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.