Editing Eternity (Warhammer High) (section)

===Hard At Work===

[[Image:IlikecommasFinal.jpg|thumb|Cora and Afina in their younger years!]]

Business was good.

Corvus Cora sipped a cup of hot cocoa and stared at several dataslates on her desk, watching numbers scroll by at blinding speeds.  Her superhuman eyes followed their movements, absorbing the information as fast as it was presented, and she grinned behind the white ceramic of her cup.  Yes, business was good.

Less than ten years before, she had purchased the Terran Manufacturing Concern to add to her slowly-growing collection of private construction companies.  The macroconstruction industry was her battlefield, and she crossed it with skill.  The new colony on Maxeillus had been one of hers, constructed with a combination of human and servitor labor, with Mechanicum oversight.  It had nearly bankrupted the company to finance, but they had succeeded.  With that contract under their belts, there wasn’t a project in the galaxy that the Corvus Design and Engineering Conglomerate couldn’t handle.

With one small problem.  While the actual construction had gone smoothly, the supply chains had cost so much that Cora had had to take out multiple loans to keep the teams equipped.  The Mechanicum kept the manufacturing and supply sources of the Imperium under an iron grip, and not without reason, but it was bad for business.  The answer?

“Vertical control, Afina,” Cora said with satisfaction.

Her secretary poked her head into the cavernous office Cora had to herself.  “Sorry, my Lady?” the mousy young Terran asked.

“Nothing of import,” Cora said smugly, rising to her feet.  The Terran Manufacturing Concern controlled over four hundred small-scale manufactorae across the Sol system, and though only a few had made construction equipment when she had bought them out wholesale, that was swiftly rectified.  With the TMC facilities making the equipment and materials she needed at a fifth of the price the Mechanicum charged, she had been able to pay off every single loan the company had ever owed, in full.  Now, the data streaming across her slates had told her how much more she had brought in with one simple purchase.

“Afina, do I have anything scheduled for the next hour?” Cora asked as she walked out into the antechamber.

Her secretary – a frighteningly smart if timid young business PA that Cora had a lot of time for – fumbled through a small schedule book.  “Er, no, my Lady,” she said.  “But right at 1300, you have a tour of the plastics molding facility in hive 0004 on Terra.”

“Oh, right,” Cora said.  “Great.  We’ll have lunch in Startseite and go to the factory after that.”

“If you will it, my Lady,” Afina said.  Cora hid a smile.  Afina’s near-reverence for her station had been a bit wearying at first, but Cora was growing to like it.  It was clearly just Afina’s means of expressing respect.

“Didn’t you grow up in Startseite, if I may ask, my Lady?” Afina asked as she dug up her wallet and slid it into her pocket.

Cora nodded.  The sleek business suit she was wearing contrasted nicely with her snow-white skin and shimmering black hair.  By contrast, Afina’s brown tweedish shirt and green dress seemed nearly pedestrian.  “Yes, I did.  Where are you from?” she asked as she pulled on a jacket.

Afina nodded eagerly.  “I’m from Albiona, my Lady,” she said.  Her soft voice would have been hard for someone without Cora’s hypersensitive hearing to detect.  “I’d been to Startseite a few times before I came to work for you, though,” she added.

“Cool.”  Cora flipped a pair of sunglasses on and tapped the call button for her elevator.  “Let’s head out.”


Her office, in the heart of Cordoma’s business district, was a mere twenty minutes from Startseite by skycar.  The luxurious black limousine raced through the air towards the city, cutting through the sun-drenched Terran surface glare.  Nearly the entire planet was one giant hive, thanks to the Emperor’s construction order.  Cora didn’t give it much thought as a child, though she was starting to understand why some hivers resented surfacers so much for it now that she owned several hive-based factories.

The limo’s interior was padded with soundproofing material, and plenty of leather upholstery.  The small holo screen set into the island that ran down the middle flickered to life as Cora faced it.  “Lady Primarch, you have a call coming in from Derrel Parkman,” Afina reported.

Cora made a face.  “Put him on,” she said.  Parkman was one of the managers of the plastics factory she had purchased mere weeks before.  He was a competent enough man, but renovating his facility had taken far more money than he had estimated.

