Maxlore masked his anxiety as he swept through the silver and brass of the lobby, looking more like a polished CEO and less like an anxious investor with a date at the unemployment office. His mind raced through his opposing emotions: bold and invincible one moment and cautious and defeated the next. He had been successful in life because he always heeded the right emotions at the right times. Always thoughtful and methodical, he’d never been in this position before.

For the first time Maxlore Industries was at risk. It could be gone tomorrow. If he didn’t come up with twenty million by midnight he would be sitting in the middle of a press conference watching his life’s work go down the drain. He was scared. There was nowhere left to turn for money. And he had no one to blame but himself.

As Maxlore strode through the lobby, he thought about the journey that had led him here. It all had begun eight years ago with the proposal to build a new type of tunnel-digging machine that used water instead of metal to bite into the earth. Hydrobore technology, the use of water as the cutting edge of the earth-boring drill wasn’t such a new thought. But his prototype Hydrobore took the idea further; it was revolutionary. It was a sophisticated tunnel building machine that cut rock, analyzed it, sorted it, and spit it out into various containers. The prototype Hydrobore created the tunnel walls, reinforced them as it oozed through bedrock like an earthworm moves through fresh wet soil.

He’d known from the beginning that the Hydrobore was going to be an all or nothing proposition. But the all was so big, so significant and the nothing seemed so far away. it took Maxlore’s daring vision to assume the risk that the Hydrobore represented.