Leaving Earth Vol. 1 (Leaving Earth Omnibus)

by Kaal Alexander Rosser

  'I need to ask Ben about babyproofing, and if there's anything he knows that I haven't thought of in that regard. Anything else, though? I don't know. If there is, we'll work it out.'

  'We will at that, love. C'mere.'

  The held each other for a long moment and shared a loving kiss.

  'Shall we have lunch? Then you can give your input to this lot.'

  'Good idea.'

  While they were waiting for the apartment to be ready, Vann started work on the pod design.

  Grum — under the guidance of Zak Winter — crafted a confidential response to the investigation findings. It included a carefully worded warning on the safety aspects of the VP's installation plan for the new generators at the Tech Centre.

  Whatever wording had been used to tell the VP that there were safety concerns, had not been so adroit. Less than a week after he had sent the message in, Grum had an email from the boss telling him that his mythical quench scenarios, the hypothetical single-point-of-failure, and Grum himself could all get fucked. Furthermore, regardless of what happened at the hearing, if Grum thought he was ever coming back to the department, he was crazy. Grum forwarded the message to Kaity and Zak, without responding.

  A week later, the apartment and the office were ready for Grum and Vann to move in. Grum had organised the packing and shifting of the two apartments they were vacating, then unpacked again in the new place under Vann's direction.

  During the intervening week, Grum had taken some advice from Stew and visited Las Vegas a couple of times. So, when they were unpacking the last of the bedroom boxes, Grum slid a puzzled expression over his face.

  'What is it, love?' asked Vann.

  'Er. What do you want to do with this?' Grum handed the box over, one item left in it.

  'What is it? Oh.' Vann took out the little ring box and opened it.

  'Vann, we've started to build our own little support structure for our family, but I admit that I still would like to formalise it. Call it a character flaw. Will you marry me, Lavanya Patel?'

  'Yes, Graham Hewson, I will.'

  It took a couple of moments for Grum to realise that someone was determinedly trying to batter the door down, from the sounds of it at least.

  'Much though I want to, I don't think we can ignore that,' said Grum. Vann nodded and he went to let whoever it was in.

  'GRUM! VANN!' Both Stew and Amy all but fell into the apartment. The garbled cacophony that ensued as they tried to talk over each other left no room for comprehension. However, the pregnancy test Amy was waving in her newly beringed hand did provide a few clues. Vann held her hand up as well, to show her ring, and the gabble rose to a new pitch.

  Grum just let the whole thing flow around him.

  Chapter 20

  GIVEN the timing of everything going on, it seemed natural to have a double wedding. Initially, they opted for the date to be set at least a year out although Amy, in particular, was less than impressed with the idea of waiting that long. When she discovered that everyone else was suggesting that length of time so that she wouldn't have to be pregnant in her wedding dress, she roundly dressed everyone down for being fools. Eventually, they settled on six months being sufficient time to arrange everything, while not too far out for Amy to be too uncomfortable.

  Vann was induced on schedule at thirty seven weeks and despite the difficult pregnancy, the birth itself went well.

  Grum was somewhat surprised when he and Vann started receiving personal congratulations from all round the company, not just the Nevada Facility. All those who had in various ways had asked him about the generators, as well as several other VPs he had not had reason to contact before, were emailing him.

  He queried Stew about that.

  'Blame Steve,' said Stew, grinning. 'I sent the announcement about little Ju to the Facility, but Steve picked it up and sent it company-wide. He included your personal email address, seeing as he knew it from before, saying that you were on paternity leave and not monitoring your work account. Everybody knows.'

  'That… Could be very useful,' said Grum.

  'Meaning?'

  'We need alternative comms channels, and I don't want to mess with the groundwork Zak and I have laid. All these people have been sending to me at my personal account. Half of them have been sending from their personal accounts. I've got another couple of weeks of paternity leave. I'll see what I can cook up.'

  Grum responded to each of the messages with a note of thanks and a suggestion that maybe they could arrange a little inter-departmental day of something: pool tournaments, darts matches and even, when there was no other recourse, golf-days.

  The response was mostly positive. When he followed up with the suggestion that, in a properly informal setting it might be possible to chat about the future of the AM generators, the response became overwhelmingly good. Many, sensing an opportunity to use this unofficial channel to their advantage immediately started outlining their idea for using AM generators.

  The Space Division, for example, would have dearly loved an AM generator to provide continuous power allowing them to dispense with the clumsy and fragile solar collectors. The trouble was that Grum knew that it was unlikely that one generator would fulfil their needs. They were talking in terms of over a hundred kilowatts continuously for full power and sixty, just for emergency. It would take twenty-five or thirty generators — set to run for twenty-five years — to give those levels of power. And then there was getting that mass up there, and transporting "live" generators. Launching them even. It didn't bear thinking about.

  He was finding that everyone had his or her own wish-list only loosely related to the original question of "do you have any plans to use the generators we're producing?".

  Free power? Yeah, sure, everyone wanted that. What did they want it for? Well, it'd come in sooo handy, wouldn't it? Sigh.

