SIXTY

 

 

TÉTREAU FLINCHED AS Présidente Gaschel threw a book across the office. It wasn’t at him, but he’d never seen her so angry. He shouldn’t have been here. Labourière should have been here. But the chief of staff was in meetings in a flotilla six thousand kilometers west of the Baie-Comeau. It would be hours before he made it back. Cécile Dauzat was standing, taking the brunt of Gaschel’s frustration.

“This is not going to be my goddamn Matapédia!” Gaschel yelled.

Fifty years ago, a big habitat, shipped from Montréal, had sunk into the clouds, taking with it colonie-crippling resources and twenty-two souls. The rest had escaped, but the economic and psychological blow to la colonie had been devastating. Dauzat murmured platitudes.

“This is no one’s Matapédia, Madame la Présidente,” Tétreau finally said. “The Causapscal-des-Vents was a crumbling habitat owned by political enemies.”

Gaschel’s warning finger came up, silencing him. “Habitats don’t just sink anymore. There are too many redundancies. Something massive would have to go wrong to sink a habitat now. What if this was sabotage?”

Tétreau wasn’t sure if he should answer. His boss wasn’t answering. But Dauzat was too cautious. Tétreau could already see that. She was just an administrator.

“If the D’Aquillons have a good motive, maybe,” Tétreau said. “If we find a motive, we can deal with saboteurs as criminals. What’s more likely, though, is that something big really did break on the Causapscal-des-Vents. If the brother and sister don’t survive, that’s tragic, but it’s also an irritation off the table. Even if they do survive, the story can turn positively for you. If the D’Aquillons had been more cooperative, the habitat might have been recycled for the good of all.”

Gaschel breathed heavily, her face flushed.

“You don’t understand anything,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how much political irritation they can cause! It’s not worth the forty-one tons of metal and electronics that are dropping into the clouds.” Her voice was low. “How the hell are we going to stop it? We can’t afford to replace the materials.”

“Air Traffic Control is coordinating the rescue mission, Madame la Présidente,” Dauzat said.

“They haven’t rescued it yet, have they?” she demanded. “They fell too far behind! Where the hell was Air Traffic?”

A tone rang on the pad on Gaschel’s desk. Tétreau didn’t recognize it, but Gaschel and Dauzat obviously did, and they didn’t look happy. That could only mean one thing. Gaschel stalked back behind her desk, took a deep breath and schooled her features. When she touched the screen, Leah Woodward’s face appeared.

“Leah. It’s good to see you, but your call has come at a bad time,” Gaschel said in rough English.

“I saw,” the branch manager said in her correct but awkwardly-accented Parisien French. “I realize your teams are busy. Our mapping satellites use cloud-penetrating radar. Can I offer you extra sets of eyes?”

Gaschel’s face was stiff, but polite. Tétreau had heard from Dauzat that Gaschel had never liked the idea of Bank owned and run satellites. She had little confidence in the Bank of Pallas’s charity or interest in scientific mapping. But la colonie hadn’t paid for the satellites, and they provided global positioning for the entire planet.

“That would be very helpful,” Gaschel responded, still in English. “Perhaps I could send over Laurent Tétreau to liaise with you? He’s an aide to l’Assemblée.”

“I’ll wait for him in the branch office,” Woodward said, finally switching back to English.

“Thank you, Leah.”

“We’ll save the Causapscal-des-Vents.”

Gaschel nodded to the screen and terminated the call. Her face hardened.

“She’s probably counting our losses now,” she said. “If we lose the Causapscal-des-Vents on top of everything, Woodward will have us in a corner.”