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Chapter Nine

The car followed a nearby down ramp to the industrial sector’s roof, unofficially dubbed as “Shelf Zero.” Negation Industries took up most of the volume below, but Isaac spotted virtual signs for the Mitchell Group, CounterGravCorp, Reality Controls, Atlas, SourceCode, and the Trinh Syndicate. Beside Negation Industries, the Trinh Syndicate was the only company with an established foothold; all the others looked like they were in the process of setting up new factories, given the large temporary holes cut into Shelf Zero and the masses of factory machinery sitting around up top, awaiting installation.

“This town might be on the threshold of a nice economic boom,” Isaac said. “Lot of exotic matter producers moving in.”

“Because of the industry lost during the Dynasty Crisis?” Susan asked.

“Most likely.”

Their car parked in a small visitor lot next to a round, white-walled guest center. They exited their vehicle and walked in through wide glass doors. A gray carpet guided them straight to a physical receptionist behind a counter while abstractions of Negation Industries products floated to either side: graviton thrusters of varying sizes and outputs, hot singularity reactors for starships and space stations, industrial-grade counter-grav plating, and the prominent spikes of TTV impellers.

They stopped in front of the counter. The receptionist, a young man with a round face and silvery-blond hair, dipped his head to them.

“Hello and welcome to the New Frontier site for Negation Industries. How can I help you?”

“Detective Isaac Cho, SysPol Themis.” He pinged the receptionist with his credentials. “My IC called ahead. Vice-President Ortiz should be expecting us.”

“One moment, sir. Let me check.” He pulled up a virtual itinerary. “Yes, here you are.” He opened a comm window and let it ring a few times.

“This had better be important,” grunted the low, gravelly voice on the line. “I’m damn sure I set my do-not-disturb flag. Do you have any idea the kind of problems I’m dealing with right now?”

“No, sir.” The receptionist rested his cheek on a fist. “Would you like to talk about it?”

“Would I? Production is throwing every excuse in the book at me while running eight percent behind today’s quota. Eight percent! Maintenance wants my head because I cut their printer runtime down to what it should be. Exotic Printer Seven just faulted out, and now Maintenance is pointing the finger at me as the reason we don’t have the right spares on standby. IT, in their infinite wisdom, decided now is the best time to push out the latest security patch, so Exotic Printers One, Two, and Three are throwing fits and might need to be shut down to have the patches removed. Quality is screaming at me over every little microscopic deviation in what we have produced today, and they think it’s a wonderful idea to chuck half of that down the reclamation chute. And all of those problems hit me in the last two hours! So, yes! I’m a little busy right now!”

“I understand that, sir,” the receptionist said with impressive patience, “but there’s a Detective Isaac Cho here to see you.”

“Oh.” The fire and brimstone wheezed out of the voice like a balloon deflating. “Shit. Umm, right. Tell him I’ll be right up.”

“I will, sir.” The receptionist closed the window. “Our VP will be up to see you shortly, Detective. Can I offer you some refreshments while you wait?”

“Sounds like he’s under a lot of pressure,” Isaac observed.

“It’s been like that since the Dynasty Crisis.”

“Supply and demand?” Isaac asked. “More demand than you can supply?”

The receptionist nodded. “As problems go, I suppose it’s a good one to have.”

The door to a counter-grav shaft behind the counter split open, and a stocky man floated up. He wore a black suit with a wide-brimmed hat and the Negation Industries logo pinned to his high collar. An oval amethyst floated above his shoulder, the visualization of his integrated companion. He caught sight of Isaac and company, smoothed out his suit, and walked around the counter.

“Detective, a pleasure.” He extended a hand. “Chester Ortiz, Vice-President of Operations here at Negation Industries New Frontier and the account manager for all Gordian Division contracts. At your service, sir.”

Isaac shook his hand then introduced Susan and Cephalie.

“Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to meet with us, Mister Ortiz.”

“Oh, not at all. It’s been a hell of a day for us, and I’ve been running around like a crazed lunatic, but I still caught the news.” He flashed a smile full of grim determination. “What a terrible accident. We were looking forward to having Doctor Andover-Chen back on site with us.”

“And Delacroix, too, I imagine.”

“Yes.” His smile became a little forced. “Him, too.”

“Did you have problems with the chief engineer?”

“I didn’t mean anything by it, and I suppose it’s bad form to speak ill of the dead. He could be a hard man to please at times. That’s all.”

“What was your relationship with the two agents?”

