Power Base: Book 2 of the Leaving Earth series

by Kaal Alexander Rosser

  'That will do nicely.'

  'I just popped in for that, Hank. I've got to get on, just wanted to keep things moving smoothly.'

  'Expertly done, Grum. Be seeing you.'

  'Cheers.'

  Grum called Ben next. It was turning out to be a busy day.

  'Grum, hi. How's it going? I was going to call you anyway about these figures which Stew sent through. I know we're doing the rebuild so we can produce different masses, but you can't have meant to start straight away!'

  'I can, and do, Ben. Remember I said that Nevada was finished without the rebuilds? This is why. The masses we were set up to produce were almost precisely useless in any practical implementation. Smaller generators — and I mean small as in down to the picogram small — and bigger ones, as big as we can per run, will be needed. If you haven't got those racks of containers we started talking about last year ready in six months… We're going to have a problem.'

  'Well, the sizes near the original sizes aren't a problem, but damn, Grum, it's a whole different ball game down at the really small levels.'

  'I know. You can probably get away with just producing as many half and quarter sizes as possible for the first year or so. Make those the design priorities. They should also be the easiest. While you're producing those, though, you'll need to get cracking on the scalable versions.'

  'OK. But… What will these all be for?'

  'The first sets will be for the orbitals and possible some other space projects. For the other types… Well, Ben. Anything we can think of which has a continuous power requirement in the range we are talking about… I want to investigate it. I'm thinking of having a competition going for the next year or so. Maybe I'll make it a yearly contest, for coming up with the most innovative use of one of our technologies. And Ben… You have the advantage. Anything involving antimatter sounds innovative by default. Are we good?'

  'Yes, boss. I'll get right on that!'

  Chapter 10

  BEING invited to board meetings was still not a regular thing for Grum. Especially when the agenda had read like a like of questions he would rather not entertain until the Nevada facility was actually back up and running at full strength.

  When it actually came to it, though, the phrasing of the questions actually did not give him as hard a time of it as he though he was going to have.

  It helped a great deal that Steve Branch had sent through the company's Mission Statement and Core Values Proposition, as a not so subtle reminder. It also helped that the Chairman was Kelvin Goldstein — against normal practice — and that the Research Director was Hank Bowers.

  Still. He was asked some awkward questions.

  Q: Was he intentionally taking roles from other Divisions, such as Human Resources?

  A: No, absolutely not. If the board is referring to the recent innovation of creating a professional services consultancy group, then its remit was strictly limited to science and engineering. Should any other groups wish to set up a similar function, however, SyncDep was there as an exemplar and source of expertise.

  Q: Had he really just shut down his entire Division for six months?

  A: No. He had signed the order to shut down the Nevada department for the purposes of a major refit and overhaul, but every other department in his Division was still operational. Indeed, due to the aforementioned consultancy group, even the personnel within the Nevada department were being productive.

  Q: Was he aware that he had, effectively, increased the wage bill, for the entire company, by engaging in the consultancy model without the approval of the board?

  A: Firstly, he had not been aware that board approval was required to most effectively utilise the personnel in his Division. Secondly, he would dispute that the wage bill had — or would — increase due to the usage of the internal consultancy model. Any department or Division which was short of the particular skills his Division could supply was free to apply to SyncDep for allocation of resources when such became available. This kept both departments — source and recipient — most fully employed, and was better value than: a) either one or both being sub-optimally utilised, and, b) having to hire external contractors or consultants to fill the skills gap, even if such skills were available on the open market.

  The HR Director had dismissed that. 'You have still caused the internal wage bill to rise! Regardless of the utilisation of one or two engineers due to an action you yourself initiated in shutting down one of your departments.'

  'However, the productiveness of the company as a whole has risen and cost of labour per unit produced has dropped due to the more effective utilisation.'

  'That is not my concern!' the HR Director all but growled. 'My concern is the wage bill, which my Division has to pay!'

  'But we’re not representing particular Divisions, here, are we, Gil?' said Hank in a mild drawl. 'We are representing specialities on behalf of the shareholders for the overall good of the company.'

  'Indeed!' That was the first time Kelvin had spoken up. 'Well said, Hank! From the perspective of this board meeting, I consider that Graham Hewson has explained his action and rationale to my satisfaction, and demonstrated — once again — that he has been acting in the best interests of the company. Despite the limited viewpoint of some members of this board. I shall close this meeting if there is no other business? No. This meeting is closed. Thank you all.'

  Ben was having problems in hiring people to work at the Nevada Facility. It was difficult, he said, to make the place look exciting and busy when it was not either of those things.

  The housing situation had not been completely resolved, either. The apartment complex for the current staff had been finished before the construction of "B" had called for the old apartments to be knocked down. However, that did not mean that the rest of the village had been entirely finished, so the facilities — especially for those with children — were patchy. It was starting to cause Ben some headaches.

  He warned Grum that he might start losing staff if things were not rectified pretty quickly.

