Cascade by Rachel A. Rosen

Author:Rachel A. Rosen [Rosen, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The BumblePuppy Press

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

TOBIAS FOLLOWED CYNTHIA to Alberta for her piece on SVAR’s project at the newly developed wellspring. The science desk had vanished during the last round of cutbacks, and besides, one couldn’t separate business and politics from the grinding back-and-forth of human ingenuity and progress. She researched, and he watched the fallout from his photo unfold, far away from the action.

He had Mallory on the ropes. Well, the Post did, but his purpose and Reid Curtis’ were one and the same. The chattering class generated thinkpieces about it so quickly that Tobias suspected they’d had the bare bones of it stashed away already, waiting for such an occasion. Everyone—everyone who wasn’t Patrice Abel, and the out-of-his-depth Ansel Graves—was itching to make magic the issue of the snap election.

They just needed one more push. Like, for example, a semi-legal R&D adventure carried out under the government’s nose.

Most of the specs Cynthia had received from the project were redacted, available only to the engineers and project managers under a detailed, though non-magical, NDA. They’d written a pre-approved press release and supplied some infographics that could, along with some first-hand interviews, probably be padded out into something resembling objective journalism. The SVAR people did have quite the inflated sense of their own intelligence. Still, if they pulled it off, maybe there’d be no need for the pre-flight guilt session reciting the plane’s estimated carbon emissions.

The whole affair was tangled, and cheeky. The SVAR people were caught up in a regulatory nightmare of injunctions and delays, a veritable mummy of red tape and pending lawsuits that had Senator Cal Harrison’s fingerprints all over it. And true to their ethos of disruption, they’d simply cut through the Gordian Knot and started to build the damned thing anyway, regulations and permits aside, while the vast apparatus of the federal bureaucracy lumbered after them like a drunken bear.

Well. That was what happened when your scientific research wasn’t almost wholly dependent on government funding. If the project hadn’t been infinitely more dangerous than ridesharing or short-term rentals, Tobias might have appreciated the nimble virtues of the private sector.

With time to kill and Cynthia occupied with interviews, Tobias sat outside of the airport, waiting for the bus out to the new suburb. Two elderly Native men were smoking. He’d quit years ago, but the smell remained alluring, his one caveat to youthful rebellion. It was also high-octane SVAR-repellant; the health nuts stood well upwind, and given that he was about to spend several days on site with them, he could use the reprieve.

The men watched in quiet amusement as the bare-armed SVAR engineers slapped at the midge swarm that had eagerly descended on them. For all their differences, there was still nothing funnier than a hapless American wobbling headfirst into the tail end of a Prairie supersummer.

Eventually, the one with the drooping moustache muttered something inaudible to the other, then glanced over at Tobias.

“You’re not gonna get a quote.”

Was it that obvious? “She’s the reporter,” Tobias said lightly. “I’m just enjoying the diesel fumes.

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