A stream of gray smoke streamed forcefully from the side of his mouth, arms folded over his chest, head slightly shaking back and forth. “My brother works there,” the EMT said, leg bouncing up and down nervously as he stood with his foot planted back against the rear bumper of the ambulance. Situated to the side of the emergency room entrance, Karib al Tenada had been the driver of the rig that responded to the scene of George Collins’s accident at the Ganges Order Processing Centre, according to the nurses whom Christina had questioned. Both women had been confused about the technicians’ decision to bring the veritable sludge pile that had been the poor man’s remains to the hospital to begin with, but certain legal expectations required that they do so.
Christina had been so numbed in the moments after seeing Mr. Collins get run down by the forklift that she couldn’t clearly recall the site of the event in the aftermath. She had a vague recollection of a vast and spreading pool of blood, a streak of which ran in a thinning line from the corpse to where the machine ended up crashing. However, for the purposes of putting together her story for The Sentinel, she wanted to get the perspective of one of the first responders to the incident. Being trained medical professionals, either one of them would lend credibility to her article, and the nurses had, as she expected, informed her that they couldn’t give direct quotes without the clearance of administrative staff.
EMTs were under no such same restrictions. Karib, however, clearly had reservations. “I understand,” she said, feeling frustrated but trying to be conciliatory. “You don’t want to get him in trouble with the company. But you recognize, don’t you, that it would be illegal for them to retaliate against your brother for statements you make on the record about what you witnessed, right?”
Karib snorted, a wry smile quirking his mouth to one side. “These people, a company like Ganges, do you think they care about the letter of the law? They will work on the outer edge of those words,” he said, looking down at the pavement. “My father, he had a saying about this; ‘Where the ink barely leaves its mark, that is where the powerful live’.”
The EMT pushed himself gently off of the back of his ambulance rig, peering around its side toward the entrance of the hospital. He swooped his head back around toward Christina, offering her the smallest of grins. “My partner, however? He has no family working there, and we rotate assignments. Speaking to one does not always mean speaking to the other. You understand, yes?”
Christina felt a small surge of hope as she looked then to the hospital entrance and saw another EMT coming out with two steaming paper cups in hand, heading straight toward her and Karib. As he came up beside his partner, handing him one of the cups of hospital vending machine coffee, he nodded to her. “Something we can help you with, miss,” he asked.
“Christina Kincaid, I’m a reporter with The Sentinel,” she replied, voice recorder in hand. “I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about an accident call you and your partner responded to at the local Ganges Order Processing Centre a couple of days ago.” The second EMT, whose copper nameplate read ‘Williams’, went through an immediate shift in expression and bearing, his shoulders slouching, head shaking slightly, and the skin around his eyes seeming to tighten up as he squinted at the memory. He took a tentative sip of his coffee, loudly, collecting himself.
“Yeah, that,” he said, not looking directly at Christina, but at some point on the ground just past her arm. “That was pretty friggin’ awful. Most times, we get called to an industrial accident, we can at least make out a face, you know? But this guy, Collins?” He looked to Karib, both men just staring one another in the eye for a moment before Williams looked Christina in the face finally. “The only thing left of his head was mashed.”
“I see. Had you ever responded to any other calls for assistance to the Centre before?”
“Sure, a couple of broken ankles, one back injury,” Williams said with a nod. He looked to Karib once more, pointing one finger from the hand wrapped around his coffee at him. “Didn’t you and Jenny get a call for a crushed hand one time?”
“Oh, God, that was brutal,” said Karib, pausing to slurp down the remainder of his coffee. He crushed the cup and tossed it toward a nearby trashcan, the arc lofty and perfect as the paper dropped in. “This poor lady, she had dropped an item that she was putting in this storage thing they mount up on rolling robots of some kind, and she reached out to grab it off the floor. When she had her hand out, the robot had some kind of computer error, and it rolled right over her, completely destroyed her hand. We barely kept her from bleeding to death on the way here.”
Between the two EMTs, Christina came away with an additional set of stories on her voice recorder about injuries they had answered to from the Processing Centre, along with a few more mentions about George Collins. Each of these other emergency calls sounded to her like simple accidents, things that commonly occurred in warehouse work environments. Even the average reader of The Sentinel would be likely to dismiss these incidents.
