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2.4
25 November

Clementine Cislunar Fuel Depot

Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 1

Cislunar Space


This is too much macho bullshit, Dona thought.

“Drink,” Orlov commanded.

Obediently, Daniel Florinovich Epureanu, the Moldovan nobody from the station’s middle ranks, shot the syringe full of medical-grade ethanol into his mouth and swallowed. He then immediately shoved the stopper end of the syringe into the bottle, and withdrew another fifty milliliters.

The two men hovered, alone together, in the spinward airlock, observed by the crew on every video screen in the station.

Orlov lurched momentarily in the direction of the red evacuate button—a schoolyard bullying tactic that would have worked a lot better in gravity. But here at L1, in the zeroest of zero gravity, he hadn’t actually braced his foot to launch his body that direction, and so it looked as much like a dance move from some twentieth-century film as it did a genuine attempt at murder.

Epureanu didn’t flinch.

Epureanu smiled.

Epureanu handed the syringe over to Orlov and said, calmly, “Drink.”

It was macho bullshit, and yet, Dona had to admire the purity of it. After the contracts had been signed and thumbprinted, there’d been three days of uneasy relations between workers and management, neither side willing to put any real trust in the other. Finally, Orlov and Epureanu had come up with this ridiculous scheme to end it: a peace summit with very high stakes indeed. They were in the spinward airlock, on the side of the station most likely to be hit by meteoroids and debris. Each man wearing only space briefs—showing off muscles and scars and tattoos, showing there was no physical weakness here. Epureanu’s hair, long and brown, was pulled into a rather severe topknot. Orlov was older, and it showed in the texture of his skin, the moles and tufts of graying hair on his back. He was also perhaps a bit smaller, but the look on his face said he was more wicked than Epureanu, and more capricious.

Each man within reach of the red button that would evacuate the airlock and blow them both out into space. Each man within reach of a grab bar that could keep him inside, if he grabbed it soon enough. Each man within reach of the goo suit—the one and only goo suit—that could keep one and only one of them alive. If he fought the other man for it. If he kept it sealed over his head, unripped, long enough for the other man to die.

“This American policeman has shown us up,” Epureanu had said, waving the goo suit at Orlov in naked challenge. “Are we less capable than he?” And so they had somewhere located a spacesuit glove and solemnly slapped each other with it, and then gone into the airlock with their bottle of drug-printer khuligan, with all the station watching them on screens tapped into the security feed. Dona herself was sequestered in Operations, ready to seize control of the station should this venture go awry. Which it very easily could; Orlov was known to be a mean drunk, and Epureanu a bold one.

Orlov drank.

“Few men are brave enough to test me twice,” he said, reloading the drink syringe.

“With good reason,” Epureanu agreed.

Indeed, where the enemies of the trillionaire’s father, Magnus Orlov, had tended to quietly disappear from the face of the Earth, Grigory Orlov’s tended to meet with very public accidents. Epureanu surely knew this. It was no small thing, for him to place himself in such peril, at the hands of such a man.

“Drink,” Orlov said, handing over the syringe. Then, grudgingly, “Your people were wise to align behind you. Had a lesser man confronted me, you might all be breathing vacuum now. Or rendered into component atoms and sold.”

Epureanu smiled and said, “It was logical, Grigory. People fear you, but they don’t like you. They like me, and they know I fear nothing.” And then he drank.

“You’re a fool, then,” Orlov glowered. But in a friendly way. “Twice a fool, and blessed with luck.”

“You’re very certainly more ruthless than I,” Epureanu said, “and probably smarter. But are you quicker? Do you even know how to close and refill the airlock, should you survive?” He paused for effect, and then said, “Ah! That glimmer of doubt in your eyes. See? Bet your money on the ones who do the work, Grigory. Even if you remember the emergency ingress instructions, can you follow them with no air in your lungs, after half a liter of this stuff?” He shook the bottle, and then refilled the syringe from it.

Continuing, he said, “I’ll tell you what would happen: you’d slap that button, then grab for the goo suit and miss. You’d see it flying out the airlock, and your hopes of survival with it. And then I would calmly work the controls, close up the hatch and blow a tank of air into this chamber, saving both our lives. Assuming your lungs hadn’t exploded, which they very well might. Drink.”

“You’re quite a prick,” Orlov observed.

“And yet, they like me better,” Epureanu said.

