The Sol Majestic

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  She grants neither Kenna nor Rakesh the relief of eye contact. As she breathes through her nose, watching the porthole intently, Kenna looks out into the blackness, imagines an alternate history where Montgomery’s body sailed out gracefully toward the sun and was obliterated.

  “I…” Rakesh reaches out to embrace Montgomery in apology, then realizes she’s not conscious yet. “That wasn’t on the schematics…”

  She turns her head to glare at him, her motion as precise as automated laser-banks. “I don’t annotate my defenses for my enemies’ convenience.”

  Rakesh shakes his head.

  “I hired you to run my waste reprocessing plant, Rakesh, and you’ve repaid my kindness with injured women and wrecked equipment. This is at least ten thousand dinari of damage punched through my wall. I’m gonna tally this up and see if it’s worth shipping you off-station, or whether I just stuff you in that damn coffin and show you what you woulda done to her.”

  She looks down.

  “And as for Little Miss Sensate here, she’ll wake up on a ship bound for home. Scrimshaw’ll kick up a stink. Miss Montgomery’s auntie will file formal protests. But hell.” She scratches an itch under her left eye. “Figure if I don’t kick someone with connections out once in a while, they won’t take me serious.”

  Rakesh’s index finger is crooked, almost registering an objection, but his opposition wilts under Captain Lizzie’s cool gaze.

  Lizzie turns to Kenna.

  “Get back to the kitchen. You got decisions to make.”

  It hurts to breathe, looking her in the eye; it’s like inhaling in a high-pressure atmosphere, everything wanting to collapse. Yet he struggles to get words out nonetheless.

  “I … cry your pardon, Captain Denahue, but…”

  But what? What she’s doing isn’t right, but he doesn’t have an argument, just tattered ideas flying around. There’s something in this chaos that’ll convince her, he’s sure, yet all he can do is grab at the nearest idea and hope it leads him to a useful conclusion …

  “I’m afraid I must take full responsibility for this project,” he concludes.

  Captain Lizzie’s measured blink is more surprise than he’s ever seen from her.

  She runs her fingers along the hatchway rail, eyes marking every patch, following every fresh welding groove. She taps the porthole thoughtfully, then rests her hand on her hip as though Kenna is more of a puzzlement than this portal.

  “These refittings are at least six weeks’ work. You’ve been here ten days.”

  But her gaze has turned expectant. The ache in his lungs eases as she authorizes him to speak.

  “No. I’ve not been aware of this project for ten hours, truth be told. But…”

  He swallows.

  “I am the Inevitable Prince. When I discovered the nature of this gathering, I should have made to contact you. Had I done so, none of this would have happened. So as the sovereign representative of the Inevitable Philosophies, the full burden for this foolhardiness should fall upon me. If you eject anyone, I request it be me.”

  His conclusion stuns himself as much as it does Captain Lizzie. He hadn’t planned on offering himself up as a sacrificial lamb, yet it was the inevitable conclusion of the argument he’d started.

  But if he doesn’t know where he’s going with this, neither does Captain Lizzie. Her mouth twists up in wry amusement. She leans back on the hatch rail, as if taking a seat to watch a play put on for her benefit.

  “And if I did allow that,” Lizzie asks, “what would you say in your defense?”

  Kenna takes in the spare robot parts heaped on the floor, the waste reprocessing controls sealed away behind thick Lucite layers, the lights twinkling above them. “I’d say … this party took place in the proper court for you to judge.”

  “How so?”

  “We stand in Waste Reprocessing, Captain Denahue. You helm a station the size of a city, teeming with the garbage of thousands, and yet … what you actually throw away can fit in a small box. You repurpose, recycle, transform.”

  Her fingers drum upon the hatch rail, informing Kenna he’s headed down the wrong track. “That’s something your dirter parents mistaught you. Reuse isn’t laudable when you’re light-years from fresh supplies. It’s survival.”

  Montgomery’s breathing loses its hoarse, tongue-stuffed gasp and eases into a steadier rhythm, as if to confirm Kenna is on the right path. “And what happened here is an abundance of misplaced talent. They were bored, working jobs that didn’t ask much of them. So when they were offered a challenge, even an insane one, they rose to the occasion.”

  She rips a strip of duct tape off the window, lets it flap in the air-sucking gap for a moment before letting it go. The silver strip sails into the void, catching a flash of sunlight before disappearing from view.

  “Pretty shoddy work for the occasion,” she concludes.

  “Mayhap,” Kenna allows. “But they accomplished that in under two hours.”

  She cranes her neck to look back to Rakesh, gives him another long, slow blink. “Your crew cut a porthole into my station in two hours?”

  Rakesh crouches behind a control panel, head poking out as if he’s not quite willing to engage with her without cover. “I had a twelve-hour shift,” he snaps. “Two hours to install the hatch, eight hours for the party, two hours to remove the hatch and patch the hull.”

  Her face is blank with disbelief. “You were gonna patch this up.”

  “I had a plan to, yes.”

  Lizzie holds his gaze, but this time Rakesh does not back down: his exasperation at not getting to carry his grand schemes to fruition holds him fast. She steps away from the rail, then turns to examine the porthole with the knowledge this had been done in less time than it takes to watch a holovid.

  “That’s why this isn’t sealed tight.” She runs her hands around the porthole’s perimeter. “You’ve got explosive bolts on the outside holding it in. When this is done, you send that tumbling toward the sun, and replace it with…” She scans the plant, finds a great metal sheet welded to a larger metal sheet. “You set that up against the porthole, blow the porthole, the air pressure sucks that patch into place, and you weld it in tight. You barely lose any air if you do it right.”

