Col Charnwood picked her up, driving a navy-blue low-slung Lada Sokol with one-way glass.

"Well, pet?" he asked after the gull-wing door hinged down.

Suzi allowed herself a smile, breath coming out of her in a rush. "In the bag."

"All right." Col Charnwood flicked the throttle and accelerated into the thick stream of traffic along the base of the river's embankment. The huge slope was covered by the thick heart-shaped leaves of delicosa plants that had twined around the rocks.

"I'll squirt it down to Maurice, let him give it a once-over first," Suzi said.

"Ya think he'll know if it's kosher?"

"Maybe not, but he'll know if it's connected with ionic streaming. I'm no 'ware genius. Brimley could've palmed us off with the data construct of a steam engine for all I know."

There was a serpent of red tail-lights growing in front. Col Charnwood swore at them as he slowed. The road was contraflowed ahead, long rows of cones stretched across the thermo-hardened cellulose surface. Suzi could see heavy yellow-painted contractors' machinery moving slowly along the embankment. They were stripping the shell of rock and vegetation from the mound, exposing the dark blue-grey coal slag underneath.

"Canna leave anything alone," Col Charnwood muttered.

Suzi didn't say anything. She knew Col had been one of the thousands who had built the embankment over a quarter of a century ago. A third of Newcastle's population had signed on with the city council's labour crews as the West Antarctic ice-sheet went into slushdown, and most of the rest had contributed at some time or another. Men, women, and children using JCBs, wheelbarrows, spades, picks, sacks, anything they could lay their hands on to haul the slag out of the barges, dumping it on the fifteen-metre-high mounds along the Tyne's banks. They rolled the rocks into place on top of the slag with ropes and pulleys, a protective crust against wave erosion. Working round the clock for a solid nine months to save their city from the rising sea level.