Valhalla Station

by Chris Pourteau

  “Our emphasis now is on search and rescue,” he said. Again.

  “As it should be,” Daniel Xiao confirmed from the other end of the conference table. His virtual form shimmered slightly, a momentary hitch in the Company’s subspace relay network. The skyline of Shanghai rippled behind him. Ruben found himself missing Earth as he always did when confronted by its images. “Remember the long term, Ming,” Xiao said. “Remember the optics.”

  Ming’s modulator burped a grunt of disdain, or perhaps it was her cough coming back. Ruben sometimes couldn’t tell one from the other. “I suppose the workers are corporate assets,” she said. “Worth preserving, when possible.”

  “Training is expensive and only earns out its worth over time,” Tan Huan observed, nodding to Ming. As usual, his contribution was trite and meant to curry favor with Ming. As Regent of Mars and head of the Syndicate Corporation’s Qinlao Faction, she was the very definition of power here. Ming’s word was Martian law.

  She took no notice of Huan, who effected a cold smile to her non-response. Ruben reflected on the old aphorism about how generations decline over time. Tan’s father, Dong, had served on the board of Qinlao Manufacturing for decades. When Dong had died, Tan had taken his seat on the board. But unlike his father’s insightful advice, Tan’s contributions were most often inane expressions of the obvious.

  “Li speculates sabotage by the Resistance,” Xiao offered, swiping the air in front of him. He tossed information into the shared feed. It hovered above the conference table. Still images showed bent, twisted plastisteel where clean, load-bearing infrastructure had been. With thumb and forefinger, Xiao zoomed and enhanced the image. “See here? And here? The results of carefully placed charges at the connectors.” Daniel Xiao knew what he was talking about, having run one of the largest manufacturing companies of his own before QM had absorbed it, part of Earth’s corporate consolidation under SynCorp. Xiao looked meaningfully around the table from behind his Shanghai desk. “We’ve got a major problem, Ming. And I just don’t just mean the saboteurs.”

  Ruben focused on his sister. She seemed mentally present and carefully considering Xiao’s words. Ming resembled her mother Wenqian more every day, Ruben thought sadly. Stricken by a gene-hopping virus and confined to a maglev-chair much like the one her daughter now inhabited, Wenqian had lived her days out as a broken woman. And now Ming was following in her mother’s fated footsteps: broken physically and heard only with the assistance of vocalizing tech.

  More than that. Ming Qinlao was alive only with the assistance of technology, her current state the long-term legacy of radiation poisoning. Even the medical implant SynCorp had recently installed in all its citizens couldn’t keep up with the progressive damage she was suffering. Her own body had turned against her, its cells mutating and murdering one another. Early therapy had retarded and even reversed the effects of the radiation for a time, but that time was long past. At least Wenqian, unlike Ming, had kept her faculties to the end. Ruben’s heart was heavy. He could already feel the loss of his sister’s inevitable conclusion.

  “Ruben?”

  His mind snapped back to the present. “I’m sorry, Daniel, it’s the middle of the night here. What were you saying?”

  Xiao sat forward, placing his virtual elbows on his desk more than a quarter billion kilometers away. “I asked if this incident has shown up on CorpNet yet? And if so, where? What form?”

  Ruben engaged his sceye to check one last time before speaking. The SynCorp implant projected media images and headlines from CorpNet onto his retina. “Helena Telemachus is on top of things, as usual. She’s cast the headline on CorpNet as a mining accident. She’s already crafted the standard thoughts-and-prayers message for the public.”

  “She’s good at that,” Tan Huan said. “But it’s not the top level of the ’net we need to worry about. It’s the Basement and the Undernet.”

  Again, the obvious masquerading as wisdom.

  “Of course,” Ruben replied, speaking to Xiao’s image rather than the flesh-and-blood Huan across the table. The Basement, the virtual traffic channel just below the publicly consumable, sanitized top level of CorpNet, was beyond the means of most citizen-workers. It was strictly pay to play for such delicate consumables as taboo pornography and ahead-of-the-curve investment advice. And one level below that was the Undernet, where the real business of the Company happened. Where backroom deals were brokered and conflicts among the Five Factions resolved. That’s where the unvarnished facts about factory explosions on Mars would be analyzed. Which meant the Undernet—because it presented the truth of life under SynCorp—was where the real damage to the Company could happen. Fears stoked, relationships fractured, trust broken. “Our QM communications people are crafting a message now. We’ll frame the narrative by presenting it first.”

