Salvation

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Callum stared at the uneasy spokesman, not believing a word of his clichés. “Call Moshi,” he said.

  His deputy’s comms icon came up in the screen lens. “Are you monitoring the Gylgen facility?”

  “Way ahead of you, boss,” Moshi Lyane replied cheerfully. “The G5Turing caught it within a minute. There’s been a lot of executive chatter with the Environment Enforcement Agency.”

  “Spillage?”

  “Satellite’s not showing anything. Yet. But the containers are below ground level. If there’s a leak, it’s not vapor.”

  “What does Dok say?

  “She’s talking to Boynak executives. And we’re on an open channel to the EEA in case they order intervention.”

  Callum’s screen lens showed him the Boynak file: the owner of the Gylgen plant, in turn owned by a tangle of interlocked holding companies, registered in a scattering of independent asteroids. He grunted in contempt. “Fucking typical.”

  “Boss?”

  “Can their in-house team handle it?”

  “Best guess: no. They’re shouting ‘nobody panic’ quite loud. And we’re not seeing any cleanup equipment on its way through the hubs.”

  “All right, I’ll be with you in ten.”

  “I welcome that.”

  Callum grinned, then looked down at the frying pan. The rashers were overcooked, and the yoke had turned solid. “Aww, bastard.”

  * * *

  —

  The huge old trees in Moray Place were all budding early thanks to the unseasonable winds that had been blowing in from the southwest for most of February. With the low morning sun striking them, it looked like an emerald frost had materialized overnight to coat the circular park. What had been the cobbled road surrounding the verdant urban isle was now broken up by two lines of raised circular troughs with cherry trees planted in the center of each one. Callum smiled up at the cherry blossom glowing a luminous pink in the bright sunlight. Savi had enjoyed the blossoms on her last visit.

  He walked around the troughs, keeping a wary eye out for cyclists. Ever since Connexion had started establishing its hubs across the globe, civic authorities had been pedestrianizing cities and towns, starting with the centers and gradually expanding out as the hub network coverage increased. There was still room for taxez, delivery bugez, and emergency vehicles to maneuver along Moray Place and the neighboring streets, but even the taxez were few and far between these days. The only time Callum really saw them was during one of Edinburgh’s not infrequent rainstorms. Cyclists, though—cyclists were very intense about their right of way, which seemed to include every flat surface in existence.

  Callum turned down Forres Street. “Any emails from Savi last night?” He didn’t know why he asked. The inbox was on his screen lens and had nearly two dozen emails pending, most of them work related, with one from his mother.

  “No,” Apollo replied.

  “What about everything you sent to the junk archive? She might be using a one-time address. Check them for a personal message.”

  “There are none.”

  “Calls? Ordinary phone calls or a sightyou?”

  “No.”

  “Calls made but no answervoice recorded?”

  “No.”

  “Has she made any social posts?”

  “Not since she posted her Barbuda videos the night before you left. Her parents and sister have both left messages on her MyLife site in the last thirty hours, asking her to call them.”

  “How about…have I been tracker pinged?”

  “None since you lost your smartCuff last November. You left it at Fitz’s apartment after his party.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Can you ping Savi’s mInet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do it.”

  “Her mInet is not responding.”

  “Ping it again.”

  “No response.”

  “Fuck.” She’s super smart, so why isn’t she doing something to let me know she’s all right? Anything?

  * * *

  —

  Like every city, Edinburgh’s Connexion hubs were arranged in a spider web pattern. On a map, it registered as concentric loops intersected at right angles by radial spurs. Commuters could walk in both directions around the loops, clockwise or counterclockwise, and inbound or outbound along the radial spurs. A simple mInet app called Hubnav told everyone the quickest route to their destination. Callum never bothered with it in the morning; his route to work was so familiar it had become simple muscle memory.

  He walked into the metrohub on the junction with Young Street. It was a loop hub, with five pay barriers across the entrance leading to a drab gray-and-green tiled lobby. Apollo gave the barrier his Connexion code, and he went straight through. As in every hub lobby, portal doors faced each other on opposite sides. Standing between them was like staring at the infinity image when you stand between two mirrors, except it wasn’t himself he could see in all the identical lobbies stretching out ahead. Looking through the portal doors, he could see his fellow commuters walk between a few lobbies then turn off.

  He automatically turned right to go through the clockwise circuit portal door that led to the Thistle Street hub, which in turn opened into the St. Andrew’s Square hub, which was an intersection hub, so turn right and through the inbound portal door of the radial spur directly to the Waverley hub.

  Waverley was the center of Connexion’s Edinburgh metro network, standing on the site of the old train station. The twelve radial spurs that led into it emerged onto the floor of a plain circular building with a glass dome roof overlooked by the severe old castle perched on its stone cliff high above. At the center of the hub were two wide portal doors for the National City network—one in, one out. Even this early in the morning, it was busy. Callum took the portal door out.

