Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

More months passed; Ethan stopped keeping track of his mistakes. He didn’t have time for that. It was all he could do to try to juggle the fixes. He added another public relations aide to his continually growing list of new positions. The one Chummy had given him worked fine, but he wanted a lower-level minion of his own in that office who’d call him up and tell him if he really needed to know something. He’d like a personally loyal headhunter too. He certainly wasn’t going to just take the inter-directorate transfers of all the dead weight the other offices wanted to shift his way. The other parts of the company were starting to catch on to his methods. Nobody dared steal people back from him directly, but they were getting ruthless with each other. It was only a matter of time before someone tried to take back one of his top people. He needed to be ready.

Yet another just graduated propulsion systems engineer had cracked the TCG email system to send him a résumé directly. Ethan almost deleted it, but with a reluctant nod to the grit required to overcome his spam blockers, he sent Philip Chao’s messages to HR. On his screen, DeeDee Nelson’s neat organizer bot replied with a short thank-you and swept all the correspondence and résumé attachments into Samson Young’s To Do pile.

Ethan groaned at the sheer magnitude of the elevator project’s To Do pile. Nothing necessarily had his name on it, but he was in charge of putting names on all the tasks. If he was going to make this work, and Ethan always made things work, he’d get the best to do it. He was going to keep breaking every polite-handshake no-compete the conglomerate had ever made and rob anyone and everyone to get the strongest team possible. Certain rude people—Cindy Brooks formerly of Chicago Admin Support came to mind—might say he’d already done just that. But Ethan didn’t feel like he’d done enough of it. Damn them all. He was stuck as chief of sciences. That meant he had to make the space elevator into his very own moon shot and steal all the superstars that the planet had to offer.

He was not going to be bloated into becoming too big to succeed. Ethan knew that trick, and it was not going to break him. They thought they’d given him rope to hang himself. Not going to happen. He’d be happy to garrote at least half the private trade deals the company had and cut the feet out from under key suppliers who’d been loyal partners for decades, if he needed to. Later on they’d write books about his bravery, and the other chiefs and vice presidents would have to repair the broken relationships. His bridges were already on fire, so Ethan would use this position to its fullest.

There would be an elevator, and Ethan would be its heart.


Presiding over yet another design review breakout session, Ethan had had five lead engineers and three top scientists sketching designs on actual paper while a dozen lesser project managers stood back against the walls taking notes and sending prototype orders to distributed teams to build and test mock-ups. Ethan had not the slightest idea what any of them were saying, but they believed each other and from the looks in those eyes, they had confidence they could and would complete the project successfully. Ethan hoped he didn’t need to know what any of it meant. He could read the people instead…except for Chummy.

At that last visit, Ethan had hid his glare as Chummy himself, the original troublemaker, came in pushing a cart with a gurgling coffee machine and a soda dispenser loaded with Diet Coke. The project managers had swarmed the cart immediately and several distributed fresh cups to the core team which were taken but barely acknowledged.

“We don’t have a beverage contract for this facility,” Ethan remembered having said.

Chummy had given him one of those sparkling white-toothed smiles. “We own the facility. I talked to Cindy. She doesn’t mind.”

Ethan had hovered and watched while Chummy chatted with this and that low-level scientist about nothing at all important. No schemes were revealed, no accusations were made. Chummy had left again without anything more than a threat to come visit again soon.

He’d contained himself and not snorted publicly at Chummy’s comment about Cindy’s opinions. Ethan would have bet she’d support Chummy if he’d come in with kilos of cocaine for all the staff, never mind a few outside-budget Diet Cokes.

Cindy Brooks, current chief of administrative support, minded absolutely everything, except of course when Chummy asked for it. Ethan suppressed an eye-roll just thinking about it. Ms. Brooks was certainly not Cindy to him. Not since he’d cut secretarial support staff five years back at the Chicago office when she’d just transferred out to Beijing. He’d saved that division of the company a half million dollars and earned her enduring hatred.

