2.6
28 October
Clementine Cislunar Fuel Depot
Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 1
Cislunar Space
Taking long, meditative breaths, Sally Grigorieva Orlova watched the stars through the visor of her spacesuit.
With only three weeks of training in her logbook, Sally was technically forbidden outside the station without an experienced astronaut to escort her. However, as Sally was not in the habit of paying attention to what was and was not forbidden, she was out here by herself, floating in the full glare of the Sun.
The side of her suit that faced the Sun was hot, and the side that faced away was cold, and she had turned off the circulation of coolant fluid to enjoy the sensation of these temperatures against her body. Like a spa. It could be a spa, someday.
However, the brightness of the sun did not bother her eyes or impede her view of the amazing sights all around her. The display on the inside of her visor was not only shading against the light reflecting off of surfaces, but also (thanks to subroutine calls to the suit’s native eye-tracker and ephemeris) completely occulting the disk of the Sun itself.
Once Sally had figured out that the visor’s “shade” was actually just a repurposed liquid crystal display film, it had not been difficult to hack the suit’s processor to add the occultation capability, along with other capabilities she was still exploring. It was amazing that no one had ever thought to do this before. She figured if the suit’s designers ever actually spent time in space themselves, or if the people living and working in space knew more about how their equipment worked, then this was one of the first things they would have changed. Astronomers put occultation discs in front of the Sun all the time; it was not exactly a new idea.
Then again, it was amazing that no one here on Clementine had ever thought to ask, Hey, Sally, what are your skills? What have they been teaching you at that fancy school for troubled youth? Probably a lot of hands-on stuff, yeah? Not so much bookwork.
Dear Daddy had decided to bring her into the family business by teaching her what he knew about what he did. This didn’t bother her, to be treated like a blank slate or a flawed copy, but it did lower her opinion of Daddy, who seemed to have an unfortunate habit of letting resources go to waste.
The suit was brand new, and the inside of it smelled like plastic and machine oil and her own hair. It wasn’t a bad smell. Breathing deeply, floating in a neutral, fetal position, she spoke the words, “Annotations on.”
The helmet display came alive with new markings—dozens of them, all over the sky.
In front of the occultation disk, for example, was an arrow pointing just off-center, with the words esl1 shade hovering over it. Below that, another arrow and the words esl1 shade station.
Home of the RzVz pukes, for whom she felt an almost instinctive enmity. What were they doing, what were they holding, that was worthy of nukes and stealth ships? Dear Daddy seemed to brush off this question, focusing attention on the who, rather than on the whom. The actor, not the acted upon. But Sally’s interest was not so easily deflected.
And to the right of the occultation disc, the bright dot of Venus, nearly resolvable as a sphere, and annotated with the words thalia bouyant island. Home of that fucking kid from Weightless, making money doing nothing at all.
And to the right of that, the vast crescent of Luna, whose north and south poles were cluttered with annotations. These were the assets of the Chinese and Brits, or Yuèqiú Gōngyè and Harvest Moon Industries, or Premier Ping and Horseman Killian. All of them up to no good.
Annotations in empty space showed the positions of ships: thorches and ion ferries, EOLS capsules and transatmospheric shuttles, some visibly moving, most not.
The position of 101955 Bennu was also marked, not because Sally thought it was particularly important, but because Dear Daddy was never going to shut up about it. It was a big pile of money, yes, but she had learned, in her fancy French school, about the “curse of oil,” and of mineral wealth generally. Extractive industries produced less economic growth than comparable activity in almost any other sector, except farming.
“Be engineers,” her social studies teacher had advised his classes, with something like genuine concern. “Be artists. Design clothing. Work in a cubicle, doing nonsense. If you touch the ground, your value drops.”
Well, M. Glasier might be amused to know just how literally Sally was taking that advice! If she had her way, it might be a long time indeed before she touched any sort of ground again.
The position of EML4 was marked as well, and that did have value. There was nothing there, and Sally didn’t own it, but she was going to sell it to the Miembros anyway.
Working the attitude thrusters on her suit, she rotated past the Earth—an unreadable mess of yellow tags, dozens of them. Each a manned satellite or spaceship, going about its petty business. She could filter these by type, if she wanted to. She could filter by tonnage or crew size or value in Euros, but right now she wanted to see all of it. She wanted to be reminded, visually and viscerally, just how much stuff there was out here in outer space.
None of it hers.
Rotating further, she saw, at the level of her knees, the bright dot of Alpha Centauri—brightest star in the celestial sphere. And at the level of her chest, an arrow marked i.r.v. intercession. That fucking starship. So much wealth, so much technology, and this was how Igbal Renz chose to squander it?
Whatever that particular trillionaire was doing out there in the deep void, he had tipped his cards by doing it along a straight line pointing to Alpha Centauri. Clearly, that was his ultimate destination, and it maddened her to think of an entire star system—three stars and at least four planets—under the control of someone she could not threaten or manipulate or milk.
It was a problem. Renz was also an asteroid miner, but only as part of an explosive, vertically integrated monopoly that was—in every way—unafraid of thinking big.
Something was going to have to be done about it.
Turning further still to the right, she saw Mars—an orange dot annotated with the words antilympus township.
And en route back from Mars, the H.S.F. Concordia. Probably mostly empty; on its way back to Earth to pick up people and supplies.
Dan Beseman thought he could own the planet Mars. He thought he could sell it to people—sell even just the dream of it. But his feet were touching dirt, now. His enterprise was, at the bottom of the day, every bit as extractive as Orlov Petrochemical. That little colony had cost him his fortune, and there was no way he was ever going to make that money back, selling one hundred tickets every twenty-six months. The man was an imbecile. Sally wasn’t worried about him. Hell, the little Venusian boy was more of an irritant.
She completed her rotation and nodded, grimly satisfied that she had indeed looked over the entirety of the human universe. Or at least those parts of it that could be seen.
Someday the stealth ships would be added to this display, and then nothing would be hidden from her. Like her father, Sally had let her share of resources go to waste. Money, time, connections, attention. Roskosh and bullshit. She was never getting any of that back, okay, fine, but her squandering days were over, as were her days of thinking small.
She knew there was much still to learn and do at Clementine. Orlov Petrochemical regularly acquired and moved and spent sums of money that would be out of reach for most of the countries of Earth. She needed to understand how this was done. She was only seventeen; she needed to understand a lot of things. Still, she’d been disappointed to realize that Dear Daddy, behind all that bluster, really just wanted to pump gas and get paid for it. He was dangerous if crossed, yes. Dangerous if you got between him and his goals, and sometimes dangerous anyway. The wages he paid, just to find someone willing to float next to him! But he seemed to see the world—all the worlds, really—in terms of energy and fuel, working heat and waste heat. Such a narrow lens. It had gotten him this far; it had made him as rich and powerful and feared as the average man’s most vulgar daydream. But it didn’t take a genius to see this mindscape would take him no farther. At the age of sixty, Grigory Magnusevich Orlov was topped.
Sally would let people underestimate her, right up until their fate was sealed. The details were still hazy, but she knew, with a deep conviction, that Clementine was just a stepping stone. She would own it someday, yes; Dear Daddy would hand it over without complaint. But by that time, she would barely even notice the gain.
She’d been told all her life that her smile was cold, but she felt her lips curling upward with real joy as she contemplated her future, because she knew that someday all of this—all of cislunar space, all space, all of humankind—would be hers.
Hopefully she’d be immortal, as well, so she could have it all, forever. And only then would people realize, they should have shot her when they had the chance.