“That doesn’t matter,” said Lem.
“Of course it matters,” said Benyawe. “Or at least it matters to me. You may not want to hear, but I’m going to tell you.”
“You always do,” said Lem. He turned his body to face her, rested one elbow on the back of the bench, and waited.
“I voted for you to go. Not just to leave as CEO but to get out completely. I didn’t want you on the board at all, not under your father. That would be its own circle of hell for you. Your father was coming back regardless of how I voted, but I could at least try and keep you from making the mistake of staying under his thumb. So yes, I made quite a scene and demanded that you go. I put my foot down, more so than I’ve done in those meetings before. I think I shocked a lot of people. They were expecting me to be an immovable wall, which I was, but it was a different wall than what they were expecting.”
“Thank you,” said Lem.
“For helping to throw you out of your company?”
“It was never my company,” said Lem. “Not really. It was always my father’s. I liked to pretend that I had made it mine, that I had built what it’s become, but my father was right. The company’s growth came from the Hegemony contracts that my father allowed me to have. He was controlling it all along, really. I thought I was a real boy, but I was Pinocchio.”
“A habitual liar?” said Benyawe.
“A marionette,” said Lem. “Dancing to my father’s tugs on the strings.”
“Now you’re being melodramatic,” said Benyawe.
“Grossly,” said Lem. “It’s rather off-putting, isn’t it?”
“Did you call me here to mope?”
“I called you here to offer you a job.”
“I have a job,” said Benyawe. “One I happen to be very good at, one I’ve worked very hard to keep.”
“You have worked hard,” said Lem. “And you are very good. That’s why I want you on my team.”
“And what team is that? Community croquet? Ultimate Frisbee? I really only have the strength for bridge these days, Lem. Maybe Go Fish. I’m getting old.”
“There aren’t teams on Go Fish. It’s every man for himself.”
“Or every woman,” said Benyawe. “But point taken. See? I’m less qualified for teams that I even realized.”
“I’m going to miss you,” said Lem. “I may not have been a very dedicated friend, for which I’m regretful, but I will miss our banter. You always know what to say.”
“First you offer me a job, without explanation, and then you act as if I’ll never see you again. I’m getting that Lem-has-gone-wackadoo vibe again.”
“I’m not offering you a job so much as a company,” said Lem. “I’m starting a nonprofit. I want you to have it.”
“I make an exceptional salary at the company, Lem, as you well know. Some people would call it an obnoxious salary. When you say nonprofit, my current salary isn’t sure if it should laugh hysterically or cower in the corner and scream.”
“Is money all you care about?”
“Retirement is all I care about. Once this war is over, I’m done. Mandu and I go back to Nigeria, and I get some goats.”
“Goats?” Lem asked. “You don’t strike me as a goat lady.”
“I’m not, really,” said Benyawe. “Goats are cute. That’s about the extent of my goat knowledge. I’d probably enjoy them for an afternoon and then hate them for eating the flowers. But the idea that I can have goats and not have to worry about orbital mechanics or chemical combustion or the schematics of the latest doohickey we’re building is what’s enticing. I can just focus on me.”
“Why not go to Nigeria now?” said Lem. “Leave Juke Limited, with or without goats, and return home while you know there’s still a home to return to. If we win, you can remain in Nigeria and make everything of your life that you’ve imagined. And if we lose, you will at least have lived some of the life you truly wanted. You decide. I’ve giving you the company. You can live anywhere in the world so long as you have net access.”
“You haven’t told me what this company is.”
“We’re basically a military contractor.”
Benyawe laughed. “Yes, nothing says nonprofit like exorbitantly expensive military weaponry. You can’t compete against your father, Lem, if that’s your plan. If you’re doing this to prove to him that you’ve got chutzpah, it won’t work. You’ll only prove to him how easily he can crush you. Juke Limited is an unstoppable juggernaut, as resilient as hullmat. The company isn’t going anywhere. It will steamroll every competitor in the world, particularly if we win this war and your father gets his wish to build a second fleet with interstellar ships.”
“He told you about his little scheme? For us to go to the Formics and wipe them out on their own world?”
She glanced around her. “That’s highly classified. Probably not something to be discussed in a public park.”
“It isn’t a park,” said Lem. “It’s a phony place pretending to be a park. The real parks are on Earth, in Nigeria, where you should be. This company I’m starting, this nonprofit, it’s a military contractor, but not in the traditional sense. My model is what happened with Bingwen and the NanoCloud. He recognized a need for a handheld delivery system, and then you put a team together and gave him a solution for free. No contract. No committees. No red tape. No bureaucracy. No one in finance killing the initiative because the margins were too low. A problem was presented, and a solution was almost instantly provided, one that the marines on site could assemble themselves. You didn’t have members of the board putting their nose in it and crunching numbers. You didn’t have delays in production and nightmares with distribution. You didn’t have any of the normal headaches. None of the parts of your job that you hate. All that went away. You only had to deliver an idea for the Fleet to build on site, where it was needed, so it got from your brain into a marine’s hands immediately. Or nearly immediately, which saves lives because it doesn’t leave marines in a lurch, desperate for equipment and solutions. That’s the company I’m giving you, Benyawe. One that discards traditional models of military contracting and completely ignores the sluggish quagmire that is Fleet bureaucracy.”