The image of an elderly man with thin grey hair appeared on the screen.  “Your Ladyship, hello,” Parkman said.  “Hope I’m not interrupting anything?”
“Just a trip to lunch,” Cora said.  “What can I do for you?”

“Actually, I was hoping we could move the tour of the factory from 1300 to 1330,” Parkman said apologetically.  “We’re having about fifty shipments of microbeads arrive at the same time as five pickles.  The whole facility will be in gridlock.”

“I want to see it as it, Derrel,” Cora said mildly.  “Half the reason we negotiated the buyout was that your facility could handle shipments that size without problems.”

“Well, that’s fine too,” the manager admitted.  “Very well.  I’ll see you then, your Ladyship.”

Cora bade him farewell and hung up.  Afina looked at her nervously.  “My Lady, you know, it’s funny,” she said.  “I know in my head that the word ‘pickle’ just means a sealed container of volatile liquids being moved to a processing facility, but…”

“But the mental image is fantastic,” Cora finished for her, grinning.  “I know.  How do people even come up with this stuff?”

“I don’t know, my Lady,” Afina admitted.

The car settled down outside the restaurant Cora had chosen for their lunch before taking off to the factory.  Cora and Afina exited and faced the structure, one Cora had frequented as a child.  “Wow, I missed this place,” Cora said happily.  “Montegreen’s.  Good times.”

“I’ve never been, my Lady,” Afina said, following her boss into the place.

The hostess noticed them as they entered, and her eyes widened as she recognized Cora.  To Cora’s relief, she didn’t act unusually, instead directing them to a table near the stage.  “It’s a great place; most of us visited at some point or another,” Cora said.  They sat at the little table and the hostess deposited some menus.  “Small town, you know.”

The stage was occupied for the lunch crowd, with some stand-up doing a routine.  Cora tuned him out – a tricky business with her hearing – and focused on her slate, which she propped against a napkin box.  The news trickling in over her screen was mostly financial information from her brokers and accountant, but routine in nature.  Afina discreetly cleared her throat when the waitress arrived.

Cora ordered without opening the menu.  “Malted brawn steak with a side of mesquite fried corn,” she said, not taking her eyes off the slate.  She looked up at the waitress with a sheepish smile when she heard the other woman chuckle.  “Some things never change, eh?”


As the meal approached its end, Cora rose from her hunched observation of the slate and cricked her back, looking around the main room of the restaurant.  A few kids in the corner booth remained, but the lunch crowd was vanishing as people went back to work.  “Much better,” Cora sighed.  “It’s quieter.”

“Does it hurt your ears when it’s louder than this, my Lady?” Afina asked over a bowl of ice cream.

“No, but it’s so distracting,” Cora said.  She dug into her own, melting bowl of ice cream with gusto.  “All right.  Five minutes, and we’re off.”

“Alright,” Afina said.  They ate in silence for a while as the rest of the customers vanished, one-by-one, and a few stragglers wandered in for a late snack.  “May I ask you something about this expedition, my Lady?” Afina asked after a minute or two.

Cora looked up at her and licked vanilla away.  “Sure.”

“Why did you choose a factory that didn’t manufacture the things we were needing to purchase, my Lady?” her secretary asked hesitantly.

Cora shook her head, scattering black strands over her shoulders.  “Because the Mechanicum hates competition.  If I had tried to muscle into the business by just buying a manufactorium that built construction materials, it would have cost more than buying a struggling factory that made something else entirely and repurposing it.”

Afina sighed.  “That’s silly.”

“No kidding,” Cora muttered.  She set her bowl down and stood as the waitress dropped her card off on the table.  “All right.  Let’s went, shall we?”

“Yes, my Lady,” Afina said.


In the car outside, Cora was just fastening into her seat when her arm invisibly twitched.  Cora stared at the implant in her forearm with surprise.  She had long ago restricted access to her personal communication implants to immediate family and friends.  Curious, she blinked three times and opened the data stream in her sunglasses.

Three words, a message from her cousin Morticia, floated in her sight.  “Tonight’s fine here.”

Cora beamed.  “Excellent,” she murmured.  Afina looked at her curiously, but said nothing.


Derrel Packman nervously adjusted his splash coat and awaited the Lady Primarch to whom he now owed his job.  The factory was a complete zoo at that moment.  No fewer than forty five trucks were still queued at the docks, and even if the offloading was going perfectly, it still looked like a demolition derby in the warehouse.

