by Wil McCarthy
“What?”
“My former employers.”
“On that thing?”
“Yes.”
He scratched his scalp. “Impossible. I gave you that. Is it same device? How is such a thing possible?”
He wasn’t alarmed per se, but he was confused, and he didn’t like it.
“Two-channel device,” she said. “You and the French government wanted to communicate the same way. How everyone communicates today, yes? If they don’t want to be overheard. The only difference is that you wanted a voice channel, and they wanted text. So, this handset is a clone of the device you gave me, and of the one they did. It doesn’t look quite the same as either of the originals, but no one ever noticed. A black rectangle is a black rectangle. And anyway, carrying two similar devices would have looked suspicious.”
“Tampering with the device we gave you looks suspicious,” he said, though without any great conviction.
The problem with double agents was that they were demonstrably untrustworthy. Were they really working for you, or were they spies working against you, and for the people you had asked them to betray? But he’d worked with enough turncoats to realize they simply unmasked a basic truth: anyone could be working against him. Chances were, in an organization as large as Orlov Petrochemical, he had many potential spies and saboteurs already embedded. It made sense to distrust Dona Obata in the same way it made sense to distrust everyone, and reality in general. How many men had gone to their graves unaware, at the hands of a close associate? Paranoia had a bad reputation, but in truth, he knew he could never be paranoid enough. He would be betrayed one of these days, and he probably wouldn’t see it coming.
“I’m bringing this information to you,” she said. “You’re not discovering it; I’m telling you. French Intelligence. Contacting.”
She showed him a screen covered in chat bubbles, containing cryptic French text. “Bonne matinée oiseau chanteur. La fontaine est sèche. Ton oreille est chaude?” Coded messages of some sort.
“What do they want?” he asked.
“They’ve figured out I’m here. They want to know if I’m safe, and able to function.”
Function. That was an interesting word for it, Grigory thought. Function how, exactly?
“And are you?” he asked, trying on a menacing tone.
She sniffed. “I didn’t have to tell you this. This is an opportunity. This is a direct channel to the highest levels of the French government.”
“I have telephone and email,” he told her. “I can call governments any time I please. Presidents take my call, my dear. What do I need with back channels?”
“We can plant false information,” she said. “Turn our enemies against each other.”
“Our enemies are already against each other. More than even you may know. What is to be gained by telling them anything? They believe you are here. They do not know it beyond doubt. You could be alive or dead. You could have slipped back to Earth on a landing body, or dropped to the surface of the Moon with a methane shipment. The shuttle that came here might have been empty; they might have murdered you at Transit Point, and sent the empty shuttle here to throw suspicion off themselves, and onto me. You see? Your former superiors know nothing, and that . . . ambiguity is more useful to us than any false information. These are treacherous, treacherous times, my dear. Much is at stake, and this makes people greedy and afraid. We like greedy and afraid, because these are handles to grab people with. So we tell them only that the tralphium will lower their energy costs and reduce pollution, and that Clementine is everyone’s benefactor. Everyone’s frightening, mysterious benefactor, whom they dare not cross. But if Clementine is unhappy, then Orlov Petrochemical is unhappy, and perhaps it won’t be only the tralphium energy they lose. Perhaps even the deuterium can be shut off. I control ten percent of global electricity, and when the energy supply is controlled, people’s hearts are controlled with it, or they freeze to death in the dark. They know this. Everyone knows this, or learns it quickly when circumstances explain it to them. My father turned off the gas supply to Europe many times, in order to educate them. They turned to solar, to wind, to liquefied natural gas from America, but this was never more than politics. They needed my father’s natural gas pipelines, and so they did what was necessary, to keep him happy.”
“Charming,” she said, without disapproval.
He laughed. “Woman, you are not as afraid of me as you should be, nor as ashamed of yourself. And that is paradox, because I like you that way, unafraid and unashamed.”
“That’s not why I exist,” she said, now finally seeming a bit annoyed with him. “For you to like or dislike. I’m not a fawning, fainting person, or a barnacle on your hull. People who have underestimated me in that way have often regretted it.”
He considered that for a moment, then snorted, unconcerned. “How am I to interpret this? As threat?”
“No,” she said calmly, “I don’t threaten. If I meant you harm you’d be dead before your next breath. But now that you’ve seen my value, I will caution you: don’t go thinking it’s easily replaced.”
At that, he simply smiled. “Are you saying the world is not overflowing with beautiful French African trained killers who also have head for business?”
“No more than it’s overflowing with trillionaires.” She paused, then added, “You know, I did try to come up with something better than liquor. I looked for gaps in your value chain, and I found nothing. You really do work every angle, don’t you?”
“Of course. It would be quite difficult to accumulate one trillion anything without this. I had trillion rubles at the age of twenty-five. One trillion dollars and one trillion euros took much longer time, until I was past forty. People say I inherited my wealth, but my empire is twenty times larger than my father’s. Twenty. And my father was very clever, very ruthless man.”
“Mmm.” She was quiet for a while after that, but eventually said, “When the American and the Kiwi take over Esley Shade Station, our supply of landing bodies could be compromised.”
