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2.3

22 November


Clementine Cislunar Fuel Depot

Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 1

Cislunar Space



“Is that your entire report?” Orlov asked quietly.

“It is,” Commander Morozov confirmed, managing to sound, all at once, stiffly formal, deflated, and furious.

“And do you have a recommendation?”

Dona wondered, briefly, whether these two men were about to come to blows. Orlov because he couldn’t stand losing and needed to take it out on someone; Morozov because he’d been put in an impossible position. Both men were hard-pushed, and both capable of violence.

Morozov and Voronin had gone back into the mess hall, the morning after the conflict. They had stayed in there ten minutes, talking and listening. Now they were back in Operations, with Dona and the trillionaire, regrouping.

“Hiring scab labor isn’t going to work,” Morozov said. “Neither are strike breakers.”

“No?” Orlov replied.

Morozov said, “I know it’s a satisfying thought, but anyone we bring up here will have to be comfortable operating in spacesuits, in zero gravity. They will need to bring cutting tools with them. They’ll need to breach one of the airlocks, and then install a new outer hatch, before they can even enter the station. There is likely to be interference, and perhaps violence, over which they will need to prevail. And then they will have to operate all of our equipment, or force our own people to do it. There are not enough people in the world willing and qualified to do all of that. Not enough to fill a shuttle, Grigory, and world opinion was already against us, based solely on Andrei Bykhovski’s complaints. Which frankly pale in comparison to the shit we’ve stepped in since then. If you’re unwilling to meet the workers’ demands, then our best move is to fire them all, send them home in peace, and then hire a replacement crew handpicked from the ranks of Orlov Petrochemical. If we do it right, we’d be down for less than three months.”

Dona watched Orlov react to that, and thought again that Morozov was risking violence by speaking like this.

“You have no imagination,” Orlov said. “Dona may be the only person in this room who doesn’t know how to use a cutting torch.”

“I do,” Dona said.

Orlov looked at her. “What?”

“I know how to use a cutting torch. It’s been a long time, and I’ve never done it without air, or gravity. But I know how.” She’d learned it at Commandement des Opérations Spéciales—not how to weld or do anything useful, but as part of a two-week course called Comment Ouvrir les Choses, or “How to Open Things.”

“Good for you,” Orlov said darkly. The Operations center was lit by the green and red and yellow of graphs and Cyrillic lettering on video displays, and this glow made a mask of his face.

Uneasily, Voronin said, “Sir, what are you getting at?”

Orlov snorted, saying nothing.

Dona answered for him: “An accident.”

“Unacceptable!” said Voronin. “However angry they may be, these are our own people.”

More reasonably, Morozov said, “The workers are surely aware of that possibility, and will be taking appropriate steps to avoid it. If they’re frightened enough, we four are at greater risk from them than they are from us. And even if we succeeded, the optics would be poor. What story would you tell the world?”

When Orlov didn’t answer right away, Dona said to him, “Morozov is right. It’s wise to move things back into in the administrative realm.”

She watched Orlov think about that one, too. His father’s company, Orlov Petrochemical, had thrived amid chaos in large part because it did not follow that rule, and never had. But when unsavory things happened, there was at least a thin veneer of deniability that let the relevant authorities off the hook. Dona herself had made a career of coloring well outside the administrative lines, and Orlov knew that, and seemed unpleasantly surprised to find her backing away from it now.

But her operations for Commandement des Opérations Spéciales had always been covert and, yes, deniable. She’d cleaned up her share of crime scenes, none of them involving thirty-six bodies and global scrutiny. And it was well past the time when she could plausibly have infiltrated the strikers and worked them from inside. She’d been too busy working the trillionaire himself, trying to shore up her tenuous position. Not looking outward, not smelling this larger trouble until it was too late. She kicked herself inwardly for the lapse, for letting the situation get so far ahead of her, but here they were.

“Can we at least find out what they’re saying to each other?” Orlov grumbled.

“At this time, no,” Voronin said. “I’m sorry, but they’ve got IT on their side. I can’t even access the security cameras.”

An uncomfortable silence settled over them.

“Three months is too long,” Orlov finally said. “Three days is too long.”

Voronin said, “It’s a violation of international law, sealing the lifeboats. Assuming we can even keep them sealed.”

“Unlikely,” said Morozov.

“So we’re on borrowed time?” Dona said, unhappily. It was her least favorite kind of time. If control of these events was about to slip even further from Orlov’s grasp, then he was compelled to act now, selecting from an ever-shortening list of options.

“We are,” Morozov confirmed.

“Well, then,” Orlov said with sudden and suspicious good cheer, “we must kiss their cheeks and invite them back to the bargaining table. Unlock the lifeboats at once, Voronin, and blame the lapse on Ms. Obata, who is ignorant of these matters. Apologies, Dona, but you’re the only one who can take the fall for this.”

