Shattered Legacy by Shane R. Daley Page A

technical paperwork, and hard-copy internal memos were scanned and archived to a closed archive network that was not accessible to the outside world. That was why he needed to be in the Records Retention Room to access the information.
    As he started pulling up the work orders, it dawned on him that if he were caught snooping here, Noah Gettleman would probably deny everything. Then again, he was already in enough trouble. What could really make things worse?
    He looked up to see the young woman still standing beside him, fidgeting nervously. She had broken several security protocols by even allowing Kanavos access to the room, but she was too polite to point that out now.
    He checked his watch. His lunch break ended in ten minutes. He searched the work order numbers, opening each return in a new browser window, occasionally switching between them to compare the results.
    As he examined the records, he tried to draw the woman into casual conversation. “You get many visitors down here?” he asked, squinting at the screen.
    “Only during the day,” she replied, still watching him carefully. “We get mostly interoffice mail guys. They drop off material for processing. Nobody ever comes back for anything. I think you’re the first person in months who’s actually wanted to pull anything out of here.”
    Kanavos suddenly stopped flipping between screens and inhaled sharply. “Oh, man.”
    “What is it?” The woman leaned down and looked over his shoulder. On the screen was an enlarged image of a standard work order form. Kanavos recognized the completion signature as his own. He flipped to the next screen and back again.
    “Oh, man,” he repeated, softer.
    “Did you find what you were looking for?” She turned her head to stare at his profile. “Did you win your bet?”
    “Oh, yeah.” He nodded slowly. “Somebody's going to owe me big-time.”
     

WEDNESDAY
    (AP) – Three hundred million people worldwide watched Monday's broadcast of the Naiad liftoff. The orbiter is expected to dock with the International Space Station on Thursday. - Templar Enterprises stock price rebounds from yesterday’s plunge. Some analysts believe the rise is due to anticipation of future space missions. “The stock has performed remarkably well,” states Bernard Drefus, Senior Portfolio Manager at Tobaro Investors, LLC. “This is despite the fact that the company went public without the expectation of profits for several years.”
     

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    W. Sinclair Dorian had funded one of the largest corporate takeovers of the 2000s when the sixty-four year old billionaire bought up a controlling interest in Templar Enterprises, an aerospace conglomerate he had founded in 1987. The takeover had been relatively smooth, since Dorian already owned nearly a third of the company stock. After reacquiring control, he reorganized the board of directors and spearheaded a management shift that returned the company’s focus to purely aerospace ventures.
    He then presented his company with a single, monumental goal: to build a reusable orbiter that could take off and land like a conventional aircraft, and could launch a payload into space at a price of less than a hundred dollars a pound.
    In addition, he wanted the company to make this technically feasible within three years, and to make the venture profitable within five.
    Taking his vision to the public, Dorian spoke confidently of the private sector's ability to revolutionize the space industry, expand space tourism, colonize the solar system, and to bring about a common goal for humankind. While his ideas were inspired, many thought Dorian was a crackpot, trying to regain the lost glory of his old entrepreneurial days. Regardless, the old man lectured tirelessly, stressing that those willing to invest in space exploration today would reap untold future dividends. He explained to skeptics that although he could afford to build his orbiter himself, he did not want to do so. He believed