However, the woman with the crushed hand and George Collins’s death could not be ignored. Nor, she realized as she headed back toward her vehicle, could it be ignored that in the fifteen months that the Order Processing Centre had been open, there had been nearly a dozen major incidents at the Centre, requiring emergency medical services.
And why hasn’t everyone heard about that, she mused as she started her car.
**
“The system flagged her as soon as her access badge photo was taken for the personnel database,” Richard said, standing opposite the broad-shouldered, sharply dressed woman at her desk. Helen Macnemara, Ganges’ Head of Internal Security and Surveillance Operations, had been working for the company since its second year of operation, ever the hawk-eyed inspector. She had been coaxed out of early retirement by the company’s neurotic owner and founder with an offer she found simply irresistible; not only was the compensation far beyond anything she’d received as a federal inspector with the Empire’s Ministry of Investigations, but she’d been promised complete and total authority to take action within the confines of the company’s activities and locations.
In short, she had been given carte blanche. This, far more than the salary, had prompted the sixty-two-year-old Macnemara to jump aboard. Of course, that had been when she was only forty-eight, three years removed from public service to the Empire, and she had come to resent the persistent ennui of not having a mission of some sort to take up.
Richard Haver, one of her deputies within the department, had sent her an e-mail the day before, asking after a curious red flag alert he’d been sent from the company’s newest Order Processing Centre, in the 7th Territory. Helen held the printout in hand, staring intently at it as she asked, “And who is this woman really?”
“Christina Kincaid,” he replied, hands held tightly behind his back, standing ramrod straight before his superior. Her office hosted no clutter, no plaques or certificates. To say it was Spartan would be giving it high praise.
“And who is Christina Kincaid, Richard,” she asked, setting the printout down on her glass desktop. Helen sat forward, hands folded together, chin resting lightly atop her knuckles. She exuded an air of authority and, just under that, an air of predation, as if she were not a human being in a plain gray pantsuit, but a lynx on the prowl for its next meal. This, Richard had always felt, was primarily achieved by the slate gray of her eyes, and the careful way in which she almost never shifted the pitch or tone of her voice when speaking. If Helen Macnemara ever felt an emotion outside of cold amusement, he’d never witnessed it in play.
“She’s an investigative journalist at The Sentinel, ma’am,” he answered finally. Helen reached over for her mouse and shifted it, tapping away on her keyboard for a few moments. She clicked on a link, then looked away from the screen. “I thought it best to go ahead and give her some leeway, try to figure out what she was up to in our facility.”
“And have any of these reporters ever been up to anything that we would approve of, Richard,” Helen asked evenly, one iron gray eyebrow slightly elevated. Richard swallowed, hard.
“No, ma’am,” he answered.
“This lead you gave her,” Helen said, easing back in her chair a little. “Do you suppose it was enough rope for her to hang herself with?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, ma’am,” Richard said. “I do have one primary concern, however.”
“Go on.”
“The Deluxe Days Special running the next three weeks,” he said. “There’s always a smattering of injuries during that time, and a lot of burnout with newer employees. It starts this coming Sunday, which gives us just two days.”
“And you’re worried that our dear Miss Kincaid is going to witness these things and run a story about it in her paper, on their website?” Richard nodded without a word. “Don’t you worry about this, Richard. Thank you, though, for taking it seriously enough to bring it to my attention.”
“Should we have someone remove her when she shows up for her shift Sunday afternoon? Let her know that we’re aware of what she’s up to?”
“Much as I like you, Richard, you think too small for situations like this,” Helen replied with a small, icy smirk. “You can go, I have a phone call to make.” Richard gave her a kind of half-bow and removed himself from her office, closing the door shut tight behind him as he made his escape. Helen dialed a phone number from memory, cradling the receiver between her chin and shoulder as she navigated around her browser, looking up more information and opening various tabs to get a broader picture of both Kincaid and The Sentinel.
After only two rings, the other end of the line picked up, and Helen said, “Zack, it’s Helen. I was wondering if you had a few minutes to talk.”
**
Finding people who spoke out fervently against Ganges’ practices inside of the Processing Centres was easy enough online, thanks to anonymity offered on countless forums and message boards. Tracking down such people in the real world, however, had proven difficult for even the best reporters. Though she’d felt she had everything she needed for the bulk of her expose, Christina had one more person on her list of people to speak with, a man who had worked at the 7th Territory Centre for the first three months of its operations before walking away and publicly decrying the company and its practices.