The experience with Ms. Brooks made Ethan even more twitchy about Chummy. He’d had Ms. Brooks contained on all sides rather like a slowly decaying zombie. All her teeth were pulled, but he couldn’t afford to properly bash her head in. Still, it took time and energy to make sure the people around her respected him and not her. It had once come back to him that she’d called him a monster at the Beijing holiday party. He could have, should have, gotten her fired for that, but the incident was now too far in the past. It would look petty now. And truly at the time he’d been afraid that if he spread word of the incident, too many others would agree with her.

His standard interview question response was to claim to be a tiger fiercely protective of his people. Internally he found the shark metaphor more appropriate, but the soft butt-sitters with no ambition who filled out most senior interview panels in advisor roles got scared if you spoke too much truth, so he stayed with tiger. But he never forgot that the company was really a shark tank and not some beautified field of wildflowers.

He was going to need to break Chummy to keep the power balance aligned right. The man had made him, and now he was the only one besides Mr. Jeffy who could fire him. Ethan wasn’t sure how to get a handle on Chummy yet. Someone like Cindy Brooks was easy. Ms. Brooks had, still, hundreds of people scattered throughout the company’s offices, and she cared for all of them deeply. With her, all he had to do was force her to fire a few and it brought her fury up to a peak where she couldn’t think any more and became easy to predict.

Chummy had no real departments: no real people. By now Ethan had the man’s job description nearly memorized. The CEO, Jeffy himself, had chosen to assign rather more than typical HR duties to Chummy. Strategic vision was in there, and he always had two assistant positions filled by young support staffers who worked like dogs for nearly nothing and who were frequently headhunted by other organizations. Chummy actually encouraged them to move on every two or three years. They generally stayed for five. Foolish besotted puppies. There was no weakness there, and at least right now, Chummy himself seemed flawlessly armored.

Ethan got up from his desk, locked his account accesses, and put on his people face. Chummy was visiting, yet again. He should be landing within the next half hour.

Ethan’s own faithful assistant, Jax, was tracking all the senior-level arrivals for him. When Ethan had found and hired the much older man, in his sixties then with a bit of a paunch but with a meticulous attention to detail, it had been in a spurt of personal insecurity. Ethan thought back to that old interview. The man had smelled of desperation and reminded him of how he might have ended up if he hadn’t learned to be ruthless. Ethan bestowed a smile on Jax in passing and the man levitated just a bit. Back then, Jax had been out of work for over two years, in the middle of a divorce, and about to lose his house. Ethan had saved him, and now Jax would do pretty much anything for him. Except, of course, anything that might even faintly harm Mrs. McAllister. That pending divorce had been called off as soon as Jax’s paycheck started coming in. Ethan thought ill of the woman on general principle, but he didn’t need an automaton, and as long as Mrs. McAllister stayed out of the way, he wouldn’t try to break up Jax’s marriage.

“Mr. Schmidt-Li,” Jax called out as he arrived at Ethan’s elbow with a tablet display. “Chummy’s arrival is on schedule, and I’ve double-checked that the coffee at the airport lounge has been switched over to his brand. Chummy’s assistants were very helpful.”

Ethan let the slightest crease of a frown show.

Jax flinched back. “I didn’t ask the assistants. You wanted us to surprise Chummy. My twins are the same age as DeeDee.”

Twins? Ethan blinked. He hadn’t known his assistant even had children.

“So I checked their profiles,” Jax continued. “DeeDee Nelson had mostly just cat photos. But Samson Young had pictures of the three of them—Chummy, DeeDee and himself—and he wrote public posts about the coffee Chummy likes.”

“Good,” Ethan said, and watched Jax’s anxiety level drop a few notches. It was pleasant to have a responsive executive secretary who could read him without Ethan needing to resort to overt critiques that might damage his personal brand as the lovable manager with the flawless long-term vision. One of the engineering team leads was waiting in the outer office, so Ethan added more loudly, “Keep up the good work, Jax.”

Ethan reached out a hand and shook his lead engineer’s hand firmly. “No major problems, I hope?”

“Not major,” Omer Ehrlich agreed, “but I was hoping to get on your schedule to talk through our options for orbit debris clearance choices.”

Ethan would have liked to let his eyes roll into the back of his head. These sorts of details were exactly the sort of thing he’d wanted to get away from with a transfer back into a sales-oriented profit center where someone else was in charge of delivering on the big promises.

