The Eastern Districts were huge tracts of sparsely populated land so flat that it could have been used for geometric diagrams. A thousand square kilometers would be cared for by a mobile farm platform and its attendant satellite machines would work the land. Each sector of the district had between twenty and thirty machines in operation at any given time to feed more than a billion hungry mouths on other worlds.
What little meat that could be found on this planet was either fish from the chain of lakes and irrigation canals, or vat-grown. The rest of the local diet was vegetarian. No-one has time or land to spare for cattle.
Law enforcement on this world is mobile through the necessity of covering such a large area of land; One floating platform and a handful of air transports for each district; An enforcement agent and an investigator for every two or three sectors to deal with the problems that the farm platforms couldn’t.
The only exception to this rule was the unimaginatively titled capital city of “Landing”, home to the world’s only full-time riot squads.
Enforcer Hiram Jochim Blake had looked after his patch - ED4-42 - for the better part of five years and was just about getting comfortable with the quiet life of rural peacekeeping where the only non-motile habitation was the stone tower of Tùr Rathaidean - The Tower of Rats.
Nothing important ever happened here. History and scandal were for other places.
And then platform thirty-one exploded.
3 Likes