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At the Ashford City branch office of Sterling Energy, the branch manager had received unusual orders several days earlier.
The manager, a mid-level company man named Aaron Shaw, had been informed by head office that Sterling intended to launch a joint production venture with a major metallurgical firm, and that the venture would be sited in Ashford City.
Shaw had nearly objected on the spot.
Ashford was a light-industry city. Its economy was developed, but its heavy-industry base was thin, and the city's entire power infrastructure had been configured accordingly. The overwhelming majority of Ashford's electrical capacity was allocated to residential use and to low-consumption industrial sectors. The city's grid had never been engineered to support heavy industry.
Metallurgy was the opposite of light industry. The metallurgical sector was, by reputation, the most power-hungry heavy industry in existence. The top metallurgical firms in the Republic consumed, individually, enough annual electricity to match the combined total consumption of two or three cities the size of Ashford.
Introducing an energy-devouring operation of that scale into a city configured for light industry was, in Shaw's professional assessment, reckless. The better outcome would be that the city's grid throttled the metallurgical plant's consumption, forcing a production halt and a financial loss. The worse outcome would be a large-scale blackout across the entire city. And the worst outcome, if the surge burned out enough of the transmission infrastructure, would be days of citywide darkness, followed by criminal liability for whoever had authorized the overload.
Shaw had raised these concerns.
Head office had informed him, in the firm tone of senior management that did not wish to be questioned, that all regulatory procedures had been completed, that the venture was fully authorized, and that Shaw should stop worrying and let the personnel head office was sending handle the operation.
Shaw, lacking the standing to override a direct head-office directive, had reluctantly handed operational control of the branch to the people head office sent, and had stepped aside to let them proceed as they wished.
Across the Republic, in the southern metropolis of Crestmark City, the headquarters of Sterling Energy occupied the upper floors of a fifty-story tower.
On the top floor, Liam Rouse stood at the window with a glass of expensive red wine, watching the traffic flow through the streets far below.
Since Maha Energy had withdrawn its investment, Sterling's stock price had been in continuous decline. Branch offices across the Republic were beginning to report capital-chain difficulties. The financial press had, with the casual cruelty of an industry that respected only momentum, written Sterling Energy off entirely. The consensus view was simple: Sterling's patron had abandoned it, and a man like Liam Rouse, stripped of Maha's backing, could no longer generate any meaningful disturbance.
Rouse did not accept the consensus.
He had occupied his position for too many years to accept being forced down without a fight. He was accustomed to being looked up to. The prospect of stepping into irrelevance was, to him, more painful than death. He was not willing to walk quietly into decline.
And he was not, by his own assessment, entirely without options.
The Hidden Dragon program was the foundation of New Future Technology Energy's standing, and the foundation of the state's support for the firm. The state was protecting New Future because the seabed reactor program worked, because it served the public interest, because it delivered. But if Rouse could demonstrate, publicly and undeniably, that the program did not actually work, that it could not reliably supply a city's power, then the calculus would shift. A state that had attached its prestige to a flagship program would not continue to expend full political capital protecting a program that had visibly failed.
And if the state's protection wavered, even slightly, then Sterling Energy's accumulated domestic strength would give Rouse a window. A chance to recover. A path back to relevance.
He swirled the wine in his glass and watched the city below.
All he had to do was make the Hidden Dragon program fail.
In Ashford City, Aaron Shaw was attentively offering a cigarette to the senior man head office had sent.
"Mr. Brandt. Whether you're in Ashford on business or for personal reasons, if you need anything at all, call me directly. The branch is at your disposal."
The man accepting the cigarette was the head-office project manager, a man named Daniel Brandt. He took the cigarette, and as he looked at the eager, ingratiating branch manager in front of him, a flicker of something close to sorrow passed through his eyes.
Shaw did not know it yet, but after tonight, both he and Brandt were going to be pushed out of Sterling Energy as scapegoats.
The metallurgical venture was a fiction. Rouse had never intended to develop any metallurgical operation in Ashford. The entire elaborate scheme, the joint venture, the equipment, the personnel, the manpower and capital deployed to construct an enormous and convincing pretext, existed for one purpose: to sabotage New Future Technology Energy's energy conversion.
The plan was straightforward in its cruelty. A massive array of high-power metallurgical equipment, brought online at full capacity during the evening peak-consumption window, would impose a sudden, enormous load on Ashford's grid. In a city whose infrastructure had never been built for heavy industry, the surge would, at minimum, trigger a brief citywide blackout during the highest-visibility hours of the day. At worst, the surge would burn out a large fraction of the city's transmission lines and plunge Ashford into darkness for days.
And a power conversion that produced a major citywide blackout on its first day of operation would not survive the political fallout. The Hidden Dragon program would be suspended indefinitely. The state would distance itself. New Future Technology Energy's flagship project would be branded a dangerous failure.
That was Rouse's objective.
The state would, of course, eventually trace the overload back to Sterling Energy. That was unavoidable. But by then, Daniel Brandt and Aaron Shaw would have been documented as having brought the metallurgical equipment online without company authorization. They would be the unauthorized rogue operators. They would bear the entire criminal liability. A blackout of that scale carried sentences measured in decades.
