Salvation

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.