  “I want to see it within the half hour,” Ming said, looking straight at Ruben. “Before the formal board meeting.”

  “Of course,” Ruben replied, glancing down deferentially. The three of them—four, he reminded himself as Xiao’s image flickered again—had come together quickly. QM’s formal board meeting was scheduled for three hours from now.

  Daniel Xiao rapped his knuckles on his desk three times. It was his way of emphasizing a point before he made it. “Tony Taulke will blow a gasket when he hears the Resistance is behind this. He’ll think we’re not doing our part to keep the peace on Mars.”

  Ruben’s eye ticked again. And I wonder how he’ll get that impression? It was an open secret that Xiao was Tony’s man on QM’s board of directors.

  “Don’t be surprised if he sends Taulke operatives here,” Xiao said. “Maybe even Fischer.”

  “Like hell,” Ming said. She seemed to grow in her chair, become more substantial. It made Ruben’s heart ache again with memories of the formidable woman she used to be. “Tony Taulke can—”

  “But perhaps it won’t be necessary,” Xiao continued. “Not if we handle this the right way.”

  “Quickly, without mercy,” Tan Huan supplied, receiving a nod from Xiao.

  “Once we’ve saved those workers we can,” Ruben said. All eyes turned his way. “We have two missions here. The first is search and rescue.”

  “Each team is to have an investigator present,” Ming said, banishing any suggestion of her previous mental void. She looked straight at Xiao. “I want it all vid-documented and stored on an encrypted server. I won’t give Tony an inch of sunlight to start wedging a toe in here.”

  There was a slight delay as Xiao held her gaze. Had he noticed her slipping lately too? Ruben wondered. Did he sense an opportunity that, with Tony’s help, he could exploit?

  Over my dead body. What Ruben said he directed to Ming: “Of course, an investigator with each S&R team. I’ll see to it personally.” He leaned back from the table. “We’re planning to convene a full meeting of the board in three hours. If you could attend, Daniel?” Ruben avoided Huan’s gaze but said, “You too, of course, Tan.”

  “Of course,” Tan said.

  “Contact my assistant,” Xiao said. “If there’s a conflict, I’ll clear it.”

  “Thank you—”

  “Yes, thank you, Daniel,” Ming said. “Your presence is always reassuring.”

  The iron in her voice might have been refined in the plant that had just suffered sabotage. Ruben assumed it was directed at him. He’d overstepped again, run the meeting with her sitting right there at the head of the table. Didn’t she realize he was doing that to protect her?

  The virtual Xiao smiled. His image faded in silence.

  “Well then, if there’s nothing else for now,” Huan said, already rising. “I was having a lovely dream that involved three geishas and a—”

  “I also want to thank you, Tan,” Ming said. Her attempt at a smile was twisted by the scarred skin that even the most delicate surgery seemed unable to restore. “It’s like seeing your father every time I see you. Such a pleasant memory.”

  Ruben stopp
ed the laughter before it left his throat. She was having a really good day today. Sometimes his sister flared brightly with lucidity, as she had with Daniel Xiao—became a sunspot of the old Ming despite the mechanical monotone of her voice, the sweetness of her chosen words sprinkled over a tart bed of sarcasm. Only those who knew her well knew her well enough to catch it.

  Which meant Ming’s subtle jab was lost on Tan Huan.

  “So kind of you to say,” Huan replied with a slight bow. He turned and left the two of them alone in the board room.

  Ruben allowed himself a small chuckle.

  “Such an imbecile,” Ming said.

  “Yes, sister. As long as you know it.”

  Despite its cockeyed affect, her smile for him was warmer, more intimate. A knowing forgiveness of Ruben’s having run the meeting. Somewhere behind it, overlain by years of physical and mental suffering, was the Ming Qinlao who’d held his hand in the caverns beneath the Moon when he was just a boy, who’d protected him from the men hunting them in LUNa City. When Ming had been more than his older sister. When she’d been his heroine. His protector.

