ESA jacket higher and kept walking. The uniform still felt right on her back even if it no longer carried any real weight. She passed the remnants of Trafalgar Square just after eight in the morning and slowed her pace to take it in. The great stone lions were still there, solid and indifferent as always, but the space between them had transformed into something altogether different. Stalls of mismatched timber and reclaimed sheeting stretched across the flagstones in ragged rows. People moved between them with the cautious, calculating manner of those who had learnt very quickly that everything had a price now, and that price was rarely printed on a screen.

A woman in a grey coat held up a set of silver cutlery, real silver by the look of it, and negotiated with a man behind a crate stacked with synthetic food packets. The packets were old ESA emergency rations, the kind that had once been stockpiled in government vaults. Now they were currency. Solo watched the exchange for a moment. The woman handed over the cutlery with shaking hands and received four packets in return. She pressed them to her chest and turned away quickly, as if expecting someone to take them back.

Solo moved on.

The alleyway behind the old precinct building was cordoned off with nothing more than a length of orange construction tape, the kind that required no power to function. A young local constable stood at one end of it, hands in his pockets, looking as though he very much wished he were somewhere else. He was perhaps twenty-five and had the expression of a man whose entire professional training had just become useless overnight.

"You shouldn't go in there," he said, without much conviction.

"ESA," Solo replied, showing him the badge out of habit more than necessity. He looked at it for a second and then stepped aside. She noticed his hands were shaking slightly. She didn't comment on it.

"I couldn't call it in," he said, following her to the tape. "The comms are still down on my end. I just stayed with it. Him. I just stayed." He trailed off and rubbed the back of his neck. "Does it mean anything anymore? The badge, I mean."

Solo ducked under the tape without answering him. It wasn't cruelty. She simply didn't have an answer she could give him honestly.

The body was at the far end of the alley, propped at an angle against the precinct's rear wall as though the man had sat down for a rest and never got back up. She recognised him even before she crouched beside him. Torben Haus, an ESA tech specialist she had crossed paths with on three separate investigations over the years. Quiet man. Good at his job. He had the kind of face that blended into rooms.

It was the back of his skull that made her stomach tighten. A section of bone and skin had been opened with a precision that no field surgeon, no street thug, and no desperate scavenger could have managed. The edges of the incision were clean and sealed, cauterised so thoroughly that there was almost no blood at all. The Ulysses cranial implant that every registered European citizen carried was gone, removed from the cavity it had occupied since Torben was an infant. Even with the system fully down, extraction of a chip without the correct override sequence should have triggered a lethal electrical surge from the backup cell. Someone had known how to neutralise that. Someone had the tools to do so cleanly, which was a problem, because those tools had not existed on the mainland since the blackout.

Solo sat back on her heels and let that fact settle.

She checked his coat pockets methodically. Nothing in the left. In the right she found a folded wrapper and beneath it, pressed into his palm with the grip of a man who had been holding on to it at the moment he died, a data-shard. She recognised the format, a pre-collapse personal storage unit, roughly the size of a thumbnail. She worked it free carefully. The moment she held it between her fingers she noticed it. The shard was warm. Not the residual warmth of a dead man's hand. It was actively warm, generating its own low heat, which should have been impossible given that the shard format was passive storage. It needed an external reader to function. It had no internal power source.

She pocketed it and stood.

On the way back down the alleyway she paused and looked up at the roofline. It was a reflex, the kind that years of working under Ulysses had almost trained out of her. The system had always covered the angles above. There had never been a need to look up manually. She looked up now.

Nothing moved. And yet she felt it the way you feel a change in air pressure before a storm. Something was up there. Something that had watched her crouch beside Torben Haus and catalogue his wounds and take the shard from his hand. Whatever it was, it moved with a stillness that was too deliberate, too controlled to be a civilian scavenger.

She walked back to the constable at the tape. He was staring at the middle distance with the hollow look of someone waiting for an instruction that was never going to come.

"Get away from this street," she told him quietly. "Don't come back tonight."

He blinked at her. "What do I put in the report?"

"Write whatever you want," she said. "Nobody is reading them."

She walked away from the precinct at a steady pace, resisting the urge to run, because running told the thing on the rooftop exactly what she knew. The safe-house was four streets north, a ground-floor flat she and Margo and Philips had claimed three days after the collapse. Jake had gone off on his own errand by then, chasing rumours about the sky base, which left Solo to work London alone. She had not minded that arrangement until this precise moment.

The rain intensified. The streets were empty of everything except water and the distant sound of a market that was slowly learning to live without the world it had been promised. Solo kept her hand near the shard in her pocket, feeling its unnatural warmth against her palm, and did not look back. She knew without looking that the roofline was following her. She had no system to call on, no network to alert, no chip to transmit a distress signal. There was only the wet pavement beneath her boots and the certainty, cold and very clear, that for the first time in her career she was genuinely alone out here.

It was a feeling she was going to have to get used to.