2.1
14 November
Clementine Cislunar Fuel Depot
Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 1
Cislunar Space
“Earth media has been confirming it: Bykhovski arrived safely,” Dona Obata said, cringing ever so slightly at the inevitable response. Dona was not a timid woman by any means—she had once killed a man with her bare hands—but the moods of Grigory Orlov, trillionaire, were volatile, and he was a dangerous man even when calm. Easily the most dangerous of the space industry’s Four Horsemen, which made him the most dangerous man in all of cislunar space.
“Where?” Orlov demanded.
“Monastery. Where the lander was programmed to go.” That by itself didn’t mean much; even if Bykhovski had managed to reprogram the lander for a different destination, where else was there to go? North to the Chinese? Would that be an improvement over life at Clementine?
“Mmm,” Orlov said. Not exploding yet, though the line of his jaw was hard and tight. He was in the “upper” observation deck, hanging by the porthole that looked up toward Luna, holding onto nothing. This spoke, silently, to how comfortable he’d become in this environment. There was no microgravity here at L1—there was no gravity at all—and the room was large enough that if he drifted too far from a handhold, he could be stranded in midair for quite some time. He was wearing the gray stretchy pants of a Clementine uniform, but without the top; instead he wore a gray-and-white polo shirt with the Orlov Petrochemical logo embroidered across the back.
When Bykhovski was first reported missing, Orlov’s reaction had been a single word: “Regrettable.” Because the obvious assumption was that a despondent Bykhovski had simply stepped out the airlock to breathe some vacuum. Dona had warned him, then: “This could be bad for morale.” To which he’d said, “Fuck morale.” Right there in Operations, where Commander Morozov and Subcommander Voronin and a couple of unimportant functionaries could hear him. To which Dona had replied, in her poor-but-improving Russian, “That a good business strategy, is it? He’ll be expensive to replace. Even more expensive if people are moping around about it.”
When it turned out Bykhovski’s spacesuit was also missing, the conclusion wasn’t much different, because what was he doing out there, all alone? Opening his visor, most likely. But radar sweeps turned up nothing, and then it was discovered that one of the Lunar landers had departed on schedule, minus its load of pressurized gas canisters, and Subcommander Voronin had said, “My God, he’s on that thing. He’s defecting.”
“Impossible,” Orlov had said. Flatly. Unimpressed.
But Commander Andrei Morozov said, “Bykhovski is one of our best.”
“Meaning?”
Nervously then, Morozov said, “It must be possible. He would not attempt such a thing without knowing it was possible.”
After a deadly long pause, Orlov said, “Review all security footage.” And then he had left the room.
That was five hours ago.
Now, seemingly exothermic with rage, he turned to Dona and said, “How did he do it?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, briefly touching a grab rail on the wall.
He snorted at that, as if amused by her boldness. Dona held no formal rank here on Clementine—just the uneasy position of “girlfriend.” She had stolen an RzVz shuttle to get here—also a defector, also a refugee—and everyone here seemed to think she was some sort of spy. Which was exactly correct, though not in the way they probably thought.
“No?” Orlov asked her. “And what does matter?”
Back on Earth he had been, by all accounts, a wife beater. Two times over, actually. He was welcome to try it with Dona, but to his great credit he’d seemed to sense, right from the very beginning, that he couldn’t have that kind of relationship with her. Even if he managed to overpower her (which he might or might not), she’d simply kill him in his sleep. And he seemed to get that about her, which she figured was why, ironically, they’d been working out rather well as a couple.
“He’s talking,” Dona said.
She gave Orlov’s anger a few seconds to work its way around that information.
“Unfortunate,” he said.
“Very.”
She’d actually warned Orlov, more than once, that his cost-cutting measures would bring him grief in the end. She was no businesswoman, but she knew an unstable political situation when she saw one. You take a confined population, already unhappy with their lot, and then take just a little bit more from them, and boom. Revolts, revolutions, strikes, sabotage. She’d seen it in diamond mines and factories, farm collectives and slums and refugee camps all across Africa, where it mostly took on the cloak of tribalism, because that was easier somehow than the simpler truth. Tenants hated their landlords; workers hated their bosses; farmers and ranchers hated the exchanges through which they were forced to sell their output at whatever pittance the government chose to set. For almost ten years it had been Dona’s job, more or less, to exploit these frictions as a way of extracting information, or applying useful leverage, for the benefit of a certain European power. But she also knew when she was losing—when she’d lost the trust or the patience of the people she was manipulating. She knew when to cut her losses and run.
Right now was one of those times. When news spread of what Andrei Bykhovski had done, the men and women of Clementine—all forty of them—laid down their tools, crossed their arms, and refused to work. Even knowing that the air they breathed came from asteroid rock. Even knowing that, if the recyclers continued to run, they had maybe a two-month supply before they all suffocated to death. And Dona could not escape.
