CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Across the continent at the Kilimanjaro space elevator base station, Ethan had fixed everything. The scientists adored him, as well they should!
With all the work he had done increasing their reputations within the corporation and upping their salaries, he was just waiting for someone to start taking him for granted, so he could slap them down properly. But they didn’t. They looked at him with shining eyes and sometimes he found himself checking the reflections of car doors and office windows to see if maybe one of TCG’s most influential C-level officers was on a visit he hadn’t known about and was standing behind him. Ethan kept his mouth shut and tried to pretend that success wasn’t terrifying.
Just because he didn’t care about money personally didn’t mean he didn’t value it. He knew the company showered love on its favorite sons and daughters through paycheck size and nothing else. And Ethan was also well aware that other people liked money quite a bit more than he did. It wasn’t just useful for figuring out who was winning at life; you could also use the stuff to buy things.
One of the scientists was honestly considering an elephant. She’d fallen for a sob story about repatriating zoo animals and had gotten involved in nonprofit work on the side.
He preferred to buy more useful things, like loyalty.
It paid higher dividends.
His hordes of scientific teams were working together to find a way to make this Herculean task of constructing Earth’s first elevator a reality. That kid Samson Young with his self-designed motor chair had proven especially useful with team organization. Sumedha, with the orbital mechanics specialists, and Asim, the group lead for the design of the lift system to connect the tether to the orbital station, had clashed at first, and not in a useful pushing-each-other-to-greater-successes-for-the-company way. Ethan had been about to sack them both when Omer Ehrlich had arrived. Omer with all his unconscious sixty-something wrinkles and talent for understanding so much of what the engineers said might have been someone to fire too, except that Omer consistently forgot to mention his own contributions to any effort. The man really and truly only cared about the success of the projects he was assigned to.
Ethan decided he didn’t mind having a modern saint around.
He stared again at the overall design document. TCG’s DiamondWire™ tether ran from Kilimanjaro up to a station in geosynchronous orbit. He needed great, nearly unthinkable, metric tons of counter mass at GEO to make the overall dynamics of the system hold everything in place. No, not unthinkable. Omer had an exact number for him. And another exact number for the amount of carbon needed to build the initial tether. There were a half dozen designs for the climber units which would go up and down the completed tether. More designs scoped out defensive arrays for ensuring space junk had no chance of ever impacting with the tether. Ethan put a reminder note on that one. He had years to go before the tether could be put into place.
They should be starting the clearance part of the project now. He had the Sadou Corp, of course, for that. Cory Aanderson had been looking for some more space debris companies to partner with, but so far the other Earth-based ones were overpriced, and the in-orbit ones only wanted to pick up convenient or high-value debris.
Sumedha wanted a decision on power plants for supplying the growing city of the ground station. The project had at least dozens of months (hopefully not as much as a dozen years) to go before becoming operational. But adjacent land speculation was already spiking to insane levels.
Nuclear, geothermal, and solar provided much of Earth’s baseload power. A scattering of hydro and wind farms did their part too. Ethan didn’t want to make an extra decision.
“Ask HR for an expert on that,” he sent to Sumedha.
There. Make Chummy’s people finally do some useful work. And maybe they could involve the local governments a bit. Power grids seemed like the kind of thing a government would want to control and tax.
The launcher system in the works to supply his elevator’s orbital station would charge their maglev with power from geothermal, he’d heard. Whatever worked for them. He couldn’t bring himself to care about other people’s technical details. Except that he got a twinge. What if they got it wrong? Everything needed to function for the whole project to work. Gah! Why couldn’t he be back in sales with other people responsible for delivery and follow-up?
There had been a note about that supply launcher in West Africa. Ethan looked it up. His technicians and their technicians were talking to coordinate details. They wanted forgiveness for having commenced coordination without prior approval. He granted it.
The sheer number of briefs and synopses on his plate now were staggering. His eyes glazed over at the business cases for asteroid-mining companies, and the profit and loss estimates his research teams had done on the private firms working in orbit. TCG would need some of them. He could identify which ones of them to target for corporate takeovers.
A smile finally lit Ethan’s face. That part of this job could actually be fun! Most of them had shares they’d sold to friends and family to get their start-up capital. They weren’t, most of them, big enough to be exchange-traded, and a lot of them probably hadn’t done their legal paperwork properly, which meant the family members who’d supported the start-ups likely didn’t really own anything at all. Buying out companies that badly managed was generally a nightmare, but he had people for the actual grunt work. First he’d find out who had gutted their employee ranks prior to offering up their intellectual property for TCG acquisition. And who had scammed the early backers who provided support by not following through on the legal transference of share ownership. Not every company had to get the same kind of offer.
Ethan had gotten his start in places like that. He’d spent fifteen years working for one space start-up after another before he’d decided it was all idiotic. The companies that were going to make it had to have government connections, not just bright ideas and a sufficient number of committed employees willing to work for nearly nothing. In the early days of the second space race it was enough to have grit and drive, but not in the boom that came after.
Now Ethan had the kind of work his younger self would not even have dared to dream of, and it pissed him off. He did not want to build a space elevator. He liked things the way they were. He did not want to have to figure out how this was going to change global commerce and what he’d need to do to reposition himself for the next step up the corporate ladder. The way the C-level officers were talking, they intended to silo him here forever.
Damned Chummy had impressed them with his stories, and Ethan knew those looks. They were scared of him. They’d gone from not knowing his name to considering him a threat. And because he was coming up sideways, none of them felt safe. He might potentially end up displacing any of the C-levels, so they were united against him. Ethan wanted to bang his head on the reclaimed hardwood desk. This was not how it was supposed to work. This was not how it was supposed to work at all.
