CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Dibussi ran around the side of the A-HRV and shouted to Pascaline, “Your cousin is squirting water on the nose cones again where Adamou said I wasn’t allowed to kick it or the aero-dimdim-ics would get ruined!”
“Should’ve told him Fako would drop fire and rocks on his head, or that we’d beat him ourselves if it didn’t quit it,” a foreman grumbled, not very quietly.
“You kicked what?” Pascaline’s head came up fast.
Dibussi giggled. “I didn’t kick nothing,” he said. But he ran off under the glare of her scowl before admitting to more.
A small crowd of building foremen stood politely to the side of the hangar waiting for her attention. Philip sat on the cement floor, back leaning against the hangar wall, reading through design documents. Pascaline snapped her fingers and collected construction reports and requests to start the next maintenance items. Maurie’s initials in the corners showed that she’d checked them over. That meant the work that had to be completed before these items started had been reported done and personally checked as done by Maurie. It also meant that the supplies needed to do it had arrived. Oh good, the substation for geothermal plant four was ready for electrical testing. The high-voltage cable shipment must have finally come in. It’ll be good to have more power-station backups for when we start night launches.
Her cousin Reuben hovered, watching.
She’d been interrupted, again, while thinking. Her finger on the smart-paper schematic tacked to the hangar’s wall tapped on the dotted lines marking the MIT changes for the fuel tank sizing and a few inches away Philip’s secondary lines re-expanded the fuel tank volume to a point closer to the original volume. She had the schematic in layered-changes mode, which generally made it unintelligible, but it let her see this shift. And it shouldn’t have existed. She returned the schematic setting to show the current approved A-HRV design specs.
The reports and requests had Philip Chao’s initials in the corners. But Pascaline checked them very, very thoroughly. The workers reclaimed their forms and hurried back out of the hangar, giving Maurie a wide berth.
“What do you need, ex-con?” Pascaline said to Reuben.
“Nothing,” he answered. “Just seeing if I can help.”
“You don’t have to worry about becoming the family black sheep, you know,” she said. “Everyone knows you didn’t actually do it. If you’d really done what the prosecution said and embezzled or shared insider information in exchange for gifts or whatever nonsense they claimed in those charges, you’d have done a better job and gotten away with it.”
“Thanks, I think,” Reuben said.
“Or you’d’ve at least done a cost-benefit assessment and made sure you got paid enough to afford a truly impressive legal team of the kind that’d’ve had you staying in a penthouse with an ankle monitor instead of sitting in a dirty jailhouse without bail awaiting trial.”
Reuben snorted.
“Yeah. Besides, I’m the forever black sheep.”
“About that,” Maurie said, walking around from the shadow of the new A-HRV’s wing, “when are you going to come clean about not finishing school at MIT?”
Philip’s head came up. His eyes were wide and utterly failing to keep secrets, but he was behind both Maurie and Reuben. He slunk out of the hangar, and Pascaline decided he was the rat. But she might still try to brazen it out.
“There’s no time to do a doctoral dissertation while getting this launcher running,” Pascaline said, eyes hard.
Reuben waggled his hands back and forth. “If I were on a jury and you said it like that on the stand, I’d believe you. But…” He shrugged. “It’s your undergraduate degree that you didn’t finish. We’re your family. I’ve known since my deposit check on my first apartment bounced that there were troubles. And I think Maurie figured it out—when, exactly?” he said.
“Around the same year it happened. Not too long after Uncle Benoit deleted your graduation party from the all-family shared calendar,” Maurie said. “Fatima was upset about it, and Uncle Benoit said you’d failed out, which Fatima refused to believe—she really likes you, God knows why—and eventually Uncle Benoit said it was that your tuition costs had been cut from the budget to make sure the ‘higher tier’ family members got their full quarterly stipends that January. Grandpere didn’t always pay the closest attention to spending recommendations and back then he still trusted Uncle Benoit.”
