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Leaving Underground Laboratory One, Ethan rode Bumblebee through the surface tunnel, surfaced two blocks away from the construction zone, and pointed the car toward the city center.
He had a phone call to make first.
Xavier Holt, Director of the National Energy Ministry, was staying at one of the senior official guesthouses in the Ashford City government compound for the duration of the opening ceremony and the follow-up state functions. Ethan dialed his direct line.
"Director Holt."
"Mercer. It's nearly eleven at night."
"I know. I was wondering if I might convince you to come out for a late dinner. Something is on my mind. I'd rather discuss it tonight than wait."
There was a small pause on the other end.
Holt was, by long habit, an extremely disciplined man. Late dinners were not part of his standard schedule. His evenings were structured around documentation review, exercise, and an early sleep. Spontaneous social calls from young business contacts at eleven at night were precisely the kind of disturbance his routine was designed to refuse.
But Ethan Mercer was not a typical young business contact, and the careful "something is on my mind" framing was, Holt read instantly, a man asking for a private conversation about a specific matter that could not wait until business hours.
"Where."
"I'll come to you. I'm twenty minutes out."
"I'll be at the front entrance."
Twenty minutes later, the yellow shape of Bumblebee pulled up at the front entrance of the guesthouse on schedule.
The passenger door opened.
Holt, who had been waiting on the steps in a dark coat, did not stand on ceremony. He had been quietly admiring Ethan's car since the press conference months earlier, and propriety regarding his official position had so far prevented him from finding any plausible pretext to ask for a ride. Now that an invitation had effectively been delivered, he was not going to refuse it.
He lowered himself into the passenger seat with the small, slightly self-conscious pleasure of a senior official getting to act on a long-held curiosity.
The door shut. The seatbelt drew itself across his torso and locked.
He had time to begin a question before Bumblebee accelerated.
The acceleration was the acceleration of a vehicle whose drivetrain had been specified by an interstellar civilization. Holt was pressed back into the seat with a force that bypassed the normal sensory register of fast car and landed in the more visceral register of was this a mistake. The yellow shape of Bumblebee detached itself from the guesthouse curb and merged with the late-night traffic at a velocity that no Valorian vehicle code permitted, and Holt, gripping the door handle, made a small involuntary sound he would later refuse to admit having produced.
In the driver's seat, Ethan kept his expression neutral. He had not, in honest fairness, warned Holt. But Ethan also suspected that warning would have spoiled the experience the older man had clearly been wanting.
Bumblebee, for its part, was visibly unhappy.
The yellow sports car had, over the last several months, become accustomed to a specific passenger profile: Ethan alone, or occasionally Yvette. Holt was a new variable. Worse, Holt, from the moment of buckling in, had been touching everything. The control surfaces. The interior trim. The dashboard inlays. Each tap was the careful curious touch of a man who had been admiring the car from a distance for months and was finally, gleefully, allowed to inspect it.
To Bumblebee, who possessed a small but distinct personality matrix and a Decepticon-adjacent intolerance for being handled by strangers, the touching was deeply irritating.
The Transformer made a small private mental note. The next time a new passenger needed transport, perhaps the responsibility could be assigned to Blackout. Holt being carried by Blackout, while Blackout was in helicopter form, would be a moderately educational experience for everyone involved.
Bumblebee covered the distance to the chosen restaurant in under five minutes.
The establishment was a late-hours dining spot Ethan had selected specifically for its discreet private rooms. As Holt reached for the door handle, Ethan held up one hand.
"Hold on, Director."
Holt paused.
Ethan produced two pairs of sunglasses from the center console and handed one across.
"If you'd rather not have the entire restaurant staring at us, put these on. Our faces are, between us, recognizable in a way that is going to attract attention. The sunglasses are not perfect cover, but they significantly slow recognition."
Holt looked at the sunglasses with the resigned expression of a man recognizing that the rules of his evening had been quietly rewritten. Then he sighed, took the pair, and put them on.
Both of them, late at night, in coats and dark glasses, exited the car.
Bumblebee, the moment Holt's weight had cleared the seat, emitted a small audible exhale of relief through its dashboard ventilation. The exhale was not strictly necessary as a mechanical function. It was an editorial comment.
Ethan, with a small inner sigh of his own, parked Bumblebee in a discreet corner of the side lot and led Holt toward the restaurant entrance.
