Chapter 4

All too early in the morning I woke up, temporarily alone as Phyl had just arisen to take a hasty shuffling stroll to the bathroom. When she returned a few minutes later she snuggled back into my arms, above the bed covers this time and entirely naked, without her tank top. She snuggled her bare breasts into my chest and we were both nearly asleep again when her bedside phone rang. It was security upstairs reporting that the first Littlejohn crew from New Mexico had arrived outside at the main gate in a big passenger van. Another two vans were still on the way, expected to arrive later this morning.

This killed rather completely any building sexual tension that might have been developing between us, and with a loud groan she informed them that she’d be upstairs in a few minutes. She rolled back over to give me a quick kiss and then she slowly hauled herself out of bed to scrounge up some clothes. I made my own trip to the restroom and found Phyl slowly still selecting and discarding outfits, clad now in just a bra and panties. She shuffled forward to offer me another intimately friendly hug.

“Now I’ve done it ... I’ve slept with the boss! Do we pretend it never happened or can you drop your high minded principles and consider this the start of a torrid affair?” She laughed, giving me another hug. “I know ... we’re still just friends, but I think you can tell now what the benefits would be like, otherwise.” She might have been laughing, but there was more than hint and a wink there too. Damn I was tempted!

With the arrival of the first Littlejohn work crew we now all had as much or more work to do than a dozen clones of ourselves could have handled. First of all, I had to handle the outgoing HR paperwork for nearly three-quarters of our entire staff of contractors. It wasn’t really fair and it was terribly inconvenient for all parties concerned, and we compensated everyone accordingly with generous severance checks ... but it had to be done. As contract employees they hadn’t signed up for the sort of risks that the senior staff had. We kept two on anyway that were just too essential to lose: Jade Mitchell, who was Peggy’s right hand girl and genius lab rat, and also our chef, Carlos. Jade was just ... essential, and I’d been after corporate to make her a permanent salaried employee. As for Carlos, well if he ended up being a backstop for a bullet, no one would much care. Carlos was surly, ill-tempered and frankly just plain disagreeable to live and work with, but the alternative of us cooking for ourselves seven days a week, even with a reduced staff was much too horrifying to contemplate.

For the most part, the termination processes went pretty smooth. Everyone had been well paid and would receive excellent references. About half were even deemed worthy of keeping an eye on for future rehire at some different location. No one seemed too put out and I gently eased the last of them out the main gate a bit before lunch, loaded in a series of vans with corporate security drivers to take them to the Aphrodite airport, with prepaid travel vouchers to their homes and severance checks hot in hand.

That made for at least four hours that I’d escaped Peggy’s clutches, but there was no further respite. I missed dinner entirely helping my senior mine manager tag and bag items from her seemingly endless checklists, and get everything ready to be ported or rolled into the freight elevator out. I hated every minute of it, but she needed the help ... even when after another work crew with higher level security clearance arrived from our own corporate office late in the afternoon to take over most of the heavy lifting. Still, the urgency of these tasks helped me to keep my mind off of the impending EPA visit and every crate, tank and machine-that-goes-ping that was hauled out of here and put either in a truck or loaded into a railcar ... now, today, was one less problem I might have to deal with tomorrow! That alone was worth every minute of working around the clock until everything was done.

I just hoped that the lawyers for the intruders meant next week, and not this one. They didn’t ... our unwanted and unwelcome guests arrived early that Friday morning.

That’s was fine ... the trucks had all left, fully loaded by Thursday and our train, loaded with almost everything else that we wanted sent back to Poravuvu, had pulled out from the crater at about five o’clock that same morning. I was bone tired and annoyed as fuck ... and more than ready enough to deal with a private investigation team from the EPA!

I guess that now is really as good of a time as any to spare a few words about your humble narrator. It needs to be understood pretty much right from the start that I am not a magnificent specimen of masculinity. I’m well across the wrong side of thirty-five and short-ish, 5’6” according to my driver’s license but that number is actually generous I think by two or three inches. My shoulders and chest are big, huge really; enough to cause my head to hunch forward a bit and make my muscular arms appear even longer than they really are. Half a man high and two men wide ... that’s the joke about the men of our family. As for the face, well it’s one that really only a mother could love, more square than round, with an oversized sloping forehead, generous nose and deep set and unfortunately beady eyes. My hair is red and impossibly unruly. I gave up dealing with it back in my college days and now try to keep it in a tight Ivy League cut on the sides with just a hint of a flattop. That mostly keeps it manageable, except if I’ve stayed here at the mine long enough for it to grow out a bit too much ... unfortunately like now.

