Chapter 5 - Senator Pickles' Investigation
Before Mason could speak, Lucy looked up from her crate. "The big machines were hungry," she said.
Claire turned her chair toward the child. "What do you mean, Lucy?"
"The men in the gray suits came down here last night," Lucy said, pointing her crayon at the panel. "Daddy was already home, but I came back with him because he forgot his lucky screwdriver. We saw them plugging the giant black boxes into the wall. The boxes had the little fans on them. They were making a very loud noise, like Senator Pickles when he's mad about the breadcrumbs."
Mason cleared his throat, stepping between Claire and his daughter. "She's right, Claire. They weren't testing prototypes. They were running a secondary server array off our primary manufacturing line. High-frequency data mining. It pulled so much current it melted the copper busbars in the main switchgear."
"Data mining?" Claire whispered, the pieces of the puzzle suddenly falling into place. Richard Sterling wasn't trying to fix the drone division. He was using Northstar’s private infrastructure to host a third-party crypto-ledger or an illegal data farm, hiding the energy signatures inside the company's massive manufacturing utility bills.
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"Can you prove it?" Claire asked.
Mason reached into his tool bag and pulled out a small, burnt piece of silicone—a high-voltage connector chip that didn't belong to any Northstar system. "This was jammed inside the main breaker trip-mechanism. It’s a custom bypass. It has a serial number registered to a holding company called Sterling Global."
