Scene 13

Chuck straightens his shirt and checks himself in the reflection of the elevator doors. Before he’s satisfied, they open and he steps back onto the sixty-second floor.

The door to Osterman’s office stands open and Chuck can see the CEO is listening intently to a report from his assistant.

“—sublimation potentially leading to a steam explosion. When I asked him how bad, he said somewhere between Old Faithful and Mount Saint Helens. Says he won’t sign off unless we change the site.”

“The cohort will be on site in a month. There’s no time to change the site, and no need. Ice is a feature—not a bug. I swear, you could hand that man a tea kettle and he’d insist it’s about to explode.”

“Understood, sir. I’ve communicated your perspective to the team. They all understand.”

“Very well. Fire the geologist,” Osterman says. “Get the rest to yes.”

“Yes, Mr. Osterman.” The assistant starts to leave.

Osterman looks up. “And Ellis—”

Ellis stops himself halfway through the doorway and turns around. “Yes, sir?”

“He has a company car. Make sure it stays in our parking lot.”

“Yes, sir.” He glances dismissively at Chuck, already pulling something up on his phone before reaching his desk.

Osterman’s eyes land on Chuck. A thin smile appears.

“Chuck! I trust your presence means you have something for me?”

“Yes, sir. I got lucky.”

The smile cools by a degree. “We make our own luck, Chuck.”

“Of course. What I mean is—first, I want you to know I’ve already secured the credential. I set your session token to expire every fifteen minutes, so even if—”

“Every fifteen minutes.”

“Yes, sir. So no one can—”

“You set my credential—the one I use to access every system across all of my companies—to lock me out every fifteen minutes.”

“To re-authenticate, sir. Only if you’re idle. Our secur—”

“I have a forty-two character alpha-numero-symbolic passkey, Chuck. Do you know what that means?”

Chuck opens his mouth.

“It means I’m not typing it every fifteen minutes. Change it back. It must never expire.”

“But sir, that’s how the—”

“Change. It. Back.” Osterman looks at him like a vending machine that just ate his money. “Was there anything else, or did you come up here just to make me regret not firing you in the first place?”

Chuck takes a breath. He’s rehearsed this part.

“Sir, the intruder came in through layered anonymization. Tor network. VPN on top. Maybe more than one. The connection itself was untraceable.”

Osterman holds up a forefinger and looks over Chuck’s shoulder. “Ellis—” he calls. “Check my calendar. Was I scheduled to receive an in-person delivery of excuses today?”

“No, Mr. Osterman.” Chuck hears a voice behind him reply.

He takes a slow breath and continues. “When people apply to the Mars program, they have to install a verification app on their device. Identity confirmation. Standard process.”

“I know how my company works, Chuck.”

“Yes, sir. And as I’m sure you know, the app is designed to persist even after the user thinks they’ve uninstalled it. It keeps running in the background and phones home to our servers any time that device connects to an Ares Frontier endpoint.”

Osterman’s expression shifts slightly.

Chuck pulls a folded printout from his back pocket and holds it out, his hand shaking.

“His name is Marcus Ashby.”