  And now he was determined to repay that debt. To be hers.

  “Ruben,” she said, “one more thing.”

  “Yes?” he said, smiling with memories.

  “How long will production be down?”

  She regarded him with the open face he remembered but with little awareness evident in her eyes. He forced the smile to stay on his face, though it was a falsehood now. That was the thing about sunspots, he realized. They flared quickly, brightly … but they always burned out.

  “We’re still assessing,” he said. His sceye pinged him a reminder: it was time for her meds. “But we should know something soon.”

  • • •

  “That could have gone better,” Ming said. Her eyes focused on something across the conference room. Ruben followed them and found half a bottle of Jameson’s whiskey, her favorite brand. It was the last bottle left of the case Tony Taulke had sent for her birthday last year. The aftereffect of staying mentally present for the board meeting, hyped on stims, had left her shrunken in her chair. Ming seemed a generation older than she had just a few hours before.

  “They can always go better,” Ruben replied. He rose to fulfill her unspoken wish.

  To say the full board meeting had been rough was like comparing a hurricane to a gusty breeze. But at least the board wasn’t in open rebellion. Not yet, anyway. Daniel Xiao had helped them there, sidelining a motion by Elise Kisaan, Regent of Earth, that would call for a vote of no confidence in Ming. The last thing Qinlao Manufacturing needed after the bombing, Xiao had argued, was more public embarrassment.

  Ruben still didn’t trust him.

  “They think I’m weak,” Ming said. “There was a time I would’ve encouraged that.”

  Ruben considered adding ice to the glass, a sometimes preference of his sister’s. Maybe neat was the way to go today. He brought the glass to her and set it down on the tabletop, a black volcanic agate mined from Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system.

  Everyone who sat around the table recognized it for what it was: Ming Qinlao’s statement of power as Regent of Mars. At least that’s what the pitch-black tabletop had once symbolized. Now it seemed just so much compacted, lifeless rock. The cast-off refuse of a dead planet’s dead past.

  He wanted to say something, to make Ming feel better. But the ping of her private channel saved him the effort.

  Tony Taulke was calling. Not answering wasn’t an option.

  Ruben shared a look with his older sister, whose expression hardened despite her fatigue. With effort, she sat up straighter in her maglev-chair. One never showed anything but strength to Tony. The chime rang again.

  She nodded, and Ruben accepted the call. The CEO of the Syndicate Corporation’s Five Factions filled the screen.

  The first thing you noticed about Tony Taulke was the vertical line of bone framing either side of his skull. Each arched upward sharply, like they were standing guard on either side of his forehead. His skin looked stretched over his brow, flattened to perfection, free of worry lines, which was oddly perverse on a man cresting sixty. Tony’s smile, when it appeared, never seemed to reach his eyes. His teeth seemed imported from a cosmetician’s catalog.

  Taken separately, his features were almost comical. But their combination presented the finely crafted face of a man born to rule others.

  Here we go, Ruben thought.

  Chapter 3

  Tony Taulke • SynCorp Headquarters, Low Earth Orbit

  “Ming,” Tony said without preamble. The first-name basis came from earned intimacy. He and the other leaders of SynCorp’s Five Factions had spent the past quarter century carving up the solar system together. That bred a certain claim to closeness. “I trust the QM board meeting went well? Danny Xiao has already briefed me on the security situation.”

  “That was fast,” Ming Qinlao replied coolly, a bit of the old bitterness in her voice. Love was not a commodity lost between the Qinlao and Taulke Factions. And especially not between Ming and Tony. “I hope his information was complete and accurate.”

  The subspace network somehow enhanced the mechanical tone of her vocal amplifier. The vital, whip-smart engineer Tony had watched decades earlier reclaim her company from her aunt, Xi Qinlao, seemed as far away in memory as Mars was from Earth. The broken woman before him hadn’t weathered time well, especially over the past year.

  “Oh, it was full of disturbing detail,” he said, pushing aside his pity. “The kind of explosives used, for instance. The kind the Resistance favors, yes?”

