Chapter 15

Anya Petrova took the napkin from her lap and wiped her mouth. A server approached to take her empty plate and Petrova waved him away. She wasn’t worried about being seen here, the service staff was of her own payroll and she’d closed the restaurant for the day. Reaching for the bread in the middle of the round steel table, Petrova used her knife to prepare a slice of butter and anointed the bread to her liking.

The restaurant was a small cafe style street food parlor. The walls were made of a porous brick painted bright yellow and the smell of coffee intermingled with traces of fried food like dancers of different cultures colliding onto a single floor. The silence at the table had grown unbearable, but Petrova refused to break the quiet.

Petrova could hear a nervous swallow as one of her guests gathered himself to answer; the oldest one, gray hair rounded around a shiny bald head and an unassuming face with graying blue eyes. He sat between two women of equal distinction. One woman had short blond hair and a scar on her cheek. The other woman wore a scarf around her neck and head, but her blue eyes were piercing. All three individuals wore the dress of corporate executives. Even terrorists wear suits nowadays, I suppose, Petrova mused. She watched the man, Clarence, his throat bobbed and the saliva slid down his throat. Petrova finished chewing her bread and reached for her wineglass.

His raspy voice communicated wisdom. Petrova heard only the manipulative tones of a charlatan. “Madame Petrova, your plan is bold, but if Thorne is as unhinged as you suspect, he will expose himself on his own soon enough; we don’t need your direction to weaken him. We are, however, interested in the resumption of talks in the hopes that we can find common ground. The question that this delegation would have is: why would you work with us now? You’ve written us off for the entirety of our campaign against the coalition.”

“I realize that my methods have seemed counter to your efforts, but you must see that we have been fighting for the same goals. Our planet is sick, and we must set aside minor difference in politic to see the greater evil mounting against us.”

“You are correct that your methods have proven counter to our interests. I would go so far to say that your efforts have undermined our goals. You haven’t answered my question. Why should we trust you?”

“This isn’t a question of trust, Clarence. This is a question of our planet’s future. Your cells have proven that the collective, or whatever you call it, will never sufficiently come together to create lasting change. You need someone on the inside. Someone with power. I’ve always been that someone, you just haven’t been able to see it.” Petrova reached for her wine glass and took a sip. Her guests had not eaten or drank.

“So you say, yet your coalition continues to strip resources from our planet while they grind the labor deeper into the dust. Why, I’ve heard reports that a scrap mining team was lost just the other day, and the coalition has been silent.” The guest had not raised his voice, but his whispersome tone was now stern and sharp.

Petrova frowned. These conversations usually went easier for her, but she’d known this conversion would be no easy feat. At the beginning of Petrova’s political career, she’d enjoyed a prolonged period of cooperation with the Front, but now they’d grown wise to her tactics. Petrova’s relationship with the Front had been of pure utility for her. For the Front, however, hope had sprung and found root in the alliance. Where Petrova saw a useful bunch of rabbelrousers, the Front saw in her a path to legitimate political influence. Unfortunately for the Front, Petrova’s intentions from the beginning were to dispatch the front as a distraction and to prevent any stifle any attempts at political legitimacy.

The Front had grown wise and had ultimately severed their relationship. It had worked out well for Petrova, even then. The Front’s public showing of their separation emboldened Petrova in the eyes of other corporate powerhouses in the coalition; she was cemented as an ally of the elite and began her true rise to power. She’d retained her own personal sense of rebellion, though, and she agreed with the Front on one thing: the Coalition had to go. After almost twenty years of non-communication, here there were again. The conversation lacked the friendly antecedents they’d enjoyed in the meetings of old. No, the masks were off and knives out early now. Petrova saw the play and knew she needed to harden now or face losing this negotiation.

“You’re out of options, Clarence. Thorne will destroy you unless you act now. He plans to mount a coalition-exclusive assault force, and who do you think he plans to target?” Petrova threatened. If they couldn’t be persuaded through satisfaction of their own morals, perhaps a fear of destruction would do the trick. “That bombing last month in Stratosopolis, did anyone ever take responsibility? I seem to remember a vague memo circulating through my office about suspicions surrounding your organization. Perhaps I should look into that more?”

“You know damn well who hit Stratos, Anya,” Clarence said. His voice was sharp and a heat radiated from his side of the table, but his posture was calm. He was right, she did know. He sat, relaxed, in his chair and raised a cup of wine to his lips. “Your threats mean very little to us, nowadays. How long would you say the coalition can stay relevant? Another ten, twenty, thirty years? What if people start to wake up to what you’re really doing? Think you’ll be around for that long? We’ve been silent, Anya, but we haven’t been inactive. We’ve been resting, but we haven’t been idle. You think I don’t know that something groundbreaking was found under Cirrus? Something that threatens your legitimacy as a governing body, and now you have the audacity to threaten us? The petulance. Anya, you are better than this.”

