December 17th, 2267. 10:12 Vosture Prime – John’s Homestead

Elias gasped in horror. John was spying on their candidate. He had listened in on private conversations. Worse than that, he was searching for their backgrounds to use against them. So many things make sense now. He cursed under his breath.

“Elias, not that I am anyone to judge another’s actions,” John chuckled to himself, “Why on Earth would you want to be with that woman?”

A burst of anger rose up within Elias. He squeezed the grip of the pistol tightly as he clenched his jaw. Daphne, for all of her numerous and painful flaws, was his true love.

“She was my betrothed. We were…”

John interrupted her, “Elias, you loved an ideal. Who you loved and who she actually was were two radically different things.”

He turned to face Elias and took a drink, “I say this without any malice or ill intent towards you, she was no partner to you. She was using you for her own personal gain.”

“You know this how?” Elias spat back.

“I spent a substantial amount of time observing all of you. She was a corruptive influence on all of the women. Some far more so than others. And let us not forget about your money-making scheme. Her machinations enabled the processing company to discover the rounding issue in July.”

Elias stared at the floor. John was right. Damn him, he was right. How had he not seen through the lies and Machiavellian machinations of Daphne? Elias shook his head as he looked at John, no he had seen that. He lied to himself, but not about loving her. He did love her, that was absolutely certain, but she was a horrible partner.

“How would you recommend I tell her family of her passing?” Elias asked curiously.

“I’d tell them the blunt truth. You owe them nothing more.”

“Would you have found us without her misdeeds on this god-forsaken planet?”

John paused as he looked at the ceiling above and behind Elias in deep thought for a moment, “Yes, though I suspect it would’ve taken me a month or longer to actually locate your headquarters.”

“Let’s go back to your spying on our candidate, was that useful?”

“The following day I installed a remote monitoring system in another unoccupied unit. I also set up one in the Hillsdale building’s roof. That got about forty percent of their meeting rooms and Dale’s primary office,” John grinned, “I think you can put two and two together on what juicy intel I got from that view.”

“Mr. Marvin’s office was effectively impossible to tap into. It was inside the building along an internal greenspace. We didn’t…” Elias closed his eyes and sighed loudly.

What in the fuck had they done? Guild and anger swelled up within him. They knew they were under attack while the campaign was still occurring, yet they never gave Dale any warnings that he may have been under surveillance. After all, how could one agent do so much?

“Well played, we never thought for a moment you had our candidate under surveillance. And that you had him under surveillance for three whole months before the election.”

“Well, not quite that long. It was two and a half weeks short of that or thereabouts.”

“How did the meeting go when the processing company had fixed the glitch in their processing software? And what did you do to work around that?”

Elias grunted quietly, “We were all stunned, the truth as to why that was happening was hidden from us until far too late.”

July 11th, 2267. 06:20 Elias’ Office

Kaius dashed into the office with a worried look on his face. Elias looked up and his concerned friend. He finished his drink of coffee hastily and bore a concerned look on his face. It was all that he had to do to get Kaius to speak.

“The central processor rolled out a patch last night,” Kaius was shaking, “Our gravy train is shut down for good.”

Elias closed his eyes and sighed, “An audit wasn’t scheduled until…”

“Alberic went through their communications and the error was well known but wasn’t planned to be fixed until next year. As it turns out they finished some other projects ahead of schedule and an eager-beaver junior analyst took it upon themselves to finish the code work.”

“What are our cash reserves like now?”

“Flush, but we won’t be able to spend as lavishly as we could,” Kaius finally sat down on the couch and looked over at his friend and superior officer, “If the campaign goes the direction that we now think it will, we’re going to need more than we have.”

“Yes, our best-laid plans seem to be burning all around us,” Elias said as he stood up and looked out the window behind his chair, “I trust you have a plan to acquire more credits?”

“We sent out a brute squad to shake down the drug dealers in our neighborhood. They won’t go to the police.”

“Beating up a bunch of drugged-up vagrants is one thing, attacking drug dealers and stealing from them won’t result in them running away from us. That could end poorly for us,” Elias’ voice sounded very concerned over the questionable tactic.

“It could benefit us by driving the dealers away from this area. They don’t know it’s us though. They are being rather sneaky about it.”

“I trust you have a better and more permanent plan?”

“We think there may be another vulnerability in their software. We’re investigating that now. There’s also a more direct but obvious route.”

“Hitting the central bank will cause quite a stir. So much so that our communications with the greater Confederacy would be more apparent.”

“This is true. We could hit their transfer network though, skim those fees,” Kaius sighed and shook his head, “We’re looking into it. I think we can hit their interest rate calculations and take a fractional amount there.”

“How long do you need?”

“Three, maybe four days tops.”

“Very well, Constantine may clean up the neighborhood through theft. I want a list of all plans you come up with and how we will get them installed without our foes knowing about them.”

Kaius stood up, “I’ll send you the finalized plans as they come in so you can have some reading materials. Oh, by the way, Constantine said he needed to talk to you about something.”

“What was that?”

Kaius shrugged, “Hell if I know. He was being super cagey about it.”