She had reached out to Timothy Westerling that morning, before heading to the hospital to speak with the EMTs, and Westerling had agreed to meet her at a coffeeshop on the outskirts of Verick, a small suburb located perhaps half an hour’s drive from the Processing Centre to the south. She recalled hearing briefly about Westerling; an Impirial Army veteran, he’d been derided in the news as a complainer and troublemaker, and had been arrested twice for trespassing on the Centre’s property after quitting. He claimed publicly that, while the second arrest had been justified, as he had been waving a sign in the parking lot in an attempt to start a protest, the first had been a knee-jerk overreaction by Ganges when he’d only gone to the facility to pick up his last check and drop off the blaze orange safety vest he’d often worn at work.
When Christina stepped through the front door of the café, she found it easy enough to find Westerling- he was the only customer in the place, and he would have been hard to miss even if he wasn’t. Large and imposing in the way that might make one think immediately of the gods of myth, Westerling rose from his seat with a permanent scowl on his face, approaching her steadily. When she took his offered hand to shake, her own practically disappeared in his, and the raw physical strength of the military man wafted off of him in atmospheric waves.
“Thanks for speaking to me,” he said, his voice a kind of low, husky growl. “You want a drink? My treat,” he added with a smile that belied his usual countenance.
“I’d appreciate that. Biggest they have, French vanilla, and a couple of ice cubes in it so I can drink it right away,” she said. He nodded, waved her over to the small table he’d taken by the café’s front window, and headed over to the service bar. When he returned a minute later with her drink and one for himself, he let out a long sigh, squinting out the window at the mostly empty street. “Are you expecting someone else,” she asked.
“No, but one can never be too careful,” he said. “Do you have any Ganges-owned apps on your phone,” he asked abruptly, looking her dead in the eyes.
“Not that I’m aware of,” she said, pulling her phone out and handing it across the table to him. Westerling didn’t even attempt to open her home screen, popping the backing off of the phone and pulling out the battery, setting it off to one side while sliding the phone itself back to her.
“Better safe than sorry,” he said, wiggling his own flip phone at her.
“I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that a guy like you didn’t get hurt while working at the Processing Centre,” she began, pulling out her digital voice recorder, showing it to him, and after he nodded, she hit the ‘record’ button and repeated her question so that it would be heard on the recording.
“That would be correct, ma’am, though I saw my fair share of people get hurt there. Mostly sprains and muscle strains, a crushed toe in one instance. That was totally human error, though, a newer guy was dragging a pallet full of product on a pallet jack too quick, wasn’t paying attention, and ran right over someone’s foot.”
“That had to be painful,” she commented.
“I imagine so, I heard the guy screaming from all the way down in the packaging lines.”
“So then, if you don’t mind my asking, what caused you to walk away from Ganges? To try starting to protest them? What was your chief issue with the company?” Westerling took a long pull of his coffee, and seemed to pinch in a little, looking out the window once more before looking to Christina with a deep breath.
“One of the biggest lessons I took away from my time in Special Forces is that there are no bad units, at their core, just bad leadership,” he began. “You can take the biggest bunch of know-nothing knuckleheads, and if they have solid, reliable leadership, they can accomplish the mission, give or take an unexpected variable or two.
“So what you need, really need, in an organization as massive and vital to the economy as Ganges is, is strong, dependable leadership.”
“Okay,” Christina said, pulling out her pocket notebook and jotting down a quick line about Westerling’s physical demeanor. As he spoke, he seemed to loosen up a little, gesticulating slightly with his hands. This topic of leadership seemed like a passion for the big man, and it came off as obvious to her. “So, there’s problems with leadership, in your view, within the company?”
“Major problems, and they start within the Processing Centres, if my experience was any kind of metric to measure with,” Westerling continued. “The way it was explained to me and the others in my group, when the facility first opened, was that the Area Managers at our location were newly minted, previously Processing Assistants at other locations around the Empire. Think assistant managers, you know? And in order to get leadership roles filled in the middle management range at this new facility, Ganges offered these folks a promotion and raise if they left their old facilities and came to this new one, in the 7th. There was a big push for it, since the 7th was the last Territory to get cleared to even have a facility.”
“Being a largely military community, there had been a long-standing holdout sentiment among the public, as I understand it,” Christina chimed in.