  The larger projects really would need large, self-contained power-plants which did not rely on earth-bound supplies. That left solar, nuclear and AM. So far the conventional fuels had coped with demand but they were running up against two very real barriers. Firstly, the global discovery and mining of fissionable materials had been in decline for decades, and current generators around the world were vying to get their share. Secondly, the further you went out the weaker the sun got.

  Ten meters squared of photovoltaic cells would get you in the region of a kilowatt of power in or near Earth orbit. So, anything that had been designed to use solar cells was not going to run out any time soon. New stuff, however – especially if it was designed to use much more power – needed either huge solar sails or another power source.

  That was where the lack of nuclear fuel became a problem. No uranium, no new nuclear reactors; no new nuclear reactors, no power for the space platforms, bases and refineries. Everything else either could not be made to work in space or got used up so quickly that it was almost worthless to an on-going operation. You could use a big, exothermic chemical reaction to lob several hundred tonnes of metal into orbit and bring it back again a few days later, but it was hardly sustainable. Fuel cells bridged a small part of the gap, like having a big battery; but like a battery after so long it needed replacing or recharging.

  So matter/antimatter generators were to save the day. Once you had produced the stuff and stabilised the annihilation rate you had a reaction that would keep going, and going, and going.

  Chapter 21

  THE generators were being produced smoothly and it looked like the twelve destined for the Technology Centre were on course to be delivered and installed on time.

  The most promising unofficial conversations were with Space, Salvage, and Medical. Each had applications which could use the generators, so long as the Nevada Facility could turn out more than it was doing at the moment. Or everyone was going to wait a long time.

  At the end of his paternity leave, Grum decided it would be wise to log back in to his work email account and see what disasters awaited him. Grum practised the four box meth
od of email triage: "can do now", "can do later", "not enough information", and "fuck it".

  The first box to get filled was the last box on the list, because eighty percent of the messages, at least, always fit in this box. Having pared down his inbox to twenty percent of its unread size, Grum sorted his way through the rest.

  Despite Steve's email saying that Grum was not logging on to his work account, a number of the first emails expressing congratulations on Ju's birth were to his work address. Any of these that he had not already dealt with via his personal account, he put aside to deal with on Monday. The most surprising of these emails was from the CEO, Kelvin Goldstein. What made it surprising was not the congratulatory message itself, but the fact that it had an invite for himself and the Next Gen Club to attend the installation ceremony of the generators at the Technology Centre.

  Grum had to assume that the VP would not be happy with that, but the VP was not happy with much these days. He made a note to talk to Vann, Stew and Amy about the invite.

  The next surprise was a message from Kaity Cobb to both himself and his boss. The hearing was being cancelled, and the investigation dropped in light of new evidence.

  This time he did not want to make a note to talk about it later. He forwarded the email to Zak as an FYI, cc'ing Kaity and the VP. An "Out Of Office" response came back from the VP's address immediately. No mention of holiday, no date of return, nothing.

  Grum picked up his phone and called Stew.

  'What's going on?' demanded Grum as soon as Stew answered.

  'You'll have to clarify a bit.' Stew sounded harassed.

  'The boss is gone?'

  'I don't know about gone gone, but not there, yes. I'm guessing you're sorting emails before Monday.'

  'Yes. When did this happen?'

  'As far as I know, it was this morning. I sent a message trying to get authorisation to extend the contract for Steve's temporary assistant — who are both in the room with me, by the way — and I just get the oh-oh-oh message. Nothing from his office number, either.'

  'Extend the contract. I'm coming in.'

  'Aren't things still a bit up-in-the-air with you at the moment?'

  'No. All sorted. I'll fill you in when I get there, but just prepare everything for me to sign off.'

  'Right you are, boss. That'll make Steve happy.'

  'Good. Now I have to go and do some grovelling.'

  'Good luck.'

  'Cheers.'

  Grum turned round and saw Vann standing in the doorway to the office, smiling at him.

  'No grovelling necessary,' she said. 'Go be a leader.'

  'Thanks, love. I'll make sure I take the extra day another time. Oh, and we have an invite to the installation at the Tech Centre from the great and powerful CEO himself.'

  Vann's eyes widened. 'Really? That's interesting. And on that subject, I have a present for you…' She beckoned him with a curled finger to follow her back into the office, and Grum briefly regretted his decision to go in to work.

  When he entered the office, Vann raised an arm, index finger extended and a proud smile on her face, pointing at the two wall screens.

  'I realised,' she said, 'that several of the pod design solutions could be used discretely but in concert, rather than being hooked into the overall pod. If you can get the installation plans changed to do this, it'll be a lot safer than the current plan.'

  Grum walked over and gave her a gentle squeeze. 'Thank you, love.'

  It wasn't a fix, exactly, not really much more than a bodge-job, but it would make the installation safer and stop the containment power feedback – more properly a re-feed – being a single-point-of-failure.

  The idea itself was simple and only over-looked because of the way the generators had always been viewed.