“Mister Packman, the volatiles delivery is sorted,” one of his managers murmured.

Packman sighed.  “Good.  Is the lab ready?”

“It should be, sir,” the lab manager said.  “When does the Lady Primarch arrive?”

“Any minute,” Packman murmured.  The lifelong bureaucrat was hesitant to show Cora the factory out of more than just self-consciousness.  Some of the upgrades had been messy.

The security door in front of them opened, and a Treasury officer in uniform emerged.  Lady Primarch Cora herself emerged behind the officer, and immediately angled towards Packman.  “Director Packman, good to see you again,” Cora said, extending a hand.

Packman bowed as he shook her hand, settling his nerves.  “Your Ladyship, welcome back,” he said.  “We’re eager to show you the changes we’ve made.”
Cora half-smiled at the obvious but necessary lie.  “I’m sure.  Shall we?  Where do we begin?” she asked.

Packman retrieved his hand and gestured at the traffic pattern of trucks and forklifts in the room.  “Well, we haven’t changed Receiving much, so let’s move straight to Airblowing,” he said.

“Great.”  Cora fell in step behind him with Afina tagging along behind her, who was surreptitiously recording everything on her slate.  “So, last time we discussed the possibility of gutting the old mechanic shop and replacing it with a more open area where all the mechanics and facility Techpriests can just hop on the equipment they need,” Cora noted.

“We tried to implement that idea, ma’am,” Packman said, turning down an aisle of massive boxes stacked four stories high.  “The techpriests don’t want to have to open their more advanced equipment to use by the general mechanics.”

“And why is that a problem?” Cora asked.  “Is it something the general mechanics will even need to use?”

“They may use it anyway,” Packman said.  He shrugged awkwardly as they proceeded through the cavernous room.  “Well, in fairness, no, the trained mechanics won’t, but the line workers have been known to try to use the gear the mechanics leave on the line for repairs or changeovers.”

“I see.”  Cora thought that over in silence as they reached the end of the aisle.  “I noticed you put those spherical mirrors in place,” she said, pointing at one of the little silvery orbs in the air.  They reflected light from odd angles, allowing people to see vehicles approaching from the cross-halls without having to actually step into them.

“We did, ma’am,” Packman said.  “Vehicle accidents were rare before, now they simply don’t happen.”

“Good,” Cora replied.  “Where to next?” she asked.

“Well, I was thinking that we would see the new plastics molding area on the way to the offices, ma’am,” Packman said.  “Unless you’d rather see something else?”

“Actually, I’d love to see the glasscutting area,” Cora said.  “From what I remember, it wasn’t even here last time I visited, before the buyout.”

Packman quickly shifted gears.  “Very well, Lady Corvus, we can visit that first.  This way,” he said, turning in the intersection.

Cora followed him down the hallways, her hyperactive senses absorbing information from around her.  While, indeed, the place did look better than the shape it had been when she had bought it, there were still problems around.  Portable tanks of casting liquids and coolants were stacked on top of each other, ancient plastic pallets frayed and cracked, and the floor was sticky enough that she actually had to avoid patches.

“And here we are,” Packman said, pausing at the entrance to the glass area.  Cora glanced into the massive room and rubbed her chin, taking in the sights.  The whole assembly floor was crisscrossed with lines and drains, and the bustle of workers and forklifts filled the empty spaces.  Pallets of glass sheets and piles of small boxes filled spraypainted squares on the ground.  Brilliant white lights hung from the ceilings, several of them showing signs of recent installation.  All that, Cora took in with a glance, and could have fit into any factory in the human species.  The rest, she took in with her transhuman eyes, on a level no other save her own relatives could hope to match.

She saw the thin lines of rust and paint chipping around areas where the floor had been corroded away and simply painted over.  She saw the way boxes and pallets had been stacked outside the designated area, and the way the workers were stopping to look at the clocks every few minutes.

Cora also noted the way the workers’ uniforms were ripped and ragged and stained, moreso than they could be after one day’s work.  Some of the uniform shirts she saw were ripped wide open, hanging by scraps.

“We’re quite proud of the improvements we’ve made so far,” Packman said.

“I bet,” Cora replied.