“Which means I won’t see him until tomorrow if we’re lucky…” Elias’ tone of voice carried the annoyance he appeared to have.

“Might be longer than that. He’s got a couple of other things going on that he needs to take care of too related to our mission.”

“Wonderful,” Elias said sarcastically, “Well, let’s get back to work and see what we can knock out today.”

“Yeah, also about that,” Kaius said cautiously, “Bad news comes in waves. The void foundries are all shut down.”

“Shut down? You mean diminished output…” Elias was interrupted.

“All three foundries are completely offline as they each experienced a debilitating issue. They went out one after another,” Kaius sighed, “The timing of that was a bit surprising.”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“Not quite the adjective I’d use. Kaius, if this is sabotage then we’re not dealing with an individual, we’re dealing with a large intelligence…”

Kaius once again interrupted Elias, “It’s early, but initial signs aren’t sabotage. One of the foundries suffered electrical issues. The furnaces themselves are fully functional, they just can’t get enough juice to them. Another one had an issue with its circulation system which effectively shut down all smelting. The final one had an issue with its extension system which had the same effect as they couldn’t move the recently formed materials correctly.”

“While there are three separate issues it could be they planned to exploit existing weaknesses in each. I want your team to confirm if this is sabotage by an unknown source or a self-inflicted wound.”

“My team is already on it. There’s no easy way to put this, but the early signs point at us causing these breakdowns. Or more to the point, your fault for increasing the demand too high.”

Elias turned and sat down in his chair with an exasperated look on his face, “My fault?”

“The adjustments you made to the output plan stressed the foundries more than initially presumed. I think this was unintentional, but you effectively brought them to their maximum output. I suggest adjusting the output downward about three percent to prevent this from happening again.”

“Confirm that this is the case, please. If it is, I will adjust the output plan accordingly,” Elias held his head in his hands as he stared at his desk, “Fucking hell, what kind of slowdown are we looking at?”

“Repairs should be completed in one of the foundries within the next thirty-six hours. The other two should be fixed within the week,” Kaius said, “But any shutdown like this also will cause a three-day restart period.”

“So, a week of no output. Fuck,” Elias said, “Please confirm this for me.”

“I will. I know this isn’t my place to say this, but it wasn’t your fault. Their output schedule isn’t tied to industrial capabilities. There should have been a warning when you set the output to be.”

Kaius then left the room leaving behind his senior officer to ponder the various punches that were directed at him. And there Elias sat staring at his desk. The weight of the mission was finally felt in full force.

Elias closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The faces of those fallen comrades then flashed within his mind. One lost due to a senseless act of violence. The other two were due to gross negligence on the part of a random cab driver. Those losses were bad enough and were difficult for him to compartmentalize and come to terms with. But now knowing that his own actions, without fully understanding the industrial systems first, caused a serious delay in their mission.

“Fucking hell,” Elias spat out under his breath.

Then his fiancé appeared in his mind. Anger welled up in him. While he loved her deeply, her attitude was always grating. Perhaps this was who she really was, maybe the person he loved was only a figment of his imagination. Who she really is began to shine through in this faraway world.

Twenty minutes passed with Elias going through the events of recent times. When he was done, he was feeling worse than he did after Kaius had left. He dug deep and found that determination that was wavering for a bit and refocused on the plan at hand.

The first thing he did was dig into the industrial production system and gain a better understanding of how the sliders affected the production demands of the void refineries. An hour after reading through the different manuals and internal working forums he finally achieved the necessary understanding of how the system works. Only to find an assistant vice president overseeing void operations had adjusted them to safe limits.

Elias sighed loudly as he smiled at the numbers, “Still meeting the plan with time to spare…”

The rest of the morning went more or less as expected. Elias was eagerly reading the internal reports from each of the void foundries. To his great surprise, and relief, one of them was going to be brought back online later today. Dampening that excitement was that one of them, the oldest of the three, suffered more extensive damage. Repairs to it will cause significant downtime, to the order of a week or more.

His timeline continued to slide, but they still were projecting to wrap the project up in early November. That still gives them nearly three weeks of wiggle room. Elias was beginning to steel himself for more curveballs. In fact, the optimism he once felt about this mission was largely gone at this point. He knew deep down that his team could succeed in this mission, but he needed to expect more curveballs in the future.

15:50 Kaius’ Office

Kaius looked up from his desk when the door opened. Elias walked in. He bore a concerned look on his face, which given how he was called into the room was to be expected.

“Apologies. Dale is calling in a moment. Don’t worry, voice is being modified so he won’t be able to identify us.”

Elias nodded as he sat on the sofa next to the door, “What does he want to talk about?”

“No clue. He messaged that he’d like to check in with us on a few things,” Kaius sort of shrugged lazily after he spoke.

Then the distinctive local ringtone sounded from Kaius’ terminal. Kaius entered a few things into the terminal before connecting the call. Video on Dale’s end appeared but none was being transmitted here.

“Ever the mystery man or men, eh?” Dale said sarcastically.

“That is correct,” Kaius said, “What can we do for you?”

“Apologies for the last debate. I’ve been working about four to five hours a day on improving my delivery of the debate questions. We’ve made quite a bit of progress.”

