Nickel Stream
By J.C. Conway
EVEN THROUGH THE FULLERENE-GLASS filter, the stream of Nickel-78 plasma brightened the work station transition chamber. It was a big leak ... bigger than any Gina had seen. It reminded her of the early stories, when solar miners earned their hazardous-duty pay.
She cocked her head and returned her foreman’s glare. “Don’t you think it’s a little too hot out there, Marty?”
Marty’s face hardened.
“Put ... a plasma shell on ... and get out there. That valve is not going to close itself.” His face transitioned through shades of red—some common and some as exotic as the filtered horizon that dominated every view from the work platform.
Gina stood firm. She might still have a lot to learn, but this wasn’t the first foremen she’d had to handle. Hell, her father had been a Company foreman. “If the machine can’t do the job, then there’s no way I’m going out there.” She tipped her head and gestured to the viewport. “Would you turn around and look at it?”
The massive quantum-flow coupler spewed N-78 plasma from its broken seam. Probably a jammed meter and stuck valve. A strong clamp would do the trick. It would force the stream through the coupler and into the space time transport vector without a costly shut down. Unfortunately, the loose plasma stream already melted five robot clamps, which Marty considered to be “expensive equipment.” Now he had it up his ass that she would turn the valve manually—a brilliant solution except for the risk of incineration.
Gina scowled. Marty’s top lip tightened. She saw fear in his eyes. But it wasn’t the rational fear of catastrophe outside in the blazing chromospheres. It was far more shortsighted and she’d seen it before. Marty was afraid of losing his authority. Marty was the Foreman—with a capital “F”. He was the man in charge and he didn’t want subordinates challenging him.
Moron.
“Come on, Marty,” she pleaded, attempting a tone of deference to avoid a rash response.
“Fine ...” His left ear twitched. “I’ll do it myself!”
“Marty, no!”
“She’s right, Marty.”
Gina spun. Sam had entered the chamber. Thank God. Sam had been a solar miner before Gina or Marty were in diapers. If Marty would listen to anyone, it should be Sam.
“Nobody asked you,” snapped Marty.
“Yeah, I know,” said Sam, shrugging. “But this here ain’t no accretion-disk skimming operation. Just send another machine, and keep sending ’em till it works. If it don’t, we’ll shut’r down and fix’r up.”
Gina cringed. She knew the kind of damage a solar-well shutdown would inflict on Marty’s budget.
“We’re not shutting it down,” barked Marty.
“Don’t see much choice,” said Sam.
“I know what I’m doing,” said Marty. He shoved his arms into an inner environment suit. “You run a sloppy operation here. There are plasma leaks everywhere. And you always take the easy way out. That stops here.”
“Lazy?” Sam glanced at Gina. “Did he just call us lazy?”
Gina closed her eyes and shook her head. Maybe Marty was even dumber than she thought.
Sam pursed his lips. “Hank never asked us to go out there for simple repairs.”
Gina groaned at the mention of a past foreman. “Sam, don’t.”
Marty pressed his inner-suit seals and brushed past them toward the bulky plasma shells hanging on the wall.
“Neither did Erin when she was foreman. Hey, Gina?”
Gina rolled her eyes. “Yeah, Sam?”
“What about Dutch or Natalie ... did either of them ever—?”
“No, Sam.”
Marty spun, almost falling in the plasma shell. “Let me be clear,” he said, slapping clamps tight. “I don’t care who did what when. I’m in charge now. I’m doing things right! I gave instructions, and they were ignored. That won’t happen again if you want to stay employed.” He activated the power systems and reached for the helmet controls.
“That shell won’t protect you from a direct hit by that spray,” warned Gina.
“It’s a plasma shell,” said Marty, shooting a disdainful glare. He glanced at Sam. “It’s what these things are for.”
“Makes sense to me,” said Sam.
“Stop it!” said Gina. “Read the specs. Once it goes you’ll—”
Marty secured his helmet with a shunk! He could no longer hear a word she said.