In the conference room above, Cora leaned back in the chair and watched the presentation Packman was giving her about how they had improved this and that, and dutifully recorded it with her flawless memory and the small tablet she had brought with her.  While she did, Afina quietly excused herself for the second portion of her responsibility to Cora: not being quite as visible.

The young Terran woman donned an anonymous ‘Visitor’ coat and hairnet and slipped into the factory, walking purposefully for the manufacturing floor.  The other people present walked right by her without a second glance, not even looking at her face under the net.

Afina looked over the manufacturing floor as she walked through the massive door, taking in the details.  The conversations around her died under the sound of the massive grinders, and she slid a pair of ear protectors on as she approached them.  The sound died down as she passed it and entered the sorting area, where teams of humans sorted the multicolored plastic and stone chips more effectively than a Mechanicum sorter robot ever could.

One of the line supervisors was talking as she neared his line.  “Juan, get the second bin from the cleaner, it’s done by now,” he said, gesturing at a metal box behind them.

“Yeah,” an oil-stained young man with a ragged beard muttered, walking over to the boxes.

“So…did you see her?” one of the other line workers asked.

“Who, the Princess?  No, she wasn’t there,” the line supervisor said.  “Bunch of the others were.”

“Eh.  Just another rich surfacer telling us how to work,” the worker beside him said.

“We’ll see.”

Afina frowned mightily at the slight to her mistress, but forced herself to walk on by.


Upstairs, Cora stood as Packman finished his speech.  “Thanks for taking the time to make that, Sieur Packman,” she said, as she took her place at the head of the room.

“Our pleasure, Lady Corvus,” Packman said, bowing back to his seat.

“All right, my friends,” Cora said, as she gripped the podium and looked over the small group.  “We’ll start with a brief recap.  When I purchased this company to add to the Conglomerate, I was hoping that the equipment here would cut down significantly on the costs of creating the materials we can’t field-fabricate for large-scale colony building,” she said.  Packman and the others nodded.  “So far, it has.  Upon my purchase four months ago, the refurbishing costs were pretty high, but have been offset by the decrease in expenditures from the rest of the Conglomerate nicely.”  Cora smiled as she recalled exactly how much money she was actually saving now that she didn’t have to go get her materials off the open market.  “The refurbishing costs have already been offset, in fact.”

“Oh, excellent,” Packman’s Treasurer said excitedly.  “That’s wonderful news.”

“Indeed it is,” Cora said happily.  “Now…of course there will have been some problems in the major equipment replacements.  The old plastic melters replaced entirely, the pelletizers gutted, the fabric section replaced entirely…anything I should know about?”

“Well, we had a few small problems with sorting the power grid and moving some rooms around, but not much beyond that, honestly, ma’am,” Packman’s Plant Manager said.  “We’ve increased our workforce to over eight hundred.  Our Human Resources staff had to increase accordingly, but the new employees are working out well, on the whole.”

“With the usual range of exceptions,” Cora said, sipping at the drink in her cup.  She made a face and pushed it aside.  “Anyway.  How are the new structural changes for the building?”

“Not a problem, ma’am, though they did take quite a while, as I’m sure you know,” Packman said.  “The only real problem is the security issue.”

“By which, I assume, you mean the fact that the factory has suffered some thefts of late,” Cora observed.  She slowly twirled a stylus around her finger as she spoke, watching Packman closely.  He was a bit nervous, but not worryingly so.

“It has, ma’am, though we have stepped up background searching on all applicants,” Packman assured her.

Cora looked down at her slate, and paged through to the section on factory hiring policy.  “Looks like most of your new hiring goes through headhunters, for anything short of executive positions…and you don’t pay any benefits to new hires for over a year.”

“That’s correct, ma’am,” Packman said.  He wasn’t apologizing.  The elderly executive gestured at the factory floor below.  “Our workers have a high turnover rate.  We’re not going to invest in retirements or medical insurance for them when they rarely stay on for more than a year.  We say so upfront in their contracts.”

Cora looked over the copy of the contract he had provided.  “So I see.”

“Are you saying you disapprove, ma’am?” Packman asked.

“Yes.”  Cora set the slate down and folded her hands over it.  “Treating your workers like expendable drones doesn’t build any sort of loyalty to the company.”

