The portal came out in a toilet cubicle. She unbolted the door and looked around. It was inside a metal cargo container, one of six identical cubicles. Nobody about. When she closed it, the bolt slid back, locking it. There was an “Out of Order” sign pinned to the door.
She went outside into a swirl of warm dusty air. The old portable toilet container had been dropped next to a high chain fence that enclosed an area almost eight kilometers across: the North Brisbane Commercial and Government Services Transport Hub (C & GST). She thought it looked like a protective pen for endangered vehicles. There was hardly any greenery, just an expanse of tracks worn into rust-red earth that had spent a decade being compacted beneath big pounding tires until it reached the consistency of concrete. Various civil engineering companies had their own compounds staked out in the area, where big earthmovers and civil construction machinery were parked. Container stacks were laid out in grids like small towns, with G4Turing-managed gantries lifting them on and off flatbed trucks.
Right in the middle of the transport hub was a broad ring of tarmac, as if a land reclamation team had forgotten to break up a chunk of old highway. Around the outside of the ring, its off-ramps were just tongues of concrete leading to the tangle of dirt tracks snaking across the C & GST. The inner rim, however, hosted a circle of six-meter portals laid out like some modern homage to Neolithic standing stones. Even this early in the morning, trucks were rumbling around the tarmac, their powerful electric motors whining loudly in the still dawn air as they drove in and out of the portals. Only a few had human drivers in their cabs; the rest were truckez.
Savi left the toilet container behind, walking across the hard, rutted ground to the nearest container zone. She saw only a couple of other people wandering about, both in hi-viz jackets stained with the ruddy dust. If they saw her they didn’t pay any attention.
Misra threw a nav guide across her screen sunglasses, and she wound up at the end of a container row where a truck was parked on the loading pad. It had “851” painted on the side of its cab. Someone (presumably Pete) sat inside, not looking down at her. She stood in the shade of the containers as the gantry slid along the row and carefully lowered a battered blue container onto the truck. Once the gantry moved away, Savi clambered up the couplings and found herself a ledge in the broad gap between cab and trailer. She jammed her feet against some cable, bracing herself, when the axle motors began buzzing, and 851 moved off.
They drove along one of the tracks, heading for the big loop of tarmac. She breathed in the grubby air, relishing the role she was now immersing herself in.
He’d be having kittens, she knew. Maybe one day she’d tell him. When they were home and cozy. In twenty years’ time. After he’d had a lot of beer.
She daydreamed about what they were going to do next. No way did she want to leave fabulous Rome, certainly not for freezing Edinburgh. The Scottish capital was pretty enough, but even in summer it was bloody cold. And she certainly wasn’t going to move into Cal’s slob-out bachelor pad. He was going to need some serious house training once they got a place together.
Savi nearly asked Misra for the
Truckez adjusted their speed, allowing 851 to slot into the stream of traffic going around the tarmac ring. A minute later they drove through the portal to Kintore. The town was half a continent away from Brisbane, so it was still the middle of the night there. Darkness closed around her, and the temperature took a big leap upward. Even growing up in India didn’t acclimatize Savi for the scorching desert air. It was the lack of humidity, she’d realized the first time she came to Kintore. Desert air was dead air.
Originally Kintore was a remote Northern Territory town, founded in the early 1980s by the Pintupi people, who resented the white Western culture that was slowly constricting them. After that it kept going in its quiet way for a century until the newly formed Water Desert consortium signed its deal with the investment-hungry Australian government.