Orlov’s frown deepened.

“I am not your enemy,” Epureanu said quickly. Dona judged that the Moldovan had, yet again, overplayed his hand with the trillionaire. But he was a canny fellow, and recovered quickly. “As you know, sir, I am actually quite an asset. You accomplish nothing without your people—remember that, please—but this place attracts strong ones, who want strong leadership. Like teenagers, they push against the boundaries set upon them. And like teenagers, they secretly feel those boundaries as a hug from loving parents.”

“Hmm,” said Orlov, sounding (at best) partially mollified. This was blatant flattery and half-truth, but sincere in its way.

“They watch us drinking together,” Epureanu said, “in the barrel of a loaded gun. Think how we look to them now, you and I. Who will dare not to love you? Who will dare not to fear me? Who will cross either of us?”

“Mmm.”

Orlov eyed the red button, and the other airlock controls, and the hatch, and the grab bar, as if working out a specific plan of action. As if working out whether there were any slight advantage in murdering Epureanu at this moment. Through the video screen, Dona thought she detected a flutter of nervousness in Epureanu then, though he hid it well.

“Add me to the list of people who like you,” Orlov said, drinking. Taking the bottle out of the air and refilling the syringe from it. “But I’ve liked a lot of people who got in my way. Ask them how well it went. No, Daniel Florinovich, what you need to be is useful. Everyone here needs to be useful.” He seemed to muse on that for a moment, and then said, “Not just here. People throughout the world would do well to remember it. Husbands, wives, children, parents. Retired old grannies. It’s the useful ones who keep what they desire. Drink.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Epureanu said, and drank. “But perhaps it applies to you as well. Perhaps that’s why we finally came to terms.”

“Mmm,” Orlov said. Then: “My father owned a palace in Minsk, every room striped with rare stone and endangered wood. Striped! He owned a yacht the size of a World War II battleship. He had another little mini-palace in a cargo container, that could go on a train or the back of a truck, or in an airplane, so he could have his rare wood wherever he went. Me, I gave these things to my sisters. Even as a form of intimidation, luxury is a fool’s game. I think it was his greatest weakness, and the first thing I ever dared to challenge in him. I do sometimes miss the smell of the wood.”

“My father was a bastard,” Epureanu said. “Drink.”

“Mine was a killer.”

“Ah, yes. He was. I’ve been tempted to say, you and I are not so different, but it isn’t true, is it? I couldn’t do what you do. You could learn my job well enough, but I do not think I could learn yours. The nuance, the posturing, the following through. The math! It’s like watching a man smash bricks with his fist. He must commit to the act so completely. If he doubts himself for a moment, then it’s his hand that will break. I wasn’t born to any of that.”

“Nor I,” Orlov said. “Papochka beat it into me, and called me weak until the day he died. And yet, his company could fall, unnoticed, within the rounding errors on my balance sheet. Is vengeance mine? Do I piss on his grave? I bring him flowers, Daniel. I thank him for the education no other man could have provided. As for you, I see one important bit of wisdom you’ve acquired: when to back off a challenge and flatter your boss like a little bitch.”

“To flatter my boss, yes,” Epureanu agreed.

Dona could see him eyeing the bottle as it hovered absolutely motionless in the air, placed there skillfully by the trillionaire, as if on a shelf. “But tell me, Grigory, if we do not pull the trigger on this gun and fight each other to the last breath, then this is merely a drinking contest. How will we know who won? This teensy bottle is not enough to knock the heart’s-piss out of me. Nor you, I think.”

Orlov smiled then, with surprising warmth. “If we finish this teensy bottle and you can still pronounce your own name, then you and I will go together to the mess hall, and knock the piss out of anyone who dares to oppose us. And then we are both winners, ah?”

It was macho bullshit, Dona thought, but it served a purpose. On the schoolyard, the wisest boys fell in line behind a bully, while the idealists who stood up to them left the playground in tears. And the wisest bullies knew how to lead the boys who fell in behind them, and then they grew up and ran the world. Dona was pretty sure she could whip Orlov if he were drunk, and possibly even Orlov and Epureanu both. But if they did indeed make it back to the mess hall still conscious, she would hug them both, and kiss their cheeks, and call them her heroes, and drink with them until she passed out or puked.

Because God damn it, this place was home, and she’d never loved anything more.


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