“I’m aware, ma’am, but what option do we have?  We expanded our workforce by hundreds, my Lady, you’ll recall,” Packman said awkwardly.  “Payroll went up enough as it is.”

Cora nodded slowly.  “All right.”  She rose.  “Is there a little girls’ room around here, sieur?” she asked.

“There is, my Lady, down the hall on your left,” Packman said.  “Shall we reconvene in five minutes?” he asked of the room.

A general chorus of affirmatives met his suggestion.  Cora walked out the door and made for the room, pawing in her pockets for a vox with a camera function.


Below, Afina was meandering through the production areas, trying hard to have the particular mix of casual and purposeful that she needed to have to get the job done in her appearance.  The secretary par none walked past a small breakroom and she slipped in, deftly un-doing her hairnet in mimicry of the people around her.
A group of workers by the coffee machine were arguing about something as she sat down.  She tuned in with half an ear.  “So I told the fuck, he isn’t allowed to give me that bullshit, not now or ever,” one fat mechanic was saying, with much waving of arms.

A young-looking technician in a tattered blue lab coat shrugged uncomfortably.  He had small foam buds in his ears to block out the loud noise of the omni-present pumps and grinders.  “I guess he had a point, though.  I mean, this isn’t exactly up to spec, you know?”

The mechanic waved his hand again, disgusted.  “It’s all a bunch of shit.  They’re like animals.  They should know not to shit where they live.”

The technician shrugged again.  “I know.”  He spotted Afina and wandered over.  “Hi.”

“Hi,” Afina said, pulling out her vox to check for messages from Cora.

“Uh, I don’t think we’re allowed to use those down here,” the tech said nervously.  “The old floor manager fired a guy for using one in the bathroom.”

“Supervisors are allowed to use them,” Afina said.  “And guests.”

“Are you a supervisor?” the kid asked, sitting down in a new chair.

“I work for the corporate office,” Afina said distractedly.  Cora wanted her report.  She packed the vox back up and stood.  “See you later.”


Cora finished photographing the walls in the bathroom and walked out into the hall.  Afina fell into place at her elbow with military precision, already transmitting her observations.  “My Lady,” Afina said demurely.

“Did you find anything of note?” Cora asked quietly.

“There are very, very few people here who like their jobs, my Lady, but I saw few things that truly worry me,” Afina reported.  “There were some rather disappointingly low standards of uniform repair.”
Cora nodded.  “All right.  Well done.”

Afina beamed at the compliment and followed her mistress into the conference room.  Cora moved to the head of the table as soon as she entered, and waited for the other people to return.

The black-haired young mogul cleared her throat or attention as the door closed.  “All right.  Before we move on, I’d like to address a few things we’ve observed so far.”  She tapped a button on her slate and the screen behind her blanked.  Up popped a flash of a screensaver – some craggy mountains overlooking a small inland ocean – before a blank list of bullet points appeared.  “Okay, first things first.  I know nobody here wants to be lectured, so I’ll keep this succinct.  You’ve made progress,” Cora said, earning a few nervous grins.  “Things still need to change.”  The grins vanished.  “The things in the warehouse that I saw need to be rectified.  Stacking non-modular containers on top of each other?  Someone’s going to be crushed.”  She entered a line on the list: Warehouse safety.

She continued.  “I also saw, down on the production floor, that a lot of lines and grinders had large painted squares next to them.  What goes in there?” she asked.

The floor manager spoke up.  “Those are the spots where the pallets are set.  We put the items that come off of the lines there.”

“Then why were so few of them empty, while pallets of material were strewn haphazard around the floor around them?” Cora asked pointedly.

“Because people don’t like following rules that inconvenience them, my Lady,” the manager said awkwardly.  “I mean, we will of course do better.  I’ll think of something.”

“Put posters up around the lines, showing pictures of people doing it wrong,” Cora suggested.  She wrote ‘Pallet Locations’ on the list.


As the meeting dragged on, the list grew longer and longer, until finally Cora stopped her recitation and took in the room.  Some of the executives were visibly angered by the procedure, though only her super-senses allowed her to see it clearly.  She sensed their patience wearing thinner and decided to lance the boil.  “All right, folks, I’ve been talking for a while.  Why don’t I surrender the podium for bit and see what ideas you all have to contribute,” she said, stepping back.  She took her seat next to the podium and waited.

