by A. J. Thomas
Sean waited for the inevitable attempt to mitigate the pain, the attempt to make him feel better about the whole thing. It hadn’t happened much in the hospital, where the staff were used to interacting with people who were enduring the worst moments of their lives, but everyone he’d met since spouted some bullshit encouragement that might have been taken from an inspirational poster to try to make him feel better. He was sick of being told there was a silver lining, that God worked in mysterious ways, and that he had to enjoy getting all the best parking spots. Even Tonya did it every time she tried to talk to him, and they’d worked together for years.
When a long moment passed and Nate didn’t add the automatic platitudes, Sean risked looking up at him again. He’d shifted forward, resting his forearms on his legs, but he didn’t seem inclined to add anything at all.
That was all there was. Just simple acknowledgment.
The surprise left Sean staring at him, shaken and confused. “So what’s going on with the company? Have they offered a settlement that’ll actually cover my medical bills yet?”
“Just the initial offer they made to you in the hospital. But since your medical bills have already exceeded that amount, they know they’re going to have to come up with something better. They want to meet this afternoon to try and reach an agreement, so I’m heading there next.”
“Which is why you’re here,” Sean said, nodding.
“Yeah. You don’t need to accompany me, but obviously you’ve got a vested interest in the process. I calculated your total damages for the complaint already, although in the interest of actually getting you that amount, I added thirty percent and figured we’d start there. But before we get into the demand for damages, I need to go over a few things from your account of the accident one more time and clarify some inconsistencies that came up in my own investigation. Mr. Alden has also provided a statement, along with some interesting evidence that’ll help us out. I invited him here today because I think you deserve to be aware of what he’s got to say before you decide how you want to proceed.”
“I wrote it all down,” Sean pointed out. “Everything I can remember was in the statement I gave you.” He winced when he heard the whiny tone of his own voice. “I still have a hard time talking about it.”
“Okay,” Nate said softly. “I’ll talk about it, and Mr. Alden can talk about it, and you can just correct us if we get something wrong.”
Sean nodded and leaned back in his chair. “Whatever.”
“So you did two summer internships for CPG, and both times you were assigned to the crew of the Republic Sea. In May of this year, you graduated from college and accepted a full-time position on the same ship, is that right?”
“June. Graduation was at the end of May, but I didn’t start work until the first week of June.”
Nate’s smile seemed to get a bit less amiable. “June?”
“Yeah. I’m normally not that big on dates, but I know I started on the fourth. I’d only been aboard three days when I got hurt. I probably could have started earlier, but I had three labs to finish and a paper to hand in for my technical writing class.”
Nate looked smug.
“Told you,” said Cory, smirking.
“So you weren’t aboard the Republic Sea on May 16?” Nate asked.
“No.”
He shuffled some papers beneath the table and pulled out a photocopy of what looked like part of the ship’s log that had been enlarged. “Is this your signature? Because it’s your name.”
Sean stared at the photocopied squiggle. “It’s my name, but that’s not my signature.”
“Do you know what this is?”
“It’s one of the ship’s maintenance logs. Oh, nope, that’s a maintenance log for the large compression tank. It’s part of the pump assembly and control system me and Bruce built.”
“So your name is on a maintenance log for a date when you weren’t on the ship to perform any maintenance. How do you think that happened? That your name ended up on the maintenance log when you weren’t there?”
“It happens. We’d go out for weeks at a time, and the shifts are long. Eight hours on, eight off, eight on, and so on. All the time. The ship is always under way. Maintenance on the pump system is supposed to be performed by a certified engineer, but there are usually only three assigned to the ship.”
“Just me and Bruce before you came aboard in June, because he was holding the position for you,” Cory explained.
“Everybody needs time off sometimes. If one of the engineering crew isn’t available, the navigation crew will take care of it. It’s not like any of it’s difficult. You calibrate a few gauges, check valve seals to make sure the silicon hasn’t broken down, that kind of thing.”
