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?”