“It sounds brilliant,” said Benyawe. “But it’s missing what such a company requires. Several somethings, in fact.”
“Tell me.”
“One, the company’s objective is to produce ideas,” said Benyawe. “Solutions to whatever countermeasures the Formics introduce. But ideas have to come from somewhere, or more specifically, from someone. They can’t all come from me. I’m not that smart or that capable. This is a company of engineers. Do you have anyone other than me?”
“Not at the moment,” said Lem. “But you’ll help me build a team. We’ll find them at Juke and its competitors. We’ll find them at universities. We’ll find them at ten thousand places all over the Earth. Remember when we needed help with the hullmat? What did we do? We reached out to the world. We opened the door and welcomed any and all ideas. And what did we discover? We found Wila, who we wouldn’t have found otherwise. And she showed us what the Formics were doing. She opened our minds to a solution that none of us would ever have considered on our own. There are more Wilas out there, Benyawe. More people who have something to contribute, but since they don’t work for one of the big players, they don’t contribute. I want to enlist the world, Benyawe. I want to throw back the curtains and ask anyone with a brain to help us beat the Hive Queen. We can’t compete against her with only a few members of a select team. We need everyone to help design whatever tool is needed. I call it open-source warfare, and it’s our only hope of keeping pace with the Hive Queen.”
“What you’re suggesting sounds good in principle, Lem, but do you have any idea how difficult it is to manage what you’re suggesting? Enlisting that many people? Finding them? Vetting their ideas? This only works if it’s fast, if it gets ideas to marines immediately. But what you’re suggesting sounds like chaos.”
“It
will be at first,” said Lem. “Finding the right people, collecting the right minds. That won’t happen overnight. But once this A-team of engineers is assembled, you’re off to the races.”
“There’s another big problem here,” said Benyawe.
“I knew you would spot all the problems,” said Lem. “That’s why I chose you.”
“Open-source warfare only works if we know what the needs are and if there are engineers on the ships ready to implement what we suggest. Every warship of the fleet would need a workshop dedicated to building and implementing new equipment on the fly at the battlefield. That workshop would need to be staffed by mechanical engineers who, like Victor Delgado, can custom-make this equipment to marines’ exact specifications as quickly as humanly possible. They’ll need equipment like printers that can manufacture any number of different materials, design and drafting software, tools.”
“Ships already have most of those things,” said Lem. “And we can recommend staffing changes on every ship that will dedicate engineers to these immediate needs. Remember, if we do this, it might save the Fleet tens of billions of credits a year in expensive military contracts. Maybe hundreds of billions. They’re going to like this idea. It gets them solutions faster and it costs them next to nothing, expect perhaps for the expense of materials, which they would be all too happy to provide. They’re going to accommodate this. They’re going to weep with joy at this idea.”
“And they’re not going to pay us,” said Benyawe. “So where does the money come from? Nonprofits don’t operate on air. And people don’t dedicate all their brain power and energy for nothing. Even something as noble as saving marines and protecting the human race. People have mortgages. People have to eat.”
“Initially I’ll fund it,” said Lem. “I’ll bankroll the whole thing. Then we’ll work with people who raise money like this for a living. It saves marines’ lives. It expedites the war. It allows people, through their meager contribution, to stick their own hot poker right in the Hive Queen’s eye. I’m not worried about money.”
“Obviously,” said Benyawe. “But I am. How much of an investment are you willing to make initially?”
He gave her an amount.
She stared at him.
“You don’t think that’s enough?” he said.
“I didn’t think it was possible for one person to have that much.”
“The last few years have been kind. War has done wonders to my stock options. Yours as well, I suspect.”
“That’s money on a whole new level from what’s in my portfolio, Lem.”
“We’ll know what’s needed,” said Lem. “Mazer set up a forum on the IF intranet. We’ll access that, and we’ll talk to marines directly. No more corporate walls between us and them. It’s time engineers went to war.”
“You’re asking me to leave the company I helped build,” said Benyawe.
“And to leave my father.”
“I have no loyalty to your father. My loyalty is to my husband and my children and the human race.”
“Then I’m making you an offer you can’t refuse,” said Lem. “Find an office space in Nigeria, something that can accommodate an enormously reliable network and digital infrastructure, someplace the company can call home. My donation is the nonprofit’s first grant. You’ll have total stewardship. I have a wealth management team. They’ll help you assemble a finance team to manage the grant and use it to generate some investment income. That will be your first job, assembling a small team of executives. Decide how many engineers you’ll need on permanent staff and how many you’ll use via freelance and open-source. I’d like to keep overhead to a minimum. That’s the whole point of the model, being as efficient as the Hive Queen. All I need is for you to say yes.”
She watched him for a moment. “You have lost your mind, haven’t you? Not in a deranged sense, but in the sense that you’ve shed who you once were. The old Lem would think this was lunacy.”