A pang of fear struck Petrova’s diaphragm. Shit shit shit. If these radicals knew about the reports, who else? Petrova’ssmile faltered only marginally while she calculated her response. It was slim, but she saw an opportunity to seize the initiative: Clarence and the Front would have shirked her meeting if they knew the contents of the reports. Their attendance was evidence that they still needed to bargain because they were missing the information they needed. First, though, she needed to test the waters. What, exactly, do you know, Clarence?

“These reports are precisely what I need your help with. I need to know what, exactly, I’ve been complicit with. I’ve heard theories, but as far as I understand the documents were destroyed down below the surface. There is one living person who might know what they said, but she is currently in the clouds. If the data is as damning as I understand it might be, then a reunion between our interests may be the only way to responsibly find justice.”

“These reports prove that you will be the one whom justice is enacted against, will they not, Anya? When your rogue asset is detained and you learn the truth of what she knows, you will only learn hear a summary of your career. You are the problem with the coalition. It is not the coalition, is the members who demand relevance and power at the expense of authentic responses to problems of environment and social justice.”

“I will not be lectured on my method to political engagement by a hermit that hasn’t left his hole in whatever dis-repaired level of Aegis in twelve years! You judge with ease from your stakeless position, but tell me this: how would you distribute power? Give it to your friends, use it to execute your enemies? No, you would play the long game because you would recognize that politics is a game of inches. No, fuck that. Politics is a game of half-inches, Clarence. You don’t get to shoot your way to the top without the wheel turning over onto you at some point. I’ve seemed contrary to your position for most of my career after our fallout? It’s because you became incompatible with political exchange. There’s a way to do these things, but you went too far. When you joined your forces with the thugs of the lower cities, you signed your own termination from political influence.”

Clarence scoffed and looked to his companions, who shared his disdain for Petrova’s position. Petrova hoped she hadn’t pushed him too far. She’d sounded angry, but passionate, and hoped Clarence would see this as one of their old conversations about a difference of method, Petrova claiming to work within the system while the Front could motivate a base from outside of the halls of corporate governance. Clarence had known people who had died in the fallout from their political separation, though. She shouldn’t have called them thugs.

Petrova knew she was winning now, though. She’d almost convinced herself to the perspective she was trying to convince Clarence. That was her sign; when she almost had herself believing a contrary opinion to her own. Petrova knew that their paths would diverge again soon enough. Once they’d done their part, Petrova could claim her spot atop the Coalition.

“You’ll be in Valhalla for the next couple of days? We will need to consider what you have told us and share the information with our network to source a reaction.”

“I will, but please understand the importance of quick action. The longer you wait, the stronger Thorne gets. He’s usurped my security forces and soon plans to take other coalition members as well.”

Her guests looked nervous, but Petrova wanted more. She wanted fear. “And don’t think that I would forget your unwillingness to assist me in this matter.”

“The threat reveals itself,” one of her guests said. Her voice sounded like the vocal chords had shaken off years of rust. A smile on her face, but her bangs concealed her eyes. Her fingers were interlocked with Clarence’s, her other hand was in her lap.

“A threat that you would do well to comprehend,” Petrova said smoothly. “I must consider the plausibility of any ally, and if you demonstrate an unwillingness to cooperate in a matter as dire as this one, I will have learned a lesson about you.”

“I think we are finished here,” the one known as Clarence said, looking to his comrades on his left and right for unity in their departure. The group rose as one and Clarence bowed.

“Always a pleasure, Madame Chairwoman.” Petrova nodded, granting her permission for them to leave. As the door closed behind her guests, Petrova snapped her fingers to summon the server. Now her plate could be removed.

These were Petrova’s favorite moments; the dust of battle settling, Petrova relaxing into her chair to analyze the moves of the match, the mental chess board of her previous discussion set up on the table in front of her. She traced the discussion and smiled. Her guests had given away more than they realized. In agreeing to meet in the first place, they had shown a willingness to cooperate with the coalition, which meant that they could be corrupted. Of course, Petrova had no intention of maintaining a true alliance with a People’s movement. Yuck. While she respected the plight of the laborer, Petrova had no great interest in altering her standing in the world so that the masses could live in marginally more comfort. Give them all of the health benefits they wanted, but she should hardly be expected to let them work in the same office as her.

No, her plan was a simple one, but it would work. The Lower Tier Liberation movements of the bottoms of Valhalla carried a militant and radical reputation. The true reason, Petrova had always suspected, for Valhalla’s immaculateness, was that heads would fly from high towers if they did not respect the demands of some of the lower classes. She banished that thought, though, and laughed aloud at her brief concern for a threat from the labor. The leadership on Valhalla portrayed themselves as allies to the working classes, but Petrova knew it was a charade. The people’s movements of Valhalla were powerless if pushes were ever to come to a shove. It was a puppet show performed to give them a sense of pride. Tell them that their wages were two percent higher than the global average or that you were considering a prohibition on industrialization on the surface under Valhalla and they sang songs of victory in the street and went to bed early ready to clock in to work the next morning with a smile on their face. Sometimes they even wrote you into their myths about “friends of the people.”

