Salvation

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.

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.