Worst still, Chummy thought he was happy about it. Chummy was the sort of asshole who listened to what people said and believed them. So, when Ethan had shot out that line of bullshit the scientists loved so much about spreading humanity across the stars and building a better future, Chummy had taken him at his word.
The ass.
Still, still, Ethan breathed deeply.
He could work with this. Make the elevator work and make sure everyone knew it was his leadership that had made it happen, and he might not need to end up CEO to have the CEO’s level of power.
Weren’t football coaches still the best-paid university staff members across the board including college presidents and top professors? That sort of power disparity didn’t usually exist out in industry. But chief of sciences hadn’t existed until about six months ago when Chummy had started talking to the C-levels and spreading around those business-case proposals Ethan had written as a backdrop for his planned leap back into operations.
And now Chummy was coming to Kilimanjaro for a visit. Ethan had invited him. But the man had actually accepted as if he truly believed he was helpful when he dropped in and stuck his nose everywhere. Chummy must want something from him, and Ethan still waited to see what it was. Chummy could and had come up with some real stinker ideas. Ethan wasn’t about to let Chummy talk him into something that would complicate this situation even more.
Ethan’s mass of old plans was in disarray. He’d bloated everything here extravagantly when he was in his last position. Back then, he’d been certain someone else would have to deal with it. And now he should have been facing a need to lay off a solid third of the science staff, but instead the C-levels had doubled his personnel budget and encouraged him to take on whoever else he thought he’d need. Ethan would have liked to stab Chummy for that.
It was a trap, of course. Every employee had to provide about three times salary in return on investment to cover facility costs and pay and benefits and not be a drag on overall investor returns.
Take a low return team that lacked a matured profit strategy and then double the required returns he, as chief, needed to deliver? Yeah, Ethan knew exactly what those C-levels were doing. If he hadn’t been the one they were doing it to, he could have sat back, taken notes, and expressed deep appreciation for their business tactics.
Ethan moved another one of his files out of the business cloud and into his personal encrypted file vault. That should be the last of his old plans for gutting the science labor rates. He couldn’t afford to implement his previous plans now. If he fired that many people there would be no one left to build the elevator. Instead he was hiring. Still. He shivered.
He might not survive if anyone even learned about his original plans. Jax McAllister, his assistant, knew. Probably. Ethan was almost certain Jax knew. He’d overheard the tubby man make a comment about him always war-gaming worst-case scenarios and being the most foresightful man he’d ever known. Ethan would’ve ignored it as basic flattery designed to sound like loyalty if Jax hadn’t also added something along the lines of, “So, of course, you’ll see heartless research questions and really painful staffing plans in some of the files. He does these deep dives to push himself to make sure those things never happen.”
Jax’d been chatting with DeeDee Nelson that time, not the more talkative Samson Young. Both of Chummy’s aides were creepy in their own way, but DeeDee at least kept her mouth shut. Samson could ask the most deceptive little questions. As if anyone at the C-level should care whether or not the office building maintenance staff in Kilimanjaro had access to dentists who would accept TCG’s health insurance!
Jax had managed those ridiculous questions.
And Ethan had actually found himself double-checking the corporate policy on benefits for subcontractors and making quick changes to match the wide-eyed reply, “Oh no, of course, Mr. Schmidt-Li wouldn’t let something like that happen!” that he’d heard Jax respond with.
His man was good. Jax had had the forms backdated when Ethan had gone to get them filed.
Ethan glared at a notice on his screen. Samson Young strikes again. “Based on HR review, employee Jax McAllister routinely performs duties beyond administrative-assistant-aligned functions. The pay-level increase for employee Jax McAllister is attached. Titles of personnel in aide roles to senior executives vary. If a new job title for employee Jax McAllister is desired, HR suggests ‘Executive Secretary’ or ‘Staff Liaison.’”
Great. Already outsiders were spending his money. Ethan made a note to himself to tell Jax about the raise before the next pay period. He could spin it as his own idea, he supposed. If he even remembered without Jax doing the reminding. Ethan glared at the HR message.
“The boss doesn’t care about money.” He could hear Jax explaining it away to anyone who asked. Ethan suppressed a shudder. Of course, he cared.
The massive research funds they’d been promised had already hit his business accounts. He had a small army of accountants managing plenty of smaller transactions: buying materials and moving personnel around. The expected returns would begin being assessed against his teams immediately. Oh yeah, Ethan knew exactly what those C-level TCG executives were doing. Or at least what Ms. Garcia, the CIO, was doing. He couldn’t read Mr. Jeffy at all, and Mr. Zhou, the CTO, had been either the best actor in the history of show business or he truly was enraptured by the prospective expansion of the space industry that the much cheaper transport to and from Earth orbit implied.
Ethan scheduled yet another meeting with Omer to work on his space elevator spiel. The scientists all knew he didn’t understand one word in seven that they had to say about how everything worked, and they didn’t expect him to. But everyone else in the world, including far too many news reporters and internal business associates in operations, expected him to be able to not only understand the science-speak but also translate it to their level. It was enough to make him want to pull out his newly planted hair treatments. Cameras now came with this job too. He’d had to drop the age-concealing makeup efforts altogether. No time to maintain it properly, and he had staff now who’d actually worked in China who wouldn’t believe his claims about why he’d adopted the fad.
Chummy had a hell of a lot to answer for.