“Well, as account manager, I’m their point of contact with Negation Industries. I manage the production of their order, deal with any issues or contract disputes that might come up, and generally do my best to keep the customers happy.”

“Any social interactions with the two?”

“Nothing besides two celebratory dinners to mark project milestones. We didn’t hang out after hours, if that’s what you mean.” Ortiz motioned to the shaft he’d arrived through. “I’m more than happy to answer any questions you have. Would you like to take this to a private room? Or perhaps you want to see the impellers we’re building for the Gordian contract?”

“Let’s start with the impellers first,” Isaac said. “I’ll also need access to their desks and any material they left behind.”

“Easy enough. I’ll take you there after I’ve shown you the factory. This way.”

They took the shaft down to a six-way junction where gravitational forces swept them sideways through a transparent tube with a view of the factory floor below. Bulky industrial prints, each two or three stories high, sat in rows with a mess of conveyor belts spanning the gaps between them, filled with pallets of partially fabricated products. One of the larger printers was down for maintenance with vivid red virtual marquees declaring a list of faults. Drones, ACs, and physical workers swarmed over it, removing panels and pulling components out.

“Problems?” Isaac asked.

“Just another day on the factory floor,” Ortiz replied matter-of-factly. “If the job was easy, anyone could do this. Working with exotic matter requires extreme levels of precision—both on the exotic and normal matter sides—and we’ve been pushing our equipment hard to keep up with demand. These are all ‘standard’ printers you’re seeing. We haven’t passed any exotic ones yet.

“Printing exotic matter is tricky business. Physics gets a little strange when you start plopping negative signs in odd places. Ever let something go and have it fall upward faster and faster?”

“Can’t say that I have,” Isaac said.

“That’ll sometimes happen here. How about pushing an object up in order to keep it from falling up? Ever do that?”

“Again, no.”

“And most people never will, despite how much our society relies on exotic matter.”

“Why is that?” Susan asked.

“It’s because any finished product has a greater sum of regular matter incorporated into the design, so the mechanism ends up with positive mass. Otherwise, technology with exotic matter would be almost impossible to handle in day-to-day life.”

The tube turned downward, taking them below the upper printer level to a massive chamber with twelve giant cylindrical machines crammed together. The tube dropped them off at a high observational balcony overlooking the floor.

“The bread-and-butter of our operations.” Ortiz swept a hand across the view. “These twelve exotic matter printers were custom designed and built by our on-site engineering team, and a few of them employ special, proprietary modifications. You won’t find faster or higher quality exotic printers anywhere in the Saturn State.”

“That’s a bold claim.”

“But a truthful one.”

“Maybe so,” Isaac said, “but I couldn’t help but notice a few big names establishing a presence below Shelf Zero.”

“Oh, them.” Ortiz chuckled dismissively. “Yes, it seems our competitors are finally waking up. Shame it took them so long. They had to lose whole factories before they started looking for better options. We realized Saturn’s promise long before the current shortage.”

“And why is that?”

“There are a lot of reasons. Hydrogen is the preferred base to begin with when producing exotic matter, and Saturn offers abundant access to hydrogen gas. Furthermore, our printers are optimized for the higher atmospheric pressure this far down the Shark Fin, accelerating the conversion process to give us an edge over the competition.”

“What about the other gas giants?” Susan asked. “Why Saturn and not them?”

“Each has its own problems. Both Neptune and Uranus lack much of Saturn’s industrial infrastructure, and Jupiter’s surface gravity is prohibitively high. A harsh two point five gees versus our pleasant one point one. Plus, all that radiation isn’t doing the Jovians any favors, either, whereas Saturn’s radiation is quite mild. Barely worth a mention.”

“Jupiter’s industrial infrastructure is significantly larger than Saturn’s, though,” Isaac countered.

“True enough. The Galilean moons were colonized long before Saturn, so the Jovians enjoy a head start on us, but I don’t think that’ll last forever, and the higher-ups in our company agree. Both planetary states bask in a wealth of raw materials, but Jupiter’s gravity and radiation place barriers around many of its resources. Those barriers can be worked through, but Saturn doesn’t have those problems, so why go through all that effort?”

“Interesting.” Isaac gazed across the machines below. “Where are the Gordian impellers?”

“Here. Let me show you.” Ortiz called up an interface and sent data to their shared virtual vision. The floor vanished, and Isaac realized each cylinder extended half a kilometer down into Saturn’s atmosphere. Sections of the great machines turned translucent, and the spikes of time drive impellers appeared within nine of the units.

“The scope of your contract is for nine impellers?” Isaac asked.

