Blood Debts

Chapter 5

Shaking his head at the display, "No son ... that is a dead world and I won't risk your men to confirm something I already know."

42)

Persephone was a marvel.

Samson watched as she gracefully slipped from one newly created adoring 'fan' to the next person present who in no time at all was turned into an adoring fan too. These people, complete strangers to start with, after a few short minutes with her were willing to sign their children over to her.

The management of this Chroynos Power Generation reactor still hadn't caught on yet to the random visit. The plant and the hundreds like it around the planet were more or less automated. People were present merely to make sure the blinking green lights stayed blinking green. If they faltered, or an alarm sounded, that was a bad thing and it required someone's attention.

The job was pretty simple. But computers were not allowed to make those decisions so living, breathing, thinking humans were still involved in the process. Machines were fine for the hundreds of millions of microsecond computations and readings during any given twenty-four hour period, but the one in a multi-hundred billion microsecond 'anomaly' that the computers couldn't compensate for required the attention of those who could dictate actions outside of fixed programming. The computers needed human minders or the reactor would automatically go offline for safety reasons.

Humanity's collective shudder at the thought of what thinking machines could and had wrought in the past, sent that option and the person who suggested it flying for whatever was closer, a door or an open window.

Machine rebellions aside, it was always a good idea to have humanity tied into the 'decision loop' where fusion reactors were concerned.

The very principle of turning tiny atoms into progressively much larger atoms and plucking the loosed electrons from the maelstrom just made sense. Early in Humanity's arrogance many had taken fusion as a simple silver bullet solution to everything. 'Safe efficient power' was the motto of the day. Until the day several million unlucky bastards, on a world light-centuries away, outside the Chroynos boarders were on the receiving end of a runaway reaction that expanded to the point where it broke its containment and bathed them all in superheated molecules and freed electrons. Needless to say, the gaping hole in the side of the planet and millions of dead, dying, and missing, set people to rethinking the proper application of computer driven reactor safety measures, tied to profit algorithms. The computer figured 'more power equals more money because I am operating at higher efficiency, which is a good thing', right up until the micro second before the feedback from the rest of the grid sent an electronic shock wave back into the overloaded reactor. The feedback created so much resistance in the massive super conducting lines that the feedback's heat choked the only exit for the building output. This caused a catastrophic escalating cascade of electrons, inside the magnetic containment, which over rode that containment.

The computer had just enough time to send its truncated equivalent of 'uh-oh' to its central operators before its catastrophic failure dug a fifty meter deep and four hundred kilometer diameter hole in the side of its planet, in the center of their largest city.

The dead were the lucky ones. They didn't have to worry about the bath in half consumed radioactive fusion material. The base for the operation is common H2O, water, but when it is superheated and released if it strikes living tissue the Hydrogen, Helium, Oxygen and freed electrons make a mess. The burns from the superheated molecules were nasty but the long term damage was caused by the complicated rays of mixed non-visible light that the blast put out, specifically X-ray and Gamma-ray radiation. They had a tendency to strip any DNA that they struck, into its constituent molecules, and prevent cellular regeneration, or simply what thousands of years before had been called, radiation poisoning.

So human operators sat at consoles in every reactor around the Human populated worlds of the Galaxy, reading magazines, chatting over hot drinks, and watching lights blink happy green. All the while avoiding and dreading the steady shine of little red buttons that would initiate a controlled collapse of the electromagnetic containment field. Since no sane human wanted to be blown apart into constituent atoms, and all the overlapping, hopefully sane, humans would provide at least one to kill a runaway reaction, the overly redundant process was as safe as Chroynos Engineers could make it, and they were very good at what they did.

So as Persephone made new best friends with every human controller in one of the family's hundreds of fusion reaction plants on this planet alone, one of them was always close enough to a kill switch to keep them all in their present atomically assembled state.

Her shadow, dressed in black trimmed with gold, out of any discernible uniform, and tucked under a thick overcoat followed patiently with his hands clasped behind his back. The unassuming but ever-watchful soldier stayed out of the way of all the important people, while they met the Heiress to the Empire.

None of them could see his right hand grasping the hilt of the blade or the drawn pistol in his left hand. Behind his back and hidden under the folds of the overcoat, they were invisible. Since the shadow was invisible, no one noticed either weapon.

Samson was becoming more and more irritated, not with the employees who were flocking Persephone but with the managers who failed to notice over the last two hours that thanks to her magnetic personality, no one was at their consoles maintaining the stations in this reactor. In addition to the rattling of his nerves, the sheer fact that the managers were so far removed from reality made him wonder what good they were, they simply weren't managing or supervising.