“—only have forty-five seconds ...” Gina shrugged. “But what do I know? I’ve only been working this field for fifteen smoking years.”
Marty waddled into the airlock and closed the door.
“How did our species ever survive?” asked Gina.
“Don’t know about the species,” said Sam. “But he ain’t gonna survive.”
Gina checked the flow console. The readings were still erratic. Through the dense portal she watched Marty leave the platform and wobble in his bulky shell toward the quantum flow valve just one hundred fifty meters away. The space between was hotter than a barbecue in hell.
She twisted her mouth. “We should have stopped him.”
“Why?”
She tapped the console. There could be a vortex tip out there. Or there might be another plasma surge—”
“—or he might forget to breathe ’cause he’s an idiot,” added Sam.
Gina sighed.
“We warned him, didn’t we?”
Sam nodded. “Did all we could.”
They watched. As Marty approached the valve-control override, the coupler shuddered and the eruption expanded. The flare momentarily engulfed Marty’s plasma shell. It withstood the inferno. Marty bobbled out of the widening stream. Then a sputter, followed by a belch, sent another wave of plasma, wider yet, bathing him again, and then receding.
“Ooh,” said Gina.
Sam nodded.
Marty’s outer shell disintegrated, leaving him with only his thin, inner protective suit.
“That’ll be hot,” said Sam.
Marty flailed awkwardly, but he clearly knew the procedure. He could make it back if he hustled.
Gina put her hand on the intake control. “Ready the burn kit, Sam.”
Marty launched toward the intake, clearly distressed. Seconds passed. As he approached, the plasma stream swirled dizzily twelve meters above Marty’s left shoulder. Gina had only seen the pattern once before—the negative-energy vortex that forced the nickel stream into the coupler was loose, no longer feeding N-78 plasma into the Company’s space-time pipeline, but instead twisting space and time swinging wildly and uncontrolled.
“Hit the kill switch!” shouted Gina.
Sam dropped the burn kit and lunged for the emergency cutoff. If they were lucky, the vortex would evaporate before sucking Marty into the stream. The weeks of no-production down time was no longer a relevant consideration.
Sam threw the switch. The coupler powered down. In a few moments, the well station one hundred kilometers below would also stop.
Gina watched the vortex. There would be a delay of about seven seconds before it lost its grip in the physical universe.
Marty continued on path toward the airlock. The vortex flapped like a loose fire hose. It sputtered.
“Come on,” whispered Gina.
Then, as the tear in space-time closed, the vortex whipped toward Marty.
Gina blinked.
Marty was gone.
Sam stepped to the portal. “Did it ...?”
Gina drew a breath.
Sam shook his head.
“Hope you and Nicolas haven’t got any plans. This’ll take weeks.”
Gina’s mind spun. Plans? “Uh, we were going to look at real estate ... to build a house.”
“Where?”
Gina turned toward him. His expression was as relaxed as ever. Her father used to do this too—in the face of dire calamity, he calmly discusses mundane things.
“In-system would be best commute-wise. But anything affordable within two light-years ... We were going to look at Trellis.”
Sam nodded. “Newly terraformed. Lots of space. That’ll be nice.”
Gina glanced out at the idle coupler. “Yeah, well—”
Sam clapped her on the shoulder. “You can write the report.”
“Thanks,” said Gina. “You can restart the well.”
***
Three quiet days passed in the station as Sam descended by quantum tether to the well. It was a miserable assignment for him, she knew. His quarters were cramped. The closer he dropped toward the star the more his life-support shields strained to keep his cabin in stasis with his core body temperature. Even communications transmitted through the tether drew too much energy away from life support and were thus limited to terse and intermittent exchanges. But an experienced human had to sink the electromagnetic shaft and prime the well. There was no other way.
Still Gina cursed, knowing Sam got the better end of the bargain.
She stared at her most recent draft report on the administrative console screen. The “send” icon glared at her like a buzzard waiting for its dying prey to get on with it. She skimmed the draft, checking figures, revising details. But four words tainted the revision, just like every draft before it.
