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CHAPTER NINE

Later, on the jet, Chummy settled in a chair and pulled out his comm to recharge. DeeDee snatched it out of his hands, but the other passengers were faster to speak than she was.

“What’s Zhang Li up to?” Cory Aanderson demanded.

The VP for Sales followed the question with a long coughing fit. They all waited out the rasping bout of hacking. It sounded painful. Rodney hovered with a box of apple juice fitted with a straw.

DeeDee used the jet’s connection rather than her own comm and queued up a call to the doctor. Rodney waved her off. “The medicos already know about the cough.”

“I’m not dead yet. See, even Rodney isn’t worried.” Cory Aanderson accepted the straw and sipped. In the air on a direct flight back to Berlin, the cabin lights should have been dimmed again to help them readjust to their new time zone. But corporate necessity didn’t always align with biorhythms.

“Trying to hire you was a cover,” Cory said. “Not that any company would mind if you ever said ‘yes.’ But there it is. And wanting an external review of their team selection was real, but only a second check, since the rock we’re buying is already in lunar orbit and they are actually sending that team out to get the replacement.”

“In lunar orbit?” Chummy had missed that. “But that means…”

“Yep. We just shaved two years off the timeline for getting the elevator in operation. I think Jeffy might have me bronzed.” He stretched, very pleased with himself.

Rodney smiled at his boss. “I get that Zhu Zhang Li is used to elaborate conspiracies, but sometimes I want to shake the woman to find out what’s really going on in her head.”

Cory Aanderson coughed again, but it was a better sound.

Chummy shrugged. “I’ve got no idea.”

DeeDee made furtive eye contact and raised a hand.

“Ms. Nelson.” Cory Aanderson saluted her with his apple juice box. “Speak. Or send us an emoji-laden text scrawl. It’s really okay.”

“I, um, can’t.” DeeDee lifted her chin and spoke up. “Spies. Shen Kong wanted a spy.”

DeeDee hadn’t plugged any of her paraphernalia into her seat’s varied data ports. She also still held Chummy’s comm tight in her hands as if someone might take it from her and plug it into something.

“Though maybe I could be wrong.” She darted a longing glance at the closest data point. “I couldn’t check.”

“What about your backup comm?” Chummy said. His assistant loved the cutting-edge devices. But things in beta broke frequently, so she always traveled with a backup.

“I had it set to auto-sync, so I wouldn’t lose any data.” DeeDee stared mournfully at her shoes, which matched today.

“Is she okay?” Rodney looked to Chummy for reassurance and took half a step toward the young woman. She shrunk smaller into herself.

Chummy tapped DeeDee’s hand like it were a comm. “What is it about spies, DeeDee?”

“There’s a new virus in my system,” she said. “It’s collecting copies of everything.”

Rodney groaned. “Again?”

“But that’s the problem…” DeeDee trailed off.

“How much is compromised?” Cory leapt to the core issue.

“Nothing.” DeeDee looked over at the foot of the old salesman’s bed. “I didn’t reconnect to the company network after accessing theirs.”

“The automatic scans would block anything anyway. There’s really no risk here,” Rodney pointed out.

“Wouldn’t block this one. It’s custom,” DeeDee said.

Rodney looked at his own comm recharging. “I’ve got mine set to auto-connect.”

“Not a problem.” Cory Aanderson gave Rodney a rueful look. “The security goons don’t give sales people, any sales people, full proprietary access. They know we’re easy targets. But…” He looked at Chummy. “You’ve got full access? And your staff does too?”

“And she knew that,” Chummy admitted.

“DeeDee didn’t connect.” Rodney repeated, looking at her like he could see inside her head if he stared long enough.

Cory Aanderson met Chummy’s eyes over DeeDee’s still-bent blonde head. “It’d be against the network security policy to reconnect without turning over your devices for a thorough check first, so of course DeeDee hasn’t plugged them in,” he said.

“And also I noticed the spyware uploading,” DeeDee muttered. “Explains why Ms. Zhu’s goons kept offering me chargers and extension cords for the data port outlets at the airport.”

“They did?” Rodney asked. Chummy hadn’t noticed either, but if DeeDee said they had, then they had.