“Legally, Clementine is a sovereign nation,” she told him.
He glared, saying nothing.
Struggling through her limited Russian, liberally substituted with French and English words, she said, or tried to say, “We’ll be accused of human rights violations. You’re used to running your businesses as transnationals, straddling borders and playing governments off against each other. But here you are the government. There’s no one to play or bribe. On Earth, if your workers don’t like the deal you’re offering them, you simply replace them with cheaper workers from a more desperate country. My love, you have learned the wrong lessons from this.”
He looked at her for an uncomfortably long time before answering, “I own mining towns in Siberia, some of them nothing more than a single large building. The workers emerge in their protective gear, they do their work, and then they come back into the building. My building. They make good money, and their food and drink are provided. They have Internet. They grumble about the conditions, but when they go back home, to whatever shit town gave birth to them, they don’t stay. They come back to me, again and again. You think this is different?”
“It’s similar,” she said carefully, touching the grab rail again to stabilize herself. Orlov remained motionless in the air, an angry Buddha. Here at L1 they were most of the way to the Moon; it loomed above the window like a rocky sky. Unlike other places in outer space, the gravity of Earth and Moon balanced perfectly here. There were no microforces pulling him this way or that. He could stay there a hundred years, or launch himself like a missile toward the hatchway, to take some sort of action against the striking workers. She didn’t, in any sort of humanitarian sense, care what happened to the workers here, but this was her home now, and she cared about that. She needed this thing to work out, and so did he. So she said, “But what would happen if you didn’t let those workers back to their shit towns? And what would happen if they were not peasants at all, but highly trained astronauts? How would that go?”
He didn’t answer. As a “belt-tightening measure,” he had canceled all shore leave and refused to let anyone out of their contracts early. Their five-year contracts! It made a kind of superficial financial sense, because sending a shuttle on a round trip to Earth and back cost two hundred million dollars, or some even more ungodly number of rubles, which was quite a bit more than these people made in a year. But it made them prisoners.
“It’s almost dinner,” she said. “Come with me to the mess hall. Eat with the people of Clementine, and see how they look at you.”
“I know how they look at me.”
In a hard tone, she said, “Well, then you know you’re going to have to make some kind of statement. Some kind of concession. If you simply roll back your existing orders, you’re going to look weak and encourage more misbehavior. But if you don’t . . . I think some of these people are willing to die. Bykhovski certainly was.”
Derisively: “Mmm. If labor relations are such a specialty of yours, do you have a recommendation?”
“It isn’t,” she said, “and I don’t. But things have reached a breaking point. Your people are not powerless against you, and the more chance you give them to realize that, the more power you’re going to have to concede. Time and speed are of the essence.”
He said nothing. For a long time. Eventually he turned his gaze back upward, to the Moon.
“There’s also an anomaly,” she warned him. Still cautious. “Regarding Bykhovski’s landing at the monastery.”
“Mmm?”
“Someone was killed. I don’t know the circumstances, but Harvest Moon is calling for an investigation.”
“Mmm. Useful,” he said.
She thought about that, and decided he was right. Anything to keep Bykhovski from looking like a hero. Let him be a blundering coward and fool instead.
“How did he do it?” Orlov asked again.
“Voronin is compiling a full report, with video.”
“I see.” After another long pause, the trillionaire said, “I will think of something fatherly to say, to get these bastards in line. I’ll think of something they value more than I do, and I will say it was always my plan that they should have it, but I’m revealing it early to help assuage their grief, at the loss and disgrace of a beloved comrade. I’ll do it in an offhand way, and truthfully, because this issue isn’t even my biggest headache.”
“No?” she said, surprised. What could be bigger?
He looked up at the Moon for a while, silent and very still, and Dona could see his anger was not cooling. Her sense of such things was finely honed, through years of gathering up-close intelligence on dangerous men and, when necessary, goading them to action. The people of Clementine had made a powerful enemy, and it would take a lot of peace and quiet and hard work to reverse that.
Eventually, he reached into his leg pocket and pulled out a rollup tablet. He opened and locked it, poked briefly at its screen, and handed it to her. This imparted a slight momentum to his body so that, finally, he had to feather-touch one of the grab rails beside the window to hold his position.
“Press ‘play,’” he told her darkly.
She did, and a video started up. For several seconds, she didn’t know what she was looking at. Gymnastics? An obstacle course? The picture was grainy and dark, and showed a long-limbed figure in fast, whirling motion, vaulting hand-and-foot over stacked rectangular obstacles. With some surprise, she realized the figure didn’t have a head. Its arms and legs were identical, and capable of bending unnaturally, and made of shiny gray plastic.
“It’s called ‘parkourbot,’” Orlov said.
“What am I looking at?” Dona asked, unsure why he was showing this to her.
