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In the office, Aaron Shaw's trembling, urgent persuasion filled the room.
Daniel Brandt, lying on the floor where the punch had put him, stared blankly at the ceiling and did not appear to be listening to a word of it.
At a certain moment, the office lights flickered, and then their brightness dropped, visibly, by about a third.
Brandt observed this with a strange calm.
"So the lines finally couldn't hold," he murmured.
He turned his head toward Shaw.
"Mr. Shaw. Stop fighting it. You and I are small fish. We were never going to slip a man like Liam Rouse. And as for exposing him, you can try, but nine times out of ten the state will not touch him. You know that as well as I do."
Shaw fell silent. The fight went out of him again.
Because Brandt was, on this point, probably right, and Shaw knew it.
The men at the top of every major industry in the Republic, the ones worth hundreds of billions of marks, were not men whose hands were entirely clean. No fortune of that size was accumulated without some darkness somewhere in its foundations. And the state, when it considered moving against men of that magnitude, had to weigh the broader consequences. The disruption to markets. The investor panic. The political fallout. Knowing a powerful man had done something did not always translate into being willing to act on it, because the act itself carried costs that the state sometimes judged too high.
Shaw understood all of this. It was why his hope had been thin to begin with.
Watching the office lights continue to dim, his heart sank in step with them. The man who had framed him would carry on living comfortably while Shaw spent the rest of his life in a cell. And there was no way out.
Just as the branch manager was sinking fully into despair, a confused sound interrupted him.
"Huh."
Brandt, on the floor, was staring fixedly up at the ceiling bulb.
He could not be certain it was not his imagination. But in that instant, the dimmed light had seemed to brighten, slightly.
It was impossible. To prevent New Future from switching lines, the circuit breaker itself had been sabotaged. There was no path available to the company except a large-scale blackout. The lights were supposed to keep dimming until the city went dark.
But as Brandt stared, puzzled, the brightness of the bulb on the ceiling continued, quietly, to rise.
---
Looking at the successfully installed replacement breaker, Ethan let out a soft breath.
It had genuinely been close.
If he had arrived half a minute later, he was not certain the conventional lines would have held. And if the lines had melted through, the entire city would have gone dark. Worse, blackouts caused by line failure of that kind were extremely difficult to repair. The transmission network across a city was an enormous, intricate tangle of conductors. Simply locating the failure points would take significant time, and replacing the burned-out segments would take far longer. A blackout lasting several days would paralyze every system in Ashford and severely disrupt the lives of its citizens. And a citywide multi-day blackout on the first night of operation would have done exactly what Rouse intended: it would have crippled the Hidden Dragon program's prospects.
That outcome had been, by perhaps thirty seconds, averted.
In the control room, the technicians erupted in cheers as the new lines came up clean on the main display.
The chief technical engineer pushed his reading glasses up his nose and stared at the readings in open disbelief.
"This is a miracle of power engineering. Look at the thermal behavior. Under transmission load at this voltage, the new line is holding its temperature variance within three degrees. Three degrees. The energy conversion efficiency required to achieve that is, I genuinely do not have a frame of reference for it. This Mercer is everything they say he is."
Listening to the praise around him, Colonel Tolliver slumped into a chair.
After the night's procession of crises, his legs had simply stopped supporting him.
Five minutes of repair time. Million-volt arcs in the inner zone. A new class of transmission line carrying an enormous load. Each of these, on its own, was a problem severe enough to produce despair in any reasonable person.
And in the hands of that young man, not yet twenty years old, they had been resolved, one after another, as though they were routine.
In addition to admiration, Tolliver felt an emotion he had never quite felt toward anyone before: complete conviction.
He now trusted the young Chairman of New Future Technology Energy without reservation and without condition. If Ethan Mercer had turned to him at that moment and told him he was, in fact, an alien from another world, Tolliver would have believed it instantly, without the slightest hesitation.
---
While the room was still absorbing the night, Ethan walked out of the conversion center carrying the replaced breaker.
The personnel surged forward to meet him.
He set the iron mass down in front of them and took the opportunity to step out of the Mark VII for some air, the armor folding open and releasing him.
"Colonel. Take a look. This is the breaker we pulled."
Tolliver, a man whose expertise was command rather than engineering, could not see anything unusual in the device. But the elderly chief technical engineer beside him, after a careful inspection, found the problem.
"This breaker has been tampered with."
Before Ethan could speak, Tolliver's eyes went wide.
"Are you certain, old-timer? Do not say something like that lightly. This is not a small accusation."
The engineer, nettled by the doubt, jabbed a finger at the core of the breaker.
"Look here. There should be a very small component, right here. It's missing. When I started in this trade, decades ago, the Republic couldn't manufacture breakers of this grade domestically. We relied entirely on imports. And some of the foreign suppliers we bought from were not above quietly compromising the units they sold us, to keep us dependent and keep us behind. This was one of the places they liked to interfere. A tiny omission, here, undetectable in inspection, catastrophic under extreme load. Once we developed our own domestic manufacturing, the problem stopped. But I'll tell you, without thirty or forty years in this work, you would not catch this fault. I almost didn't catch it myself."
Ethan nodded slowly.
"That explains how the defective unit cleared inspection and got installed in the first place. The flaw was designed to be invisible."
And now Tolliver, standing between the two of them, finally understood the full shape of what had happened.
The Hidden Dragon program. A project capable of solving the energy supply problem for the entire eastern half of the Republic. A project personally approved at the highest level of the cabinet. A project that benefited the nation and its people directly. A project surrounded by every possible halo of importance and protection.
And someone had dared to sabotage it.
Someone had looked at a project meant to improve the daily lives of every citizen in the Republic and decided to try to destroy it, on its first night, for their own private gain. It was a contempt for the welfare of the entire population. It was, in its way, a direct challenge to the authority of the entire national leadership.
And what shamed Tolliver most was that the saboteur had very nearly succeeded. The plot had come within thirty seconds of working. And Tolliver was the officer responsible for the security of this site. The attack had happened on his watch.
His patriotic fury, combined with his professional shame, set his body trembling slightly.
"Mr. Mercer. You have my word."
His voice was tight and absolutely steady.
"The Hidden Dragon program is a cornerstone of this country's future. I will report tonight's events to my superiors completely and truthfully, this breaker included. And if the investigation confirms that someone genuinely dared to do this, to tamper with a project of this importance, then I will tell you plainly. Even if it costs me this uniform, even if it lands me in a cell of my own, I am going to beat that man's face into pulp with my own hands."