  The British National City hub was the Waverley hub built on an industrial scale, constructed twenty-five years ago on a cheap derelict industrial zone in Leicester; because its physical location was irrelevant, the accountants just wanted the lowest local tax rate on offer in the country. It was an annular concourse a hundred meters wide with high, polished black granite walls and a black-and-white marbled floor. Huge lighting galleries hung from an arched ceiling, bringing an intense noonday glare to the dense throng of twenty-four/seven commuters.

  It was built to operate a hundred and thirty portal doors: sixty-five on the inner wall, all exiting their respective cities to deposit people into the concourse; and a matching sixty-five on the outer wall, the outbounds, each one with its city name glowing in bright turquoise neon above. There were no neat channels along the concourse designated for people to walk between them, no convenient moving floor strips, no smiling staff to help. The concourse was a purely Darwinian melee. Travelers used their Hubnav app to find where their city door was, then they just put their heads down and went for it, resulting in a permanent rush hour of intolerance and midlevel aggression, of people running urgently only to clash with the slow movers, people cursing each other, parents checking children were keeping up, luggage and shopping bugez being booted as they strove to follow their owners, all of them kicking up a noise to rival a football stadium crowd.

  Callum slipped through them all as if he were Teflon coated. The door to London was six to the left of the Edinburgh exit. He made it in forty seconds. Through that and he was in the Trafalgar Square hub, with its twenty-five radial doors to take you out across the huge capital city, plus one door in a recess, guarded by a security barrier. It opened for Callum, allowing him directly into Connexion Corp’s internal hub network.

  Three portals later he was in Emergency Detoxification, a big, purpose-built facility in Brixton where for once no expense had been spared to give it eight specialist handling garages full of support machinery, wrapped around a core of offices and maintenance depots.

&nb
sp; ED operated seven active response crews, ensuring two would always be on standby at all times to cover most of Europe. The division’s mission was to prevent any emerging contamination situation from getting anywhere close to the point where leakage occurred. That meant getting the first-response teams in fast and early, and dealing with the problem directly with the resources only a company like Connexion could deliver. That required a full backup for the on-site teams, from full technical support in the Brixton office to fast civil evacuation procedures and emergency medical crews that could be brought in from right across the globe in worst-case scenarios.

  Everything depended on the first-response teams managing things professionally and disposing of the problem in minimal time (and at a minimal cost). The practical, political, and financial expectations focused on the team leader were huge.

  Callum’s first-response crew used an office that had a window wall overlooking the facility’s Monitoring and Coordination Center, whose architects had clearly modeled it on Connexion’s starflight mission control. Callum greeted his crew and stood beside the tall glass, watching the activity in the M & C Center. He could see the long lines of consoles below and noted a full support crew was already in place, bolstering the normal monitoring staff. A sure sign of a building situation. They were studying fast-changing data displays under the supervision of five separate operations directors. The wall they faced was covered in a dozen screens. Most of the secondary screens showed the same news streams of minor disasters he’d seen in the flat. One of the two main screens was showing the cleanup at an aging chemical plant on the banks of the Wista just outside Gdańsk. The ED crews had been working that one since before his Barbuda trip. The land around the plant had been used as a chemical drum burial ground for decades, and none of the contents or locations had been logged. The Environmental Enforcement Agency only discovered the site when the drums started leaking into the Wista. ED was having to excavate the whole area down to fifty meters to clear it.

  The second big screen relayed the gates of the Gylgen disposal plant, with snow falling as if to soften the problem. There wasn’t much activity going on outside the long, dark buildings behind the double chain-link fence. That was when Callum knew for sure Brixton would be sending a crew in.

  He watched Dokal Torres, their corporate liaison counselor, standing beside Fitz Adamova—in Callum’s opinion the best of ED’s operations directors. The two were having a very intense conversation.

  “That looks serious,” he decided.

  “There’s money in play on this,” Moshi Lyane said cheerfully. “Corporate always gets serious when money’s in the room.” At twenty-eight, Moshi was keen to prove himself; he had a puppyish eagerness combined with fierce intelligence. Callum was convinced that back in the rocket age, his deputy would have been a right-stuff astronaut for NASA. But now Connexion had changed the world, so Moshi was at the new cutting edge of risk-taking, and helping to make the world a better place at the same time. It was like an addiction; all the crew had it. “Update?” he asked.

  “We’re going to get the call,” Moshi said. “Boynak still haven’t moved anything through their hubs that can help.”

  “Nothing?” Callum asked in surprise. “Are we even sure there’s an emergency?”

  “They might not be moving equipment,” Alana Keates said, “but Dok just confirmed four of their top engineers arrived onsite an hour ago.” She glanced through the window at the counselor.

  “Evaluating,” Callum said. “That must be it.”