“That’s right. Eight of them are ready for testing. We’re making a few minor adjustments in preparation for the field tests.”

“I understand Gordian purchased ten impellers in total. Why is Negation Industries responsible for only nine of them?”

“Because of all our other orders. We tried to free up the necessary capacity, offered discounts to other customers in exchange for delayed production. Some people bit, but not enough. In the end, we settled on a nine-unit order, and Gordian went elsewhere for the last one.”

“Fair enough. And the ninth impeller? You said eight are ready for testing.”

“Yes, that one,” Ortiz huffed. “It’s still behind schedule. Way behind.”

“That particular unit seems to be a bone of contention between you and the Gordian agents.”

“With good reason. Andover-Chen and Delacroix inspected all nine units during their visit about six weeks back, and we still hold that all of them met their specifications.”

“They disagreed?”

“That they did.” Ortiz clenched his jaw. “Look, I don’t mind exacting customers; that comes with the territory. But Delacroix.” He shook his head. “That man went too far in demanding we build a new impeller from scratch instead of adjust the one we’d already built!”

“Was he authorized to make that call?”

“Yeah, unfortunately,” Ortiz sighed, nodding slowly. “It’s a somewhat gray area in the contract. By the letter of the agreement, Gordian Division does have the right to specify changes to the impellers if they fall outside a certain percentage of the agreed tolerances. Still a dick move, if you ask me.”

“And the ninth impeller fell outside that tolerance range?”

“Yes. Barely. We were four percent under the targeted chronoton permeability rate of change, which is why we argued reworking the impeller would bring it firmly within the agreed performance specs. Delacroix rejected that offer outright. I thought I might have a chance getting through to Andover-Chen, but those Gordian chaps just formed ranks, and that was the end of it. I knew I wasn’t making headway, so I sucked up the loss and moved on.”

“What happened to the failed impeller?”

“We disabled the time drive features, chopped it up, and sold it off as bulk exotic matter. That’s standard procedure for us.”

“Why not use it for another contract?”

“Generally speaking, we can’t because the specifications from contract to contract are too different. Sometimes we can get away with that, but Gordian’s the only impeller customer in existence.”

“I see. And who bought impeller nine?”

“The Trinh Syndicate.”

Isaac raised an eyebrow. “The other company on Saturn with a Gordian contract bought your defective impeller?”

“Yeah, I know. That struck me as a little weird, too, but they put in the highest bid.” Ortiz blew out a breath. “Damned frustrating affair all around, if you ask me. But, it’s behind us, and we’ll finish number nine eventually. If you ask me, his stubbornness didn’t make sense. Gordian has been screaming for new impellers, and the fastest way for us to get impeller nine out the door was to rework it, but nooooo! It had to be perfect! So now they can wait longer for us to finish the last part of their order.”

Isaac jotted down a note to follow up with the Trinh Syndicate.

“Last question for now. Are you aware of any reason why either man would have been killed?”

“Wait a second. You mean they were murdered?” Ortiz seemed genuinely surprised. “I thought it was an accident.”

“Please answer the question, Mister Ortiz.”

“Sorry. Hmm.” He gazed up at the ceiling in thought. “Yeah, I guess it would be funny for a Themis detective to show up for an accident. Sorry, I’ve had a lot on my mind today.” He shook his head. “But no. I can’t think of anything, really. Sure, Delacroix could be tough to deal with, but I’ve handled far worse in the past, trust me. And Andover-Chen was one of the easier customers I’ve had in years.”

“What about the rejected impeller?”

“In this business, you win some, you lose some. All that did was cut into our profit margin. We’re still comfortably in the black on this project. I couldn’t understand someone being killed over it. What would be the point? We’re still on track to close this project out as an overall win, just not as big as we were hoping.”

“Thank you, Mister Ortiz.” Isaac closed his interface. “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to see their work area next.”

* * *

The Gordian Division office was built into a circular overlook branching downward from the roof of the exotic printer level. The desks sat facing each other in the center of the room’s wide, panoramic view with a diagonal counter-grav tube the only obstruction. Ortiz received two urgent calls on the way over and asked to be excused while they sifted through the agents’ desks.

“That’s quite all right,” Isaac said. “I think we have everything we need from you, for the moment.”

“Sorry. Call if you need anything.”

“We will.”

The tube whisked the vice-president away, leaving them alone.

Susan walked over to the wall and gazed down at the exotic printers.

“Let me get this straight”—she crossed her arms and switched to security chat—“Gordian Division gets its impellers from a factory a hundred kilometers down in Saturn’s atmosphere?”

