Back | Next
Contents

2.3

03 May

Clementine Cislunar Fuel Depot

Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 1

Cislunar Space


“You see this blip on the radar?” Orlov said, pointing to one of the many screens on one of the many control panels in Operations. “This is a ‘thorch,’ operated by Harvest Moon Industries. In English, I believe the word is an abbreviation for ‘thorium torch,’ or something like that.”

Dona watched Sally staring at the screen, clearly trying to make sense of it. Even with heavy AI processing and annotation, radar screens were not known for being easy to interpret.

Dona took a moment to try to see the room through Sally’s eyes; the lighting was dim, and although the screens and buttons showed off many colors, their dominant hue was pumpkin orange. There were minimalist “chairs” pointing in four different directions, allowing strapped-in technicians to make maximum use of the available volume.

Behind Orlov and his daughter hung a nervous Mikhail Voronin, the station’s subcommander, whose weary face seemed to say, What now? What next? Will this teenage nitwit be gunning to replace me?

“Thorium torch is correct,” Voronin said.

Poor Voronin had spent eight years weathering Orlov’s moods and cleaning up Orlov’s messes, and when his former superior, Commander Andrei Morozov, had finally quit in disgust, Voronin hadn’t even been granted the dignity of a promotion. Instead, Dona herself—who was admittedly only ever the trillionaire’s girlfriend, not any sort of astronaut or businesswoman—had quietly slipped into Morozov’s role, without asking anyone’s permission or forgiveness. Now, servile and broken, Voronin had the constant look of a man simply holding on until his retirement, four years hence.

“It looks like it’s going to burn up,” Sally said, for the ship was on a highly elliptical orbit whose apogee kissed the “moon” line that marked the orbit of Luna around the Earth, and whose perigee was located a few pixels below the boundary of Earth’s atmosphere.

Smart girl, Dona thought, realizing she might have to reassess a few things.

“It does look like that,” Orlov agreed, “but when they reach the atmosphere, they will ignite their peculiar engine and scoop up two hundred kilograms of air on their way back up.”

“Don’t they have air already?” Sally asked. She was trying to keep her hair out of her eyes by tucking it behind the earpieces of her glasses, and that wasn’t going well for her.

“They do,” he said. “They have all the oxygen a man could ever dream of, and they buy nitrogen from us. And cyanogen and methane and benzene, because they have no source of carbon other than us. Even their thorches gather, at most, fifty grams of carbon per mission.”

“So . . . they’re not trying to compete with you.”

“With nitrogen and carbon? They couldn’t possibly,” Orlov said. “These rockets are fantastically wasteful, powered by radioactive steam. Even ignoring Sir Lawrence’s sunk costs, his break-even price would be five times what we charge. And we charge as much as the market will bear.”

Dona watched the lights go on in Sally’s mind. “Ah, so they just want—”

“To shut me out, yes. To plan for a day when they can, however painfully, survive without Orlov Petrochemical. They are also . . . We had an exclusive arrangement to buy all of their tralphium. This is heavy helium, for fusion reactors down on Earth.”

Sounding offended, Sally said, “I know what tralphium is. I know all about your energy businesses, Father.”

Orlov curled his lip at that, and said, “Perhaps I should drop you on an oil platform, if you are so knowledgeable. Perhaps you will tell me that our exclusive tralphium arrangement with Harvest Moon has expired. We are still that doddering Englishman’s number one customer, as sheer size dictates we must be, but he is also free to sell to our competitors, and to greedy Americans. The United States is far behind in the electricity wars, but they can catch up quickly with Sir Lawrence’s help. And they will.”

Sally was nodding at that, taking it all in. After a brief pause, she said, “And Renz Ventures never did buy anything from you. Do you know what Igbal is doing out there with his starship?”

“No,” Orlov admitted.

“Really? Not at all?”

“There are only crazy rumors. I have not been able to find the truth.”

“Well, it’s a strange thing, isn’t it?”

“Very,” Orlov said. “Either he is crazy, and this will break him, or there is something more to it than is visible on the surface. Renz is an enemy who competes for the same resources we do, and though I hate to say it, he holds the technological edge. With so much energy at his disposal, he holds every edge. It troubles me. I lose sleep.”

“He does,” Dona confirmed.

“Well, that’s two Horsemen down,” Sally said, counting them off on her fingers. “What about Enterprise City?”

With rising (though controlled) venom, Orlov said, “Dan Beseman cannot live without me, if he wants to keep fueling his Mars ship. He keeps sending more people up to the Red Planet—an endless supply of high-octane idiots—but his foolish little township in Antilympus Crater needs things more than it needs bodies. Do you listen to their radio traffic? Always pleading for finished goods, for substances they cannot mine or synthesize, for spare parts they cannot yet manufacture. All of this requires fuel, which we gladly sell to Beseman for as much as we can get him to pay. But in this, Harvest Moon is trying to compete with us. You see this blip?”

He jabbed a finger at the radar screen again. “This is a steerable tank holding five hundred kilograms of liquid oxygen, flung by a magnetic cannon—a mass driver—from the Lunar south pole.”

“Made from ice? The oxygen, I mean? From those ice mines, in the craters?”