“Sure, sure, but I’m confident your team can come up with a good solution for the company.” Ethan patted the man on the shoulder. “Come on down to the airport with me, Omer. I’m meeting Chummy, who’s in from Berlin for the week to have a look around. He might like to hear your ideas directly and you can fill him in on some of the recent wins your teams have had.”

Ethan couldn’t off the top of his head think of anything the engineers had been doing right. From his perspective they brought him nonstop problems.

If it weren’t for some of his favorite scientists insisting that the engineering team was top-notch, he would have fired the lot of them and brought in a group more capable of filtering their communications with him into a list of planned solutions instead of all these nitnoid problems and their convoluted interrelated fixes which caused other problems.

The engineers seemed to delight in pointing out third- and fourth-order problems they’d identified but not yet solved. It was a wonder any of them were still employed. His scientists at least had learned not to come to him with those sorts of things. They sent him bad news by email instead. It wasn’t much better, but they did set up experiments to look for solutions without much prompting. And his executive secretary was earning his pay increase with a carefully maintained interconnected tracker of the ways the problems and problematic fixes were developing.

Jax hopped into the driver’s seat to plug in the destination and adjust the car’s main cabin to Ethan’s preferences. The part of Tanzania they were headed to down the slope from the Kilimanjaro site was far too hot for Ethan’s preference, but he’d taken to wearing linen-blend suits and drinking his coffee iced. With a minion like the engineer in the car, Ethan’s temperature choice was mid-seventies with a healthy air circulation. It supported the image of being frugal with corporate resources and adapting to local conditions. Ethan hoped Chummy would ask for it to be cooler on the return trip. Sixty-eight felt like heaven these days, but he rarely got it. The high elevations on Kilimanjaro where the temperatures were too cool for comfort were reserved for construction, and early on, Ethan had established the portion of the resort altitudes where the temperatures were idyllic as a mix of reserved wildlife refuge and an elite living space for the on-site build crew.

Jax met Ethan’s eyes through the rearview mirror. It would have been sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit if only the two of them had been in the car. Once the autodrive engaged and the trip started safely, Jax’s seat turned him around to angle conversationally toward the two back passenger seats. Jax offered up coffee and water. Ethan declined. He planned to drink with Chummy in a few minutes, but Omer gratefully downed bottles of icy cold water.

“His airplane just landed,” Jax reported as the car parked itself at the drop-off spot in front of the airport concierge desk. The company lounge was three floors up with a view of the tarmac.

Ethan popped out of the vehicle with a practiced bounce. It hurt his knees but made him look fifteen years younger. The engineer followed more slowly. Jax waved them on. “I’ll stay with the car to keep the airport valet program from burying it in the back of the auto lot. Ping me when you need it back, and I’ll switch it back to autodrive.”

Ethan felt the rush of blessedly cool air on the back of his neck as Jax ratcheted down the interior temperature before the doors fully closed. Ethan would bet it was going to be a fine icebox for Jax while he waited, but the man was dependable. He’d have it at seventy-five before Chummy stepped inside. Ethan gave his executive secretary a wave as the vehicle slid away from the curb to clear the spot for other travelers.

The plane waited on the tarmac about to taxi over to a skybridge. Omer tried to bring up a few more elevator design issues awaiting a decision as Ethan ushered him inside the terminal, but Ethan was able to distract him from too much detail with a few words about who Chummy was and his role in the conglomerate. It was all the bullshit position description stuff that didn’t matter, but that sort of distinction wasn’t always clear to the lower levels. Something in the way Omer’s eyes glinted suggested that maybe Omer already knew Chummy fairly well.

But if not, it wouldn’t hurt to make sure Omer was informed and could tell others. It should elevate Ethan’s credibility a bit that someone titled Strategic Visionary had flown from Berlin special to see him.

“Oh, Chummy’s just in awe of you, like everyone else,” Omer said. He rubbed his head where he had more hair missing than present. “You could have him come to you on the mountain or reschedule if you’re too busy.”

Ethan’s eyebrows rose. “He is a company VP.”