“The old Lem is dead. I’m done with the company and this absurd quest to outperform my father. My therapist, if I had one, might call this the great liberation, the moment when I snip away whatever was tying me to that man. I’m free.”
He stood.
“Think about it. The money is in the account. I’ve already given you access. You’ll receive a link shortly. You could go home right now, pack your things, and be on the first shuttle to Earth with Mandu, if you wanted. Or you can take a week or two to think about it. Just keep in mind that marines have needs, and that the current model to meet those needs is painfully slow.”
He started to walk away.
“Wait,” she said. “And you? Where do you fit in this? Before, you acted like I’d never see you again. You’re not planning on harming yourself, are you?”
He turned back and smiled. “You’re worried about me. I’m touched. But I’m fine, never been better. I’m glad to have you on the team.”
“I didn’t say I would do this,” said Benyawe.
“No. But you will. Because you have a soul and marines need help.”
“I help marines where I currently work,” she said. “I help marines every day.”
“Others can do your job at Juke, Benyawe. No one else can do this new job.”
“Sure they can. Any number of engineers can lead this effort.”
“No. They can’t. Because if it isn’t you, I’m not doing it,” said Lem. “You’re the only person alive I trust with that kind of money.”
She was quiet a moment. “That makes me sad,” she said. “That I’m the only one, I mean.”
“Don’t pity me,” said Lem. “Work for me. Save marines. Enlist the world. This is as much a war of logistics as it is a war of violence, and it’s time we started winning both. No bureaucracy, no committees, no war profiteering. I know it’s what you want. It’s what I want too. And it’s what the Fleet needs.”
He left and didn’t turn back. Father would be furious that Benyawe was leaving during a critical transition, right when he needed her the most. The idea of Father raging at the news shouldn’t delight Lem—that would be juvenile. But it did delight him. Endlessly.
* * *
Meeting number two was in a single-table restaurant in Old Town that was both figuratively and literally underground. A restaurant that only a handful of people used and knew existed. A restaurant that Lem had built and kept a secret from everyone and used only in unique circumstances like this one.
Oliver Crowe arrived on time in a fine black suit and shirt and tie along with a retinue of grim-faced security personnel, men not unlike the ones who had guarded Father back at the Hegemony offices.
Crowe sat opposite Lem at the table and took in the room. It was decorated in a classical Parisian style, as if plucked from France in the late eighteen hundreds, right at the height of Impressionism. “Those are real Monets, aren’t they?” said Crowe, pointing to the two paintings on the wall. “I’ve heard about art thieves who create copies of priceless art so realistic that even curators can’t tell the difference. And then they sneak into museums, steal the originals, and replace them with the counterfeits so that no one even knows the museum is showing a fake. Then the real painting goes on the black market, perhaps sold to wealthy individuals who have secret private restaurants hidden beneath boring municipal buildings.”
“I’m afraid I’m not that devious,” said Lem. “At least not so far as the humanities are concerned. Skullduggery is more your forte, isn’t it?”
Crowe smiled and took a drink of his water.
Louis, the server, came and explained the meal that had been prepared. First a butternut squash soup, followed by a garden salad, then a ravioli with arugula and goat cheese.
“That sounds lovely,” said Crowe.
Louis nodded and left.
“You can have one of your bodyguards taste everything beforehand, if you like,” said Lem. “In case you think it’s poisoned.”
Crowe laughed. “And why would I make such a ridiculous a
ssumption?”
Lem shrugged. “You’re a spy. Don’t you always assume that everyone is trying to kill you?”
“Intelligence work is not as interesting as what you see at the cinema,” said Crowe. “I work at a desk. I get my coffee from a break room. I spend more time worrying about my pension than I do about my food being tainted.”
“But certainly all this skulking around and assassination plotting builds up a list of enemies.”
“Enemies only exist if they know you exist,” said Crowe. “That’s my first rule: never reveal yourself to anyone.”
“You revealed yourself to me,” said Lem. “You revealed yourself to Wila.”
“Are you angry about Wila?” said Crowe. “That I took her from you?”
“She never belonged to me,” said Lem. “And no, I’m not angry. Wila is perfectly capable of taking care of herself. Although I suspect that if she knew what you were doing, if she had any sense of who and what you really are, she might not have jumped into ASH.”
“You mean my plans for the Fleet?” said Crowe. “The plans that I hope you will assist me with?”
“Let’s call them what they are,” said Lem. “Assassinations.”
“I prefer the term ‘command realignment,’” said Crowe. “Fixing what is broken for the preservation of the species. Did you know that if a coyote gets its leg ensnared in a trap, it will gnaw its own leg off to free itself? Picture that. To survive, it will eat through its own flesh, break its own bones, chew and snap through its own sinew and muscles. All while bleeding profusely. Can you imagine that degree of pain? Not merely cutting your own leg off swiftly with a sharp instrument. But to use your own teeth to tear it away. The International Fleet is a trapped coyote, Lem. And unless the bad commanders are removed, the whole coyote dies. It’s not a pleasant business to be in, but that is how nature works. The strong survive, and the weak die. At the moment, the Formics are the strong ones in this scenario. We’re the organisms on the brink of extinction.”
The Hive Page 36
