Chapter 317: GeneCorp Filing
The filing ran to twenty-four pages.
Cole had written longer documents. This one was not long because it needed to be. It was long because the Assessors' Board required specific evidence categories for a resource classification petition, and GeneCorp's legal division had been very clear about what would and would not hold at preliminary review.
He sat at his Kael's Seat office on the fourteenth morning back from the eastern zones and read the draft from the beginning.
The argument was sound. The Gene Distribution Network predated the Guild's eastern division by ten thousand years. It was not built by the Guild. It was not built by the carrier. It was built by a civilization that was no longer present to claim it. Under continental resource law, structures predating current institutional authority — especially those with documented commercial output at the surface — fell under public resource classification, with extraction rights subject to licensing.