When Persephone had made an offhand comment about lunch, she was swamped by table invitations. The whole multitude apparently assumed that they could all fit at her table at once for the upcoming meal. As the control room was stripped of technicians Samson felt the overwhelming urge to do something about the potentially run away reactor. It would not be a problem but Samson was developing an irrational fear of Persephone being blown apart.

The fellow he finally kicked in the shoe looked at him indignantly. It was as though some wall or lighting fixture had stood up to talk to him. "Set shifts, to maintain your duty stations, and you will rotate through to visit with my lady," ordered Samson. "Take half of these people to work than we will send people back and you all can rotate in to spend time."

The dumb look did nothing to improve Samson's mood. He draped his left arm over the fellow's shoulders and pointed to the assembled mob, "You will get half of these people, and you will head back to work. The rest will come with us for food. Then you will all be relieved and you will join us at the table is that understood?"

It took Samson a few seconds, to realize the technician was paying more attention to the pistol, he forgot he had in his hand and was using as a pointer, than his words. He slapped the pistol against the man's chest, "I want you to take everyone from this line," indicating with the pistol along the man's sight line, into the crowd, "back to work and then we will send people back to you all so you can join us and all get face time. Is that clear?"

"Yes Sir," the civilian replied. The man had the same irrational fear of the pistol as Samson had of the station.

Samson released the man to his assigned task and allowed the pistol to slip back into the shadows of the overcoat.

He was actually fairly surprised at how smoothly things had been progressing, as they made their way to the dining facility.

Very few things are more distracting and irritating to a body guard than a milling crowd of adoring fans. There are too many angles and no matter where you stand there are a dozen other ways to deliver a fatal blow to your charge. Samson was stressed and irritable after the first few hours. The dining facility was a nightmare come to life and it had poison spines glued to its festering slime covered caprice.

The cavernous dining room was shared by multiple shifts from the plant, reactor, management, and its administrative staff, as well as other tenants of the building's several floors above and below.

Why you would put a reactor on the middle floors of an industrial structure, then send the massive conduits all those hundreds of meters 'down' to ground level, adding all that additional expense for the massive high gauge wiring that whole plunge before it split into its various main lines was a design enigma that annoyed Samson.

Positioning of wiring was nothing compared to the annoyance of swamping fans, mobbing employees, adoring true-love suitors, and upwardly mobile individuals being overlooked by management. Samson was at wits end, and was seconds from carrying the blade and pistol openly.

While frustratedly overseeing the crowd of admirers, Samson saw Persephone turn towards him. As his eyes met hers, her special smile for him graced her lips and eyes, when she flicked her eyes at the food on her plate, he allowed himself the brief respite of closing his eyes to shake his head back and forth, indicating he wasn't interested in food. Her slightly pinched eye and quirked smile expressed her mild displeasure at his refusal of sustenance, which is all it was to him while he worked. Hers was the same look a mother gives her adult child who refuses to eat a particular vegetable after so many years, loving but still critiquing. Not that Samson, as an orphan, knew what a mother really was, but it was a hardwired response to know her displeasure he had developed with Persephone.

She returned to the conversations to left, right and center without missing a word as the surprisingly orderly changeover of sycophants took place.

Samson rolled his stiff shoulders and cracked the wrist holding the pistol. It was turning into a long day. On one of his periodic glances behind himself and Persephone, he noticed a gaggle of approaching management suits. Leaning to her ear, he whispered, "Heads up, Love, here they come."

She looked over her shoulder at him, questions unspoken on her lips, but dwelling in her eyes. As Samson sidestepped, she followed his eyes to the approaching group of executives. They looked both revolted to be in the room with the 'commoners', and desperate to be present with such a high ranking shareholder.

Her sigh and rolling eyes were visible to all at the table. Her actions were not obvious enough to elicit panic or laughter, but enough to be noticed. Her pleading look to Samson turned to resigned love as she blew a soft kiss only for Samson, and she prepared to do battle with the highest level suck-ups in the building.

43)

When Phyllip opened the door, even before he could take his first step into the room, the exasperated sigh, followed immediately by a demanding "What", that was somewhere between bored and angry, slapped Phyllip in the face.

"Well good to see you too Thanatyos," Phyllip replied sarcastically.

"Stop patronizing Phyllip. What do you want?"

"Since you put it that way, I'll skip the 'hi-hello-how-are-yous', and get to the point..."

Thanatyos Chroynos interrupted, "Please do!"

Phyllip clenched his teeth and beat a blast of anger back down into his core. He wasn't there to fight with his younger brother Thanatyos, but Thanatyos seemed insistent on a fight. "Mid-term grades are posted..."

"Yes I know! Is there any other good news you plan on sharing?!"