“Yes. Their volume is low—less than a third of what we produce—and their delivery schedules are less reliable. But they have forced us to lower our oxygen prices.”

Pushing her hair back from her eyes again, Sally looked intently at the blip, as if it might give up secrets to her. In the light of the screen, for a moment, she looked exactly like her father.

“Competition is bad,” she said.

He grunted in agreement, then said, “Beseman has also been talking about a space elevator, to bring hydrocarbons up from Earth’s surface, so he is not reliant on us for that, either. He’d spend a trillion rubles on another risky venture. Even if it works, even if he could convince all the governments of Earth to allow it, he’d need the rest of his life to earn that money back. We have the infrastructure now, the asteroid picked out already, to put kerosene fuel in his little spaceship for decades.”

“And the smaller players in low Earth orbit?” she asked, with what Dona had to admit was remarkable maturity. “Transit Point Station? All the little satellite repair services?”

“They order from us. They have no choice. But they grumble.”

“So, nobody actually wants to do business with you,” Sally said, matter-of-factly.

Dona felt a surprising flutter of protectiveness at that, because it was not the kind of thing most people could get away with saying to Grigory Orlov. But although the trillionaire flashed an ugly look at Sally, he said, “Exactly. And since you are such a clever businesswoman, perhaps you should tell me how to regain the top hand, hmm?”

“You’re letting all of these people remain alive,” Sally said. “With good reason, I assume.”

She looked briefly at Dona, and then behind her at Voronin, as if to confirm that this most obvious, most Russian of responses had in fact been considered.

“We’re vulnerable here,” Dona said to her, in French. Her Russian had gotten quite good in her time here at Clementine, but it still offended her ears, and sometimes she longed for the lilting nuances of her native tongue. “Like it or not, we owe our autonomy—actually, our survival—to the indifference of governments. Any large-scale disruptions that can be traced back to us—”

“Will get the station invaded,” Sally finished for her. “Like ESL1.”

That surprised Dona. “You know about that?”

Sally shrugged, which, given her inexperience in weightlessness, didn’t look like much. “I know a lot of things. Look, I know when you size me up like that, you see a spoiled child who makes bad choices and puts herself in danger. And you’re not wrong; I’m in danger here as well.”

“But . . .”

École Sainte-Anne Pour Élèves Doués is an expensive school, for troubled youth from all over the world. I know all kinds of people.”

Dona would have liked to hear more about that, but presently, Orlov cut in with, “My French is shoddy, and I fear poor Voronin here does not speak a word of it. Kindly restrict yourselves to Russian or, if you must, English.”

That last word fell from his mouth the way a dog spits out medicine. Dona could relate; Orlov was not quite old enough to remember a time when Russia, the nation-state, had ruled a quarter of the planet, and held influence over another quarter, and had had the other half quaking in fear. And they had, at various times, been the world’s only spacefaring nation. Orlov wasn’t old enough for that, either.

Still, he spoke often of the bitterness that had settled over his country when all of that had ended, and also, more fondly, of that time in the early twenty-first century when it seemed like Russia just might réparer la merde—get its shit together again. Now that hollowed-out nation-state had only its nuclear missiles, and even those were questionable. How many of them would actually launch, if it came to that? How many would detonate? Those old twentieth-century nukes were what Dona’s rarely-thought-about father would have called a “glass hammer”—threatening only until you shatter it on first use.

In a lot of ways, Orlov and a handful of smaller oligarchs were all that remained of Russian greatness. Outside of certain business communities, only people from countries that bordered on Russia even bothered to study the language anymore. The only reason Dona had known enough of it to be useful here was because she’d been sent, a few times, to investigate Russian mineral interests in Ghana and Namibia, and had been forced to do the “nine-week cram” as part of her preparation. A lucky thing!

“Sally knows about the takeover at ESL1,” Dona said. In English, just to be difficult.

Orlov hmmed and nodded, looking reluctantly impressed. And worried, because if the mighty Igbal Renz had been brought to heel by the Americans, then so could Orlov himself. No one said anything for several seconds, so it was the trillionaire again who filled the silence: “You still have not given me your business advice, girl. Let’s have it.”

Sally shrugged again, looking uncomfortable. Dona didn’t envy her; with so many things wrong, it was hard, even for Dona, to form a pithy summary. And yet, if the girl answered poorly, she must feel at serious risk of being delivered back into the hands of her creditors. And she seemed now, finally, to sense that if she answered well, she risked her father’s temper.

What Sally finally said was, “You’re out of friends, aren’t you? And badly in need of some new ones.”

His glare, fortunately, was nothing remarkable. “Is that all? Make new friends? Is that really all you have for me? The Cartels, I suppose? Or the rising landmen of South Asia?”

With an admirable mix of arrogance and fear, Sally replied, “Well, I might just be able to help you with that, Father. The blat I have access to might surprise even you.”

Blat: a hazy, corrupt word meaning something like “contacts” or “arrangements” or “called-in favors.” It was the kind of word the trillionaire liked to hear.

“Yes? Well, that’s something I’ll believe when I see it. But you have, for the second time today, caught my attention. Perhaps we will make an Orlov of you yet.”


Back | Next
Framed