“Apologies aren’t needed, you weren’t the only one who underestimated your opponent, Mr. Rosberg,” Kaius said.

“I don’t suppose you and presumably your team have uncovered anything we can use against him?” Dale asked.

“We’ve gone over this multiple times my friend,” Kaius rubbed his eyes, “Attack campaigns in this world do not work. They may be the status quo or even expected in other localities, but not here. There’s also the rather large elephant in the room that your issues are much larger than yours. We have to presume that his camp has something on you.”

“What if you could verify that?”

“Hmmm…” Kaius said as he looked at Elias.

Elias gestured to mute the line, “What do you think?”

“We haven’t looked into Mr. Marven’s campaign.”

“Can you do it without alerting anyone?”

“The trick is if he catches us, what do we have Dale say?”

“He plays it off as allies behaving poorly, which could improve his image actually. Thought I’d prefer to have eyes on their campaign, so we know what’s going on without them knowing we have that access.”

Kaius unmuted the line, “Don’t assume that we can do that, but I will order my team to look into the feasibility of doing that.”

“Much appreciated. I’ll await whatever you find from that. Now onto a more uncomfortable thing, my team thinks William’s proclamation and purchase of blighted land has given him five points in the election.”

“We think that number is closer to three points with a margin of error being roughly a third of a point,” Kaius said.

“That was the low end of our assumptions actually. We think we can lessen that loss by roughly half if I do something similar.”

“You’d need to give him credit for it and call it a good plan. You’d also need to know what to do with the land in question,” Kaius said, “It’s frankly a blatant coattail situation, but it’s possible to work some in your favor.”

“What if we bought the two square blocks north of the land he purchased? We already know what he is going to put in there. We can build complementary facilities and business space there,” Dale said as he transmitted a plan of sorts to Kaius, “You can see what my folks came up with.”

Kaius shared the plan for the holographic display at the center of the room. Elias smiled as he leaned back on the sofa. It was as clever as it was devious. Dale’s corporation would own the land and rent the space out and in theory, he’d make millions a year thanks in no small part to William’s renovations to the south.

“That’s a very enriching plan you’ve come up with. But I’d agree that it seems to be a sound purchase.”

“Yeah, I have cash on hand to acquire a third of it. I need an advance of some funds to help speed this purchase up,” Dale grinned as he spoke.

Elias cocked his head and looked annoyed. Kaius muted the line pulled up their budget and focused on their credits on hand. He looked over at Elias who was shrugging. They had the funds, but it was going to eat up about twenty percent of what they had available to them, and at the moment was all the money that they had available to them.

“Two points?” Elias asked as he leaned forward to look at the plan and budget side by side.

“One point eight is my guess, but that puts us out on top once again accounting for the margin. It’s an expensive gambit, but if we can get tapped back into the processor or bank…”

“Do it.”

Kaius unmuted the line, “The money will be transferred into your corporate account by the top of the hour. Might I suggest you leak the purchase of said land? We think it would be more impactful if you let the political analysts dig into the purchase and make assumptions about it before you announce your plan.”

“I had planned on leaking the purchase news after we get the green light from the colonial regulator. My team wanted to announce the official plans during a planned interview I have with the local news tomorrow evening.”

Kaius nodded, “Good plan. Is there anything else that you need?”

“Nah, I think that covered all the things my group created. I am presuming you’ll have the finalized list of questions that the moderator plans to ask by next Wednesday?”

“The list is as far as I know finalized, but we’re waiting until they become official next Tuesday. One of my subordinates will get them sent to you,” Kaius paused for a moment, “William’s team accepted the change of timeframe on the next debate with an unusual alacrity. You need to be extra sure of your preparation.”

“Make sure you get me the questions and I guarantee you that we will be ready for it.”

The call then suddenly ended. Kaius smirked as he looked at Elias. Another curveball was thrown but this time it looked like they hit it out of the ballpark. Kaius then looked at a message from Alberic tossed his arms up in the air and cheered.

“I think we’ve found another scheme, this time with the central bank. It’s another rounding error thing. It’ll be drawing less money, but still around fifteen to twenty thousand a day,” Kaius said, “We’ll know for sure tomorrow.”

“Well, that lets me shrug off one monkey on my back. Is this plan of his going to work?”

“Two percent is within the realm of possibilities. Fucking clever to have us pay for it when he’s going to ‘make bank’ thanks to our investment. Three months of operations is all he’ll need to do to pay for the construction and get back his, our, principal.”

“Doing more isn’t going to help since it’s not likely much besides demolition will happen before the election,” Elias signed, “Plus that money isn’t going to come in for some time.”

“It is what it is,” Kaius said as he looked at Eliass stand up.

“Keep up the good work,” Elias said smiling, “I’ve got some more reading up to do with the void refineries.”

“Hey, sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good,” Kaius smirked, “Thank god these colonials are shit at securing things.”

“I’d prefer to be good if it’s all the same, but I won’t kick a gift horse in the mouth.”

With that Elias walked out of the office. The day started out about as poor as it could have. But now in the afternoon, positivity reigned. But it was no time to rest on his laurels. Elias had so much work to do, and now he was motivated once again.