“Or at least delayed, yes. This thought has crossed through my mind.”
“We do have two space shuttles on hand. Those could carry several weeks’ worth of cargo apiece, if we save it up and land it less often.”
“Indeed, and we have four lifeboats that could serve similar function.”
She frowned. “Oh. Wow. Do you think that’s a good idea?”
“Naturally not, since our own skins could be at risk if we do that—yours and mine. But we control the tralphium, no? I am thinking there will be public outcry on our behalf, if we tell tabloids we are planning to use even one of our lifeboats to bring safe, clean energy to the people of Earth, because Coalition countries have left us no other way. Governments fear this sort of outcry. This gives us leverage, either to pass our cargo ships through the blockade and get some launch vehicles to Suriname, or else to demand that an occupied Renz Ventures continue to sell us landing bodies. It hardly matters which; if we accomplish either, we hang onto our revenue stream and our leverage, both.”
“Yes, well, if that’s your plan, you have an America problem.”
He paused, intrigued. Not many people spoke back to him in this manner, and the woman did seem to have good ideas. “How so?”
“You have, what, two power plants in North America? Neither of them on actual U.S. soil?”
“Correct. Go on.”
“America leads the Coalition. That means America’s basically in charge of the blockade, the embargo, and the raid on ESL1. It’s America you need leverage over, and you haven’t got it.”
“No? America listens to the weeping of its allies.”
“It doesn’t. Certainly, it doesn’t listen to the weeping of France. You said it yourself: our enemies work at cross-purposes to one another. You think an increase in European energy prices will bring the U.S. to the bargaining table? You know them better than that.”
“All right, let us say you are corre
ct. What solution do you propose?”
“France,” she said. “France knows about the ESL1 raid, but is no longer in a position to benefit from it. In fact, they could conceivably benefit more from exposing it before it happens. That gives France leverage over the U.S. And you have leverage over France. More than you do over the U.S., at any rate.”
“So, what, we politely ask Laurent Patenaude to politely ask Tina Tompkins to politely let an Orlov Petro ship through the blockade? In exchange for favorable electricity rates?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
Orlov pursed his lips, thinking about that. It left a sour taste, certainly. In the long run, what he needed was to make all of them—America and Europe and Russia and China—irrelevant. It already rankled that he was at their mercy right now; would he compound it by groveling? But yes, that was what Magnus Orlov would have done. “Leave your feelings out of it,” he’d counseled Grigory more than once. “Pay attention only to what you can quantify. If your reason for doing something, or not doing something, can’t be expressed in numbers, then it’s erunda. Nonsense.”
Magnus had been sixty years old when his forty-year-old wife, Yelena, had finally (in his own words) “coughed up a legitimate male heir,” and Magnus had died when Grigory was just twenty-five. That wasn’t a long time to know one’s father, particularly when he traveled all the time. But perhaps for that very reason, Grigory had always hung on Magnus’ every word. It was only more recently, in his forties and fifties, that he’d begun to feel confident enough in his own judgment to go against that of his father. And right now, his judgment was telling him not to play a strong hand weakly.
“If America is target of this maneuver,” he said, “why offer France any involvement at all? Why give them a chance to refuse, or play to their own agenda? I could simply email President Tompkins tomorrow morning, telling her, ‘Orlov Petrochemical is friendly and will keep your secrets in space. And as friends, we ask for one ship per week to pass through your blockade, inspected to whatever degree you find necessary, and paying for the time of the inspectors, as necessary.’ It’s a velvet glove with an iron fist inside of it, and within the fist, a bribe. She would find such an offer difficult to ignore, and difficult to refuse.”
“Oh,” said Obata, blinking in surprise. “My. That is direct.”
He nodded. “Indeed. And I will bet you one thousand rubles that she doesn’t even take the bribe. There’s no mechanism for the U.S. government to receive payment like that, and they cannot accept donations from foreign powers or foreign corporations, of which we are both.”
Obata appeared to think that over for a while. Finally, she said, “Why an exemption to the blockade, rather than continued shipments from Renz Ventures? You’re thinking RzVz may not survive the assault? Our orders were to capture it intact.”
“Your orders,” he corrected. “France’s orders. Probably New Zealand’s orders as well; I can’t think why these would be different for either country. But the Americans always have a different standard for themselves than for their allies, hmm? There is good reason to believe your friend, Alice Kyeong, may be operating under a different directive entirely.”
1.9
24 April
✧
ESL1 Shade Station
Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1
Extracislunar Space
Venturing out into the station, Alice made a show of getting to know her own original crewmates a little better, while also familiarizing herself with the layout of the station. She talked for fifteen minutes with Jeanette Schmidt in a place called the “employee break room,” which had a window and a Ping-Pong table and a little drink-bulb dispenser. She talked with Pelu Figueroa in the gym, one module down from the break room. She talked with Maag in the “galley,” which was a dining area adjoining both a kitchen and something called the “Secondary Hab Corridor” or “Beta Corridor.” She talked very briefly with Nonna Rostov, the nervous Russki, in “Gamma Corridor,” where both of their apartments were located. Where all of the newcomer’s apartments were located, in fact. The module was apparently brand-new, having been fabricated here at ESL1, installed and opened up over a period of a few days, and then left to outgas for a week before Dandelion finally arrived. That explained the new car smell, eh? And she talked with Saira Batra, the petite mathematician, in the docking module where they had first arrived, and where Dandelion was still attached, its docking hatch open to let the thing air out.