  A secondary power source — usually the local power grid — provided the power needed to maintain the magnetic containment chamber in the cell.

  In the full pod design, the generators would fit into a pod, which acted as both conduit and accumulator. The power was then delivered to the distribution grid of the building or other installation.

  The problem with the Tech Centre installation was that the VP had decided each generator had power to spare it, so could maintain its own containment chamber. No matter how Grum argued the VP would not change his mind.

  The issue was that almost any fault which stopped a generator producing electricity, for whatever reason, would cause a quench in the superconducting magnets. They would dump all the stored energy into the surrounding environment via the heat-sinks, the resulting lack of magnetic containment within the generator meant immediate annihilation and an explosion equivalent to over a hundred tonnes of TNT.

  That would be enough to disrupt the other eleven generators and would quite possibly level the building, damaging a fair amount of the surrounding environment as well.

  Vann's solution was to fake a grid between the generators. Rather than each generator taking a feed directly from its own output, all the generators would feed into a local "mini-grid" from which each one would also draw. The output from the grid would then feed into the distribution system for the building.

  As long as one generator continued, the chambers could be maintained and no catastrophic failure would occur.

  It still felt like putting a sticking plaster on a broken leg, but it was better than nothing.

  The complication of it was that the mini-grid needed to be constantly monitored and the feeds to the containment chambers also needed care in case any degradation occurred. If the grid failed all the generators could go at once. Each generator had more than one connection to the mini-grid, as did each cell's containment chamber, but still…

  There was also the other main aspect of quench protection. The mini-grid reduced the chances of a quench happening, but all technology fails sometime. On the other end you needed disaster mitigation. Grum knew that, ideally, Vann would have halted the installation and redesigned it from scratch. The only thing Vann could recommend, instead, was for the installation to be contained in the lowest sub-basement the Tech Centre. They would have to hope the mini-grid held up for the life of the generators.

  Grum asked Vann to forward him those plans, get a copy to Steve Branch, and find out who was now handling the installation at the Tech Centre. There had to be a building services engineer or someone who would need those plans.

  By the time he reached his office, Grum had a message from Zak saying that he would send the invoice over on Monday. He also had waiting for him, a copy of the contract extension for Steve's temp to sign, a message from Steve telling him who was handling the installation, and a note from Stew saying "welcome back".

  Chapter 22

  WHEN the VP did not return to his post after a month, Grum re-started all the projects which had been put on hold and promoted Ben Abelson, again. After two months, Vann was back at work on the short-hours-full-pay deal, and the boss still had not returned. All the generators had been shipped to the Tech Centre and the installation was very nearly complete.

  Grum had set up some informal meetings, for during the installation day, with the most promising leads regarding AM generator use, on the premise that he could give them at least a little good news about continued production.

  Leaving Ben in charge of the Facility, the Next Gen Club and Steve Branch flew up to New York, the evening before the installation. Grum had not questioned Steve's decision to join them on the junket, figuring that it was not really his business and the temp was covering the admin.

  The mood of the following day was jovial. Almost everyone was happy enough with a little get together at the company's expense.

  Grum was chatting to the VP of Salvage, when another man approached them. Apart from the fact that he was on an obvious inbound course, Grum would have not given this man a second glance, except that he recognised him from the abortive performance review. Grum was on his guard immediately.

  'Mr. Graham Hewson?' he asked as he came to
a stop next to Grum. 'You may not remember me. I'm the personal assistant to the CEO.'

  The rest of the group was looking warily at the newcomer.

  'I do remember you. Mr Grey, isn't it?' said Grum.

  'Yes, sir. Mr Goldstein has asked me to convey you to his office. If you would please follow me. I'm positive your associates will be able to deal with the business at hand, here. Mr. Hewson? Please?'

  Grum felt that he had no choice. He quickly kissed Vann on the cheek and gave a one-shouldered shrug to the others, before following Mr Grey out of the room and into an elevator.

  A swift ride was followed by a short walk to the door of what appeared to be a conference room. Here the assistant left him, without a word. Grum shrugged to himself and knocked on the door.

  'Come!' The voice was confident, calm, and apparently slightly amused by something. Grum opened the door and went through into what, although it was the size of a conference room, now appeared to be one office.

  The CEO, Kelvin Goldstein, was seated on a green leather sofa set with a coffee table and two single armchairs to one side of the room, the centre of which was dominated by a large mahogany desk.

  'Mr Goldstein,' said Grum, trying to figure out if his VP had complained to the big boss, or if this was something to do with the installation.

  Kelvin Goldstein smiled and waved Grum to a padded leather armchair opposite him.

  'I guess you're wondering why I've called you up here,' said Kelvin. 'Well, it's not everyday that the crown jewel of your business empire gets the first matter/antimatter power-plant in the world…'

  Ahh, thought Grum, that's it.

  '…But that's not it,' Kelvin continued. 'You and your team have achieved remarkable feats in the last two years. From starting the Nevada antimatter production project to a fully operational AM production facility, a fully operational matter/antimatter generator production facility and, my sources tell me, a forward-looking steering group.'