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2.2

21 November


Clementine Cislunar Fuel Depot

Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 1

Cislunar Space



Daniel Epureanu grabbed a pair of bolt cutters out of the equipment locker with all the fight-or-flight energy of a crooked policeman hauling someone out of a car. This thing had gone too far, which ironically meant it needed to go farther still in order to turn out well.

After a week of nothing but talk, the striking workers—essentially the whole crew of Clementine—had gathered early this morning in the mess hall, to speak once again with Grigory Orlov and his management goons. (Leave it to Orlov Petrochemical to find broke-nose musclemen capable of commanding a space station!) That meeting had gone poorly. Orlov had offered everyone a full pardon and a fifteen percent raise (up from ten percent a few days ago), and they had, practically as one voice, told him to shove that straight up his rectum.

Orlov had met that response with a frightening calm, and simply repeated his offer.

“Take it or consider the consequences,” he had said grimly. People shouted at him then, and still he just hung there in space, unmoved by their suffering.

“Lockout!” someone had shouted then. Epureanu couldn’t trace the voice, but it seemed to strike an immediate chord. Within moments all the workers, in their rage, were literally clogging the exits, and then fanning out into all the other modules, as each man and woman rushed to his or her workstation to lock it from unauthorized access. From management access, or access by scab labor. Which probably sounded good to the people doing it, except that some of those workstations controlled critical life-support functions, or the ability to safely launch spacecraft from the shuttle bay, or to recharge the batteries of spacesuits.

“Don’t . . .” Epureanu had tried to say, flitting from one module to the next.

“Will you . . .” he had tried to say.

“Can you just . . .”

But nobody was listening to him, or to anyone else, and so in a triple of minutes this thing had gone from a simple work stoppage to an outright mutiny. And that was fucking serious, and people were going to get killed if they didn’t bring themselves under control. And killed perhaps even if they did, if Orlov’s goons decided to blow the airlocks or some such thing.

Epureanu didn’t know whether they had that capability or not, but it seemed foolish to assume otherwise. Orlov was that kind of man, and quite frankly Epureanu might want that superpower as well, if he were outnumbered by burly Russian miners whose pocketbooks he controlled. And so Epureanu did the only thing he logically could under the circumstances: he shut off the pumps that ran the airlock hydraulics, and then cut all the fluid lines just to be sure. Now the airlocks could only be operated by physically muscling the hatches open and closed.

And that was really serious—a step into sabotage as well as mutiny—but it did not make sense to cross this particular Rubicon without a good defensive position staked out, and nobody but Epureanu seemed to realize that.

Then, with basic safety under control, he started grabbing people—physically hauling them from where they were hunkered—and saying: “You, Novatny, guard the spinward airlock. Jam the hatch and keep it jammed. Don’t let anyone out, and for God’s sake don’t let anyone in. You, Pavel, guard the hangar. Doctor Chernov, secure the medlab and prepare for casualties—we may have some soon. You, Sherval, route as many functions as you can through this terminal. You have access, no one else does. You understand? When you’ve finished, give me a list of things we control. They will be doing the same thing in Operations right now, so act quickly.”

And just like that, Daniel Epureanu was in charge. He found himself snapping out orders to men who technically outranked him, and he didn’t care, because this was a mutiny anyway, and somebody needed to get these fools organized, and there was not one second to spare.

People had gathered up impromptu weapons, but Epureanu told them, “No, put that away. That’s not going to work. You think they don’t have guns? We outnumber them, but it’s our economic value that will save us. Stand down.”

And that helped, but not enough, so he cut a communication trunkline and physically spliced his headset into it, granting himself override capability over every loudspeaker in the station.

“Workers,” he said. “Stand down. This is Maintenance Supervisor Daniel Florinovich Epureanu. Please stand down and return, empty-handed, to the mess hall to resume negotiations.”

“Who put you in charge?” asked a chemical engineer named Aronov.

“This did,” Epureanu told him, covering his headset mike and brandishing the bolt cutters.

“Okay, okay,” Aronov said, ducking his head a little.

“Go on,” Epureanu told him.

Then, uncovering the microphone, he said, “Mr. Orlov, sir. We apologize for the disturbance. If you are willing to engage in substantive negotiations, we will hear you out. Please understand that your previous offer has been rejected, but we await your next in a spirit of camaraderie.”

And so there was a second meeting, which turned out to be even shorter than the first.

Epureanu had assigned positions or tasks to perhaps a third of the crew. The rest of them flowed, in clumps and spasms, back into the mess hall. Orlov kept them waiting for fifteen minutes, though, and when he finally appeared in the hatchway, accompanied by Commander Morozov and Subcommander Voronin, and by his weird African girlfriend, the crowd was quite restless indeed.

Orlov drifted into the room, casually taking up space so that the crowd had to fall back away from him. His goon squad backed him up.

“Sixteen percent,” he said, without preamble or post-amble.

