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The disbelief in the reception hall was not unreasonable.
Resolving the entire energy supply problem of the Republic of Valoria was, on its face, a fantastical claim. If the Republic had been a small nation, the audience might have been merely skeptical. But the Republic of Valoria was not a small nation. It was a continental power whose population represented a substantial fraction of the world, and its corresponding energy consumption was an astronomical figure.
The West-East Power Corridor. The hydroelectric network. The state nuclear program. The Petrochemical Group and the other state-owned giants. Hundreds of private energy firms operating at capacity. Even with the combined weight of all of it, the Republic still experienced rolling power constraints in its industrial corridors. The fact that an energy system of that magnitude still could not fully eliminate shortages was, in itself, a measure of how staggering the national demand had become.
The audience ran the obvious mental arithmetic. Perhaps, if someone manufactured many thousands of Ethan's miniaturized fusion reactors, the production gap could theoretically be closed. But thousands of fusion reactors raised an unanswerable safety question. Each reactor housed a sustained fusion reaction. However small the per-unit failure probability, multiplying it across thousands of units produced an unacceptable aggregate risk. A single catastrophic failure would be a regional disaster.
So the miniaturized reactor approach was, in the audience's collective judgment, ruled out.
And if it was ruled out, the audience could not identify what basis Ethan Mercer had for his claim.
What stung the assembled energy executives more sharply, however, was the implicit insult.
If one young man and one one-morning-old company could resolve a problem that hundreds of established firms and multiple state giants had not resolved, then what, exactly, did that say about the hundreds of established firms? Ethan's claim was, whether he intended it or not, a statement that every energy executive in the room had spent their career failing at something a teenager could fix in a quarter.
"In my assessment," one executive muttered to his neighbor, "Chairman Mercer simply does not regard any of us as worth considering."
"Of course he doesn't. Look at who he is. A celebrated young scientist with personal relationships at the cabinet level. Why would a man like that have any regard for ordinary industry people like us?"
Liam Rouse, who had spent the morning being comprehensively outmaneuvered by Ethan and was nursing the resulting humiliation, recognized the shift in the room's mood as an opportunity.
"Exactly," Rouse said, raising his voice enough to carry. "Mr. Mercer, everyone in this room is aware that you are a genius. You have made the point thoroughly. But there is genuinely no need to humiliate the rest of us to make it. We came to your opening ceremony in good faith. Why repay that good faith by toying with us?"
The remark was calculated, and it worked. It gave the room's diffuse irritation a shape and a direction. Murmurs of agreement rippled across the hall.
Rouse felt the small warm glow of a man whose manipulation had landed. He drew breath to add a second remark, to push the room's anger one degree further.
Then he remembered the parking structure. He remembered the two-and-a-half-ton sedan skating sideways across the concrete. He remembered the human-shaped crater in his patron's armored car.
Rouse closed his mouth and said nothing further.
On the stage, Ethan had observed the entire maneuver. His expression did not change, but a cold point of light moved in the depths of his eyes, and it was aimed, specifically and unmistakably, at Liam Rouse.
Beside him, Yvette brought one hand to her forehead and pressed gently.
I knew you didn't play by the rules, she thought, in the direction of her Chairman. I did not fully appreciate that you would walk onto a stage in front of the cabinet and casually announce you intended to solve the national energy shortage in a quarter. Do you have any conception of the weight that sentence carries?
She did not, however, allow the exasperation to reach her face. She stepped smoothly forward, took the microphone, and spent the next several minutes doing what a competent CEO did: working with the event staff, redirecting the room's energy, smoothing the audience's irritation back down to a manageable temperature.
When she had restored order, she stepped back beside Ethan and gave him a single sharp sidelong look.
The look said: If you say one more reckless thing on this stage, I am not cleaning it up a second time.
Ethan spread his hands at her, with the wounded innocence of a man who could not understand why no one would simply believe him.
Everything he had said was true. He had ten reactors on the seabed. The frustration of being disbelieved while telling the literal truth was, he reflected, a genuinely novel form of irritation.
The opening ceremony resettled into its rhythm.
The reporters resumed their questions. Ethan answered two more, then drew the question segment to a close. The next portion of the program was the formal recitation of New Future Technology Energy's corporate vision and mission, the standard ceremonial boilerplate that no founder delivered personally. The event host took the stage to read it, and Ethan retreated backstage to rest and to drink a glass of water in peace.
The boilerplate took the better part of an hour.
By the time the host finished, the program had reached the point where the ribbon-cutting should have occurred, the formal gesture that would officially declare New Future Technology Energy open for business.
Ethan, instead, walked back out from behind the stage and took the microphone.