“Oh yes, he’s that.” Omer shrugged. “But he’s also Chummy. I think he might commit seppuku if anything he did harmed the elevator. Any of the VPs would. Or else”—Omer’s face split with a grin—“Mr. Jeffy would gut them himself.”

Omer looked through the airport’s wide glass windows at the road they’d left which led back up the mountain. “I am so very happy to be part of this.” When he turned back, there were tears glistening in his eyes.

Ethan looked away and suppressed a shudder. Adoring scientists were hard enough. Now he had adoring engineers too. At least Jax hadn’t turned into a pure sycophant.

Jax had arranged for an airport map outline on Ethan’s comm and used corporate comm access codes to track Chummy’s progress through the terminal. The red dot should arrive any minute.

Omer’s comments disturbed him. If Chummy had a drop of Japanese blood in his ancestry it certainly didn’t show, but pseudo samurai doublespeak sounded exactly odd enough to be the next management-science fad, and Ethan hadn’t been keeping up on the fads. So Ethan kept his mouth shut about the seppuku concept.

The only thing Ethan could remember doing lately was abusing the suppliers to get his teams the stuff they needed cheaply and ahead of schedule while robbing other parts of TCG for people. That shouldn’t get him accolades, but Omer wasn’t the only one prone to spontaneous bursts of gratitude.

He looked back at Omer Ehrlich, who, thankfully, no longer looked about to drip tears.

He briefly considered demanding the man explain his infatuation and dismissed the idea as counterproductive. Instead, Ethan took a longer moment to consider his own grim future if the project were less than successful. It was more than enough to get him to relent about avoiding Omer’s true reasons for tagging along on the uncomfortable trip out to the airport and back.

“Tell me about those debris clearance ideas you have.” If Chummy got there while they were still talking about it, maybe Ethan could twist the old personnel finder’s arm into a pretzel until he magicked into existence another team able to debris-clear at other than insane prices.

Omer babbled for a while about the challenges of orbital dynamics for the in-orbit companies.

And Ethan started to wonder if maybe the sales guys hadn’t been talking to the engineers. “You do realize those are only backups, right? We’ve got a subcontractor building a launcher in West Africa to toss up stuff to the orbital side as we build. You know, additive manufacturing powders and foodstuffs and such. Consumables. It’s a rough launch for things that can take some force, but maybe we could get it smoothed out enough to send non-inert payloads. Cory Aanderson got them to put debris clearance gear in their contract a few months back. I guess it’s a kinematics thing. They just play marble games with the sky and smash debris with a payload to deorbit it safely into either an atmospheric burn-up or an open sea splashdown, I guess?”

Omer winced. “Please don’t say that in front of the Board, boss. I’d hate to have them repeat that and then the media say we are turning all the space junk into ocean junk just because they’ve got bad orbits. So much of it is still very reusable; with the right robotics we could realign some orbits… Hmm, yeah.” He started to grin. “Let me get some people on that.”

“Tell the Board?” He could hear the capital in Omer’s emphasis. TCG’s Board of Directors included only the highest of the C-level executives, a few key vice presidents, and a handful of shareholder representatives. They generally didn’t involve themselves in TCG operations without a direct invite from Mr. Jeffy.

“Yeah, you’ve got a meeting with the Board as part of Chummy’s surprise. You weren’t supposed to know. Mr. Jeffy said it’d stress you and be a distraction, but your assistant found out.” His comm beeped. “Yes, Jax, I’m going to tell him,” he told it and muted the device. “But of course your people would leak. And, yeah, for the space junk, I’ll have some folks see what else we can do. I didn’t think the West African Launcher was in operation yet.” He tapped on his comm a bit. “Looks like they’ve only taken the first two payments. But from satellite imagery, they’ve got the build line cleared well ahead of schedule. Wonder why they haven’t claimed their next two milestone payments yet? From imagery, they’ve been eligible a while.”

“Really? They’re under budget?” Ethan failed to hide his surprise. “Now I’ve definitely got to offer them a contract expansion.” He sent Jax a note to query the Sadou Corporation about how soon they could be ready to do orbital debris clearance work.