“... and then he died.”
No good could come of this.
Crap.
It wasn’t like the old days when she could just say the idiot asked for it—and sure enough he got it. The colonized worlds were all over the Company these days for anything that went wrong. Hell, a report like this could close the entire star field. Those clowns at Beta Hydri were already claiming they could manufacture N-78 from artificial mesons. A work-related death at the field might be enough to get the operation shut down—and then what? Sam would be laid off before his retirement fully vested. Gina would be excess and optioned out before she could buy her dream house.
What would Dad do?
She wished she could ask him.
She hit delete.
The console beeped and asked, “Are you sure?”
Gina sighed.
I’m not sure of anything.
***
On the tenth day, Sam’s voice crackled through the platform speakers. “The well is primed and holding. Pull me up.”
Gina read the load estimates for the retrieval. If the mass indicator was right, Sam had burned through a dozen guided robots. But it didn’t matter. The well head finally drilled its electromagnetic tendrils back into the sun and was ready to pump nickel-rich plasma from deep beneath the photosphere to the coupler for transport across the void.
“Hold on, Sam,” Gina replied from the control desk. She revived a technical display and examined it step by step. “Let’s see, um, we need an integrity check first.”
“Integrity check? Didn’t we stick a new clamp on the coupler?”
Gina squinted. “Manual says perform integrity check when restarting a well.”
“Oh, come on. Check it while you reel me in.”
Gina shook her head, although Sam could not see her. “Someone needs to man the pump. It’ll only take a couple days. Chill.”
“Easy to say. What’s going on? You got a new foreman breathing down your neck?”
Gina leaned back. “Well ... yes.”
“Well let me talk to the new boss.”
“You are.”
“Huh?”
Gina rubbed her neck. “It’s ... well ... me.”
“What?!”
“Shut up.”
“When did you bid for management?”
“It was a whim.”
“And they hired you? After knocking off Marty?”
“Yeah, well ... about that ...” she paused. “We need to talk.”
“Don’t tell me ...”
She laughed. “It turns out Marty didn’t log his inspection route, and he ended up missing somewhere between Hollis, Para Vista, or here.”
“Yeah, but ...”
“So I had second thoughts about my report and ...” she explained.
“... I don’t want to hear it ...”
“... our shutdown of a high-production well is bad enough. A dead foreman on top of it just seemed like a little much. So my report was a little ... incomplete.”
“Okay, there it is. God save us now. You’re a killer and a fraud.”
“Knock it off. I didn’t hear you volunteer to do the report. How would you have explained it?”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. I wrote it, rewrote it, rewrote it again. No matter how hard I tried, it wasn’t any good.”
“Just say Marty’s an imbecile.”
“Tried. Now explain the part where there are two experienced solar miners at the station but they let their supervisor waltz out to certain doom.”
“Ummmm ...”
“And then package it so the well doesn’t get shut down permanently.”
There was a pause.
“I’m all ears,” said Gina.
“I think you did the right thing, boss.”
“Kiss up.”
“Darlin’, anything would’ve been better than the idiotic truth. So long as you pinned nothing on me, I’m with you.”
“Yeah, well, about that, we’ll discuss it at your quarterly review.”
“A little bit of power ...”
“I never thought they’d actually give me the job.”
“Ha. Better you than me. Management would be my worst nightmare. But you’ll be fine. Hell, I might even listen to you every once in a while.”
She smiled “That will be a first.”
“So you really planning an integrity check?” He said the phrase with disgust. “I’m getting kinda ripe down here already.”
“If you say we did it, I say so, too,” she said. She activated the winch to draw him back. “Retraction commencing.”
During the ten-hour retrieval, Gina triggered the coupler ... skipping the integrity check, as always. It devoured the nickel as fast as it arrived. The highest production unit was back on the grid. Gina’s first day as foreman was not so bad.