The overall impression I’m afraid is rather brutish. Very much rather more Neanderthal in appearance than true Homo sapiens, one might kindly say. If one was inclined to speak less kindly, then ‘simian’ or ‘bestial’ in appearance might be reasonably accurate. If you ran into me in the woods at night you’d probably mistake me for a great ape. I can’t help it, it runs in the family and my grandmother Mabel swears that I’m a dead ringer for my grandfather. Like him and my father both, I’m an industrial chemist ... and a really damned good one, or family connections or not I wouldn’t be here ... or be put in overall charge!

On the plus side of being ‘homely’, a certain excessive amount of masculine ugliness does surprisingly seem to be an actual attraction to some women, especially unusually attractive ones. I guess they consider me ‘safe’, more like a friendly big brother than a serious potential romantic attachment. Having a pleasant and generally happy personality helps here too. I can make the coldest beauty smile within thirty seconds and laugh within a minute. Tops. Back in college and graduate school days, I was the best first-rate ‘wingman’ that could be found, begged, borrowed or bribed to helping friends meet girls. Especially with my best friend Ted Brooks, who despite being a Harvard man and a shyster lawyer isn’t entirely a complete waste as a human being ... even if most of the girls I ‘found’ for him at the end of the night preferred to go home with me instead. Ah, those were the days!

I admit it; I fall for a pretty girl with a good pair of legs and nice tits fast, but the impulse rarely lasts long. I don’t have a ‘type’ that’s feminine Kryptonite for me either, or at least I’d never been stopped completely dead on my feet dumbstruck by any woman before... until now. Too bad she was the enemy, or at least working on their behalf!

The EPA site inspection team arrived at our gate pretty early that Friday morning, calling into security for immediate access just a few minutes before eight. I’d hate to think about what time in the morning they’d left wherever they’d come from to fly into Aphrodite and then make the long drive here. Undoubtedly AIS was well compensating them for the inconvenience.

Fortunately I was already in my office in Ops, filing the BNSF railroad paperwork from earlier this morning. By filing I mean running it through my document scanner for immediate encrypted satellite upload to corporate and then an immediate trip into the NSA grade paper shredder. My files were all nicely clean and sanitized. The EPA could haul off the lot of them and I wouldn’t lose a moment of sleep.

Security had paged my office to warn me immediately and Phyl was already on her way back to Ops. She was off with Brice doing a walkthrough at the old mine’s ore loading area and smelter and they were already hurrying back here. I told Dwayne who was the current guard on duty to call in Scott ASAP to take over upstairs and he didn’t argue. Phyl had a dozen other things that he could be doing instead and I had something rather particular in mind. I then called down into the Mine to warn Peggy, who was dealing with left over stuff on Level Three and told her to grab anything that needed hiding and get ready for company.

The intercom started playing The Rolling Stones ‘I’m Just Waiting on a Friend’ and I had to laugh. That should warn everyone else remaining in the crater or the mine to make themselves scarce or find something meaningful but innocent to do! Most of our extra hands from corporate security were gone by now but the remaining half dozen or so minions would know to find one of our deeper holes in the ground and bury themselves for a while.

A few minutes later the rental car pulled up to Operations and the four inspectors got out, slowly and a bit gingerly. The car ride must have been long and a bit ragged on the passengers. Not a bad start to the day.

The EPA chief Inquisitor was easy to recognize right at first sight. She was short, plump and near middle-aged, and radiated an attitude of ‘don’t fuck with me’ that you could sense perhaps a mile away. She was very definitely of the ‘guilty until proven innocent’ school of investigation and undoubted she’d been paid a handsome bonus on the side to ensure that at least one Class A violation could be found, preferably before lunch. She didn’t look like she’d missed many meals during the last ten or twenty years.

By her side she had an obvious assistant. A gal young enough to maybe be just out of college doing an unpaid internship, and already regretting every moment of it. She was pretty enough but obviously terrified of her boss and rarely met eye contact with anyone. She never said five words during the entire visit and if anyone ever said her name I never caught it. An irrelevance.

Next was the pair of ‘independent’ consultants, a weedy dour-looking guy in his mid-late 40’s who looked like he’d been a schoolteacher his whole life and was just looking for a handy convenient tree that he could hang himself from. By his side was a very striking gal who appeared to be in her early thirties that I was having an urgent itch to suddenly propose to, to see if she was willing to become Mrs. Mayfair. I bit my tongue hard, but it didn’t straighten out my head or slow down my heart very much.