Omer shared a manager’s grin with him. “It does happen sometimes. Looks like they’re doing well for us.” Then he saw something else on his comm’s screen. “Of course they are. I didn’t realize you’d signed off on them for us personally. Damn, sir, you’re good. Whoa! They’re building the maglev launcher system up the side of a volcano. That’s…”

Absolutely insane, Ethan thought.

“Brilliant. Just brilliant,” Omer continued. He held up a hand shaking with excitement and started ticking off the positives. “First, they’re near the equator, so that saves launch energy. Second, they’ve avoided building skyscraper-sized pylons for the track by using the height of the mountainside for some of the elevation. Third, wow! I’d not’ve thought to hire an oil and natural gas company to build a spaceport. But, of course, it all makes sense. They are making the hydrogen fuel by methane pyrolysis. And they’ve got the maglev rail power coming from geothermal. They’ll be dealing with microquakes somehow, but, oh, Endeley. Yeah, if anyone can do it, an Endeley volcanologist can… Oh, sorry, I babble. You’re amazing to have found that team, sir.”

“I what?” Ethan said.

Both their comms pinged at once. Chummy strolled across the concourse.

Ever cheerful, he shook Ethan’s hand and gave Omer a bear hug. Samson Young hung back wearing a bland smile, seated, as always, in his motor chair.

“So sorry to rush you, Ethan,” Chummy said. “But Jeffy and I were chatting in the air and he’s hoping to join in on our little chat. He would’ve come in person but Cory had a turn for the worse, so he’s visiting with him. Rodney’s got everything set up for us all to virtual in, though, if we can get to a secure conference room.”

Of course they could get to a secure conference room. They could have even used a reserved office space within the airport itself if Samson had bothered to give Jax a heads-up. And now that prearranged coffee was going to be wasted on people who’d have preferred the Kenyan blend they’d replaced.

Ethan pasted a smile on his face as Samson hurried them along. “Boss, Jax has a car waiting on the lower level. I’m setting up the call details with Cindy now.”


Sweat ran down Ethan’s spine from nerves, not heat. The air-conditioning in this Tanzania office suite purred at sixty-six degrees. Thank you, Cindy Brooks, for making him look like a spendthrift. The sweltering heat outside wasn’t to blame for his unease. On the video call, Mr. Jeffy listened, face impassive, as Omer updated everyone on the elevator progress. Ethan should’ve been doing it, but he’d found his tongue sticking to the top of his mouth and back when it was only an update for Chummy, it had been Omer who was going to talk technical details on a driving tour with Ethan filling in the other bits as possible. Without a primary speaking role and not needing to tweak a vehicle’s autodrive to go this way and that gave Ethan time to study the participants in this surprise meeting.

Rodney Johnson’s bleached smile on the video conference call sparkled far too much for a modern high-level sales guy. How had that man managed to keep his position when he looked so much like an actor playing a used-car salesman? Rodney was still only deputy to Cory Aanderson’s vice presidentship, but he was sitting in on more and more office calls. The background behind Rodney showed the nondescript beige walls and beeping machinery of a private hospital room. Cory’s voice, weak but insistent, sometimes commented from off camera.

Ethan’s jaw hurt from the effort it took to keep his face frozen in an attentive pose instead of grinding his teeth like he really wanted to.

Marketing had dumped millions into ore sales and low-gravity manufacture. Sales had killed it using the free promo all the elevator news had garnered. That should have been his bump, not Cory Aanderson’s!

New names populated almost half the engineering management members who dialed in to listen to this “Update to the Board” call. This unplanned executive meeting turned town hall had Chummy’s fingerprints on it, but even he didn’t seem to have complete control. Mr. Jeffy welcomed the new promotees warmly, and Ethan realized there were a significant number of people on the call-in roster missing. Jax lit up his comm with a listing of folks who’d been moved out of his department by a new memo from the CEO’s desk. No one else made mention of the massacre in the engineering management ranks. Ethan recognized the missing as the ones who’d stalled space development projects or run studies which found the return on investment to be insufficient for a business case. Most had been written quite a while ago. Ethan had been planning to use those other reports after he’d made the transition to sales to be the stalwart company insider who, with true humility and dedication to the good of the company, reported that the person taking over his former job couldn’t actually execute any of the bold plans he’d been promoted out of the position for.

This was horrible. This was fantastic. Ethan didn’t know what to think.