“Why would the navigation crew need to do it?”
“Safety regulations,” Cory explained quickly. “I don’t know if you took a good look at the pump assembly when you were out at the docks, Mr. Delany, but it’s huge. Thanks to the control system Sean programmed, it can pump water and hydrochloric acid into an oil well at over 25,000 PSI. With that control system, one well-stimulating ship can service every CPG oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The system is worth too much for them to risk letting it blow up.”
“So keeping the Republic Sea operational was the company’s top priority?”
Sean huffed. “Are you kidding? Without some form of fracking procedure, the oil rigs don’t make a cent. They can pump petroleum out of the wellhead, but it’s not going to just shoot up into the wellhead from the ground. When oil and natural gas form, they’re trapped in a layer of permeable bedrock. You can’t just suck it out. Every oil well in the world uses pressurized fluid to fracture the bedrock and drive fossil fuels to the surface.”
“You said acid?”
“Yes.” Sean nodded. “It breaks down the geological structures more efficiently than water. But, being out at sea, water is cheap and readily available. Efficiency minimizes cost, but there are a dozen variables you can modify to increase the efficiency of the process overall.”
“Which is what the control system we invented is programmed to do,” Cory pointed out.
“It interprets real-time geological and seismic data, increasing and lowering the pump pressure to produce positive interference, making the actual destructive forces involved in the fracturing process huge. It’s really cool.”
“Okay, you just lost me,” Nate admitted.
“It’s basic physics,” Sean insisted, opening his sketchbook to a blank page. “Traditional fracking fills the entire layer of rock with water, increasing the pressure until the reservoir rock is obliterated. It works, but it has problems, including creating such high reservoir pressure that natural gas can seep to the surface. That’s why no one wants fracking in their own area. But my system changes the pressure, cycling it. The result is waves of increased water pressure pushing through the rock, hitting the denser rock at the edge of the reservoir, and then bouncing back.” He drew a quick illustration of a wave. “When it bounces back, the next wave is timed to cross it at a point where we get the most positive interference. Get the timing wrong and you end up with negative interference, so the waves cancel each other out.” He sketched a second wave over the first, but with the wave peaks at opposite points in the cycle. “Get the timing right, though, and you have positive interference,” he explained, drawing a third wave overlapping the first at just the right moment for the waves to align. “Which means twice as much force moving through the bedrock at that moment. The effective pressure doubles.”
“Which increases the oil output while minimizing the risk of having gas or petroleum contaminating soil and water near the surface,” Cory concluded. “I won’t say it’ll revolutionize the entire process, but it’ll easily double, maybe even triple CPG’s profits over the next ten years.”
“It’ll make that much difference?” Nate asked, his eyes wide.
“Before the well-stimulating ship concept, oil companies had to spend a small fortune to build fr
acking equipment aboard each rig, still using water as a stimulating medium, and hire a set of personnel to run each one. There are over a hundred and twenty CPG oil rigs in the gulf. With a traditional pump system on a well-stimulating ship, they could service each rig with a fleet of about twenty ships. But one or two ships, with the pump we designed, can do the same.”
“Damn.”
Cory nodded. “CPG’s got the old ships running ragged trying to keep the company profitable while we’re stuck in port. Every day the Republic Sea spends sitting at the dock costs the company close to a million dollars. Maybe more, if there are several rigs in one area.”
“That explains the waiver….”
“Huh?”
“The settlement offer CPG’s in-house counsel sent me seemed fairly standard, except for a clause where you would sign a waiver declaring that you have no ownership interest in any and all inventions, technologies, or designs produced by the crew of the Republic Sea during your employment with them. I thought it was a fairly standard clause, but this changes things. Did everyone contribute to it?”
“Obviously,” Cory said, rolling his eyes.