One of the alleged safeguards against abuse of the EPA 72b reform was the requirement for at least two ‘independent’ members of the inspection team. In theory this was supposed to prevent abuses and a witch-hunt, like this sort of inspection. In practice, the EPA and the private petitioner paying the bills tried to stack the deck whenever and wherever possible. Sure, this sort of illegal rigging made for grounds for an easy judicial appeal, but that would occur long after the barbarians had surged through the gates of Rome and carried off all of the plunder. Within days, if not hours, all of your gold and secrets would now be unsafely in the hands of your competitor, despite any overwhelming grounds for an immediate legal appeal.

It was hard to get an early read on the two indies and from the start they remained fairly quiet and stayed in the background, letting the fat twat from the EPA, Ms. Linda Whitehurst, run her mouth pretty much non-stop. The thin-faced bookworm, John Pollock, was a career bureaucrat from the US Bureau of Mines, which seemed a rather sensible and knowledgeable choice for an inspector, until it became increasingly obvious that the poor fellow had ridden a desk his entire career and had never once before even been inside of a mine!

The heart stopping gal on the other hand, was a real Geologist that was sort of out on-loan from the US Geological Survey (USGS). Her name was Fredericka “Fredi” Jackson and her specialty was actually vulcanology, but at least she’d been around real rocks for a big chunk of her life and didn’t seem at all like a fish out of water here. By sort of ‘borrowed’, that meant that she’d fallen prey to the most recent round of governmental layoffs and was actually now recently unemployed, on-hire today as an independent paid consultant. That could either be good for us ... or it could be real bad, depended how much she was getting paid for this gig, and by whom.

Since we didn’t have a geologist or geophysicist on-site here anymore it was going to be hard to feed her bullshit, but I knew just enough rock-talk to maybe confuse her a bit. Heck the rocks inside the crater mine were interesting and confusing enough as it was, even without my help. When in doubt, if you can’t convince ... then confound!

I let security answer the door and steer them towards my office, but we wouldn’t be staying there long. Onan would see to that!

“Hey chick-a baby, nice tits! Shake that ass! Move that sweet money-maker for papa!” That was Onan ... a marvel of feathered tact and restraint!

“Sorry about the talking chicken dinner. He sounds and behaves like a vulgar sexist objectifier of women, but don’t let your first instincts fool you ... the useless green talking feather duster is a vulgar sexist objectifier of women! Unfortunately, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has ruled, perhaps regrettably, that a Parrot cannot legally held responsible for sexual harassment in the workplace. For starters, he’s not a paid employee and on the other hand he was a direct gift from Her Majesty Queen Ele’ele and her royal consort King Renwick of Poravuvu. Diplomatic niceties and all of that other stuff.” I gestured apologetically behind my desk toward a large photo on the wall of the royal couple and shrugged with an attitude of helplessness. I gave her a pair of signed letters from both the EEOC and the US Department of State that pretty much gave the bird the full carte blanche to make a complete and utter nuisance of itself, and with apparent full diplomatic immunity. The Queen did have a rather odd sense of humor and she did have more than a few friends in useful places.

Onan then got a better look at the ample backside of the EPA inspector and began chirping out excitedly, “Wide load! Wide load!” Then the feathered nuisance began singing the Spinal Tap song ‘Big Bottom’.

“The bigger the cushion, the sweeter the pushin”

And so forth. I decided it was time to make a hasty escape. Phase One of my plan completed ... check! Confuse and confound, but remain excruciatingly polite.

Once in the main Ops area I asked them where they’d like to go and what they’d like to see first. The EPA bitch wanted to see Security upstairs first, then the outside mine facilities ... especially the crater wall gate into the mine. No surprise. This just confirmed for me right from the start that she at the very least was on AIS’s payroll.

“No problem. I’ll take you to see anything and everything that you want ... but not in those shoes! OSHA regulations, not to mention USBM policy as well. We’ve got spare hard-toed safety boots here and hardhats as well. No safety ... no inspection. I’m sure you understand.

I think that Ms. Whitehurst might have wanted to argue, but the Bureau of Mines guy Pollock set her straight fast with a long whisper in her ear. Regs were regs. That encouraged me to think that perhaps he was at least independent enough to challenge her, perhaps a bit, when absolutely necessary. The lovely Miss Jackson, already dressed sensibly for visiting a mine in comfortable jeans and sturdy well worn-in hiking boots just suppressed a wide smile as she donned her own personal mining helmet.

Who the heck expects to climb around rocks in an old meteor crater and then go into a mine wearing heeled shoes? The EPA gals apparently didn’t think that part of their clever plan all the way thorough. Even the USBM guy’s office shoes wouldn’t pass muster either, and I sat down the three of them and brought them over various pairs of spare work boots for them to try on. It goes without saying their thin dress socks and/or hose weren’t going to make walking in those steel-toed boots any easier. They were going to get blisters ... lots of them, and soon.