The setup he’d arranged had been thoroughly de-toothed by the very top echelon of the company. Nobody would dare now do to him what he’d planned to do to somebody else. But, heaven help him, the whole company could go under if the elevator failed to work. Not just a subsidiary would fail, the whole of TCG would be gutted and chopped to pieces for small-time competitors to bid over and then liquidate for assets.

Ethan wasn’t sure if there even existed enough space business to make a decent profit with the cheap planet-side-to-orbit transport their new tether material seemed to make possible.

“There might be some time before we hit a positive return on investment,” Ethan tried out as his most mild of all possible cautions. With the tone of the call, his comment now remained as the most critical of any of the things said.

Mr. Jeffy’s answer, and also Cory Aanderson’s, and God help them all, even the CFO’s was the same. “You get the thing built, Ethan. We’ll make sure the company keeps your teams well funded.”

Ethan did the only thing he could under the circumstances. He nodded, as if none of this surprised him in the least, and signaled for more coffee.

The medium roast blend tasted the same to him as every other cup of coffee he’d ever had, but “Chummy’s blend” Jax mouthed silently as he handed it to him. Ethan tried to notice the differences in order to say something nice about it later. It tasted like coffee. A note on his comm had the details about the family-owned coffee plantation in West Africa which supplied the beans. “Partial stake in coffee company owned by Chummy’s cousin. /jm,” the note from Jax said.

The conference ended with more glowing words from Mr. Jeffy. “I trust everyone will give their full support to our Ethan here.” Jeffy’s grin couldn’t have spread any wider. “You are our future. In case anyone doubts it,” he added, to a murmur of laughter from the vice presidents who were the only ones allowed unmuted lines into this conference call, “the elevator is our future.” He winked. “Don’t fuck this up, Ethan.”

Slight motion in Cory Aanderson’s room brought Sales Deputy Rodney’s face momentarily into the call focus as most active video feed. Samson Young had it shrunk down immediately, but Ethan’s eye followed it.

“I’ll do my best, boss,” he said. Rodney’s face was a study in envy. Ethan decided to ignore it. Rodney had been his prime competition after Cory Aanderson himself once upon a time. Now the man was about to be handed that plum top sales job without even having to really fight for it. Ethan ought to be the one twisted with raw covetous agony, but to his own surprise, he wasn’t.

The call ended.

There was too much work to do, and Ethan was starting to actually believe it was really possible. That thought felt too much like hubris, so he distracted himself with an analysis of the things said on the call with an emphasis on his own words. Had he promised too much? What about that sign-off? Was calling Mr. Jeffy “boss” too standoffish? And Ethan couldn’t quite bring himself to call the CEO “John-Philip” as he’d been encouraged to do, or even “Jeffy” like most of the vice presidents did.

“Back to work, everybody!” Omer announced and led the mob of employee spectators out of the conference room. “Nobody’s going to be trying to undercut our Schmidt-Li after that,” one build foreman said to another with a note of extreme satisfaction.

Ethan returned to his office and found his path blocked by Samson’s chair. The young man was in it, facing the other way but backed into the alcove of a doorway. Ethan, standing on the other side of that same doorway, could see Chummy in conversation with Omer a little further down the hall. The spaces between rooms weren’t particularly designed for privacy, but Ethan could see why a man might think he was having an unobserved chat with a colleague here in the quiet hall. The ventilation ducts carried the sounds clear enough.

“It’s fine, Chummy,” Omer said. “Nothing to worry about. I just got the word on Aanderson’s Shen Kong space rock deal being up in the air, too. But Ethan was ready for it. He’s already got Jax ginning up a more detailed contract expansion with that Sadou group he has building a launcher to supply the orbital side for when we’re ready to put people up there and need to keep them supplied with food and build materials.”

Chummy’s answer wasn’t clear, but it was short.

“Sadou Corporation’s great. They’re under budget even,” Omer said.

Chummy turned then, and Samson rolled his chair forward to bring several refilled cups of coffee. A look of concern briefly present was wiped off the man’s face as he noticed his assistant approaching.

Ethan hadn’t been seen yet, but this was his damn building. One of several. He opened the door and invited himself into the conversation.