She hadn’t even given the movement the full story, but they were desperate for something to claim as a win. All she’d needed to tell them was that Thorne was building a private military force for the coalition and that he was going to make a move to consolidate power and claim a universal title over the coalition. That scared them enough; Thorne, as the chairman of Global Energy, held a unique interest in continued industrialization and resource extraction from the surface. The more Global Energy pollutes, the less stable the environment becomes and the more the lower classes of the city would suffer. One plus one equals two.

It wouldn’t be that easy, Petrova chided herself. Don’t get cocky, kiddo. Things were more precarious than she’d like, that was true. It was easy enough to convince the movement to act against Thorne, but would it not be equally simple for someone to have seen them meeting her at the restaurant? She’d taken precautions to close the place down and to place sentries to regulate foot traffic around the floor they were on, but her paranoia would eat at her for days now. She knew it would. In addition, who’s to say that the movement would even work with her. They’d expressed some questions that she didn’t have good answers to. Her guiding grace was that the movement was unstable and survived on scraps of good will to share between themselves. She’d given them a source of good will, she just needed the mice to go to the trap.

The ultimate irony in all of this, Petrova realized, was that her goal wasn’t dissimilar to Thorne’s. Their primary difference was that Thorne wanted power for power’s sake. Thorne wanted to be rich and for humanity to envy his influence. Thorne wanted to make the rules because that would mean he’s in charge. Petrova’s goals were more noble, at least she thought they were. Coalition members had lost sight of their purpose. The coalition, while useful for enriching the members and stakeholders, was ultimately a tool for human progress. The coaltion had stepped in because global governments of individual countries had failed to address a changing climate in time to save the planet. The vast wealth of the super-elite fast tracked the necessary technology to push the species to a new era. Technology had boomed and commerce flourished as humanity embraced a progress driven, profit motivated future. Escaping the immediate threat of the surface, though, the coalition was now bloated and lazy.

Petrova knew that the coalition would fail as a body of independent members. Thus, consolidation of leadership was now a prerequisite to a final solution, and that was Petrova’s ultimate goal. Power must be consolidated in order to save humanity. Then, she could elevate humanity beyond this polluted planet. Choices must be made, and why not pick those with more resources and wherewithal to make space habitation a sustainable enterprise? It was the natural progression of humanity. From the Earth, a select few had risen to the skies. From the skies, an even more exclusive few would rise to the heavens.

Petrova watched with disinterest as cars zipped by below the window to disappear into the immeasurable complex of Valhalla’s tower system. Planters and trees were interspersed among varying levels of the upper tiers to emulate life on the surface, but most of them were fake; the harsh sun and heavy wind at this altitude made most plant life unsustainable. Her gaze drifted lower and found the greenspace, the base of the upper tier that functioned as a structural foundation in addition to hosting the most maintained walking paths and opportunities for recreation Every city had central-park style fixtures at the bases of their various tiers, but Valhalla’s were the most beautiful. Seasonal flowers of every color were planted parallel the lanes where pedestrians buzzed along on electric carts and scooters and passed vendors stepping out on to the street to peddle their samples to the passerby.

The hypnotic state released her and Petrova returned to worrying. Morehouse should have checked in by now and his radio-silence, though not yet excessive, was out of character. She removed her mobile terminal from her dress pocket and flicked to her message history with Morehouse. His last message had come four hours prior as he was walking into a meeting with Zachary Thorne, leaving Petrova with the uneasy feeling that accompanied foul play. Morehouse was her man on the inside. She’d all but given Thorne carte blanche to use the coalition as his private hedge fund for military excursions to apprehend the last remaining link to the surface documents. Now, she was starting to think she needed a need inside man.

That would be difficult to come by, Petrova reasoned. Morehouse struck the ideal balance between lazy and motivated, competent and blithering. His cautious and slow approach to the girl’s capture had angered Thorne, she could tell, but he would consult her before making a change, at least he probably would. A wave a frustration coursed through her. She allowed it to pass before she spoke to herself.

“A small error must be corrected but not dwelt upon.” An aphorism her grandmother relied on while keeping her as a child. It remained her mantra in stressful moments, like when she forgot Olie’s birthday or when things were difficult with her board of directors. In this moment, she made a stark realization. She’d made a mistake by overplaying Morehouse, and Thorne punished her by taking one of her pieces. Like a novice chess player who relies too heavily on their Queen because it’s arguably the strongest piece, her arrogance fueling her march into error. Well, here she was, nowhere to go but forward.

Petrova checked her terminal again. Still no word from Morehouse. She drafted a message, Please check in, and sent it off. Her phone buzzed in response. Relieved, she checked the display to read Morehouse’s response.

Her heart sank in cold acceptance as she read the display to see Zachary Thorne’s contact image displayed on her terminal. The fucker was calling her to gloat.