“When they could, but otherwise, it was mostly me,” Sean insisted. “I used the semesters when I was back in school to run simulations, work out radio and satellite relays to get the data to the ship quickly enough, and code the control mechanism so it could predict the wave motion and adjust the pressure accurately. I even used the school’s 3-D printer to make models of a lot of the components. If I’d have been on the ship, I never would have had time to do any of it. Granted, I never would have bothered if Bruce and Cory hadn’t thought it was viable.”
“We found time to cast all the parts in steel once you were back with us,” Cory interjected. “But we were never employed to redesign the pump system—we were hired to run what was already there. Do you have any idea how much every other oil company in the world would pay to use that control system? If you sign an agreement saying you don’t own it, they’ll patent it in a heartbeat. You can’t let them get away with it.”
“I never really thought about it,” Sean said. “But I’m never going to be able to work in petroleum extraction again, so if they won’t cover my medical bills, maybe another company out there would pay me enough for it that I won’t end up bankrupt after all.”
“We could all make use of it,” Cory insisted. “You, Bruce, and I were the only ones who worked on it. We’re the only ones who know how the prototype functions. We could apply to patent it and sit back and collect royalties from every petroleum and natural gas company in the world, Sean.”
“I think they’d probably challenge that,” Sean said, shaking his head. “They’ve got to have some right to it too. It’s their equipment, on their ship. The sensor data is collected from seismograph stations they installed. It’s transmitted to the ship by radio and satellite systems they contracted to use. They licensed the modeling software I used when I designed the control module. Bruce persuaded them to let me fiddle with shit, but it was their shit to begin with. Frankly, I’m surprised they’re even bothering to get me to sign anything. I doubt Bruce would agree, either way.”
“No, he wouldn’t. That company is the only thing he’s ever been loyal to, and he’s not going to hesitate to help them screw you over.”
“Let’s come back to the pump system, okay?” Nate asked, scribbling a quick note. “It’s obviously a more complicated issue than CPG made it out to be, and if CPG went out of their way to provide materials and systems to make Sean’s invention work, then they’ve got a strong case to challenge any patent application. If they want you to attest that you don’t have any ownership interest badly enough, it might give us some leverage to use this afternoon. We’ll have to see what they say when they bring it up. Now, the navigation crew, that’d be the six-person crew assigned by the owner of the ship, Malik United?”
“Yes. CPG charters the Republic Sea from Malik. They provided the navigation crew that maintained the ship and actually sailed it, even though CPG pays them. CPG outfitted the ship with the pump system and a crew of petroleum engineers and geologists. The CPG crew is supposed to work on the well-stimulating equipment, but with only three guys, sometimes things have to get done.” It had seemed so reasonable before the accident, but now, listening to himself, Sean realized just how much they must have cut corners.
“Were there times when things didn’t get done? Your name is listed as the engineer who performed maintenance on this emergency valve release. Albeit this one was also signed off on before you came aboard the ship. But first, what does it do?”
Sean squeezed his eyes shut, panic rising inside him at the implications. “It releases the pressure inside the tubing and allows the hose and cable assembly to disconnect from the pump on the deck of the ship. It’s a fail-safe in case the hose blows off the wellhead.”
“And did it fail? Is that why you tried to disconnect it from the top of the oil rig?”
“It didn’t fail,” Cory insisted. “No one had time to use it. When the thrusters died, the crew were focused on using the engines to keep the ship stationary.”
“All right. Something else to look into, then. Bruce Lancaster was in charge, right?”
Sean felt his stomach sink. The last thing he wanted to do was talk about Bruce, but he knew he’d have to eventually.
Cory touched his shoulder gently. “It’s okay.”
“There’s nothing about this that’s okay. Bruce was in charge, yeah.”
“He was in the oil-rig control room at the time?”
“Bruce and I both were,” Cory said. “Sean was down on the platform.”
Sometimes, in his dreams, he found himself trapped back on the rig, staring up at the control room where Bruce was smiling down at him. He took a deep breath, fighting to stay calm.