“Hi, Chummy, Omer.”

Samson offered him a coffee.

“No thanks, Samson.” Ethan waved it away. “Why did I lose my space rock?”

Omer flapped his hands and looked at Chummy.

Samson answered. “Mr. Jeffy is pissed off at Julie of Shen Kong for trying to hack our system to get the DiamondWire manufacture technique. He wants to back out of Aanderson’s deal, because it’d give them a major portion of the first five years of elevator lift mass. That means they wouldn’t give us the rock, which is what he insists on calling that very solid, very expensive, and very conveniently already in lunar space nickel-iron asteroid. And that’d mean a whole lot of lower-kinetic-energy space debris becomes no longer low enough, and it’d have to be cleared, or it’ll shoot bullet holes in the orbit-side station as our elevator gets built.”

“That wouldn’t be the real issue,” Ethan said. “Up that far there’s just not a lot of stuff and much of what is there is also in geosynchronous orbit, so relative to my site, it isn’t moving at all.”

“Collisions or explosions could happen to make some debris up there, especially if we were building from scratch,” Omer said, ever the engineer, “but the boss is right, of course. It’d be slow relative to lower-orbit debris fields. The big issue is getting the pathway all the way to the surface cleared to protect the tether line. As long as we have full debris clearance before the tether goes out, it’ll be okay.”

“But I take on more schedule risk without that rock,” Ethan said. “Building a station of sufficient mass to serve as a tether point will delay my timeline.”

“And there’s design risk too.” Omer pressed his lips together without any apparent eagerness to add to the elevator’s already complex build plans. “We shifted all our concept testing to builds including the rock after the Shen Kong deal came in. But as long as we’ve still got full debris clearance lined up…” Omer waved away his own concerns. “Thankfully you found us the Sadous for that, boss.”

Ethan grunted acknowledgement, still focused on the rock. “Is Cory Aanderson okay with this?” He had difficulty imagining the salesman being pleased about his most recent big win being set aside.

“He doesn’t know it fell through again,” Samson said. “There was chatter right after the deal but he’s been left under the impression it’s still all a go.” He gave a nod to Chummy. “DeeDee just confirmed. Rodney hasn’t told him. And she’s also confirmed that Rodney hasn’t had any meetings with Mr. Jeffy since Mr. Jeffy told legal to hold on the Shen Kong contract.”

“They shouldn’t have tried to steal from us.” Ethan was appalled.

“We need that rock,” Chummy said.

“Fuck them,” Ethan said. “I’ll do without. Omer, get with Jax and whoever else you need to get the Sadous to agree to a contract expansion.”

“How about a formal apology?” Chummy said. “I’ll get Julie to apologize to Jeffy, and maybe they can still work together.”

Ethan shrugged. “If you can manage it, okay. If not, he’s the CEO. I’ll make my fucking bricks without straw.”

Omer blinked.

“Biblical reference. Hebrew slaves building Egyptian pyramids, um, not sure how it relates exactly,” Samson said.

“Not that,” Omer said. “You getting Julie to apologize. She doesn’t exactly like you.”

“He’ll send me,” Samson said. “Everybody likes me.”

Ethan made a note to himself to just have Jax get a note to Cory Aanderson. Brave words aside, he wanted that rock, damn it. Sales wasn’t allowed to fuck him over like this. That famous vice president wasn’t dead yet, and Mr. Jeffy didn’t seem the type to deny a loyal employee’s last request. But it was fun to see Chummy scurrying around trying to solve problems on his behalf. So he didn’t mention his own plan. They were right about the value of the rock. There was also the issue of how powerful countries might react if they were cut out of use of the elevator entirely. TCG was a non-state actor. Ethan didn’t feel like building the world’s first space elevator just to have some nation-state destroy it. There was somebody on his public relations staff who was a former ambassador. He’d have a meeting and see what the woman recommended to make the elevator into the sort of thing all the powerful nations saw as mutually beneficial. He so hadn’t needed this. Fuck Rodney Johnson.

“Samson,” he said, “bring me a rock.”

“Of course, Mr. Schmidt-Li,” Chummy’s senior assistant said.


Back | Next
Framed