Sanctuary (Jezebel's Ladder Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Hollis was the
majority stockholder in Fortune Aerospace. Mercy’s sister was the woman’s media
shadow, drawing attention away while Red trained on the moon. Mentioning the
name without a surveillance-blocking device could cause her to be fired or
worse.
    Yvette smiled. “She’s not an evil
wizard or demon. Is that how you view her?” The woman handed Mercy an
encryption-verified ‘cooperation’ card, the equivalent of a company-internal
subpoena.
    “You’re a transparency
officer—ethics enforcement.” Every organization handling the alien pages had to
have this moral police force to prevent abuse of the new abilities and
technology they granted.
    “As you signed the accords, you are
obligated to answer my questions honestly. My empathic training will tell me if
you’re dissembling. You’re permitted to have a lawyer present.”
    “I need my clothes, and then I’ll
tell you anything you want.” Mercy slipped her smart badge out of the locker to
contact Dad in secret.
    “Your father will tell you to talk
to me,” Yvette predicted.
    When Mercy reached him, Dad gave no
hints, apologies, or explanations, only the words, “Answer her.”
    A few minutes later, they were
seated in the secure conference room near Mercy’s office. The scientist
whispered, “Is this about me halting production? Any engineer in the company
can do that for safety concerns.”
    “Is it for safety?” countered
Yvette.
    “Why else?”
    “You have a history of rivalry with
Mira.”
    “Bullshit.”
    Yvette pulled a thumb-sized device
out of her pocket and ordered, “Play.”
    Mercy’s enraged voice ranted from
the player. “She needs to take a damn physics class.”
    Blanching with anger, Mercy
squeezed the player’s off button. “That was a private conversation. Has
enforcement been recording me long?”
    “Since you returned from space.”
    Jaw set, Mercy breathed
rhythmically for ten seconds. Her father and two other judges must have signed
the warrant. She wanted to scream at the betrayal. Worse, she wanted to cry.
Instead, she defended her reasoning. “You need to take the statement on that
recording in context. By my second year at MIT—age seventeen—world-renowned
scientists were taking my intuitions seriously. I adopted the NASA safety
standard at age five and confiscated my mother’s phone for reading a text while
driving. If something can go wrong, I plan a way to prevent it.”
    “But Red’s smarter.”
    It was the truth. In an idle
moment, her sister’s friend could whip off an idea to revolutionize an
industry. “Building foundations under her castle in the sky took me and a team
of scientists a year of all-nighters and the GNP of Guyana to prove.”
    “And she was right.”
    “Always right. But no matter how
advanced they are, people make mistakes. Given enough time and resources, we
can implement just about anything. But it takes far more time and money to ‘tweak’
something after it’s been put into production. Doing it her way after the fact is dangerous because it’s not in the original design spec— that is
the number-one cause of fatal incidents. ”
    “So you don’t like her personally?”
the ethics officer asked.
    “Her dad, Ambassador Hollis, gave
me my first pony ride. He’s a saint around my house. He could ask for anything.
Her mom, Jezebel, gave my dad his company. For God’s sake, the two of them paid
for the Caribbean cruise where I was conceived. To say I owe them is an understatement.”
    “But?”
    “Do you know how exacting standards
have been for this project? Nuclear weapons don’t have this tight a tolerance. It’s
not like the LHC where you just have to replace a few magnets when something
goes wrong. I could destroy the world, and no one else would see it coming.”
    “Do you want to destroy the
world some days?”
    Mercy ignored the question. “About
three-quarters of unmanned space missions blew up on the pad. In 2003, we lost
every mission. Even more can go