"Before we cut the ribbon, I'd like to offer everyone something."
The hall quieted.
"Today is the opening of New Future Technology Energy. Everyone who came is a friend of the company. And since you're all friends, I'm not going to be stingy with you."
He smiled.
"If none of you object, I'd like to use our Signal Bee relay drones to give all of you a live guided tour of the actual project New Future Technology Energy is currently undertaking."
A ripple of genuine interest moved through the hall.
A project tour was not, in itself, an unusual segment for a corporate opening. Many new companies included one. The stated purpose was to showcase the firm's project portfolio. The actual purpose was almost always a flex, a demonstration of strength designed to make future business partners take the company seriously.
But New Future Technology Energy operated in nuclear energy, a domain of extreme confidentiality. The audience had assumed, reasonably, that there would be no tour segment, because the company's actual work could not be shown.
And now Ethan was offering exactly that.
The audience leaned in.
The reception hall's enormous central display screen, which had been dark, brightened. A live video feed resolved across it, transmitted from one of the company's Signal Bee relay drones.
"Where is this?"
"That's open water. That's the sea."
"What's the significance? Reactors are built on coastlines so they can be flooded with seawater to halt the reaction in an emergency. Standard practice."
"But this isn't coastal footage. This is open ocean."
"Perhaps the facility is on a remote island. The state granted Mercer an island, and the laboratory is built there."
"That would track. Given the state support a man like Mercer commands, an island would not be a difficult thing to arrange."
The audience speculated. The footage showed open water, and open water alone, and the speculation built around the absence of any visible structure.
Then something entered the frame.
In the distance, several dark shapes appeared at the edge of the Signal Bee's field of view. As the drone closed the distance, the shapes resolved, and the audience identified them, and the speculation stopped.
They were warships.
Three warships of the Valorian Navy, in formation, on open water.
The reception hall went quiet in a new way.
On the deck of the lead warship, Captain Adrian Crane was experiencing his own version of confusion.
Before dawn that morning, Crane had received an order that did not make sense to him.
The order had directed him to take a three-ship escort formation, load an enormous and unexplained piece of industrial equipment, plus an absurdly oversized helicopter, plus a small delegation of National Security Bureau personnel, and transport all of it to a specified set of coordinates in the Eastern Sea.
A transport mission.
For a warship.
Crane had served in the Valorian Navy for twenty-two years. Warships did not perform freight haulage. Warships projected force, escorted strategic assets, and conducted maritime security operations. The idea of his command being used as a delivery vehicle for a piece of industrial equipment was, to Crane's professional sensibility, faintly humiliating. If word reached his old service comrades that Captain Crane had spent a morning hauling cargo, he would not hear the end of it for the remainder of his career.
But an order was an order. Crane had loaded the equipment, loaded the helicopter, loaded the Bureau personnel, and sailed to the coordinates.
Upon reaching the designated position, he had ordered the formation to hold station, and then he had approached the Bureau delegation.
"Gentlemen. This is the coordinate set I was given."
The Bureau personnel had thanked him and immediately begun surveying the surrounding water with the focused attention of people checking conditions against a plan.
"Are we confident in the position?"
"We should be. The oceanographic specialists from the First Marine Institute were emphatic. The seabed in this sector is flat. No significant relief, no obstructions."
"We should still confirm directly before proceeding."
Crane stood near the delegation, listening, consumed with professional curiosity and constrained by professional discipline from asking what, exactly, was about to happen. He did not interrupt. He simply watched.
When the Bureau delegation had finished its discussion, the senior officer among them walked over to the oversized helicopter.
He stopped in front of it.
And then, to Captain Adrian Crane's considerable astonishment, the Bureau officer addressed the helicopter directly, in a tone of careful, almost deferential courtesy.
"Blackout. Comrade Blackout. This is the designated position. To be certain, would it be convenient for you to descend and survey the seabed directly, and confirm the conditions for us?"
Captain Crane stared.
The Bureau officer was talking to a helicopter.
A senior National Security Bureau officer, a man whose credentials Crane had personally verified that morning, was standing on the deck of Crane's warship, addressing a parked helicopter as Comrade Blackout and politely asking it to go for a swim.
Crane began, with genuine seriousness, to suspect that he had been deceived. That the entire morning, the inexplicable order, the unexplained cargo, the deferential Bureau personnel, was some elaborate operation run by a delegation of well-credentialed lunatics, and that he had unwittingly sailed his command into the middle of it.
He was still constructing this theory when the helicopter began to move.
And what happened in the next several seconds made Captain Adrian Crane seriously reconsider whether the lunatic, in this scenario, might actually be him.