  The trouble Grum had was that there was very little he could do to make the situation better. He could promise a lot of stuff, but he could not make the construction happen any faster without compromising safety.

  He appealed to Ben to try and convince people to stick it out on the basis that things would be better once the builds were complete. Ben told him that was his standard position in any case, and it was holding less and less water as time went on.

  Grum really did not know what to do about that. It seemed fairly reasonable to him that waiting until a rebuild — that you knew was going to happen — was finished, before complaining, was only sensible. He had to be missing something from the conversation, and whatever it was was the key to fixing this issue.

  He asked Ben to work on trying to find out what was underlying this discontent and get back to him.

  'Oh this can't be good,' said Grum, as Steve Branch walked into his office.

  'It's funny how often I hear that as my greeting,' said Steve with a rueful smile. 'But I figured that it was more sensible to come and see you directly, because you keep beating me to the punch.'

  That caused Grum to pause. What on earth was that supposed to mean? 'Coffee's in the pot. Now suppose you give me some context for that statement, so I can try and catch up.'

  'Thanks.' Steve went to get himself a mug of coffee, but continued to talk. 'You see, I was about to take another trip down to Nevada to have a talk with the new head of that facility, but then I found out that you had just gone down there, and the need for me to go had evaporated. Good job, by the way.'

  'Thank you…'

  'And then, I was going to do yet another tour in the Space Division to support a VP who was needed some, but then suddenly he's all chipper again and moving forward, although with reduced resources, but a new high-profile engineer in the mix.'

  'Well, yes, you see…'

  'And then,' Steve carried on, talking over Grum, 'I hear that Nevada h
ad a problem with under utilisation… Had a problem, as it turned out, was accurate. And when — the same day — I hear Stewart Leslie making noises about an internal consultancy group he was starting up… "Oh ho!" I thought, "I can see where this is going". The only thing left on my to-do list was to help Hank Bowers fix his under resourcing problem in engineering. I waited. And whaddyaknow?'

  'Yes, but…'

  'Do you hate me that much, Grum? Are you trying to put me out of a job?'

  Grum could not help it. Steve's tone was so plaintive that he had to laugh. 'Oh, sit down. I take it you didn't just come here to feed me a string of compliments. What's up?'

  'Oh, that's part of it. Because you've created for yourself a world of hurts. The board meeting is just the start of it, I fear.'

  'And seeing as you have nothing to do…'

  'Oh no, I wouldn't interfere without authorisation. I was given a new to-do list. You can hardly call it a list, though. It only has one item: "Help Graham Hewson", so I investigated, and now I'm here.'

  'With a dire warning.'

  'With, as you say, a dire warning.' Steve pulled a copy of the company magazine from his back pocket and put it on Grum's desk. 'Ever read this?'

  'Does anybody?'

  'About thirty percent of the company, on-and-off. And just of late there have been letters and op-ed pieces which I found interesting in light of my task. Also, it should be noted, that the further you get away from the New York HQ, the more employees read it. In Nevada, for example, over half the workforce read the magazine.'

  Grum picked it up, but put it back down again. 'Tell me.'

  'OK. Someone, and we can guess at one or two of the players, is co-ordinating a character assassination against you. There are pieces which call for Divisional or departmental autonomy, others which warn against the evils of empire building, and yet others which question intra-company chargeable services or products. That last one actually uses your old boss giving the Tech Centre its AM power plant as an example of how things should be done. That's the nearest I can find as a direct attack on you, though. Everything else is simply designed to undermine your position on nearly everything.'

  'People are buying into it?'

  'Yes. The pieces are well written and convincing. They even sound sensible, from a skewed perspective and if you have little grounding in critical thinking. The fallacies are subtle.'

  'I confess, I'm shocked. I do not know how to counter that sort of thing.'

  'I have a feeling you would figure it out, in time, but time is a factor. The campaign seems designed to culminate around when the Nevada facility comes back up to full strength.'

  'OK. So what's behind this?'

  'Some of it I know, some I don't. Yet. You know that this is still a young company, as an entity, but it was made by bolting together a lot of other companies. Some of those companies had long histories, and some of their senior management either got positions in the C-suite or directorships — or both. Your old VP was one of those who got both, and he had friends amongst the C-suite and the board. I think that is quite a large part of it. Fear is another factor. A flattering one, to be sure, because some of those I think may be involved see you as a threat to their positions. You know you've been tipped as COO? In addition to running Core Power — good name, by the way — you would have a huge sway over the day-to-day management of USSMC as a whole.'

  'Hank told me about the tip, yes. I don't see how I could manage that.'

  'Yes you do. You just delegate effectively. You know how to do that. But the key thing is that your management style flies in the face of the more conservative members of both senior management and the board of directors.'

  'So I'm being undermined to protect a broken system?'

  'Happens everywhere. Just look at politics. Anyway, this is something which must be addressed, and soon. If I had been given the job earlier, I could possibly have headed off some of the more damaging work, but this is the situation we have to deal with.'