Daniel Brandt had not agreed to this willingly.
His five-year-old son had chronic myeloid leukemia. The treatment cost twenty thousand marks a month, and the treatment had no foreseeable end. Brandt's savings were exhausted. His options were exhausted.
Rouse had offered him two choices. Brandt could pack his belongings and leave Sterling Energy with nothing, blacklisted from the entire domestic energy industry by the personal enmity of a man who, weakened though he was, could still ensure that no energy firm in the Republic would ever hire someone he had dismissed. With no income and no industry, Brandt's son's treatment would stop.
Or Brandt could take full personal responsibility for the sabotage, accept the prison sentence, and Rouse would personally fund the boy's medical care in full for the duration of his treatment.
It was presented as a choice. It was not a choice.
A father whose child would die without continued treatment, offered a path that funded the treatment at the cost of the father's own freedom, did not have a decision to make. He had only a sentence to accept.
Daniel Brandt had accepted it.
He smoked the cigarette Shaw had given him, looked out the window of the Ashford branch office at the city he had been sent to harm, and thought about his son.
The energy conversion, through the daylight hours, proceeded without incident.
Ashford City's power supply switched cleanly from conventional thermal generation to seabed reactor power, and through the entire day, not a single problem occurred.
But no one at New Future Technology Energy permitted themselves to relax.
They understood the grid's daily rhythm. In a light-industry city like Ashford, the true test would come in the evening, when residential demand peaked as the city's population returned home, switched on lights, cooked dinner, and ran heating against the late-winter cold. The daytime had been the easy part. The evening peak would be the real examination.
In the executive suite, Yvette Caldwell worked the phone to the command room.
"Confirm the line temperatures. Any anomalies."
The command room staff answered without hesitation.
"No anomalies, President Caldwell. All transmission line temperatures are within normal range. And the new transmission lines that Chairman Mercer developed have already been installed throughout the grid. They're currently held in standby. If any of the conventional lines show signs of stress, we can switch the load to the new lines from standby to primary instantly."
On the command room's main display, the new standby transmission lines glowed alongside the active conventional grid.
The staff member relaying the report harbored a small private doubt as he spoke. He had heard that Chairman Mercer had taken the transmission-line research program from initial assignment to completed deployment in under half a month. Ten days, perhaps two weeks, of research and development for an entirely new class of high-capacity transmission line.
Ten days. Could lines developed that fast genuinely be trusted? What if they burned through the moment a serious high-voltage load passed across them?
But the staff member looked at the new lines running smoothly on the display, holding their standby readiness without the slightest fluctuation, and pushed the doubt out of his mind. The conventional lines had served Ashford for over a decade without incident. The grid was sound. The Chairman's reputation was, at this point, sufficient that doubting his engineering felt foolish.
"And the reactors?" Yvette's cool voice came through the line.
"Power supply is completely stable, President Caldwell. According to the parameters the Chairman provided, the entire energy demand of Ashford City does not amount to even one-billionth of the seabed array's total output. The reactors are not, in any meaningful sense, being taxed. The load is trivial to them."
Yvette let out a small breath of relief.
But she did not relax her guard.
"We hold our attention regardless. The evening is the peak period for residential consumption. Today is the first day. Watch everything closely. I want the command room fully staffed and fully alert through the entire evening peak. No one stands down until the peak has passed cleanly."
"Understood, President Caldwell."
She ended the call.
Yvette set the phone down and lowered herself onto the office sofa, and for the first time in many hours, allowed her shoulders to drop.
She was exhausted. Her composure had held all day, because composure was her professional discipline and her staff needed to see it. But the day had cost her. Her heart had not been at ease for a single hour since the conversion order.
This was the part of the Hidden Dragon program that her previous career had not prepared her for.
At Caldwell Holdings, a failed venture had meant lost capital. A bad quarter. A write-down. Money, in the end, was recoverable. A failed deal was a setback, not a catastrophe.
This was different. The Hidden Dragon program touched the lives of an entire city, and beyond Ashford, eventually, the entire Eastern Region. If a serious error occurred, the consequences would not be measured in lost marks. They would be measured in a darkened city, in economic disruption across millions of households, and in the criminal liability that would fall on the people responsible. A large group of New Future personnel could, in the worst case, end up in prison.
The weight of that was a different category of weight than anything she had carried before.
And as she sat on the sofa, the exhaustion gave way, briefly, to a flicker of genuine irritation.
A matter of this magnitude. The first municipal deployment of a technology that her Chairman had personally invented. The single most consequential day in the company's short history. And where, precisely, was the Chairman?
Not here. Ethan Mercer, the founder, the inventor, the man whose name was on every news outlet in the Republic, had handed the entire operational responsibility for the conversion to her and gone off to do whatever it was he disappeared to do. He had built the reactors, designed the new transmission lines, and then, on the day it all went live, made himself a hands-off proprietor and left his CEO to sit in the executive suite with her heart in her throat all day.
Is it actually possible, Yvette thought, with a flash of exasperation that she would never have permitted onto her face in front of staff, for one person to be this carefree?
She rubbed her temples.
Then she straightened, because exasperation was a luxury and the evening peak was approaching, and the most important hours of the most important day were still ahead.