“DeeDee’s a rule follower,” Chummy explained for what seemed like the hundredth time. “We’ve got a policy against connecting corporation-owned devices to public nets.”

“Which the airport was but the Shen Kong vehicle wasn’t.” DeeDee defended herself without noticing no one had accused her.

“I’m impressed.” Cory Aanderson beckoned to Rodney. “Can you see if the drink machine can manage a decent cocoa? Give the woman something to sip on. Add in some of my peppermint schnapps.” Cory Aanderson winked, and DeeDee looked up far enough to see it. “Good job.” He nodded at her and gave Chummy a bigger smile. “And now we know why she was really so delighted to drag you around the globe.”

“Ah, there’s also a bit of personal history,” Chummy felt compelled to add.

“I’d heard.” Cory settled more easily back into his pillows.

DeeDee shook her head. “It’s not true. She and Mr. Jeffy never dated.”

“Those two?” Cory Aanderson snorted. “You’ve been protecting our boss longer than I realized! I’d gotten the impression she thought of you as the one that got away, not our own John-Philip.”

Chummy shrugged. “There’s no accounting for taste.”

The mingled scents of peppermint and chocolate wafted forward. Rodney presented DeeDee with the first mug and then offered a round to Chummy and his boss.

Cory Aanderson happily relinquished his apple juice for a spiked cocoa mug of his own, cooled to lukewarm with a generous splash of half and half. Chummy accepted his usual coffee and skipped all the offered additions. The hum of air ventilation played a soft white-noise background.

“So it’s just a data grab?” Rodney asked after he’d finished serving. “They’d risk a major deal for this?” He rubbed his head and looked at Cory Aanderson. “Boss, they’ve already redirected their crew but we can cancel the contract.”

“We could!” Cory Aanderson’s eyes lit. “It isn’t like the orbital station has to be a rock.”

“But using their rock would be a really good idea,” Chummy cautioned. “We should talk with Jeffy first before responding to Julie. It isn’t like Shen Kong succeeded in getting anything.”

“Eh. Maybe not. But when a CEO gets her hands dirty like that, I don’t think we should trust her.” Cory pulled up a general, very general, orbital station design on the cabin’s main display. “TCG could build a crafted orbital station instead. Don’t we have designers working on that for possible second and third elevators?”

“That would delay the whole project.” Chummy shook his head. “Maybe by years.” Years in which the western launcher would be supplying the under-construction orbital station for months on end. Except that Sadou surely needed more time to get it built and then needed a gentle low number of competitors in the market to survive and prosper as a business. This wasn’t the way Chummy had arranged things. They were supposed to use the Shen Kong rock.

“So what if it’s delayed?” Cory Aanderson said. “No one else has the tether material to build a competing space elevator. We don’t have to work with people who try to steal from us.”

“They have people in space headed out to collect an asteroid for us. Think how that would look to the global business community if we canceled the contract with a human crew already up there,” Rodney cautioned.

Cory Aanderson settled somewhat but his dignity remained offended. “Lunar orbit hardly counts. And it’s a bitty baby as asteroids go even if it is a nice fat solid thing rather than the collection of gravel held together by gravitational forces that I’m told is the norm.”

“Shen Kong is scared,” Chummy realized. “We’ve been talking about expanding into orbital industry. If we do that with a monopoly on cost-efficient ground-to-orbit transit, we can knock anyone else out of business at will.”

“That’s not it,” DeeDee interrupted. “The employee files Shen Kong shared—they still have people working on the new low-mass parachute tech. And they haven’t cut back at all on their reentry shuttle people. They are hedging all bets in case there’s still no elevator ten years from now.” She stared at her feet and babbled fast to get all the words out without typing them. “Selling the asteroid might be a backup plan. If they keep it back the value of the metals in the asteroid are higher for being already in orbit, which ones on Earth are not. And also if they decide they can’t trust TCG, they could fake having difficulties delivering the asteroid to extend the time before they have true competition from the space elevator.”

“Sending things down to Earth surface is hardly the main business case for the elevator!” Rodney objected.

“Give me a moment,” Cory Aanderson said, and Rodney snapped his mouth shut to give the man his full attention.

DeeDee fidgeted with her comm, turning it on and off as if repeated restarts could will the malicious code out of the device.