Pascaline blinked. “So who doesn’t already know?” And if you knew, why didn’t you use your good-child influence to get my tuition restored?
“Pretty much just Grandpere,” Reuben said, “and Uncle Chummy. And maybe Great Aunt Mami, but maybe not. I’m never quite sure how much she knows. And, of course, nobody outside the family is aware. They told me I needed to pay back the family for my own schooling and that it’d go to a fund for you and the other younger ones, but somehow that fund never seemed to get established. Anyway, nobody outside the family knows.”
“Except the Endeleys,” Maurie said. “I sort of had to tell Adamou so he didn’t fire Philip, and I think he told his uncle.”
“Adamou doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut, does he?” Reuben said.
That made Pascaline grin finally, because he’d met Adamou only a handful of times, but he was exactly right. She added. “Adamou ratted you out too, you know. And Maurie did. You find anything in that secret accounts audit you did with all your newfound expertise in matters illegal and financial?”
Reuben shrugged. “The oil and gas side has some comptrollers with stickier fingers than they should have. It’s the usual level for a business of that size. Your project, though, is incredibly smooth. I found one supplier who’d padded expenses and then reimbursed the padding. That just doesn’t happen.”
“I blame the witchy girl,” Pascaline said pointing at Maurie. “And what are you doing with that spray bottle, really?”
Maurie shrugged. “I don’t really know. But I did check with some TCG materials scientists, and any water vapor that hasn’t evaporated off before a launch will be blown off by air pressure and not cause any trouble.”
Reuben and Pascaline exchanged a look. “She didn’t answer,” Reuben said.
“Is this related to your visions?”
“She has visions now?” Reuben said. He dropped his voice low and stepped closer. “Is it a psychosis? A lot of those are not just treatable but actually curable, you know.” He turned to Pascaline. “One of the foremen mentioned her, saying, ‘The mountains shall be melted as with their blood.’ I thought he was teasing the new guy. He did also say everything was back on schedule.”
“It’s a farce,” Pascaline reassured him. “Well, mostly. I’ve never been entirely sure with Great Aunt Mami. But Maurie’s just her normal self but turned grumpy from all the discomfort. She caught something out in the bush that’s one of those not completely curable things. And she has been visiting Great Aunt Mami.”
Maurie waggled a hand back and forth. “I’m getting morning fevers again and usually seeing things when my temp spikes, but playing it up some does seem to encourage the staff. And, yeah, Great Aunt Mami likes having visitors and has a lot of suggestions about using long-term illness to your advantage. That bit about melted mountains was straight from Isaiah chapter 34. I dreamed this morning that we’d have a baptism by fire if we f—um, messed up. And we really could. So I begged some holy water from these two clergymen I know and I’m spraying on the new A-HRV while I do a walk-around.”
“The holy water does seem to make a snaky hiss when it splashes on the nose cones,” Reuben said.
“That’s all in your head. Don’t give it too much attention,” Maurie said. “Don’t deny it in front of anyone, though. Great Aunt Mami warned me that one of the track-layer foremen got a double major in civil engineering and folklore and, even worse, there’s a really popular ‘Legends of Mami-Wata’ course in the University of Yaoundé online curriculum that lots of engineering students have taken to satisfy their humanities requirement. Great Aunt Mami’s got the foreman under control for us. For now at least. She’s convinced him to consider my Mami-Wata spiritualism a useful fiction for group cohesion like the World War II gremlins.”
“Yeah, well, we’ve got a different problem,” Pascaline said. And she explained what she’d figured out about the new A-HRV engine modifications being not quite as much of an improvement for the payload mass fraction as that MIT PhD candidate Lucas Brown had promised.
“Wait, what? No, that’s not a problem,” Reuben said. “You were going to do the extra launches to get all the payload up there when you had the starter A-HRV design. You might not have quite as few launches as you thought, but you’ll still need fewer total launches. And isn’t TCG paying per launch anyway?”