And then, with appearances properly kept up, she spent the better part of an hour talking to Bethy in every public place they could casually pass through, starting in Alpha Corridor and then gradually drifting through the station’s other spaces. It wasn’t immediately evident, but the modules of ESL1 Shade Station—some long and skinny, some short and wide, some fashioned into T and L shapes—formed three loops at three different orientations, so it was possible to get from anywhere to anywhere by several different routes. Alice made an effort to memorize these, so in an emergency—in the emergency she was here to cause—she’d know her way around. She and Bethy couldn’t speak freely, of course, but they could speak in a fairly thin code. “How are things looking in a general sense?” Bethy asked at one point. They were in the hydroponics lab, where Bethy nominally worked, on the far side of the gymnasium where people tended not to wander very often. That wasn’t public enough, though, so Alice turned them back around, through the gym and back toward the break room.
And she replied, “Better than you’d think! I haven’t identified specific security issues, but with management on our side it shouldn’t be difficult.”
To which Bethy said, “Are you sure? Duckies, is anything that easy? Maybe you need a second opinion.”
“Yours?”
“Yeah, if you like. I’m assigned to life support, but if you can do security in your spare time, I don’t see why I can’t help you out in mine.”
The high pitch of Bethy’s voice wasn’t in any way abnormal, but it was at odds with her stocky-strong arms and legs and her callused hands, which in turn were at odds with her narrow waist and flared hips. Like a rhinoceros in a corset! And nearly everything Bethy said was rendered vaguely comical by her gung-ho Kiwi accent, so she left quite a first impression on people.
Even ignoring the Actual Mission and the months of zero-gee combat training, she was actually kind of perfect for the role of station security.
“I need to talk to some more people before officially taking anyone on,” Alice told her.
“Gotta keep up appearances, eh?”
“Something like that. I’d stick with your normal routine for right now.”
“Whatever that is,” Bethy complained. “You get the feeling these people are just making it up as they go?”
“Definitely, yes. But making what up? There’s some kind of grand plan unfolding here. There’s method to this madness.”
“Okay, Hamlet.”
Alice stopped at that. “What?”
“Never mind. What are you doing today? Arresting drunks and writing parking tickets?”
“Me? No, I’ve got a date.”
“Hmm. Really. Hunky Pilot Guy?”
“His name is Derek.”
“Fluffy duckies, girl, you don’t waste time.”
Alice snorted. “You’ve been asleep. I’ve actually known the guy for months.”
“Hmm. Good guy?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
Bethy seemed to think that over. “Is there a, you know, operational benefit to the security team?”
“Depends what you mean,” Alice said, then busted out laughing like a schoolgirl.
Bethy didn’t like that. She didn’t like it at all, and suddenly her dorky Kiwi self was replaced by somebody hard and cold that Alice had never met. “Don’t compromise yourself. This Security business is serious, eh? Don’t compromise me.”
“Oh, lighten up,” Alice said, rather surprising herself. “He’s retired Air Force, like me. Loves the President. Yeah?”
“Irrelevant. Is he a friend of Security?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you compromising him?”
This was getting a little close to their shared secrets, and Alice felt the need to rein it back. The two of them were drifting through the station, drifting from handrail to handrail in a not-very-purposeful manner that nevertheless looked perhaps a bit too polished for a pair of newcomers. Alice had her weeks aboard Dandelion as a partial excuse, but it wasn’t like there’d actually been a lot of room to move around. It was nice to have space to roam; the loops and jumbles of ESL1 Station formed enough blind alleys to feel like there was also enough space to have a private conversation. But not too private. Not this close to operational secrets. Even closed up in a private apartment, she wouldn’t speak her secrets out loud.
“I don’t know,” Alice admitted. “Can we change the subject?”
“Find out,” Bethy told her. “That is the subject.”
When she finally went to look for Derek a few hours later, he wasn’t easy to find. He was hanging out in the employee lounge, which was on the opposite side of the station from the galley, which was where people actually seemed to want to hang out. The break room was really just a T-shaped connecting module that led from Gamma Corridor on one side to, on the other, the station’s small gymnasium and hydroponics lab, and also Egress Lock #2. But the break room had a little porthole window in it, and Derek was staring out of it, looking glumly at the Earth.
“Hey, flyboy. You okay?”
“I miss my sister and her kids,” he said. “And my mom.”
Alice nearly made some snide comment about momma’s boys, but thought better of it.
“I miss blue skies,” he continued. “Does that sound trite? It does to me.”
“VR’s not cutting it for you?” Alice asked.