A waiter met them at the door before they had finished walking up the step.
The waiter was young, attentive, and clearly trained in the etiquette of late-hours private dining. He took in the two men in coats and dark glasses, registered the unusual presentation, and addressed them with the careful neutral politeness reserved for guests whose appearance suggested they preferred not to be identified.
He asked their preferences.
Holt, who had been informed by his ministry staff that the Republic had transferred twenty billion marks into Ethan's corporate account, did not feel any need to restrain himself on the menu. He ordered with the unhurried satisfaction of a senior bureaucrat selecting from the upper price tier of a private menu without concern for cost.
Ethan, watching the order accumulate, kept his face polite while his heart performed several small protesting motions.
He had come here to ask for a favor. The favor was substantial. The cost of dinner was, by any reasonable comparison, trivial. But Ethan had grown up counting change for the laundry machine, and the part of his psyche that performed that counting had never gone fully dormant. Watching Holt order three of the most expensive items on the menu in succession produced, in that part of his psyche, a small involuntary ache.
He managed a serene professional smile.
The waiter, after totaling the order, was sufficiently impressed by the bill that he led them, without delay, into one of the establishment's private rooms.
In the main dining room, several of the late-night patrons watched two men in dark glasses disappear through a side door at eleven-thirty at night and returned to their own meals with mild amused suspicion.
In the kitchen, the rest of the wait staff gathered around the waiter who had taken the order.
"Are you serious? Those two looked like they were avoiding someone. You gave them a private room? What if they don't pay."
The waiter shook his head with the patient air of someone who had thought this through.
"You don't see the angle. If they dine and dash, a private room makes them far easier to physically contain until the manager arrives. The manager prefers it that way. We've used the same approach with three other suspicious groups this season."
The kitchen staff considered this. They conceded the point. They returned to plating.
In the private room, behind a closed door, the two men removed their sunglasses.
Ethan, with an exaggerated show of deference, pulled out the innermost chair for Holt and gestured him toward it with the careful courtesy of a host whose intentions were clearly not innocent.
Holt, who had been on the receiving end of various Mercer-flavored opening gestures for several months now, lowered himself into the chair without comment.
"Kid," he said. "You don't come looking for me at eleven at night unless you're after something. Out with it. Tell me what you need, and let me decide whether this meal is worth what you're about to ask me for."
Ethan, who had not actually expected to be permitted to ease into the conversation, dropped the pretense.
"J.A.R.V.I.S. Send a copy of the materials list to Director Holt's device."
"Of course, sir."
Holt's phone, in his coat pocket, gave a small chime. He removed it. A new document had, somehow, appeared in his message inbox without any visible network activity having occurred between the watch on Ethan's wrist and the phone in Holt's pocket.
Holt's face, briefly, went through the specific expression of a senior official privately envying a piece of technology he could not officially be seen requesting.
If the National Energy Ministry had access to an artificial intelligence assistant of J.A.R.V.I.S.'s caliber, the operational workload of the entire ministry would, by Holt's professional estimate, be cut in half overnight.
He pushed the thought aside. He opened the document.
The list was long. Holt scrolled through it twice. By the second pass, his scalp was distinctly uncomfortable.
"Mercer."
"Director."
"Are you planning to siege a terrorist cell. I am asking that question seriously. The volume of rare-earth metals on this list, combined with the quantity of military-grade semi-finished components, is enough material to outfit a small private military force. Please tell me, in plain language, what you intend to do with this."
Ethan rubbed the back of his neck with the sheepish expression of a man who had been caught with a suspicious shopping list and had a defensible cover story prepared.
"Director. The terrorist-siege framing is a bit harsh. Our domestic security forces handle terror cells without difficulty. The kind of opponents who would warrant this material list are not within our borders."
"That answer," Holt said evenly, "does not actually answer the question."
Ethan dropped the joking tone.
"The seabed reactor program is solving the production-side problem for the Eastern Region's energy supply. But the distribution-side problem has not yet been addressed. The West-East Power Corridor was designed around ultra-high-voltage direct-current transmission. That technology was developed for a generation of power plants whose output profiles are not compatible with mercerium-based reactor output. If we attempt to channel mercerium-grade energy flow through the existing UHVDC infrastructure, the transmission lines will burn through. The substations will fail. The grid will fall over within days."