While the crowd hung back, Epureanu kicked gently toward Orlov’s team, stopping himself two meters away by hooking a foot on one of the tables.

“Daniel Florinovich,” Orlov said, nodding politely.

“Grigory Magnusovich,” Epureanu said back.

They regarded each other for a long moment.

Finally, Epureanu said, “Grigory, you once told me to know what’s mine, and to take it without asking. That’s advice I’ve followed ever since. I’m following it now, as you can see. But you seem to have locked us out of the shuttles, and even the lifeboats.”

To which Orlov replied, “And you have locked me out of the hangar, and the airlocks. Very good, Daniel Florinovich. I hardly know whether to throttle you or buy you a drink.”

And for a moment, it seemed a peace was possible. The great Grigory Orlov, son of Magnus Orlov and head of the largest energy company in the world, had in fact bought Epureanu drinks from time to time. Epureanu was barely a middle manager in this enterprise (and Moldovan besides!), but Orlov seemed to fancy himself a man of the people. He had taken a liking to Epureanu earlier this year, and occasionally spoke to him almost as an equal, or as a human being, at any rate.

Epureanu smiled and said, “First the one, and then—if we fail you—the other. We are not your enemies, Grigory. We came here to work. For you.”

“Then do it,” Orlov said without amusement.

“We will,” said Epureanu, “when we are no longer your prisoners. Your generous pay raise misses the point.”

“Then consider it retracted,” Orlov said.


Sighing inwardly, Dona prepared for violence. She was trained in a dozen martial arts, honed and shaped by a dozen times actually fighting for her life against unpredictable humans. The crown jewel, though, was Zedo, the zero-gravity grappling style taught to her by the U.S. Space Force, back when they still thought she was working for an allied government. Back when anyone thought she was working for any government at all. Her chief instructor had called her “the most gifted micro-gee fighter I’ve ever seen.” Except himself, he had meant, but then she had whipped him, too. Her body seemed built for it; she was immune to vertigo, immune to motion sickness and disorientation. She always knew exactly where her hands and feet were, exactly what direction her center of mass was moving, and pain did not startle or distract her. She did not suffer from the sort of empathy that kept people from winning fights. However, she had never in her life faced more than two attackers at a time, and there were twenty potential enemies in this room.

She didn’t know this man who was talking to Orlov, but the name tag on his uniform shirt said epureanu, and apparently he and Orlov were on a first-name basis. Which was a good thing, but probably not good enough.

He was a bold one, she had to admit. But he was within arm’s reach now, and the tone of this meeting—already setting off alarm bells for her—was headed nowhere but south. And so, if Epureanu so much as twitched, she was going to windpipe him. Assuming of course that Morozov didn’t beat her to it. Or Orlov himself, for that matter. Voronin she wasn’t so sure about, so her planned choreography simply regarded him as dead mass she could brace against for a jump.

“Grigory, come on,” Epureanu said. “You are on the wrong side of this one, and surely a part of you knows it. Is this why you’re so angry? Because your business model failed to take shore leave expenses into account, and now your earnings projections are garbage?”

“You presume too much,” Orlov said. “You think you’re a businessman now? I made you. This minor thing that you are, I made.”

“You did,” Epureanu agreed.

“I could have you mopping toilets in Siberia. I could have you buried.”

“You could,” Epureanu agreed. “But it would not serve you.”

“Oh, think harder than that, little man,” Orlov warned. “You’ve gone and made it personal. You had all better hope the public never learns the details of what went on here today. If that happens, you will all be liabilities. Ask yourself what happens to liabilities.”

“This is not productive,” Epureanu said, sounding less certain than he had a few moments before. Sounding like a man who had just overplayed his hand, and knew it.

You are not productive,” Grigory said in return, his eyes sweeping the room. “Any of you.”

And that was apparently seven words too many, because the crowd bristled, drew in a collective breath, and then a dozen men were yelling and leaping, and Dona barely had time to kick off Voronin, kick off Epureanu, and grab the trillionaire in a lock hold that dragged him back toward the exit.

What followed was several seconds of confusion, as bodies traveled on the straight-line trajectories to which they had committed—some intersecting with other bodies, some with tables and benches, some with walls and floors. Nobody was where anyone else expected them to be, and everyone was shouting or crying out in pain. Over the trillionaire’s violent objections, Dona got him into the hallway, her feet landing against the wall, her knees and quads absorbing the impact and tensing for another leap. Morozov followed a few seconds later, swinging out through the hatch, his hands on one side of it, white-knuckled. He was breathing hard and looking scared, two things Dona had never seen on him before. He was a tough guy, but not room-full-of-enemies tough. And then, a few second after that, Voronin was thrown out, so that he collided hard with the bulkhead next to Dona and the trillionaire.

“Let me go,” Orlov said coldly.

“Retreat, my love,” Dona advised him in a gentle whisper, directly into his left ear. “Now is not the time.” Then she released him, and the four of them were launching hard and fast down the hallway toward Operations.

Thankfully, no one followed.



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