  “Dok thinks so,” Alana agreed. “By the way, what happened to your hair?”

  “My hair is fine.” Callum ran his hand over his hair. It seemed a bit stiffer than usual, and he could still smell the glass cleaner. “Okay. Do we have plans of the plant?”

  “Way ahead of you,” Raina Jacek said. She was the crew’s data expert, and privately Callum would trade any two of the others for her. She knew her way around network systems better than anyone with a standard degree out of university. Most of her teens had been spent as a hacktivist, mainly for political and environmental causes. She’d been arrested several times, and even served three months in a Norwegian junior offenders’ camp. Normally that would red-flag her as far as Connexion was concerned, but her file said she had switched sides after rehabilitation.

  One night at a party when they were both mildly stoned, Raina had told Callum that she had actually had a near-death experience after her friends were sold a bad batch of crystal Nsim. Her boyfriend had died, but the paramedics were good enough to revive her. It had made her realize just how dark the underworld could go. So it wasn’t a switch of allegiance, exactly, but Emergency Detoxification was making a visible difference, even if she didn’t like the profit motive…

  They sat around the office table, and Raina threw schematics of the Gylgen plant on the wallscreen.

  “Standard disposal setup,” said Henry Orme, their radioactive materials expert. “Boynak have a contract with a whole bunch of European companies to get rid of their radioactive waste.”

  “What sort of waste are we taking about?” Callum asked.

  “Standard items: medical tracers, research lab material. Nothing too bad, until you start to lump it all together.”

  “Which is what they do?” Colin Walters said knowingly.

  “Yep. There’s a portal between the Gylgen plant and one of the ventchambers on our Haumea asteroid station. Boynak gathers the waste into batches at the Gylgen plant, and sends it through to Haumea, which vents it away into deep space along with all the other crud Earth’s desperate to dispose of. Forty AUs being what everyone agrees is a safe distance. It’s a simple and easy system.”

  “What could possibly go wrong?” Raina said happily.

  Callum ignored the snark. “Show me.”

  Colin used a pointer to highlight a section of the plans. The center of the main building had five large cylinders, four meters in diameter and fifteen long, arranged in a vertical cluster. Each of them funneled down to a meter-wide pipe at the bottom, and they all connected to the one-meter portal below via a series of valves. “These tanks are pressure chambers,” Colin said. “You collect the waste from clients in small sealed canisters and drop them into the tank through an airlock at the top. When the tank is full, you pressurize it to five atmospheres.” His pointer dot reached the bottom of a tank. “Then you open the valve. Gravity and pressure send the waste straight down to the portal, along with the vacuum suck from Haumea. Whoosh, out it all goes.”

  Callum nodded. He’d seen variants on the system dozens of times. It was deliberately simple, keeping the process safe and reliable. Tens of thousands of tons of toxic waste were sent harmlessly into space from Haumea every year; it was all the asteroid did.

  “Unfortunately, it’s not going whoosh in this case,” Dokal Torres said. The counsel was walking in from the M & C Center. Unlike the rest of the crew, she was wearing a light gray suit with a dark claret blouse—that way she stood apart and emphasized how far up the management chain she’d risen. For all her insistence on following protocol and routine, Callum liked her. She was smart enough to know when to give him the leeway to deal with problems. It was a good professional relationship. On rare occasions she’d even been known to join the rest of the crew for a beer after work.

  “What’s happening?” Moshi asked.

  “Blockage at the base of the tank. It’s been pressurized, and Boynak is worried about some of the seals holding for a prolonged period. We’re creeping outside the design specs.”

  Callum tried to keep the excitement from his voice. “Do we go in?”

  Dokal took a breath. “Yes.”

  The crew whooped and gave each other high-fives.

  “Boynak and their insurers have authorized a full breach and vent. Whatever it takes.”

  “What’s the blockage?” Callum asked.


  “The valve won’t open,” Dokal said.

  “Uh huh.” Callum nodded shortly, instinct warning him something was wrong; the way she gave a lawyer’s answer only confirmed it. “We can tack a blister to the base of the tank, and blow through the wall.”

  “Your call,” she said.

  “Okay.” He clapped his hands. “Let’s get moving. Moshi, Alana, Colin with me. Load our bugez with a couple of blisters and a pack of fifty-centimeter shaped charges. Raina, you’re in the facility’s control room—I want to know the real state of that cylinder and its seals. I’m also going to need every spec on the tank, especially what it’s made of.”

  “On it, boss,” she said happily.

  “Henry, take Haumea station. Thread us.”

  “Oh, come on…” Henry complained.

  “You’re at Haumea,” Callum said in a level tone. Henry’s partner was seven and a half months pregnant. It made Callum feel strangely protective, especially as a newlywed himself. Having Henry away from the dangerous material at Gylgen made him feel a lot better.