Andrea absorbed the information quietly. Throughout her career, she'd found that most executives lied about failure instinctively. They reframed it, diverted or distributed responsibility for it, buried it beneath jargon until the mistake became a 'strategic misalignment event' instead of what it actually was. Everest’s willingness to admit she had mishandled the situation was almost more useful than the intelligence itself. That in and of itself raised Andrea's opinion of her massively. Andrea glanced once more toward the distant BlackSun tower looming against the polluted glow of the horizon. She knew the company already, of course. Everybody did. Even before joining Lhotse she had followed the orbital collapse investigations obsessively as a student. Entire sections of near-Earth infrastructure lost because somebody at BlackSun had decided acceptable risk margins were for poorer companies. They'd 'accidentally' sabotaged the communications networks of a third of the world for the better part of a decade, and despite thatt, they had survived.

No. Worse than survived. [i]Thrived[/i].

That was the lesson of the modern world. If a corporation became strategically necessary enough, morality of any fuck up turned into a branding issue rather than a meaningful obstacle. BlackSun could flirt openly with fascism, poison orbital bands for generations and leave entire nations scrambling through communications blackouts, and still remain untouchable because they owned the route out of the dying planet, and had promise salvation from the pollution and the ceaseless conflicts and crises.

Mars. [i]Always[/i] Mars.

Every empire needed a frontier to justify itself. Caesar's had been the Rubicon. The British had laid claim to half the known world. BlackSun? They set their sights even higher. But the writing was on the wall in Andrea's mind. BlackSun had about as much business being a colonisation effort as Hell had being a ski resort. Andrea’s gaze drifted down toward Rooster again. If BlackSun had once possessed these things without understanding them, then the obvious question was whether they truly understood them [i]now[/i]. Whether they were searching because they had uncovered new information, or simply because somebody finally realised a catastrophic accounting error had occurred half a century too late. Important distinction. One meant competition. The other meant panic.

“I’ll proceed carefully, ma'am. You have my word.” Andrea said, with a note of finality in her tone. “If your previous investigation exposed interest in the auction records, then repeating the same approach directly would just confirm there’s something worth finding. I'll chase it up another way.”

She folded her hands loosely on the table, already mentally reorganising priorities. The records themselves were probably compromised by now anyway. Watched. Flagged. Maybe even baited and ready with digital tripwires. The smarter approach would be indirect pressure — identify who attended the auction, who moved the sold items afterward, who disappeared suddenly wealthy. People hid objects well. But the rich often hid patterns badly. Maybe she could get someone to breach the bigger banks with a backdoor into their systems, looking for individual spends in a local area within the right timeframe. She looked at the Founder and offered a polite smile.

"Thank you, Mrs Everest. I think I'm ready to begin my duties." She told her. "How shall I contact you with my findings? And what timeframe do you expect?"