“Classified footage.”
“Of what?”
“An assassin.”
She watched the robot flip and tumble, uncanny in its grace and speed. It was outdoors, at night, on some sort of purpose-built course. A casual glance made it look human, but its top and bottom halves were interchangeable. There was no up or down for this robot, and its hands were . . . complex. She could hear human voices in the background, gasping and muttering in amazement as the thing moved around, fluid and deadly.
“Whose?” she asked.
“American. But others have their own versions, including defensive versions that hunt and kill other parkourbots.”
“Hmm. Hmm. Why does this worry you?”
“I have heard, through trusted sources, that these robots are being adapted to operate in zero gravity.”
She thought about that, but whatever connection he was drawing, she couldn’t yet see it. “And?”
Without looking at her, he said, “Renz Ventures is compromised. ESL1 Shade Station is under American control. Your friend Alice Kyeong has seen to that.”
“She’s not my friend,” Dona said.
Ignoring her, Orlov said, “Something happened up there at ESL1. There are strange rumors—conflicting rumors—which I take to be someone’s attempt to conceal the truth. They cannot prevent it from leaking, so they hide it in a jumble of stories so bizarre even the tabloids aren’t touching them. But is this jumble the work of Renz, or the Americans? The American President, Tina Tompkins, has said nothing publicly about Renz Ventures. She sent her agents in, and took the place over. Now Renz is speaking with the UN about using the ESL1 Shade for weather modification, and Tompkins says nothing. Is she working Renz like a puppet? Harvesting his riches for the United States of America? Activity patterns at ESL1 have markedly shifted. The machines that build the Shade have stopped operating. Why?
“Please know, that kind of infiltration will not work here. Even if you, yourself, were still secretly in the pocket of an Earthly government, you could not take control of our systems. And we’d put you out the airlock for attempting it.”
“You could try,” Dona said.
“Don’t posture at me, woman. We’ve done this dance too many times. We would kill you, and you know it.”
“What’s your point?”
He drew in his breath and let it out—not a sigh, but a yoga-style cleansing breath. “Many countries depend on Orlov Petrochemical, and some on Clementine as well. We control the world’s supply of tralphium. All the lights and computers and air conditioners of the world.”
“Not all,” she said.
“Enough,” he said. “We control enough. Not in America or China, perhaps, but they do not like the rest of the world depending on us. Like Renz Ventures, we are a direct threat to the world order they have built, and thus our size and our power puts us in their rifle sights. I am not so reckless as Igbal Renz, and in this sense they fear me less. But this simply places me second on their hit list, and unlike Lawrence Killian or Dan Beseman, I am not beloved. The Earth will not weep if something bad were to happen here. And I have enemies capable of making bad things happen.”
“And?” she said, still not sure exactly what he was trying to convey here.
“Because infiltration will not work, I have been expecting someone to send a platoon of space marines to capture this place by force. But they may already know, we are well prepared for that contingency. Marines have their vulnerabilities, which we are able to target precisely. Visors and hoses are easily recognized, yes?”
Dona was well aware of the countermeasure programs, as she was effectively in charge of several of them. But she began to see what Orlov was worried about. “Robots don’t need air,” she said.
“Exactly. You paint one black and throw it at us. You throw a hundred of them at us, and what can we do? It might as well be a nuke.”
It was better than a nuke, she realized. A nuclear explosion—even a small one—would be seen by half the Earth. Everyone would want to know who, and why, and these would be hard secrets to keep. Whereas if classified robots simply killed everyone onboard the station—or killed Orlov and shut off electrical power and started issuing commands to the survivors—the responsible parties could make up any story they liked. And Dona had to agree: that was a bigger problem.
“What do we do about it?” she asked.
“We buy some of these robots ourselves,” he said.
“From whom?”
“I don’t know yet. Nor for how much. But it will not be cheap, my love. Assuaging the whining of forty asteroid miners will be a rounding error in comparison.”
“Then why do you balk? Why are you hiding yourself up here? Take your medicine, Orlov. Speak to your people. Some of them are hard people, yes. Together they could certainly kill me if you ordered it. They could also kill you if they wished to, but they want their jobs here, their lives here. They came here for the same reason I did: because you have built a place that is not for weaklings or half measures or idiots. This may be your place, but it is also theirs. You must acknowledge this. There is no time to waste.”
“No time?” he asked, licking his lips. Eyeing her body. Still an angry Buddha, but now also swollen with a bullying sort of lechery. She shouldn’t love that, but she did.
“No,” she said, with a twinge of regret. But truly, he was out of time, and more than out. Which meant that she was out of time, too.
“Very well,” he said, setting aside both lust and anger. “Let us go, a bully emperor and his bitch spy, to speak with these peasants who so concern you. You’re correct: they are my people, and they need to be reminded of it.”