***
The next few days were rougher. Sam had to learn to listen to her in her new position, and she had to learn the difference between being bossy and doing her job as a boss—a question that was most intense when she felt angry and defensive,
After several weeks of boundary building, Sam brought a wad of fused toe clamps to her office. He held them in a gloved hand. The mess still glowed.
“Do we have spares?” she asked.
“These are them.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose and cursed a whispered stream. “What are we going to do about the heat processor? I can’t get a replacement for weeks.”
Sam shrugged, but Gina could see he was holding something back.
“What?” she said.
He shook his head. “Not my place.”
She dipped her head. “Throw me a rope here, Sam.”
Sam scratched his neck. “Ned used to triple-wire nose joints to bypass the flow track.”
She leaned back. The suggestion didn’t make sense. But neither did the problem. “If you think it’ll work, that’s fine with me.” She offered her waste tube for the fused clamps.
Sam dropped them in and sat without asking. “So did you start building your new home yet?”
Gina liked the question. It meant they were back to routine; back to business as usual.
“No. I’ve been stuck here just like you. But no worry. We have a five-year plan.”
“Don’t make it ten,” he advised.
She smiled, and then shifted her gaze to the reading arriving from the quantum-flow coupler. It registered maximum output. She looked through the portal at the visible string of other wells, couplers and gathering stations. There were streams of leaking plasma here and there, but nothing serious. Production registered high across the board. Things were looking good. Gina smiled. Maybe she was cut out for management after all.
***
For two years, the field operated smoothly. At the control station, Gina started most days with emergencies, followed by assignments, then reports.
“Any reports today, Orson?” she asked her assistant, on her way to the small alcove that passed as her office.
Orson sat at his work station immediately outside Gina’s area. He pushed a button, directing the day’s first report to Gina’s desk.
She reviewed the production report for the wells. All of them were high. Good. She asked Orson for the next report.
“This one shows substantial discrepancy between outgoing nickel and the Proxima Receiving Station.”
She glanced at the numbers. “I think our meters are getting old.”
She settled in. The readings didn’t make sense. On most days, they were within tolerance... matching within one or two metric tons. But some days... just some days... they were off. How could that be? She had seen meters fail many times. They always degraded progressively. If these meters were wearing out, they would misread steadily... not intermittently. Also, when they did misread, the results were always the opposite of what she was looking at now. During periods of discrepancy, these records showed significantly less solar plasma arriving than was sent.
“Hey, Sam!” she shouted, hearing his voice down the corridor.
“If the meters in the field are wearing out, the mismatch between the field readings and the readings at Receiving Station, would show less here, and more there, right?”
“What are you getting at?” asked Sam.
“Have you ever heard of it going the other way? I mean, our meters showing more output than Receiving Station shows input?”
He laughed. “Yeah, definitely, Gina. That’s what Dutch and Gus always complained about.”
She looked at him. “Don’t keep me in suspense. Tell me why.”
Sam laughed again. “You think I asked?”
She knew exactly what he meant. No one in the field asked questions that intruded into the management level. You end up knowing something you shouldn’t know. Still, she hoped he had at least a notion. “So you don’t know, then?” she asked, dejectedly.
“No, I definitely don’t. “You’re smart. What do you think?”
She didn’t know what she thought. Maybe Receiving Station’s meters were wearing out. But it seemed unlikely. Those meters were constantly inspected and calibrated. There might be incompatibility issues, or adjustment slides. But neither of those would account for the intermittency of the discrepancy.
“Temperature variations ... Gravity differential ...” she mused.
Sam shrugged. “Maybe. I think Gus suggested each of those.”
She nodded. Gus had been an engineer during her father’s era.
“Hmm, all right, well, thanks.” She rubbed her head. She’d revisit the questions sometime later. She half-registered Sam’s “good luck” as he left. She shook her head and stepped back into the present and asked for the next report.
Orson pushed a button. “Vern’s coming in.”
