2.2
03 May
Clementine Cislunar Fuel Depot
Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 1
Cislunar Space
“We are also harassed,” said the trillionaire Grigory Magnusevich Orlov, “by these stealth ships.”
Dona Obata sighed; she could read his tone, and knew he was afraid, and that his fear could explode into violent rage at any moment.
Sally Grigorieva Orlova, a seventeen-year-old who apparently could not read her father’s tone, said, “Let’s embrace them, then.”
Orlov’s snort bordered on a sneer. “Yes, indeed, let us all be fine friends. Excellent thinking, Sally. I see you have your mother’s quick wit.”
Dangerously for Sally, she and her father and Dona Obata were in Sally’s own newly assigned quarters. She’d arrived a week ago, a few months after insisting her father take over custody in place of her “boring, miserable mother.” Since arriving, she’d worn a different outfit every day so far—bespoke garments of spidersilk and no-press cotton—and her wrists and ears and neckline glittered with dangly jewels that did not belong in a weightless environment. And those idiotic smartglasses made Dona want to slap them right off the girl’s head.
But the beige-and-brass apartment—luxurious for cislunar space—was windowless and had only one exit, so if Orlov chose violence, his teenage daughter would have no witnesses and nowhere to retreat. And he knew exactly how to move his body in zero gravity, whereas Sally was still flinging herself around like a toddler. She didn’t seem to understand this. This was her fifth conversation with her father, perhaps ever, and she did not seem to understand whom or what she was dealing with.
To his credit, Orlov then said, “Daughter, please understand. My own father, the great Magnus Orlov, raised me with criticism, the whip, and occasional hundred-character snippets of wisdom. That, and by throwing me on an oil platform at an age when other boys were still playing with action figures.”
“But you have no sons to treat so roughly,” Sally said, with remarkable defiance.
“I do not,” he agreed. “But I am amply provided with daughters. Do you imagine I have pined for you? Ask Dona, here, how many times your name has come up in all the years she’s been with me.”
“Twice,” Dona said, without waiting to be asked.
Sally looked more amused than hurt. “That’s twice more than I actually care about. I’m half raised already, o patriarch of abandoned women, and not so gently as you seem to think.”
Dona almost laughed out loud, and decided she actually kind of liked this girl. Decided, in fact, that she would expend some effort defending this strange, blonde product of European boarding schools.
In all the years they’d been a couple, Dona and Orlov had never come to blows, because he was a product of the worst kind of gangster capitalism, and Dona was a product of something even more terrible: the intelligence services that operated in Africa. Both of them knew that if things got too heated, one or both of them could very well end up in a surgical tube, or dead. But their verbal sparring was constant, and indeed a sort of bedrock of their relationship; each reminding the other of the danger they were both in. And Dona was no humanitarian, but there were people she liked, and situations she preferred. She knew when to step in front.
She said, “Grigory, my beloved, your temper sometimes distracts you from the most basic facts in front of you. Let’s recall how this conversation started.”
Three minutes ago, Sally had said to her father, “Our enemy, Igbal Renz, has been attacked.” It hadn’t gone well from there.
Now, in echo of that, Sally said, “If Igbal’s vast facility has an enemy, are these stealth ships not therefore our friend? It’s true we don’t know what they want, but have we even asked? I say we flirt with them. Make kissy faces and bring them close. And then . . .”
“Mmm?” Even through his annoyance, Orlov looked intrigued.
“Then we fuck them.”
The word she used was “opuskat”—literally, to push down. It was a dirty word even by Russian standards—a reference to forcible sodomy.
A smile and a frown seemed to be warring for control of Orlov’s face. He paused for a moment, and then said, “Interesting metaphor, but no. This is not how dangerous people think.”
To Sally’s credit, she sat back (if one can sit back while hovering, weightless, in a VIP cabin) and thought about that. She looked back and forth from Dona to Grigory, with an expression that said she knew—knew—that she was not only wise beyond her years, but also overmatched by her circumstances. Dona could see, in that look, that Sally hadn’t come here in a fit of bravado, or as a tourist, or as a spoilt child expecting to have her way. No, this girl had run.