Packman coughed.  “My Lady, the fact of the matter is that rather a lot of those solutions you proposed will require substantial increases in payroll.  We’re fully staffed as it is.”

Cora frowned.  “I don’t understand.”

“I mean, we have all of the shift rotations filled with employees,” Packman said.  “Short of overstaffing, this is pretty much a full house.”

“Then if I may ask, Sieur Packman, why have the improvements we’re seeing here seemed so small?” Cora asked politely.  “When I was here six months ago, I created much the same list.”

Packman sighed, but couldn’t immediately refute the argument.  “Lady Cora, the problem is that the factory itself had to be rebuilt, as I’m sure you know.  Our mechanics can’t be making all these little adjustments at the same time as a full-scale reconstruction.”

“Then you aren’t fully staffed,” Cora said.  “Look, I’m not trying to pick a fight, here, Sieur Packman, but don’t tell me in one breath that you’re fully staffed, and in the very next breath tell me that you have too few mechanics.”  She leaned back in her seat.  “You do your hiring through a headhunter.  Instruct them to start branching out and bringing more qualified mechanics on board.  Maintenance people too.  The amount of graffiti in your bathrooms and halls is unprofessional.  I hold my facilities to a high standard.”

Packman nodded.  “I see.  I will do that, but, ma’am, I do feel I should say…I do not have the payroll budget to support many more people.”

Cora sighed, rubbing her forehead.  “That’s a very familiar argument, Sieur Packman.”  She sat back in her chair.  “Okay.  So you’re hiring from the general hive population.  You don’t want to trust them with full employment, because that would necessitate the full benefits of employment, so you use a headhunter instead, who doesn’t give them shit for benefits.  However, the headhunter needs to make money too, so they charge you…what, five to two?  Five to three?”  She paged through the notes for the presentation.  “Five to three.  Okay.  So for every three credits your temps earn, you pay the headhunter five.  So given that you’re paying well above the industry standard per employee, but only have to have a small HR department and can fire absolutely any employee for absolutely no reason at any time, it balances in your favor.  Fine.  And since your income was previously determined by the market value for your products, you could only pay the headhunters so much.”

She flipped the stylus off of the table and caught it, twirling it in her hands as she spoke.  “Now, however, your income and budget are what I say they are.  Given what I’ve seen of the state of this place, what may have been a full house before isn’t good enough now.  That, or you do have enough people but they aren’t working efficiently enough.”  She leaned forward and glanced down the rows of people.  “My friends, this isn’t gonna hack it.  In two months, I leave for Copernicus, to construct the largest privately-funded oil refinery in human history.  I’ll be there for up to five years.  I need to know that factory output will be as high as you can make it that entire time, because…goodness, I certainly don’t want to have to worry about logistics out in the backwater.”  She flipped the stylus again and caught it, then stabbed it down on her tablet.  “If you need a bigger payroll or better training or whatever you decide you need, all you have to do is ask.”

“Well…we appreciate that, my Lady,” Packman said, a bit taken aback by her apparent generosity on the heels of the shopping list of problems.  “I do want to make sure, however…you do understand that part of the problem is turnover, right?”

“Turnover…of temp employees?” Cora asked.

“Yes, ma’am.  A lot of our employees are just kids working during school breaks or what have you.  We have relatively few long-term employees, and all of those are hired full-time, with benefits and internal TMC hiring,” Packman said.

“Yeah.  I know.”  Cora picked up her stylus and called up the local population and unemployment figures.  “Says here that unemployment for those looking for work is about four percent locally…and unemployment for everybody old enough or young enough to work but not doing so is around ten percent.  Four percent times the local population level equals around fifty million people.”  She set the stylus back down.  “Of course, you knew that.”

“Right.”  Packman sighed, feeling a little patronized.  “Ma’am, the problem isn’t line workers.  Those are abundant.  What we need are skilled workers.  Mechanics and technicians.  Those are far, far rarer and more expensive.”

“To fulfill my suggestions,” Cora said.

“Ma’am?”

“You need more techs and mechanics to fulfill my suggestions.  Right?” Cora asked.  “That’s what you meant.”

“Well, in general,” Packman said.

“And…you said you were fully staffed before,” Cora pointed out.

