Fritz may have initially been reluctant at my suggestion that he seek a position on the board, but he’s fully come around to the idea now. “Yeah, yeah, this can work,” he murmurs to himself after Campos suggests he lead the board.
Campos sits back, hands folded comfortably on his stomach and says, “So, we want to get Morgan to call elections early—we don’t want to wait a year. But that shouldn’t take too long, maybe a month or so.”
“It has to be now,” I insist, replaying yesterday’s conversation with Shu-Fen. “There’s a war afoot.”
“I know that, but it’s not a problem here. Frankly, we’re the ones with an army and it’s still marching across our fields.”
“And the Stepdaughters are the ones with a navy,” I counter. “You yourself mentioned they’d gone after your fishing vessels!”
“Yeah, but, what, are they going to come shell our domes?” Campos asks with a small chuckle of disbelief.
“Is that so unreasonable?” I ask back. You send an army of tanks, what do you expect will happen? I hear in my head in Cleve’s voice.
I can see the gears turning behind his eyes, and he sits up straighter. “Would they really do that?” he wonders aloud. Then his eyes narrow a bit. “You’ve already talked with them, haven’t you?”
I gesture at the bounty of Chiron spread across the table. “Where do you think I got these?”
“How much time do we have?” he asks seriously.
“You don’t.”
“Wh-what?!” I stare back levelly at the incredulous man, letting him read the answer on my face. “What do you want me to do then?” he asks with more urgency. “I can get you a meeting with Morgan…” He steps over to his desk and picks up a datapad from it. A quick check indicates the datalinks are functional again. He flips through his calendar and then tells us that he’s supposed to have a meeting with Morgan tomorrow morning, a slot which he can give up to us.
“That’s the soonest?” I ask. The timing might work, but the margins are slim. Xiao said we only had three days, but maybe Cleve can convince him to delay. It’ll be hard to keep so many ships hidden, but if we just need another day or two…
“Yes, that’s the soonest I can get you in to talk with him. Unless you want to try to kidnap him, which I do not recommend. He maintains a personal guard.”
“We’ll take that meeting,” I tell Campos. It’ll have to do.
He sits down heavily at the table and runs his hand across the smooth skin of his head. “Okay. And I think, yes, the board bylaws say that if there’s an emergency call for elections, it can be done in a day, twenty-four hours. Is that good? Can you hold off your navy that long?”
If Morgan calls for elections right after our meeting tomorrow morning, then the candidate names will be due the day of the blockade. The shareholder voting would be happening as the ships were moving in. It’s not great, but it could work. Possibly. “It’s not my navy,” I correct Campos. “I’m not the one making these decisions.”
“Who are you then, Mariah Esteban Thorne? I know you said you’re a representative for the planet, but…”
Isn’t that the question? Stowaway? Oversleeper? Child of Chiron? Research project? Doomed to never fit in anywhere? Sam wanted me to consider something similar during my therapy session with her in the Garden of Chiron. Where can you belong? What can you be? I let out a long breath and carefully pick my words. “I’m just someone who has unique insight into the situation.” I feel a warm hand rest itself on my knee under the table, and Fritz gives a slight squeeze, reminding me that he’s here for me.
Campos gives me a little frown, not pleased with that non-answer. “I know I’m a little bit of a pushover sometimes. You said you worked for Morgan; you know he’s not like that. He won’t mess around. You’ll only have one day to try to convince all the other shareholders of how to vote. Morgan doesn’t control the majority of shares, just a plurality. I control quite a lot, as does Bianca Horvath.”
“I’m not going to be able to get Bianca Horvath’s support; she hates this planet as much as Morgan does.” I nod at the report still sitting in front of Campos. “Dr. Khan, also not a fan of this planet. Who else do you suggest?” Campos picks up his datapad, and after a few taps, he has a list of major shareholders.
He shows it to me and Fritz. “There are many people who control small amounts, but…” He waves a hand dismissively. We’d have to do a lot of canvassing or a propaganda blast to direct their votes… Or, we’d have to talk to a few strategic people with sway across multiple fields. Shu-Fen is on this list. She’s a ways down, but like she told us, she’s doing quite well. Yushi is on the list too, and so is another familiar name that I’m surprised to see: Damian. What?! But he was so disdainful of the dome’s systems. According to this, he has a significant number of shares. They’re marked with an asterisk though, as they are held in trust. Is this how Morgan is paying for University support to the war effort? In shares? How does that make any sense? Unless… is the University planning to establish a foothold on this continent here? Are we not the only ones planning a corporate takeover? Well, it’s something I can maybe work with. Damian seemed somewhat reasonable during our short conversation. A man on a mission, a steadfast believer in the University ethos and proud of where he came from… But I have a little more context on all that now, after meeting Pastor Thara. Maybe I can make him see that a change in leadership here would suit his purposes, too.