“This changes nothing,” the old salesman finally decided. “Zhu Zhang Li tried to cover all the angles, and we caught her at it. I’ll talk to Jeffy first, of course, but I expect to have a conference call with her and her people later and work out a few more concessions. But!” He held up a hand forestalling Rodney from speaking again. “She’ll offer them, and we’ll decline. Chummy is right about us having scared Shen Kong, and if an established deep space company is worried, we’ve probably freaked out all the ones working primarily in orbit. I’ll talk with Jeffy. We need a plan to ensure we don’t completely destabilize things.”

“War with China,” DeeDee muttered.

Rodney gave her a disturbed look.

“Just a joke Julie Zhu made,” Chummy explained. “And we really ought to consider that the elevator project might not actually work.”

Cory snorted and splattered cocoa and froth over all three of them.

“Goodness Chummy!” He hacked a healthy cough and blew his nose loudly on a tissue Rodney provided. “You need to give some kind of warning before jumping headlong into dark humor like that. Might not work!” He grabbed the corner of his lap blanket and wiped at Rodney’s face.

Chummy handed DeeDee a few of the tissues. He hadn’t been joking.

“I like your plan,” Rodney said. “For your arguments when you go back at Julie, remember Ethan’s got an engineering firm on contract to supply the orbital station indefinitely. We can afford to build a station from scratch if Shen Kong decides not to come through with the asteroid. Sure, they might get their new parachute system working well enough to do orbit-to-Earth without us for a while but cheap uplift is in their best interests too. We’ll still be able to finish construction without their help, and when we do, there’s nothing that says we have to have any space available to sell to Shen Kong or any other business Julie is affiliated with.”

DeeDee’s fingers twitched. She would be sending him private little messages if her comm were safe to connect or if he still had his also infected device.

“We’d need backups,” Chummy tried to inject caution again. Jeffy really did listen to Cory’s insights, and Chummy didn’t dare try to caution Jeffy directly. He couldn’t afford to be found out before the Sadous’ West Africa launcher got up and running smoothly or it would have been for nothing.

“Won’t be a problem.” Rodney waived off his concerns, but Cory looked at him with the wrinkles deepening between his eyebrows. The old salesman was trying to read him, and he hadn’t gotten to his position by being bad at that.

DeeDee hunched in her seat and muttered, “Wish I could search on Shen Kong’s parachutes. Could find something. Probably.”

“What if we sold a parachute system ourselves?” Chummy asked, welcoming the chance to give Cory Aanderson a distraction.

Rodney blinked. “I didn’t know we had one.”

That would be because TCG doesn’t have one. But he didn’t say so immediately.

“We didn’t know we had the makings of a space elevator a year ago,” Chummy pointed out.

“Learned about it around seven months ago, myself,” Cory Aanderson agreed.

“We agreed to support the resupply of their belt-mining operations as part of this deal,” Rodney said. “So if we push them on this after Shen Kong has already allocated their rock budget, Julie will have to work with us.”

“You’d let them die?” DeeDee pushed her cocoa away. “They’ve got whole crews of people out there, and they’d get abandoned up there because of some bullshit contract dispute?”

“Jeffy would not,” Chummy said with absolute confidence. Rodney grimaced like it was a character flaw on their chief executive’s part. “But,” Chummy added, “we have no idea what Shen Kong will do. They could probably redirect our rock to one of their mining operations and get their deep space crews resupplied there as they usually do.”

“It’s dangerous up there,” Cory Aanderson agreed. “And so this parachute system of ours…Is it cheaper to produce than Shen Kong’s?”

“No, let’s say it’s not, but that Jeffy will be willing to sell it at a loss to take Shen Kong’s market share for however long it takes to bring the space elevator into operation.”

“And the reason they haven’t seen us testing it?” Rodney asked.

“Is because it doesn’t exist,” Cory Aanderson filled in smoothly before Chummy needed to say it. “But we’ll say we realigned funding after DiamondWire proved to be possible in industrial lengths.”

“But the crews,” DeeDee went back to it again.

“That’s another lever we have.” Cory Aanderson pulled his blankets up a bit more.