“Exactly so, and now I know why. These people, they weren’t ready to be put in charge, and they knew it. And after a couple of weeks, the people higher up in Ganges should’ve known it too, so I asked to speak to a Level 5, what the company calls ‘Area Captains’, about the problem. I told this guy, these Area Managers are inept, they can’t take proper charge, and they aren’t trying to help their people, they just yell at them and tell them that they’re not hitting rates and making the managers look bad.”
“Did this Area Captain take note of your point?”
“His first question to me was how the hell I would know what it took to be a leader at Ganges,” said Westerling with an unamused, snorting grin. “I told him, hey, buddy, I was in charge of a Spec Ops team in the Army, I understand perfectly well what kind of feedback is actually helpful in training and operations to get your people on board and get the job done. Give me a try, a week-long trial is all I need, and I can get some of these people up to speed.”
“Did they actually implement your suggestion? Did you get your trial run?”
“Yes ma’am,” said Westerling, pausing to polish off his coffee. “And my people, the eight folks they gave me charge of in packaging? They had their numbers up to and above the quotas within four days. I didn’t yell at them, I didn’t lecture them, but I held them to task, made them accountable. Not just to the company’s quota, though, but to me, to their teammates, and most of all, to themselves. I told them, ‘You’ve all got bills to pay, right? Things you want to do and purchase when you’re not here, in these passages, on this concrete floor, right? Well, if you want to do any of those things, you gotta make sure you’re putting in the work, fellas, because otherwise, you are not going to cut it, and they will cut you loose without a second thought’.”
“Kind of brutal, don’t you think?”
“Kind of the truth,” Westerling retorted, a little hotly, she thought. “These folks, they had to know the stakes, because it hadn’t really been made clear during the orientation or the first week of training on-site. One day, they’d just look around and say, hey, so-and-so isn’t here, I wonder what happened. Well, that so-and-so probably didn’t make rate, and they got cleared out without a word to anybody.”
“So what happened, then? With your group, with your bid to be an Area Manager?”
“Shit,” he said with another scoff. “The Area Captain, Marko, he comes down to my group’s area after about a week and a half, he pulls me aside to his office. He says, ‘So hey, yeah, you got your people kicking ass, that’s great.’ I say ‘Okay, so what does that mean for me? Are you going to make me an Area Manager?’ And he just kind of laughs in my face and shakes his head, he says, ‘No, you haven’t got a degree of any sort, that’s a requirement for Area Managers, you have to at least have a 2-year degree or 6 years in the company, you’ve got neither. Sorry, but those’re the rules. We’re authorized to give you a one-time pay bonus for helping those folks, though’.”
“You must’ve been pretty upset about that,” Christina prompted.
“Oh, I was fucking livid,” Westerling said, hands clenching on the table’s surface into fists. “But I didn’t say shit, just asked him if I was dismissed to go back to work. He told me sure, but to take my stuff and head over to the Intake stations, over near the shipping dock. And so I did that, and the Area Manager there, she assigns me a trainer, and after about an hour, I’ve got the hang of the job there. I’m doing that for about a week, and she pulls me aside and asks me if I could do for some of her slower people up in Intake what I did with my people down in Packaging.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not a bit, ma’am,” Westerling said, now smiling like a shark. “I says to her, ‘Did Frank put you up to this?’ Frank being the Area Captain from before. And she kind of blinks at me, starts to sort of shrink in on herself, but she nods her head without a word. That’s when I called it quits and said fuck it, I’m out.”
Christina paused in her notations, looking up at the broad-chested veteran, formulating quickly in her head what she felt he was driving at. She finally said, “So, in other words, they wanted you to fix their problems, short-term, but not really acknowledge that someone could do so from outside of their expected requirements of middle management and leadership.” He lightly patted the table and pointed at her with a huge, happy expression.
“That’s it exactly, thank you, ma’am,” he half-shouted. “I couldn’t find the words for it before, but hell yes, that’s exactly what it was! They wanted a troubleshooter and leader that they could continue to pay and treat like a grunt.”
“That hardly seems like the kind of approach to use if you want a company to continue to grow like Ganges wants,” she commented, finishing her own coffee and standing up from the table. “I’d like to thank you for your time, and for talking to me, Mister Westerling. You know, I don’t understand why nobody was willing to hear you out before, when all of this happened in the first place.”