He paused.
"So I need to develop a new transmission and storage architecture. Lower transmission losses. Higher current capacity. New conductor materials. New storage capacitance designs. The list in front of you is the materials base for that research program."
Holt considered this.
It was a real problem. Holt had been briefed on the transmission-side concern by his ministry's engineers. The Eastern Region's existing grid had been engineered for the production profiles of conventional plants, and the mercerium reactors would, by every preliminary projection, require a comprehensive replacement of the transmission backbone. The replacement program would cost, by ministry estimate, somewhere between fifty and two hundred billion marks, and would take five to ten years if executed through conventional procurement.
If Ethan could deliver a transmission solution that worked, on a timeline that allowed the seabed reactors to actually feed the grid, the saving to the Republic would be enormous.
"Do you have a concept already, or are you starting from a blank slate."
"I have some ideas. They require empirical validation before I can promise anything."
Holt was quiet for a long moment, scrolling through the materials list one more time.
He was, in honest professional terms, not being deceived. He could see that the list contained a number of items whose relevance to a transmission-research program was, at best, indirect. Several of the rare-metal entries had no obvious application to conductor design. A handful of the semi-finished military components were, in Holt's reading, almost certainly intended for something else entirely.
Ethan was, in Holt's assessment, smuggling additional procurement requests inside a legitimate research program.
Holt was a senior bureaucrat. He had seen this maneuver thousands of times. Subordinates in every ministry he had ever worked at had, throughout his career, tried to pad legitimate budget requests with personal pet projects, side initiatives, and procurement requests that could not be justified on their own merits.
In most cases, Holt's response had been a clean rejection.
In this specific case, however, he was dealing with the only person in the Republic whose actual scientific output meaningfully exceeded the value of whatever pet projects he might be padding the request with.
If Ethan Mercer wanted to attach some unexplained items to a legitimate research procurement, and the legitimate research produced even half of what he was projecting, the unexplained items were, by any honest cost-benefit analysis, a bargain.
Holt set down the phone.
"The materials, I can get for you. But I want results. The transmission program needs to produce, on a timeline that matches the seabed reactor rollout. The Republic is not going to spend money on a research initiative that does not deliver."
Ethan straightened.
"Director. I give you my word. The Republic's lights, in our generation and the next, will continue to burn without interruption. New Future Technology Energy will see to it."
Holt regarded him for a long moment, then gave a small nod.
The business was concluded.
The food arrived rapidly. The kitchen, at this hour and with the dining room thinning out, was able to push the order through quickly. Within fifteen minutes, six hot dishes and a large tureen of soup were arrayed across the private room's table.
The portions were generous. The two of them, even at full appetite, could not have realistically finished the order. Holt had been mentally preparing to pack the excess as takeaway for the ministry staff who had accompanied him on the trip. A rare evening with a young billionaire was not an opportunity to be wasted; the leftovers could subsidize his staff's lunches for two days.
He picked up his chopsticks.
He took three deliberate bites of the nearest dish.
He looked across the table.
In the three bites Holt had taken, Ethan Mercer had eaten the rest of the food.
The six hot dishes were empty. The plates were spotless. The only remaining content on the table was the tureen of soup, which Ethan had apparently decided to leave behind out of some last residual sense of professional courtesy.
Ethan, whose serum-enhanced metabolism had been ravenous for hours and who had been suppressing it through the entire conversation, had finally given up the suppression the moment the food arrived. He had eaten with the focused efficiency of a wartime soldier clearing a ration kit.
Holt stared at the empty plates.
His ministry staff, he thought distantly, were not going to have leftover food from this evening. His ministry staff were going to have nothing.
Across the table, mouth full, Ethan made an apologetic motion toward the soup and managed a slightly muffled remark.
"Director. Please. Eat. Don't... stand on ceremony with me."
Holt did not respond.
He looked at the empty plates.
He looked at Ethan, who was now finishing the last of the soup.
He had spent the last thirty years of his career cultivating the discipline necessary to negotiate with foreign heads of state, and he found, in this specific moment, that the discipline had nothing useful to offer him.
He said, eventually, very quietly:
"Mercer."
"Yes, Director."
"I am going to put a ration clause in the next round of grant paperwork."
"...That's fair."