  Ming sat up straighter in her maglev-chair, her face betraying inner conflict. Perhaps she was deciding how much of the truth to admit. “That’s what we believe. We’re still investigating.”

  Tony nodded and let the distance breathe between them. The subspace network of satellites was a wondrous thing. It allowed instantaneous communication from anywhere in the solar system, though when you got as far away as Titan, there was an annoying, multi-second lag. But Earth to Mars was like talking to someone in the next room. Letting that wonder of technology lay fallow for a few moments … well, that was just another way to punctuate a sentence.

  “We’ve already got the Marshals Service moving on suspected Resistance cells,” Ruben Qinlao offered. The camera displaying the image of the QM boardroom focused its digital shutter on him. “We’re making sure footage of the raids is top news on CorpNet.”

  Though she was out of focus, Tony noted a sharp, annoyed gesture by Ming. She knew as well as he did that the first party to break the silence in a negotiation was the party destined to lose. And every discussion with Tony Taulke was nothing if not a negotiation.

  Yes, Ming knew that. She might be faltering, but she’d been dealing with Tony a long time. Ruben was still learning.

  Tony raised his chin and addressed the younger Qinlao directly. “A good start. But here’s the thing, kid…” The head of the Syndicate Corporation leaned in. His head swelled in the preview image of his own viewscreen. “The factory’s already blown up. Those cells should’ve been exterminated before the fact … not after.”

  Ruben glanced away from the camera. Tony offered the screen a flinty smile.

  “Do you know Tan Huan?” Ming asked. The image zoomed in on her again.

  “I know of him, of course,” Tony said. “Don’t think I’ve ever had the pleasure.”

  “Ah. Well, like you, he has a penchant for saying what everyone else in the room already knows.”

  Though he quickly covered it up, Ruben’s gasp could be heard all the way to Earth.

  “Perhaps I should send Galatz and the corporate fleet to Mars,” Tony said, opening his hands in a supportive gesture. “Anything I can do to help speed up the investigation.”

  Ming’s mouth slit sideways, one corner sweeping upward. Tony recognized her attempt at a catbird’s seat smile. Like so much else about her these days, it
manifested as crooked and sad.

  “Isn’t Admiral Galatz running down those pirates in the Belt?”

  Tony let subspace breathe. “They were the biggest problem I had until those Ghosts bombed your refinery.” Calling members of the Resistance Ghosts had been Helena Telemachus’s idea, a reflection of her wicked sense of humor. The Resistance, she’d argued, were the ghosts gumming up the works of the corporate machine. “Now, you’re the biggest problem I have.”

  Ming waved a withered hand. “We don’t need the fleet, and we don’t need you meddling in Mars business. We’ll deal with the threat ourselves, as we’ve always done. We’ll have the refinery back up and running within two standard days, or we’ll increase production in the other facilities to fill quota until it is. Agreed?”

  He weighed pressing the issue against letting the Qinlao Faction clean up its own mess. Threatening Ming’s sovereignty over Mars and, more to the point, her faction’s manufacturing charter—even if only in the short term—would send ripples across the entire Syndicate Corporation. Always in tension with one another, always jockeying for advantage, but in the end, each faction was a master of its own domain. The Qinlao Faction had mastered manufacturing. Elise Kisaan was queen of agriculture on Earth. Gregor Erkennen, innovator and technology king, reined over Titan’s R&D labs. Adriana Rabh, keeper of the corporate purse, managed SynCorp’s finances from the Jovian moon of Callisto. And the Taulkes, from the penthouse of SynCorp HQ more than three hundred kilometers above Earth, controlled distribution of all that, fueling the Company’s economic engine by keeping traffic flowing along the system’s Frater Lanes. The balance among all five, the tenuous tension of the status quo, was something Tony held sacrosanct above all else.

  Disruption—disharmony—could torpedo profits, and that would stir up discontent among the factions. The refinery’s being offline was, of course, its own threat to the status quo, but overreaction would only make matters worse. Still, Ming needed to know he was serious, if there were any doubt at all about that. After all these years, there really shouldn’t be.