“He is? When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? Why didn’t you give this to me first?” She stood, slamming her palms on her desk. Vern Holloway was the Sector Supervisor. Every Regional Foreman reported to him. And as a Field Foreman, Gina reported to a Regional Foreman ... ever since Marty’s mysterious disappearance two years ago.
She glanced around. The place was a pit. “Hmm.” Why would Vern Holloway come here? We haven’t had a supervisor inspect since ... well, we’ve never had a supervisor inspect. She looked out the portal at the twenty lines in view. There were little jets of leaking plasma spraying from twelve of them.
“Fine.” She stepped out of her semi-office. Sam and most of the others were there. “Don’t anyone get comfortable. We’ve got to get those streamers clamped before anyone goes home.”
“Dammit, Gina, that’ll take hours. We started early today.”
“Don’t even, Sam,” she snapped. “I want those things clamped ... now!” She turned and walked toward the transport bay. “I’ll take three through eight,” she shouted without turning back. “Get busy!”
***
Gina expected Vern Holloway to arrive in a luxury shuttle with an entourage. But he instead approached the control platform alone in a standard, run-of-the-mill work vessel.
She’d met him a couple of times and respected him. He came over from another company about three years ago. If she remembered right, he worked his way from field worker to foreman before switching companies.
“Hello, Vern.” She offered a bone-crunching handshake. “Good to see you.”
“Gina,” He nodded. “How’re things?”
“All right. String three is a little below production this week, but one and two are holding fine. I think ...”
He halted her with a raised hand. “This is just a routine inspection. I do this every once in a while. It’s a perfectly normal visit. You know what I mean?”
She thought that was an odd thing to say, and she didn’t have any idea what he meant. But she knew better than to say so. “Sure. Routine inspection.” She clasped her hands uncomfortably behind her, nodded, and wondered whether Vern Holloway was being cryptic or she was just being dense.
For most of the morning, he wandered the platform; looked out the portal windows; commented on the “fine operation” and how he appreciated the steady production they managed to maintain. Gina did not know why Vern Holloway had come, but she was convinced it had little or nothing to do with a routine inspection.
Finally, they sat down with coffee in her partial office. When Orson was busy elsewhere, and it appeared no one else was within earshot, Vern Holloway said, “Gina, I think there might be some company investigators here in a few days.”
“Investigators?” It was not something she expected to hear.
Vern Holloway maintained a conversational tone that seemed far too casual for the topic. “Of course, I’m not really here because of that, and I’m not really talking to anyone about that ... am I?” He ended with a dead-in-the-eye look that allowed her to finally feel the two of them were in the same room together talking about the same thing. Now he was reminding her of her father ... another lifetime solar miner. Someone who would talk straight to anyone who would talk straight back.
She played along. “Hell no, Vern, we’re just talking about production, and some common chit chat ... the kind no one can remember. This is a routine inspection.”
Vern Holloway noticeably relaxed.
“You’ve been getting intermittent disconnects between your plasma output, and our plasma receipts at the gathering station.”
She nodded her head.
“And we’ve got a lawsuit now.”
“What?”
“It’s frivolous, of course. But the company is probably going to settle it ... for PR purposes ... and in exchange for a gag order.”
“You’re kidding,” she said, incredulously.
He shook his head. “It’s a foundation claim by the Trellis developers. Their terraforming isn’t holding. They blame us. They’ve got an unnatural increase in seismic activity, unstable temperature controls, increased environmental toxicity ... all of which they say is our fault”
“How do they think—”
“They claim N-78 contamination. And they allege,” he said the word as if it was something to be disbelieved, “the nickel is coming from our line ... that our nickel stream runs directly through their planet on a periodic basis, and pumps its load into it when it does.”
She found the theory hard to believe. But the planet was close. And Trellis was frequently in the nickel stream corridor. But that wasn’t supposed to matter. Then again, what did she know about space-time physics? And the company was settling? That was highly suspicious. Maybe a space-time pipeline could dip through a gravity well on its way to station. If so, it probably happened on many worlds. But because most planets are uninhabited, a solar nickel leak might go unnoticed for a long time. And the Trellis development had not existed when the nickel stream was constructed.