“I mean that they’re hard to replace,” Packman corrected himself.

Cora felt the ambient resentment in the room rising and felt she had seen enough.  “Alright.”  She stood, and the rest of the room rose too.  “I think my point is made.  I’d like to finish the tour now, if we could,” Cora said.  “Even when I was here a few months ago I hadn’t seen the QA and management areas.  Let’s see how they look.  And drop by the chapel, too.”

“The Mechanicum shrine?” one of the executives asked.  “I’ll go inform the Magos.”

“No, don’t bother,” Cora said.  “We’ll just arrive.  I prefer to see things when they haven’t been sanitized.”


Afina slipped out of the room as the others rose, and put her anonymous ‘visitor’ coat back on.  She walked straight over to the office block on the bottom floor of the cubic factory and lurked outside, her vox at the ready.

Within minutes, Cora and the rest of the executives passed by on their way to the QA labs, and Afina took advantage of the distraction to duck into the massive gravel storage tank farm beside the offices.  She wandered around, keeping half an ear out for anyone approaching her.

She noted with disappointment that the metal clamps that held the coolant pipes were simply dropped to the floor when not in use.  Several littered the ground under one of the massive plastic tanks.  Greasy fluids sluiced across the ground in puddles.  The drains into which they were supposed to flow were mounted at the highest points on the floor, so the liquids simply pooled under the tanks instead.  Footprints in the grease showed where mechanics simply walked right through them, oblivious.  The various tanks rumbled with the shifting weight of many, many thousands of kilograms of ground rock and plastic.

Afina heard someone approaching and made her exit, walking into the management offices like nothing was happening at all, and she had every right to be there.


In the labs, Cora donned a coat of her own and slid on the hairnet with some difficulty.  She followed the lab manager into the little rooms, and listened as the manager described various things Cora already knew from the briefing.  As she did so, her eyes traveled over the equipment in the room, watching it for any sign of defects.

A clattering of footfalls behind her made her start and spin around.  A technician was walking gingerly over the maze of hoses to read labels off of a steel drum behind her.  With him thus distracted, Afina slid away, trailing unobtrusively behind her mistress.  Cora sensed her assistant arriving and tuned back in.

“…Which is why the lab has increased in size of late,” the manager said.  “We’ve really been emphasizing the newly expanded plastics wing to make our own packaging, but the benefits have been significant.”

“I’m certain they have been,” Cora said.  “So, who’s on deck here?”

“Well, we have a small core of four technicians who are trained on every single station and are full, salaried employees,” the manager listed.  “Then we have a supervisor and a senior lab technician over them, and the six of them supervise ten more junior technicians.”

“Those junior techs are on some kind of temp contracts?” Cora asked.

“They are, your Ladyship,” the manager said.

One of the junior technicians, the one with the ragged lab coat, jerked as either Cora’s voice or the use of her name registered, but didn’t turn around.  Cora’s hypersensitive hearing alerted her to his sudden tension, and she sensed her presence becoming a hindrance to the workers.  “Okay, now for the chapel,” she said.  “How do I get there with this new layout?”

“Actually, we’d love to show you some things we’ve added here in the lab,” the manager said, gesturing to some new equipment.

Cora nodded.  “Very well, then.  What have you added?”

“Well, we started by scrapping the old HPLC, and bought two more, plus a gas chromatograph, a new NMR, and a pair of separatory analytics machines for processing results,” the manager said, pointing each out in turn.

Cora was silent for a moment as she remembered what the abbreviations were for.  “All for QA on the plastics?”

“And the dyes we use for the colored glass and packaging labels.”

“I see.”  Cora nodded approval.  “Well, that’s good.  Do you have the amount of full-time staff you need?”

The manager shrugged with some caution.  “We’re actually short by three.  We’ve had some retirements.”

“Ah.”  Cora rubbed her chin.  “Then…put out bulletins to the local colleges and see if you can’t hire some undergrads.  Do you hire them as temps, or professionals?” she asked.

“Temps,” the manager replied.

Cora tsked.  “Working with equipment like that, they should be treated like professionals.”

“I agree, but we use the temp positions as just that: temporary positions,” the manager said hastily.  “We hire on the ones worth keeping.  We pay a full package, including retirement.”

“That’s something,” Cora said.