“Some of them, anyway.”

“And there wasn’t an easier place to build the things?”

“Well, there were…until the Dynasty blew them up.”

Isaac sat down in Andover-Chen’s chair; he knew it belonged to the doctor because of the virtual portrait showing Andover-Chen shaking hands with SysGov President Byakko and a pair of Solar Descent character sheets. The same deluge of incomprehensible charts and equations appeared around him, and Isaac tried to sift through the mess.

“What are you looking for?”

“Anything on that rejected impeller.” He pushed through three layers of charts, shoving them over a corner of the desk until he spotted what he was after and pulled the annotated time drive schematic forward. “Here we are. See this?”

“What exactly are we looking at?” Susan asked, stepping over.

“The doctor’s own review of the reject. ‘Adjustments to rear quarter should increase max CP delta by a few percent. Why not do that? Need to ask Joachim.’ Interesting.”

“CP delta?”

“Chronoton permeability,” Cephalie explained, the LENS bobbing in the air beside them. “It’s how fast the impeller can adjust the flow of chronotons passing through it.”

“The important part is the doctor had doubts about Delacroix’s decision,” Isaac said, “even if they maintained a united front when dealing with Ortiz.”

“Wouldn’t this impeller decision have rubbed someone the wrong way?”

“Sure, but Negation Industries already absorbed the loss. If someone wanted to prevent all that Esteem from getting flushed down the chute, they acted too late. Besides, Ortiz doesn’t strike me as the type. I read him as the kind of person who’s bombarded with problems to fix and decisions to make on a constant basis, and he works through them as best he can. He’s used to compromises and imperfect solutions, and I don’t think he’d dwell on them too much. Rather, he’d simply move on and face down his next set of challenges.”

Isaac sifted through the other charts, but nothing caught his eye, so he stood up and walked around to Delacroix’s desk.

The difference was stark. An impeller schematic, two inspection reports, and a few open messages were all laid out in a neat row, and a trio of personal photos hovered against the backdrop. He pulled one close and ran a search on the petite young woman with long brunette hair holding Delacroix’s hand. The picture looped through a few seconds of them walking toward the camera, waves washing across their bare feet. She turned to him with laughter sparkling in her large brown eyes.

“Selene?” Susan asked.

“Yes.”

“Pretty.”

Isaac let go, and the photo flew back to its place on the wall. He grabbed the next one showing a closeup of Selene kissing her husband’s cheek. The last featured the couple looking out across one of the Venerian aerial cities, although Isaac couldn’t tell which one. He shifted in the seat, but something scraped against his left forearm, and he looked down.

“Hmm?” He ran his hand over the chair’s armrest, and bits of foam crumbled away.

“Something?”

“Either Negation Industries gave him the worst chair in the office, or Delacroix likes tearing chunks of foam off his armrests.”

“Don’t your chairs repair themselves?”

“Normally, yes.” Isaac twisted in the seat and ran his hand over the back of the chair. He pressed in, and the back gave easily around his hand. “But its prog-foam bladder is depleted.” He crouched down and checked under the desk. “Looks like the cleaning remotes missed a spot. There’s some more stuck in the corner.”

“A sign he was under a lot of stress?” Susan asked.

“I wouldn’t read too much into this.” Isaac rose and dusted himself off. “He probably did it without thinking. I had this friend back in high school who would get super nervous before exams. He’d stay up all night studying, all the while picking his eyebrow out. Just plucking it one hair at a time, and only the right eyebrow. A few times, he showed up to school the next day almost bald over one eye.”

“Did the other students poke fun at him for it?”

“Naturally, kids being the little monsters they are.” He furrowed his brow and turned to Susan. “Are there high schools in the Admin?”

“Yes.”

“Like the ones we have in SysGov?”

“What do you mean?”

“Peaceful. No one shooting at each other.”

Yes,” she stressed.

“No heavily armed synthoids roaming the halls?”

“Of course, there are. That what makes them peaceful.”

“I see.” Isaac shrugged. “Sorry. Foolish of me to ask.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Susan asked, sounding irritated.

“Nothing. We’re getting sidetracked.” He turned away before she could respond. “Cephalie?”

“Here.” She appeared atop the LENS.

“Anything to report?”

“Nothing unusual. More business correspondence and the like. I grabbed copies of everything.”

“All right.” Isaac spotted a piece of foam stuck to the back of his hand and flicked it off. “We’re done here. Let’s move on to the Trinh Syndicate.”


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