Not my problem. We did have spare thick woolen socks in the storage cupboard next to the boots, but they didn’t ask ... and I rather ‘forgot’ to offer them. Heh, heh...

First we went upstairs, taking the staircase of course, to let our spies get a good long look at our Security office. As I requested, Scott Kneiper had now taken over the dayshift guard duty and right from her first glance at him I could sense Linda sneering at him, and by extension us. Entirely the point of calling him up here on duty!

Scott was our resident IT geek and was a whiz with anything computer related, like our security systems. He also looks like an archetypical basement dwelling nerd with fat pasty-white skin and near permanently yellow stained fingers from an ever-present package of Cheetos or other junk food. At a glance or even casual observation you’d swear that the pudgy kid had his nose stuck in his gaming magazine and was paying zero (or even less) attention to the security screens, but that would be a mistake. Scott had eyes in the back of head and could tell you without even an overt glance what was really happening on each and every video screen. He’d been an Army Special Warfare drone pilot and could monitor a dozen or more video screens at just a glance. He’d still be there flying drones over the Big Sandbox and blowing shit up if he could have managed to keep his weight down to acceptable military levels.

Our enemies wanted to see if we were really casual about our security details? Perfect, let them think that Scott was typical for our guards and that we didn’t much give a shit out here in the desert. Now that was a nice recipe for making our foes nice and overconfident!

For the outside tour, I let Bryce do most of the talking and I hung back a bit to observe our observers a bit more carefully. I needed to decide how far I could push, prod, nudge and generally manipulate them, and just how much bullshit I could or should shovel. Despite having very little sleep in days, I was mentally right in the zone. My grandmother Mabel also said I was exactly like my grandfather in that I’d just as soon gleefully lie as tell the truth any day of the week. I didn’t often get the chance to demonstrate this talent, but I was already enjoying myself immensely!

I’d told Bryce to be nice to our guests, but he can be a grumpy bugger. It was clear that the inspectors (or at least Ms. Whitehurst) knew already exactly where she wanted to go, and also she could tell that something (or rather a lot of somethings) was now gone and missing. Several 50-ton hoppers full of rock that had been sitting on a rail siding for years, for starters. I could understand why she wanted to examine them, especially since the original intruders had ditched the samples that they had taken from the hoppers before they’d been caught, and before we’d had a chance to ship them out. Bryce was itching for an argument and I needed to divert both of them fast before an actual fight broke out. Having a real geologist present did help immensely!

“Pardon Bryce, folks ... his prostate has swollen to the size of a small melon and sometimes that affects his manners. I’ve been yelling at him and his bosses at Littlejohn Geo-Exploration for months, if not a couple years to finish hauling out the rest of the crap that they left behind when they leased the place out to us. Mr. Hobbs here, if I haven’t already made this quite apparent, doesn’t actually work for us ... that is, Poravuvu Silk, Ltd. He’s an employee of Littlejohn, from whom we rent out portions of this property, so he’s their resident caretaker of this abandoned ghost town. These faculties, including the old legacy mining operation and quite a few remaining ore carts are all Littlejohn property as well. They haul stuff out of here regularly, or whenever I make a big enough fuss about tripping over the remaining crap ... like old railcar hoppers just rusting away all full of paving rock.” For illustration I bent over and grabbed a few rocks from the ground where the hoppers had been and handed them to the lovely Miss Jackson for appraisal. She was quickly unimpressed ... as well she ought to have been.

“Brecca. Also definitely bits of shock metamorphic crap and bits of impact ejecta with obvious traces of impact melt from the original meteor strike.” She tossed the rocks back to the ground and casually examined a few other random samples but remained unimpressed. “Just Brecciated rock,” she announced to Nancy, much to her obvious displeasure, “superheated and shocked rock resulting from the compression and heat of a substantial meteor strike, which is exactly what ought to be present here. Tons and tons of the stuff ... basically only good for road bed or filling in a ditch somewhere. No commercial or industrial value ... none.” She firmly declared. I could have kissed her right on the spot. That was as close to a guarantee as I was going to get that she was going to make up her own mind about us based upon factual evidence, and not a golden handshake.

Sensing that her divine will had been somehow thwarted and determined that it would never happen again, Ms. Whitehurst then demanded that we unlock the crater wall mining gate to allow her to inspect the mine entrance. Bryce started to have a conniption again, but I was willing to give them access ... but for a rather contrary reason.