  'OK, Steve. You've laid the bad out for me, there has to be some good or there wouldn't be any point in continuing. The very fact that you're sitting there telling me this stuff, also tells me that there is some good to be had, here.'

  'True enough. Our CEO and Chairman is fully behind you on this. As you rightly seem to think, Hank Bowers is also in your corner. That's a powerful combo. Stew is doing a good job on your behalf, too, especially with the troops, so to speak.'

  Right. That's something to work with, at least.'

  'Yes, and a pretty solid base. It's taking a lot of effort and time for the — and I hesitate to use the word, but it is what it is — conspiracy to attack that foundation.'

  'So, how do I counter? I can't speed Nevada up, and that sounds like the most likely thing to knock some stuffing out of the detractors' arguments.'

  'I know. I want you to engage in a few pieces yourself. One thing none of the others have been particularly open about doing is a full on interview. A couple of op-eds have been the closest they've come as yet.'

  'You want me to do an interview for the company magazine?'

  'Well, yes, that too. But I was thinking that we probably need to go bigger. I would suggest that we try and arrange some national coverage. Magazines, papers, some of the big online tech blogs, maybe even TV if we can swing it.'

  'Crap, man! That sounds like a nightmare!'

  'I know. But I will help arrange it. It won't be the first time that I've dealt with the likes of the New York Times, for example.'

  'OK. I'll follow your lead on this.'

  'Great. I'll get to arranging things.'

  Chapter 11

  NOT every interview was down to Grum to do. Stew was doing practical pieces on running a department like SyncDep and the importance of the catalogues for the company magazine, strongly suggesting that Grum was the driving force. Hank chipped in with glowing pieces on how SyncDep and Grum's departments had saved his Division from a serious shortage, and even Kelvin had been persuaded to give comment on greater company-wide inter-operability.

  Some of the most damaging work, though, came from seemingly positive commentary on those pieces. What Grum had to consider to be wilful and deliberate ignorance and misinformation. One commentator said: "…we will all be very happy when the Nevada antimatter production facility is back up to full capacity in a couple of months time and can supply USSMC with all the energy it will ever need", which caused Grum to grind his teeth in frustration when he read it.

  Nevada was no longer just an antimatter production facility. That was what the old VP had called it. Also, production from Nevada would not be back to even its old strength for a good few months, and the increased capacity would take longer. Lastly, there was a strong implication that USSMC's energy supplies could be met by Nevada cheaply, or even for free. Neither of those things was true. Nevada was not working to supply USSMC itself with power, and the generators would not be able to meet that demand, not that this would even be a desirable goal. The generators and the power they produced was not cheap. It was very bloody expensive! The economics of AM power generation only worked in circumstances where continuous power was more important than the cost, or where the usage was so small that producing the power — on a per kilowatt-hour basis — was already huge, but the magnitude of the price was tiny.

  That was why the pico-scale generators were important. It should be possible to produce generators which could run for ten years giving a constant, guaranteed output of a few tens of microwatts, but only costing a few cents to produce, because each production run could make hundreds of millions of them. He had repeated this ad nausiem and yet the false message was still being put out.

  After consulting with Steve, Grum asked Stew to work with Ben on getting out and actual product catalogue for the Nevada facility, along with an official timeline for production capacity. He also officially changed its name to the Nevada Antimatter Power Facility.

  That move caused another invite to a board of dir
ectors meeting.

  Much of the board, it seemed, had been under the same misapprehension as the unknown commenter wished them to be, and were "surprised" at the news.

  Grum had to re-iterate that the material being put out by Nevada was entirely consistent with the information he had previously reported to the board, and to the company in general, and that he did not know what the source of such pervasive misinformation was. He was sure, he informed the board, that such misinformation was not coming from within his own Division.

  That caused uproar. Accusations flew at him that he was effectively saying that someone in the company was deliberately feeding false information, that he was clearly paranoid, and that perhaps the pressures of his recent appointment were starting to show.

  Grum responded that he had merely said that he could account for the information coming out of his own Division, and that none of it was contrary to the position he had adopted at any point. Once again, he reminded them that he did not know the source of the misinformation, but that in order that there should be no more confusion, he had asked the AVP of the Nevada Antimatter Power Facility to issue definitive material designed to make sure there could be no more mistakes or unwarranted assumptions.

  Hank stated that the information was entirely consistent with what he had known from the start, even though he could have wished for it to be otherwise.

  That prompted calls for the timeline to be sped up, and Grum had to work hard to make it clear that the timelines were fixed and already as fast as was possible. The costs were already established and even then were projected to go over-budget.

  The mention of costs brought another round of disappointed commentary that there was nothing in the material produced by Nevada about providing USSMC with free power.

  That was because there never was a possibility of that, and never would be, Grum told the board.

  Antimatter production was an expensive business, and the generators were not applicable to general power production of the type the board wished for.