It took three minutes for the tank to empty. Callum, Moshi, Alana, and Colin all kept watch on the casing, but although it trembled as the gas was expelled, nothing else happened; the whistling noise reduced to nothing after a couple of minutes. “Right, then. Let’s get it prepped for dumping,” Callum said. “Henry, I’m looking to start threading up in about an hour.”

“I’ll be ready at this end, chief.”

Moshi had the job of blowing the horizontal support struts that fastened the tank to the surrounding lattice. He clambered along the metal girders, fixing a double charge to each strut. Alana and Colin used their electron beam cutters and severed the disposal pipe at the bottom of the tank below the jammed valve, then went on to slice out a two-meter section. When they were finished, there was a clear space below the valve.

While his crew was working on readying the tank, Callum started clearing an area to work in, level with the gap Alana and Colin were preparing. He cut into the girders, creating a cave to bring the portals through unencumbered. It was tough work, sending long lengths of metal tumbling down into the pit below, where they bounced and spun off the thick pipes leading in from the other tanks, clattering away to the very bottom of the pit. Several struck the side of the portal chamber five meters below him.

To hold the six-meter portal, they’d brought three support rails with them—telescoping composite tubes that Callum and Alana set up underneath the tank’s severed pipe. Bonding pads at each end secured them to the remaining steel girders.

The whole procedure took nearly seventy minutes. Callum was sweating profusely when they finished, and Raina confirmed the rails had bonded correctly to the molecules of the lattice girders. Standing on the precarious walkway, he opened the second case, which contained another thirty-centimeter portal, and placed it base down on the mesh.

“Henry, we’re ready. Start threading.”

—

As soon as the tank’s gas evacuation was complete, Henry had cycled out of the ventchamber airlock and headed back to the ED ready-one compartment. Haumea station’s broad passageways were simple metal tubes with nearly a meter of insulation foam sprayed on the outside to help combat the cold imbued by the asteroid’s lonely trans-Neptune orbit. The station didn’t warrant the investment of its own manufacturing module; all its sections and components were shipped out directly from Earth. They were laid out across Haumea’s ice-crusted rock surface in a series of basic geodesic spheres with radial spokes leading out to cylindrical ventchambers of varying size. There were more than eighty ventchambers already, most of them with their outer doors permanently open, allowing plumes of misty vapor to fountain up out of their portals as toxic chemicals or radioactive gases were shunted far away from Earth. The remainder would intermittently produce bursts of canisters, which streaked out across interplanetary space like a blast of giant shotgun pellets. New spheres and ventchambers were still being added as Earth methodically disposed of its historical pollution.