“We’ve examined material samples from Trellis ... volcanoes, atmosphere, water. A detailed, highly technical report was prepared. The report concludes the plasma absolutely could not have come from our line.”
That’s a relief, she thought.
“But, we found something else on Trellis,” he said.
“What?”
“A nickel-plated Marty Funco,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, feeling a flash of dizziness.
Vern Holloway seemed to be studying her reaction.
“Listen Vern let me—”
He lifted a hand. “Before you say anything, you know that, even though we’re just sharing gossip here, there are some things it might not be best to say. And I haven’t asked you to explain anything.”
You might end up knowing something you shouldn’t know, she thought.
“I’ve read your report. You said Marty Funco was not present when you shut the well down, and you did not know where he was.”
Gina’s heart pounded. It wasn’t exactly a lie. By the time they shut the well down, Marty was ... gone. Besides, Marty’s death was Marty’s fault. She knew it. And if she’d just spelled it out, anyone who read her report would have known it, too. But that was two years ago ... before she understood the value and the art of CYA in company reports. She did not have to cover it. The matter was not a big deal. But it had seemed like a catastrophe to her at the time, and she thought then that the company cared. Now she was stuck with the lie ... stuck with the cover up. She’d thought the damned thing was behind her, but here it was.
Vern waved a palm. “As long as that’s all that happened, then that’s it. Finding his body on Trellis doesn’t really mean anything. The company certainly would not benefit from information linking Marty’s disappearance to this pumping station.” He paused. “But if there’s more ... and I’m not suggesting there would be ... but if there was more, and anyone heard about it, there would be a lot more questions, and things could get very uncomfortable very fast.”
She nodded. Her throat was dry, and she felt it would be difficult at the moment to actually speak. She would have sipped her coffee. But she was afraid her hand would shake the coffee right out of her mug before it reached her lips.
“In fact,” Vern continued, “it would probably look like something was deliberately concealed if more information came out now.”
She nodded.
“That would not be good,” he added.
“No it wouldn’t,” she agreed. Her mind raced. She was confident Sam would not say a word. But she thought it would be prudent, in any event, to find him and talk to him, tonight.
***
“Tough day, Gina?” Orson asked, powering down the work stations.
“No, it was okay,” she said. The company investigators had been at the platform all day. The disruption to the work schedule was staggering. She removed a pin from her hair. “Have a good weekend, Orson.”
Sam walked in as Orson left. Gina reached into her bottom drawer and produced a bottle of rye and two tumblers. “Grab a—”
In half a heartbeat Sam slid Orson’s chair into Gina’s semi-office and sat across from her, ready to relax. He eyed the glass as she poured, then glanced up at her. “So they told me they already knew all about it ... you already told them ...”
She rolled her eyes. “Never could keep a secret.” She handed him the glass.
He took it and laughed. “They even guessed it almost right ... they said there was a loose vortex ... that he got sucked into a quantum hole ... ha! Good guess.”
He took a drink and smiled. “So I said, Really? Is that so? She never told me!”
She chuckled and drew a shot.
“And then I said Hell, I hated the SOB! Why didn’t she tell me? I thought she trusted me! Those jerks.”
“I just said you were a liar.”
He looked at her, took another drink, and said, “Well, I am.”
“You and me both.” They clinked their glasses.
He changed the subject. “So what do you think about the ...”
“Well, according to the report ...”
He interrupted her with an obscenity, and continued, “You know what you can do with the report.”
She thought back to what Vern Holloway had said. “The report concludes ...” That’s what he said. Not that it was so. Just what the report said. She was unaccustomed to reading so deeply between the lines. Maybe management wasn’t her bag after all.
“I think the nickel stream dives right into the planet’s gravity well whenever it enters the corridor. The line works on pulses. Every pulse sends the same amount of product. So a drop in receipts is equal to a drop in pulses. I think those missing pulses are dumping into Trellis ... that’s what I think.”