“And if the workers all evacuate?” Voronin asked.

“The four of us would be hard-pressed to keep the station habitable for very long,” Morozov warned.

“Anyone who evacuates will forfeit all wages, past and future,” Orlov said. “And we’ll bill them the replacement cost of the boats.”

“Okay, that’s the stick,” Morozov said. “What about the carrot?”

Orlov was holding a rollup in one fist, and at this question he hurled it, hard, against the hatchway behind Morozov, where it broke apart and tumbled away, trailing its screen like a tattered gray flag.

“Idiot!” Orlov said. “Have you never seen an Internet meme? Or political cartoon? The carrot is suspended from the stick by a string. The stick protrudes from the collar of a donkey. The donkey, being hungry and stupid, walks toward the carrot, thinking he will reach it. But he never does, because the carrot moves with him, step by step, dangling always out of reach. And so he walks forever, pulling a plow or turning a wheel, until he drops dead from exhaustion. This is what grown-ups mean, when they say ‘carrot and stick.’ Perpetual motion! Labor without cost! A simple visual metaphor, understood by the wise and always mangled by idiots like you, who cannot be trusted to run a simple petrol station.”

No one had a reply to that.

Finally, it was Dona who spoke: “They want yearly shore leave, Orlov, and you’re going to have to give it to them. Seeming to is not enough—these are highly intelligent people, not donkeys. And the world is on their side. But why not force them to bundle it? Send them down one full shuttle at a time, and make the workers themselves figure out who goes when. All the weddings and funerals and graduations are their problem, not yours. Until they fill a shuttle, no one leaves, and until that shuttle returns, everyone else is on extended shifts. Make them share the cost and the headache, down in the fine print of the agreement they sign. It’s too late to be magnanimous, but quite frankly, they expect you to be transactional.”

“You’re speaking English,” Voronin complained.

“Shut up,” Orlov told him. To Dona he said, “So now you’re a negotiator?”

Someone has to be, she thought but did not say.

Orlov looked closely at her, and said, “You’re a clever woman; you know when to slip in the knife, and how. Is that what’s happening here?” Without waiting for an answer, he continued, “You also know when to run. You ran here, because you feared what would happen if you ran home, a burnt asset who betrayed her masters. But from here, where can you run? Who would ever trust you? Nobody. This place is the end of your road, unless you deign to lose yourself in Africa, living in a tin shack until everyone has forgotten you. You need for this enterprise to succeed—to flourish—or you will be going home. Where someone else will slip in the knife.”

Without a trace of irony, she said, “This is why I love you, Grigory.” Of all the people she’d ever met, the trillionaire was the first to really understand her. Effortlessly, it seemed.

He continued his scrutiny for several more seconds, and finally said, “Now you are my own asset, ah? You have a point—several, actually—and your dogshit plan may just end this madness. Your ambiguous position here even gives us the opportunity to save face, because no one knows who the fuck you are.”

She said nothing, because what was there to say?

Orlov continued, “You will go back in there and speak to them. Apologize for the lifeboats. Tell them it was a mistake—your mistake. Tell them it was all your mistake. Then make your ridiculous offer, and whatever threats you deem appropriate. These idiots”—he nodded at Morozov and Voronin—“have failed twice, and I myself have failed once, because we underestimated the enemy’s conviction. But you cannot afford to fail.”

Again, she said nothing, simply waiting to see if he was done.

“I misspoke,” he said, then. “It was caution, not fear, that kept you from going back to Earth. I am not sure you are capable of fear.”

“I am,” she said.

“But it takes more than that, ah? It takes more than this. You were never afraid of me.”

“No,” she agreed. She had broken into his safe, rifled through his encrypted files, slept next to him. Slept next to him, yes, the most dangerous man in the solar system.

“I’m not sure I am capable of love,” he said to her, heedless of Morozov and Voronin. “At least in the sense other people seem to mean it. But I think it’s a good thing you came here. I think it’s good you are my asset.”

“I think so, too,” she said, now impatient to get on with it. The situation was far too dynamic; she preferred to move, silently, through a world of other people’s scripts and routines, but they were “off book” now, as people said in her business. They needed to get back on book, fast, and right now she didn’t care how much money or embarrassment it cost Grigory Orlov.

“You may regret my methods,” she warned him, “but I will solve your problem.”

“Is this wise?” Morozov demanded, eyeing Dona with something like resentment. He knew more about her than most, but still basically nothing. She could see he didn’t trust her, and that was smart. She was not to be trusted.

“Our interests are aligned,” she told him, because that much was true.

“Go,” Orlov said. “I want us operational by nightfall. Make that happen, and what love I can muster is all yours.”

“Always a charmer,” she said, touching the back of her hand to his cheek with genuine warmth, because in all the rough-and-tumble years of her life, all she had ever really wanted was that kind of honesty.



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