“No, they pay for mass delivery and there have been interim payments each step of the way on construction since they are funding the track system too. There’s a very significant bonus, though, if we can get them enough material up there so that they can have an initial DiamondWire line dropped from the orbital side down to the Kilimanjaro ground station in five years. It’s prorated after that, down to no bonus at ten years.”
“It’s partially dependent on their orbit-side team,” Pascaline pointed out. “I hate that we can be penalized for other people’s mistakes.”
Maurie laughed. “Yes, yes, we know.”
A gleam shone in Reuben’s eyes. “The sooner you can start sending the carbon launches, the sooner they can get their secretive DiamondWire processing started up there.”
“But, uh,” Maurie said, “Philip signed off on the Lucas Brown engine improvement.”
“Yeah,” Pascaline said, “he lied.”
“Fire him,” Reuben said at the same time as Maurie asked, “But do you still need him?”
“Not if he’s lying,” Reuben countered. “And Pascaline can do it just fine herself; she caught the error.”
“But what was really wrong?” Maurie asked. “Is it still a better A-HRV than the other one?”
“No, a math thing, yes, and nobody’s firing him.” Pascaline answered their babble. “I have a better idea. Did you know that Adamou has finally paid me back that favor he owes me?”
Both her relatives responded with a pleasingly increased degree of panic about her leaving the project. They interrupted each other again in an urgent babble that ended in a joint plea of, “But you can’t leave!”
“I’m not firing myself,” she assured them. “Did you know that TCG offers a number of academic institutions research grants and has lately set up a board specifically for Earth-to-orbit initiatives? I suppose planetary surface-to-orbit initiatives is more accurate. They’d like the option of building a space elevator on Mars, rather than being forced into it right away. So they want relevant research to continue. The board will review proposals and select who should actually receive the cash. It’s a small-time-commitment position with very high pay in keeping with the high value of my expertise. They asked Adamou to serve on it, and he recommended me. He’ll be on it too, but I’m to be the chair. I look forward to reviewing MIT’s grant proposals in the future. If my deputy tech lead chooses to abandon this project before completion, I shall judge his applications accordingly.”
Reuben twitched.
Maurie scuffed a shoe on the floor.
“What?”
“Will you have that job after Philip Chao tells them you don’t have any degrees?” Maurie whispered.
Pascaline blinked. “Actually, they won’t care.” She shook her head. “Oh, that’s it! So that’s why Adamou couched it to TCG that way. I’ve been selected for the board based on my engineering management experience. The biography submitted calls me a philanthropist. Ridiculous, I know, but he cited all those backcountry well repairs and electrical grid installs and solar power upgrades which we really did legitimately do. My experience with the launcher was just a bonus.”
Adamou, himself, entered the hangar and greeted Pascaline with a long kiss. “That board position was an early wedding gift, not actually my favor repayment. I’ve got an even better one for you for that.” He waited a beat with an inviting grin.
Pascaline lifted her chin in challenge and said only, “Well?”
Adamou pointed to her comm. “If he took me seriously, you should be getting some messages there very soon.”
Pascaline lifted her comm and blinked.
“Thank you, my dear,” Great Aunt Mami sent, “I should’ve known it would all work out. This is the most excellent hex of my life.”
“He?”
Her comm pinged with the arrival of a long message. And Maurie’s comm pinged. And Reuben’s pinged.
Reuben read it first and started laughing.
Maurie’s eyes went wide.
Pascaline finally looked.
“I had a chat with your grandpere,” Adamou explained. “Great Aunt Mami, or rather Tchami Magdalene since the appointment names her by her given name, is now the Sadou Director for Arts and Culture. All art gala support funding, major family philanthropic donation approvals, and so forth will go through her from now on. Your Uncle Benoit is eager to convey his deepest apologies. Since she’s not inclined to see him right now, he’s apologizing to everyone she’s still willing to see.”