“It can’t be,” he said. “Hell, there’d be hundreds of planets getting pumped with nickel.”
Gina pursed her lips. There certainly were space-time pipelines all over colonized space. And there had to be at least hundreds ... maybe a thousand ... planets that crossed nickel stream corridors. But only now were many being developed for Earth-environment habitation.
“You think they’re not?” she asked. “Most planets are uninhabited. Outposts, with enclosed environments, would never notice. Only terraformed developments would be affected.”
“Nah. They’d shut us down.”
“If they knew. I think the company’s paying to rebuild Trellis.” She emptied her glass. “They say it’s just for PR.”
Sam scoffed. “It’s never just PR. So what do we do now?”
She thought about it. “I think they’ll settle Trellis. It’ll be years ... maybe decades ... before anyone else makes a case. In the meantime, well, I think we start using better clamps.”
Gina revived her work station and retrieved the line maps. She superimposed a map of terraformed colonies within commuting distance. Then she highlighted Trellis, and every other world that crossed a nickel stream corridor.
“See these?” she asked, indicating the highlighted planets.
He did.
“All of these worlds are subject to periodic gluts of N-78.” She tilted her head and deepened her tone. “The company report concludes,” she said, repeating Vern Holloway’s careful wording.
Sam smirked.
Gina continued. “The company denies that this is our nickel. But you and I know there’s only one way Marty’s body ended up here.” She pointed.
“You know what? It’s not my job to figure that stuff out.” He crossed his arms. “And it’s not yours neither,” he added helpfully.
“Yeah, Sam. I get that.”
“You’re learning.”
She shrugged. She’d certainly learned a few things. She learned her lines leaked. She learned upper management skills included the ability to talk around a subject and required an ability to read between the lines. It made her head hurt. “You know, that offer to switch jobs is still open.”
“Oh, no, sister. I ain’t that good a liar.”
“The hell.”
His grin widened, exposing bad teeth and a sense of glee that Gina found mildly annoying. “I’m just a loyal, ignorant line worker.”
Gina straightened. “Me too.”
“Yeah? What’s the most important thing?”
She twisted her mouth. She considered the nickel field, Sam’s job, the demands placed on her platform, the scrutiny the event with Marty drew, and management’s response. “To produce,” she admitted.
He nodded and downed his drink with a swift motion. He leaned forward and she met his bloodshot gaze. “And ...”
She blinked. “And what?”
“For me, it’s just doin’ what you say.”
“That’s a cop-out.”
He raised an eyebrow. His stare, and the deep wisdom that supported it, reminded her of her father. “No it ain’t. But there’s one thing that’s more important for both you and me. You gotta do it your way. I gotta do it mine. You do know what it is though. You’ve always known. But it’s time you admitted it to yourself.”
He thrust his tumbler toward her. She filled it again.
“My kids will not work in this business.”
“Of course. But that ain’t it.”
“Give me a lifeline.”
“It involves not doin’ what you’re thinking right now.”
She frowned. She glanced at the bottle. Two shots remained. “All I’m doing is asking you—” She stopped.
He leaned back. His smile returned.
It might be the rye. But she felt suddenly more at home than she’d been since this whole mess started. A warm comfort filled her. She poured a shot and offered the remainder to Sam.
“You go ahead,” he said.
She emptied it into her glass. There was indeed one more thing she’d learned. Something she had always known, but not with this depth of understanding.
“You had a question,” he teased.
She sipped and called him a name that insulted his mother.
He winked. “You’re a good boss. What you thinkin’?”
She pushed back and put her feet on the desk. She rolled her eyes and then leveled her gaze at Sam. It was the most important thing. “Sam,” she said, pausing for effect, “don’t ask questions.”
Sam tapped the desk. “Damn straight." 
J. C. Conway writes science fiction, romance, and fantasy stories. His debut novel, “Hearts in Ruin,” was released in May 2014 by Liquid Silver Books. His recent short stories have appeared in “The Colored Lens” and “Comets & Criminals.”
