Chapter 3 - The Thirty-Day Countdown
Word travels fast in the aviation industry. By the time I arrived back at my apartment to pack my essentials, my personal email inbox was already flooded with frantic messages from Northstar Meridian’s middle management. Engineers I had mentored were asking what was happening; safety directors were demanding to know why the core telemetry licenses had suddenly been flagged with a thirty-day termination warning; and Marcus Bell, the general counsel, had sent three separate emails begging for an immediate, confidential renegotiation meeting.
I didn't reply to a single one.
Instead, I sat at my kitchen table with a cup of black coffee, watching the digital countdown clock I had coded into my personal management console.
29 days, 23 hours, 45 minutes until AURORA license revocation.
Across town in the executive suites of Northstar Meridian, pandemonium had undoubtedly broken out. Without AURORA, their entire long-range fleet would lose its automated severe-weather routing certification under international aviation safety laws. Regulators in both the US and Europe required real-time predictive hazard mitigation for transatlantic flights. If Northstar couldn't prove they had a licensed, functioning predictive system by the deadline, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) would ground their entire wide-body fleet overnight.
At 2:00 PM, my doorbell rang.
I opened it to find Nolan standing in the hallway. He looked like he hadn't slept in a week. His tie was loose, his hair was slightly disheveled, and the arrogant veneer he had worn in the conference room had completely fractured into raw, unfiltered panic.
“Evelyn. We need to talk,” he said, stepping past me into the apartment before I could invite him in.
“You’re trespassing, Nolan,” I said coldly, leaning against the doorframe. “And you’re tracking mud onto my rug.”
“Stop playing games!” he snapped, turning around, his voice echoing off the apartment walls. “Do you have any idea what you’ve set in motion? The board has been screaming at me all morning. Celeste is threatening to strip my executive title if I don't fix this mess by tonight. The FAA just called asking for documentation on our predictive software licensing renewals!”
“Then I suggest you show them the documentation,” I replied evenly.
“We can’t! Because the software belongs to your private corporation, and our legal department is telling me that buying it out at market value would cost upwards of seventy million dollars!” He stepped closer, his expression shifting from anger to desperate manipulation—the same pleading look he used to give me when we were first dating and he needed help passing his commercial checkride. “Evelyn... please. We were married. We shared a life. Can’t we work this out like adults? Come back to Northstar. Name your salary. Two hundred thousand? Three hundred? And we can drop the demotion—that was just... that was Mother’s idea, you know how she gets about corporate restructuring—'
I let out a short, humorless laugh.
“Nolan, do you hear yourself?” I asked, looking him dead in the eye. “Three days ago, you sat me in a folding chair against a wall and humiliated me in front of fourteen executives to stroke your mother’s ego and punish me for a divorce you initiated. Now that your multi-million-dollar airline is about to crash into regulatory concrete, you want to play husband?”
“It was business!” he shouted, desperation overriding his judgment. “Everything we did was just business!”
“No, Nolan,” I said, walking over to the door and pulling it wide open. “Business is what I’m about to do with Graham Vale. You built an empire on stolen code and family nepotism. Now you get to watch it burn down to the foundation.”
Nolan’s face drained of all color. “Graham Vale? What does Vale Aeronautics have to do with this?”
“Everything,” I said, pointing out into the hallway. “Now get out of my apartment before I call building security to drag you out. Unlike your corporate board, they actually do their jobs.”
May you like
Trembling with rage and humiliation, Nolan backed out into the corridor. He stopped at the elevator, his eyes full of venom. “You’ll never work in this industry again, Evelyn. I’ll make sure of it. I’ll blacklist you from every airline from here to Singapore.”
“Try it,” I smiled softly. “I’m already leaving the atmosphere.”