Dona was not one for speaking gently, but she could at least be mild. She looked Sally in her pale blue eyes and said, “Do you know the game, ‘fuck, marry, or kill’?”
Sally nodded, suddenly looking very uncertain. Not weak, not even particularly frightened, but like she did not, for once, know what to do or say. Smart girl.
“You don’t fuck people like that,” Dona said. “People with nukes and invisibility cloaks. If you’re smart, you don’t kill them, either.”
Nobody said anything, until a low, unsmiling laugh hissed from Orlov’s lips.
“You women and your metaphors. Shall we marry the Cartels, then? Squeeze ourselves into a slutty dress and walk them down the aisle?”
Again, silence, but it was Sally who broke it this time: “Don’t they have something you want? Don’t they have a lot of things you want? Weapons? Political cover? Fear?”
Dona nodded grimly. She had handed Sally this opening, and Sally had taken it.
Orlov said nothing.
Sally seemed to finally realize she was in actual physical danger, but that she could talk her way out of it. Even more tentatively, she said, “You have something they want, as well.”
“Yes? And what is that?”
“Citizenship,” she said. “This station is an independent country.”
“For tax purposes.”
“And to evade prosecution for your numerous violations of Russian and maritime law.”
Again, Orlov said nothing. That was interesting; it meant Sally had his attention.
“You could be selling them passports,” she said. “You could charge a lot for passports.”
And yet again, the trillionaire had no response, so Dona stepped in and said, “Actually, the novelty value alone could be substantial. We cleared almost a billion dollars last year selling space vodka.”
That had been Dona’s idea, and it had worked out so well that they’d lately started charging even more exorbitant prices for “silver-zeolite-filtered” and “platinum-zeolite-filtered” versions of the exact same product. Four thousand dollars a bottle, and they literally could not make it fast enough to meet the demand. And passports . . . why, those could be printed on Earth, having no impact on the station’s own production facilities.
Pressing onward, she said, “Your daughter feels a need to prove herself, Grigory. Perhaps you should allow her?”
“It is a fresh idea,” he conceded, “but we do not actually know who is behind these incursions. It is probably not the Americans, but it could be the Chinese, or another nation-state looking to steal its way to greatness. Even if it is Cartels, we would need to know which one. There are many problems with this suggestion. But we are in need of lateral thinking. If you will meet me in Operations an hour from now, we will see if you can be of use.”
With that, he kicked off from a corner of Sally’s bed, launching himself toward the open hatch, and disappeared into the hallway outside.
“Father of the year,” Sally said, with no particular emphasis.
By now, Dona had worked out this girl’s situation, and knew how to play her. She said, “To whom are you in debt?”
Sally was floating by the dressing mirror, beside the door to the en suite bathroom, and in its reflection Dona could see the girl’s shoulders tense. But her face remained impassive, and she said, in French rather than Russian, “My credit cards?”
Dona had subtly positioned herself between Sally and the exit, and she now allowed her expression to harden. “Everyone who comes to this station brings problems with them,” she said, still in Russian, although French was her native language. “It’s my business to assess the threat of you, so I’m not going to ask again.”
With a flare of defiance, Sally said, “You’re guessing. You don’t know anything about me.”
In fact, Dona had done a dark-web sweep on the girl last night, using tools and techniques unknown to most people, and knew more about her than she was willing, at this time, to reveal. Identification numbers, bank accounts, medical history. The girl suffered from clinical depression, and had—at the age of seventeen—already twice been treated for sexually transmitted infections. And what the dark web could not reveal, Dona saw written plainly across Sally’s face.
“I won’t push you out an airlock,” Dona said now, “but I’m thirty seconds away from breaking your arm. You have traded on your father’s name, to acquire credit beyond your means. It happens to rich girls, sometimes. I don’t care about the money, but I need to know who is holding the debt, so I can guess what they will do, if they find you are beyond their reach.”
Now Sally looked truly afraid. Her eyes darted up and down Dona’s dark, athletic frame, no doubt seeing, for the first time, the formidable intellect in her, and the potential for violence. It was her day to notice these things.