I ask for a copy of the list, and when Campos hesitates, I reframe my question. “Can Fritz have a copy? He’s a shareholder and a potential board member.” That makes the request more palatable to him. This isn’t really proprietary information; the public is allowed to know who can vote for what. Campos thinks it would look suspicious for it to be found on me, but in the long list of suspicious things in my control right now, that’s pretty far down, in my opinion.
“So, you said you know Morgan. Is that good?” he asks me.
I shrug. “He’s changed thirty years’ worth, and I’ve lived two months.” He may have tried to wake me up, or he may have sabotaged my cryopod and jettisoned its submodule. I have no idea.
“Wow, you are fresh off the boat, huh?”
“I am. Do you know anything about what happened?” I ask. “How did Morgan get in control here?” Campos lets out a long sigh, then gets up and heads to a sideboard. From it, he extracts three glasses and a glass decanter of an amber liquid. He pours out drinks for us all and settles back down, clearly preparing to relate a long story. Before he begins, I share, “I know that he scheduled his cryopod to trigger him awake before other people.”
Campos’s eyebrows shoot up. “Really?”
Fritz passes across all our evidence as I continue, “I know that he was the last person in Captain Garland’s quarters before the captain was found dead—but after the captain had already died.” Campos gives a hmph of suspicion. “But what I don’t know is how this place came to be. And how somebody who wasn’t supposed to be on the trip at all—”
“What do you mean?!”
“—and added himself to the roster on the last day, how that person ended up in charge of this dome.”
Campos blows out a long breath after flipping through the files newly loaded onto his datapad. “This is damning evidence!”
“This is the kind of material that might make planetfaller shareholders question his leadership,” I suggest.
“This… this might convince Bianca Horvath,” Campos says. “None of the other stuff,” he waves at the Chiron goods. “But this? She would vote out Morgan in a heartbeat.”
Leyland Campos was not one of the first to wake up when Unity arrived at Chiron, but he tells us what he knows. The ship started pulling apart during an uncontrolled descent, but whether that was before or after Garland’s death, he’s unsure. Morgan was already awake and organizing people, helping them get safely to the colony pod to make planetfall. “He did a really good job of that, taking the right amount of authority for the job,” Campos says. “That colony pod made it down safely, mostly intact. Almost all of us aboard survived. There were some pieces that didn’t make it, unfortunately.” Whether those broke off or were intentionally jettisoned, he doesn’t know.
Morgan earnestly tried to save as many people as he could, so people looked to him for leadership. Not only had they made planetfall without all the resources they thought they were going to have, there was also miasma slowly killing them without them realizing it. Morgan was the one who had the idea to salvage pieces of Unity and repurpose them. These domes were originally intended for farming Earth crops in isolation from the Chiron environment, but he ordered them used as dwellings to keep people safe from the miasma.
“Then there came the question of how we were going to organize, how we were going to pay for everything. We didn’t have all the plans that had been made back on Earth, so we had to do it ourselves.” I can’t help but roll my eyes at where this is going. Confronted with dangerous lives on a new world, what was considered a top priority? Establishing a currency.
Campos starts talking about the challenges of financing new construction on an alien world. Everyone was assigned one share of Morgan Industries to do with as they liked. “It was decided that was the most fair, the most equitable start we could give everyone. And if you wanted to go into debt to finance a project like building a new fishing boat or whatever, you could do that. It gave you the chance to do that, instead of just if you don’t have the money, you’re out of luck.” There’s real admiration in his voice as Campos describes the start of the oppressive debt currently filling the domes.
Morgan knew extremely well how to work that debt system—big surprise there, since he’s the one who proposed it. Rather than sell his share, he took on more debt than almost anyone else in those early days. And he was able to make it all back… and then some. “I took on debt, too,” Campos says, “but I came to the planet with construction experience and had access to some of my plans. He had managerial experience; he knew how to organize people.”
Campos relates an anecdote of some interest. “One of the big families, the Santiago family—Morgan ended up getting almost all their shares as well with the services he managed to provide and the things he did. Somehow, they lost everything. I think there’s maybe one of them left. I heard she got exiled. Quite a shame, too,” he says, shaking his head sadly. Given that he was in the construction industry back on Earth, he would have already been familiar with the Santiago empire.
“So that’s how Morgan Industries came to be,” Campos concludes. “Morgan got the plurality of shares. People looked up to him for a long time—all the planetfallers, certainly, because he helped organize us. And miasma sickness rates dropped dramatically. We have healthcare for our repo squads who have to go out into the field.” But not for factory workers in too much debt, apparently. “We make sure that we don’t go outside more than we have to.” Though you’re fine with exiling debtors to it. “And when we need to, we fungicide the xenofungus away. Maybe one day we’ll be able to clean this whole continent,” he ends on an upbeat note.