“It wasn’t necessarily the media’s fault at that time, Miss Kincaid,” he said calmly, looking out the window again. “I didn’t exactly give them all the details, and felt like I couldn’t. Everybody who works there signs a contract with a non-disclosure agreement.”
“So, what’s changed, then? Isn’t that still in effect now,” she asked. He looked up at her then, and shrugged, smiling once more.
“What’s changed is that I don’t give a shit if they sue me into the ground, now,” Westerling said. “The only way things ever change is by someone standing up, saying no more, and taking the bullet. I did that for years in the Army; I finally realized that that shouldn’t change just because I don’t wear the uniform anymore.”
**
Over the course of four days, Christina holed up in her apartment like a hermit, ordering takeout for her lunches and dinner, spending her time in three-hour chunks organizing and structuring her article, putting together what she considered her magnum opus. Perhaps it wouldn’t earn her a Freedom Pen award, but what she was putting together was vital, essential even, for the people of the Empire to be made aware of.
She took perhaps half an hour on the third day to daydream about the piece being syndicated and linked to all across the Internet.
What she finished with ended up being a nearly fifteen-thousand word, three part study on the horrors of working for Ganges. With everything in order, she saved her file, prepared an e-mail, attached the file, and sent it off to her editor finally on a fine, foggy Tuesday night.
Loosing a long sigh, she flopped back on her couch, hands together on her forehead, elbows crooked out to the sides. She lay there with her eyes closed for several minutes, an awareness creeping in on her conscious thoughts that she felt grungy. Sitting up, Christina snorted a harsh chuckle. “Oh my God, I haven’t showered in almost a week.”
Bounding up from the couch, she half-jogged back to her bedroom, gathering up clean clothes and bolting for the shower. She had put herself through the wringer in the pursuit of this story, and as she scraped her coarse loofa over her arms and legs, she envisioned the sweat, rigor, and bodyaches of working at the Order Processing Centre sloughing off with the soap and grime that lay on her skin.
Freshly showered and wearing lightweight clothes, she felt renewed, rubbing her hair with a rough white towel as she returned to the living room. She settled back down on the couch and tapped the space bar on her laptop to wake up her system from idle mode, and found herself looking at her e-mail inbox, somewhat confused.
Her top message was an auto-generated reply, of the sort she recognized; her e-mail server hadn’t been able to deliver her message because the recipient’s address wasn’t valid. Christina opened up the mail, checking the ‘To’ line, confirming for herself that she had indeed typed in her editor’s address correctly. Maybe it’s just a glitch, she thought, trying once more to send off the article.
Five minutes later, as she was perusing her social media feeds, she received an alert from her e-mail that, once again, her message had not gone through. Annoyed, Christina grabbed her cell phone and called Tom directly. After six rings, he finally picked up, and Christina took a quick breath to calm herself. Hopefully, he’d inform her that he’d just changed his address.
“Hey, Tom, it’s Christina,” she said.
“Yeah, I saw that on the caller I.D.,” he replied muzzily. “I’ve been meaning to get in touch with you.”
“Don’t worry, I finished the story,” she said with a grin that he couldn’t see. “Matter of fact, I’m trying to send it to you, but I keep getting that auto-denial saying the receiver address isn’t valid. Do you have a new one I’m supposed to send my material to?” There was a pause on the other end of the line, too long for her liking, in which she heard some kind of shuffling or movement. “Tom? What’s going on?”
“Yes, I have a new e-mail, and I’ll give it to you to send stories to,” Tom said finally, his volume reduced. “But Christina, we’re not going to run your Ganges story.” Christina felt her chest tighten up, her throat swelling with tension.
“Tom, you have to read this article, we have to run it,” she choked out. “These people who work there in those facilities, they’re barely treated like human beings.”
“It doesn’t matter, Christina,” Tom said, his voice husked out, emptied of something vital. “We’re never going to be able to run a story like it, not anymore. Ganges owns The Sentinel now. They finished the deal last Friday. I’m sorry.”
The call disconnected then, leaving Christina slumped on her couch, staring blankly at her computer screen. Everything she’d heard, all the notes she’d taken, the brutality of working in the Processing Centre herself, it had all come to nothing. Ganges would ensure that her article never amounted to anything.
Because everything, it seemed, even information, flowed down the Ganges, or sank to the bottom of its waters.