The cocoa splatter had dried to almost invisibility, but now that he knew the blankets were dirty, Chummy noticed the whole hospital bed had a musty unlaundered smell.

“Our goal,” Cory Aanderson said, “is that they continue with the asteroid delivery like they planned, and we have some resupply ready and waiting for them. Ethan mentioned the other day that he’s already locked in a contract for orbit-side supplier for consumables and the carbon tether build powder.”

“He’ll have backups, though,” Chummy pointed out. If he had to move to Kilimanjaro to ensure it, he would. Chummy needed the space elevator to have layers upon layers of redundancy not just in the engineering itself but also in the supporting operations.

“Not Ethan,” Cory Aanderson said. “That boy is always sweating the bottom-line costs for things. It’s why he’s great for the elevator. He’s got a wide-open budget, but he’ll be spending it like he has to account for every single penny. He’ll do backups for life support because he has to, but stuff that can wait maybe three to five days like food, no way in hell he’ll pay for redundancy.”

Cory Aanderson beckoned Rodney for his closer attention. “Got any ideas for those salvage companies? Next on my list is finding a deal for the space trash.”

“You’re going to contract with a sole provider for clearing space debris?” Chummy knew he was outside his authority, but the concept was ridiculous. They should know better, they should all know better. And TCG was going to depend only on the Sadous’ western launcher for the orbital station’s resupply during the construction phase? And then they had the potential for an excessive delay in the setup of the orbit-side rig because they might use some fragile, easily holed construct instead of a solid asteroid? A rock might not be pretty but there was significant value in a thing able to sustain at least a few collisions with small space junk. His little favor to the family might not just risk money. It might cost lives.

Chummy felt sick.

He needed to get off this jet. He needed to go back to his quiet little apartment and call Aunt Mami to make a plan. A very, very detailed plan with lots of exceptional people on site to make it work. Forget local talent and hiring from within and a cross-training program to develop the skills of domestic employees. Forget all that. People could die.

DeeDee tapped him on the shoulder. “You okay, boss?”

He looked up, gray-faced and trying his best to be blank.

“I’m really sorry about getting the equipment virus-infected. I’ll pay the company back for it. It’s just—” She swallowed hard. “I need a few months, cause, uh, I’ve still got some student loans.”

Chummy slowly realized what she was saying. “DeeDee, you aren’t responsible for what Shen Kong chooses to do when you connected to their network. You did a great job here, truly.”

“But I let it get trojaned!” She waved a hand over all her fine gear. “They’ll probably have to quarantine all of this. It’ll take months to figure out exactly what it did and by then it’ll all be too outdated to be worth overwriting and reinstalling the apps and installing all the updates, patches, and fixes. It’s all mech waste now!”

Chummy nodded. “But you didn’t infect the system. And you didn’t let us spill all our proprietary data back out for someone else to see, steal, and copy.”

“That’s it!” Cory Aanderson clapped his hands, which made only a muffled sound because one hand still held the mug. “Shen Kong is after the space elevator. They took this enormous risk of losing us as business partners because they want the secret of how to manufacture DiamondWire.”

“Are our proposed transport rates that usurious?” Chummy asked.

DeeDee’s fingers twitched.

“Expensive,” Chummy translated the word she would have looked up.

Rodney shook his head. “I don’t think that’s it. It’s that we’ve got no plans to build a second and third elevator on Earth. They aren’t needed here, not after we have a first one in regular, sustained operation.”

“What do you mean?” Chummy said.

“The Moon might have a business case for one,” Cory Aanderson allowed. “I’ve mentioned it to Jeffy. It’s just that it isn’t our business case. Our lunar interests are pretty minimal at the moment. We might have been looking at obtaining some, but our war chest is all about funding the Kilimanjaro space elevator now. We aren’t in the business of buying companies at least for a little while.”

“I’m not going to the Moon,” DeeDee said. Rodney and Cory both blinked.

“We were about to visit the elevator site when I got the call from Jeffy redirecting us here,” Chummy explained. “Your predictions make it sound like the next major build site might be lunar, so…”

“It’s not the risks,” DeeDee added. “It’s the connectivity. Horrible, horrible connectivity between lunar networks and Earth networks. They say you have to wait for downloads. Can you imagine?”


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