As an act of kindness, Dona said, “I worked for the intelligence service of a major European country. Mostly in Africa. Your father keeps me at his side because there is no other safe place for him to keep me. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Sally said. Wide-eyed, she was drifting slowly toward one of the apartment’s walls, and rotating slowly in the air. Doing nothing, now, to change her momentum.
“So, then.”
In a rush, Sally said, “I didn’t mean for it to get so out of hand. I have a trust fund that pays out monthly, and I just . . . got behind. Please understand, I know some rough people. Rougher than I thought, apparently. This friend of a friend . . . well, he offered to help me. I didn’t realize he was charging me at all, much less charging me interest. I thought he was my boyfriend. It was very stupid. I can’t believe how stupid.”
Finally, she reached out a hand and took hold of a grab bar, looking afraid to do it and also afraid not to. The bracelets on her wrist jingled with the motion.
“Drugs or gambling?” Dona asked.
“Neither,” Sally said. Then: “Well, a little of both, but mostly just . . . high living. Air taxis. Bottle service. Concierge service. Clothes.”
“Yeah, I noticed the clothes. And I know how these things can happen, without you even really noticing. I won’t judge you, girl, I really don’t care about any of it. But I need you to give me a name.”
“I don’t know his real name. People called him L’incendie.” Then, in Russian: “It means ‘the fire,’ like a house fire.”
“Give me a nationality, then. Was he French?”
Sally shook her head. “South American. From Venezuela, I think.”
“Wonderful,” Dona said, and sighed. At one time, the scariest answer to that question would have been “Italian” or “Japanese.” Then, for a time, “Russian,” or perhaps “Chinese American.” But South America was a mess these days, even more than it had been thirty years ago. There was a lot more money kicking around, a lot of profitable industry, but the gradient between rich and poor was steeper than ever, and the Cartels—even now, after the war—were into everything, with a level of violence so absurdly surreal that even Hollywood movies had to tone it down.
Cynics would sometimes say the main purpose of the war was to clear the Cartels out of Suriname, so three of the Four Horsemen could launch their rockets there in peace. That wasn’t true, or anyway it wasn’t the whole truth, but any South American tough guy who wasn’t directly Cartelled up would be at most two degrees of separation away from them. The Cartels themselves would see to that.
Fortunately, Orlov Petrochemical had avoided the cesspit of Suriname almost completely, preferring to launch from Kazakhstan and offshore platforms, and from islands too small and politically weak to mount much resistance.
Sighing again, Dona waved a hand at Sally and said, “Relax. I can see the mere threat of harm has taught you what you needed to learn. You’re a bright girl, but you have seriously fucked up. This L’incendie, or the people he answers to—”
“He doesn’t answer to anyone.”
“Everyone answers to someone,” Dona said, unfazed. “And these men would have stuck you in an apartment, and charged a hundred thousand rubles a night to watch you fucked in every hole. On camera, you understand, and then they would have attempted to blackmail your father with the footage, and then they would have had to be murdered for their trouble, and the people they answer to would not be happy. And then there’d be a little war in your name, and the one thing all parties could agree on is that you were a liability. Do you know what happens to liabilities?”
“That’s a lot of speculation,” Sally muttered, clearly trying to salvage some sense of dignity and control.
“Only the details,” Dona said. “You’re a liability already.” Then, trying to keep the irony out of her voice, she added, “You were right to come to me with this.”
Still holding her grab bar, Sally said, “What’s going to happen to me?”
“I will quietly pay off your L’incendie, with a little extra for his trouble. It’s the cheapest option. You owe him less than fifty million rubles?”
Sally stared back blankly, so she amended: “Less than a million Euros?”
Sally nodded. “Less than a quarter million as of today. I only borrowed—”
Dona held up a hand. “The details don’t matter. I’m going to make this problem go away. And you”—she paused for dramatic effect, because she liked Sally and wanted her to get it—“are going to make yourself useful.”
“Or what?” Sally seemed to be asking more out of curiosity than defiance.
“You’re a smart girl,” Dona said. “Use your imagination.”