I’m already growing agitated, listening to all this… this… fabricated system of debt oppression, and at this image of fungicide sweeping the landscape, I’m visibly uncomfortable. I’ve felt that, not just burns on my skin or pain lancing through my limbs, but also the countryside burning and the planet screaming. At my shudder, Campos hastily says, “I don’t like it, but it is deadly to humans.”
“It’s deadly because you haven’t adapted. Because you’re staying in the domes. Because you’re not participating in the environment,” I argue.
“We tried living outside the domes those first five to ten years. It’s extremely bad for you. Those planetfallers you see today are the lucky ones. You only just woke up; maybe you don’t know how bad miasma sickness gets. Every day that you’re outside is like living two or three. It’s not a matter of adaptability! I want to adapt, but we don’t have the genetic engineering capability to do that kind of adaptation…”
His words drift off as I stand up from the table and cross the room to the terrarium. I remove the lid and hold my right hand over the opening. My left holds my cane, and it spasms more tightly closed at the streaks of pain that jolt through that forearm. Here in the dome, the energy has to come from me, not the environment, and it’s not exactly comfortable. The scar there is glowing with its own light, though my audience might not be able to distinguish it from the sparkly ink in the tattoo around it. They certainly see the motes of indigo coalescing along my right hand and softly falling down into the terrarium. The plants inside shift and weave together as they grow up towards my hand, as if they were sunflowers turning toward the light. Feeling like a puppeteer working the strings of a marionette, I slowly raise my hand, keeping it always just out of reach of the plants. They surge up over the top lip of the terrarium.
I look from the terrarium back over to the table. Fritz is watching with rapt attention, and Campos looks shocked. “I was not in a completely sealed environment for those thirty years, but I was on life support,” I explain.
“So it is possible to adapt,” Leyland breathes out, amazed.
“I’m not saying it’s easy—”
He gives a sniff of grim amusement and mutters, “You just have to not die first.”
“—but there are ways. And the Stepdaughters of Chiron are researching those ways. Scientific exchanges between your two groups would help so many more people. It’s not just about what food you eat or what you build your buildings out of.”
“Hmm…. And you’re immune to miasma?”
Not inert to it, no. If I was standing in a cloud of it right now, my arm would not be hurting. But what I say in reply is, “It doesn’t affect me the way it does everyone else.”
“Can other people do this too? Are there others like you?”
“I don’t know if there’s anybody quite like me,” I say in a small voice, feeling heavily the distance between me and the others in the room. “But there might be people elsewhere in cryopods that didn’t open right but retained power. There are certainly people among the Stepdaughters of Chiron who are more in tune than others.” And Cleve, though he wasn’t bathed in miasma, was subject to resonance energies of some sort during all that time; surely that has something to do with how he’s bonded with a shimmerfly. That’s his information to share though, not mine. “I’m just saying it’s not impossible. But it has to be worked, or it’s not going to happen.”
Campos lets out a reflective sigh. “You know, I think maybe you’re right. Of course, we had to focus on survival in those first few years or we would all have just died.”
“That time is over,” I tell him. “The slot machines in the street suggest that priorities have moved on from mere survival.”
“Those are… profitable but pointless,” Campos admits. “Yes, you’re right. We have a stable dome now; we should be adapting. Good luck in your meeting with Morgan. You have my full support. I’ll talk with Bianca Horvath, if I can have these documents,” he says, tapping the gambling ledger.
“Certainly. That would be better than me talking to her.” In our last conversation, she called me a terrorist. “She’ll hear these things coming from a planetf—” I interrupt myself with a snort of laughter. I’m a planetfaller, too, after all. “She’ll hear these things coming from a local better than she will coming from me.”
“Yes,” Campos agrees. “Particularly from a captain of industry. But the smaller shareholders on the list, I think you two will have more success with.”
I nod. “We have a network of people who can interface with them.”
“Do you mind if I ask… Do you have connections with the dissidents inside the dome?”
That is Fritz’s question to answer, not mine. Currently he’s friends to both sides, but also enemies of both sides. But once he’s on the board and can effect some real change, there will be no need for such sides to exist. Fritz chooses to be honest but not forthcoming. “Yes, I have some influence,” he admits.
Campos gets the drift of what’s going on, but he isn’t offended. “If you can just try to keep them off my property in the meantime, maybe get them to stop attacking my networks, I’d really appreciate it. I’m the one who is trying to build with local Chiron materials, after all.”
Oh, Leyland, back to the goods in the end, I see. Not listening to the other half of what the resistance groups are saying. Their anger isn’t only about the planet, but also about the crippling debt systems that you’re benefiting from.
Fritz, though, just nods politely—not that we have any idea who did that attack this morning. Possibly the same ones who bricked his own shop!