“And was Bruce the one who instructed you to disconnect the tubing? That wasn’t quite clear from your written statement.”
He remembered Bruce’s voice, remembered the way he’d shouted at him to get the cables unbolted. Without the bow and aft thrusters to hold the ship steady in the current, there had been enough slack in the cables for the ship to be tossed into the concrete pylons the oil rig was built on, over and over. The ship, along with everything he’d worked on for two summers, would have been destroyed. At that moment he hadn’t cared about saving the ship or the pump equipment, just saving the bunk Bruce had said they’d share when they were aboard. He’d wanted to save the tangled sheets that seemed to forever smell like an intoxicating combination of Bruce’s aftershave and sex.
“Someone yelled at me to disconnect the cables and hose before the ship was crushed, but I don’t remember who it was,” he lied.
“When you were disconnecting the bolts, did it occur to you that what you were doing might be dangerous?” Nate asked. “That you should stop?”
“The only thing that occurred to me was that the waves were high and there weren’t bumpers set out, so if the ship got thrown into the pylons, the impact would breach the hull.”
“Bumpers?” Nate asked.
“Rubber bumpers. They keep the side of a ship from hitting the dock. Looking back, I know they wouldn’t have made a difference if the ship had crashed into the bottom of the rig,” he muttered. “The only way to save the ship and the rig was to disconnect the hose and cables, either from the wellhead or the pump itself.”
“And did Mr. Lancaster or Mr. Alden do anything to save the ship? Other than telling you to do it?”
Sean tried not to glare, but he couldn’t help it. “I am absolutely sure Bruce followed whatever protocol CPG had in place to deal with unforeseen equipment failures. And I know he tried to help me.”
Bruce had been there when Sean thought it was the end. He’d been right there at Sean’s side.
Nate was staring at him, a curious look on his face. “You two were friends?”
“I suppose we were friends, yes. Bruce is a good guy,” Sean said, trying
to avoid the question.
On the couch, Cory almost laughed.
“He did everything he could,” Sean insisted.
“And you don’t want to get him in trouble,” Nate said, scribbling a quick note on an already full legal pad.
“They’re going to try and blame someone. The easiest option for them is to blame me, but if the settlement or trial turn out to be costly, they’re going to try to pin responsibility on Bruce. This could ruin his career, his life. He doesn’t deserve that.”
Nate sighed and tapped his pen on the notepad in his lap. “It did ruin your career. I don’t want to suggest it ruined your life, but things certainly can’t go the way you planned, can they? Did you deserve it?”
“You don’t know shit about my life,” Sean insisted, feeling defensive. “This might have dropped me back down to where I started from, but I’m not dead yet. I’m not going to suggest Bruce did a damn thing wrong, because he didn’t. Everything went crazy, someone shouted to disconnect the cables, and I followed through. It didn’t even sound like him.”
Nate nodded slowly and pulled out his phone. “Mr. Wilkinson, do you have any idea how many people break out their cell phones and videotape something the moment things start to fall apart?”
Cory looked insulted. “It wasn’t like that. I didn’t break out my phone because Sean got hurt. We were in range of the shore and a cell tower for the first time in weeks—I was making a video to send to my family.”
“Regardless,” Nate said, turning to Sean, “Mr. Alden here did manage to capture footage of the control room during the accident.” Nate turned the phone so he could see. The video file began with a still image of Bruce, looking terrified.
“If you’re being honest and you really don’t remember who shouted at you to disconnect the hose and cables, I should probably hit play, because I think you need to see what happened. Do I need to? Do you honestly not remember? Or are you trying to protect him?” Nate asked.
“He didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I’m sure he did exactly what he was supposed to do in the circumstances. But he did order you to disconnect the cables.” It wasn’t a question. “Whether it was right or wrong doesn’t actually matter, in the long run. Whether or not he acted according to company policy….” Nate shrugged. “The real question, as far as your case is concerned, is whether or not his instructions contributed to your injury.”