  Rakesh straightens from behind the console. “That wasn’t my idea.” He snorts, debating whether to say more. “We iterated through a lot of plans before settling on this one.”

  She steps back, taking the whole room into perspective, her frown no longer an angry captain’s scowl, but an engineer working out a complex problem.

  “Except this hole still weakens the plant’s integrity, Rakesh. It’ll hold for daily wear, but if something with any mass impacts the hull, it…”

  “I admit it’s not a perfect solution,” Kenna interjects, before an argument breaks out on approach. “And it is, to be honest, a fairly insane problem they set out to solve. But I think Mr. Rakesh and all the people who helped him are stupefied by tedium. I think they burn to work upon something meaningful. And I think their lives will be enriched if you can guide them toward better projects.”

  Lizzie’s sigh is all the concession she’s willing to give. “The problem is, most of them work on the necessary projects. Waste processing isn’t sexy, but someone’s gotta helm it. What these people want is something crazy to work on, and I don’t always have the cash to outlay for the exciting bits.”

  “It may have escaped your notice, Captain Denahue, but this hasn’t cost you a dime.”

  Her flesh goose bumps beneath her camisole, muscles tensing for battle, and Kenna remembers she didn’t want to run down to the waste reprocessing plant at two in the morning. “This has installed a person-ejector I don’t need. That nobody needs. So why would I add another layer of administration, sorting through a thousand brain-fuzzed ideas to find one I’m okay with? If I’m going to let them cut up my ship and hold maker parties and authorize new construction, what’s in it for me?”

  Kenna now
knows what his final argument is. He doesn’t want to give it. Captain Lizzie is rightfully angry at being yanked out of sleep to roust a bunch of malcontents who’ve weakened her infrastructure.

  She has every reason not to be the person Kenna hopes she is.

  “What’s in it for you?” Kenna asks. “Well—you’ll likely see less vandalism around the station. And you’ll get friction from turning them down all the time. And I acknowledge the ones you do allow will have them working on a hundred projects you have no interest in, and once in a while they might even work on something you genuinely needed. Probably not that often, though.”

  Captain Lizzie punches her thigh. “That’s not all, boy. Finish your thought.”

  Kenna sighs. “Mostly, you get to make people happier.”

  A rasping noise from the coffin panics Kenna, until he realizes Montgomery is laughing.

  Lizzie leans back on the railing, massaging her neck. For the first time since she arrived, she looks tired—like a woman tasked with running a monstrously complex set of moving parts, both politically and physically, who wants to do the right thing by all of them.

  “I’m not gonna talk about this now,” she allows. “But I’m not gonna start spacing people, either. Rakesh, you and I are going to have a talk in a few days, and you’d better come up with some projects that intersect with both your people’s fitful needs and my practical inclinations. If they’re good, maybe you get to stay. Maybe.”

  Rakesh looks relieved as Captain Lizzie’s men haul Montgomery and the Bitch off to the docbot. “Should I, uh … get people in to patch the hole here?”

  She plops down onto a pile of plastic, staring at Kenna. “Not yet. First, the Prince is gonna return the Waste Reprocessing Plant to its former condition. All this mess cleaned up, all my control panels returned to working conditions.”

  “We had plans for that,” Rakesh says. “I can get my—”

  His voice drops like a cut speaker when Lizzie turns her still-sharp gaze in his direction.

  “The Prince claims he’s responsible,” she says. “So the Prince can clean it up.”

  “But that’ll take hours for one boy to do,” Rakesh objects.

  She gestures toward the plastic. “This is comfy. I got the rest of the night to watch. Ain’t like I’m getting back to sleep, anyway.”

  And when she makes eye contact with Kenna, it is not a hard captain’s gaze, but another, wearier question buried in her cool brown eyes: Do we have a problem here?

  Kenna looks at the sprawling mess the party left—shattered eyedroppers, used condoms, piles of equipment that he has no idea whether they belong to the party or the waste reprocessing plant. He doesn’t know how to peel the plastic covering off the controls, either. He’s not tall enough to reach the twinkling lights overhead, and Lizzie said there were six camera feeds to be taken down but he can’t see any of them.

  Mother and Father would tell him manual labor is shameful.

  That doesn’t explain Kenna’s smile as he gets to work.

  20

  Three Hours Before Kenna Is Released from Jail

  Savor Station’s jail cell holds everything Kenna finds comforting: it’s tiny, maybe six feet by six feet. The walls smell of rusty piss, masked by bubbling gray paint. There’s even a cot to curl up in—a luxury on a transport ship, seen as necessity here.

  Yet above all, Kenna loves the Plexiglas wall that stops him from walking over to the Majestic and damning it with his foolish decisions.

  He pushes his face into the cot’s taut burlap, feeling the empty squirm in his stomach. As long as he pretends to be asleep, they cannot make him choose. Last night’s party was a detour, but with morningcycle’s cold light comes The Sol Majestic’s execution.

  He remembers each dish: the chemical grapes that dissolved into salty foam, the tureen full of broth that turned into a stew, the lacquered duck, the pot of delicate flowers, and

  How do you rust an egg?

  He shivers. As long as he does nothing, he cannot harm The Sol Majestic.

  Except the bill for the robes is coming due, and the chefs must have time to prepare, and—

  The monitor embedded in his cell wall flashes. It must be Captain Lizzie. She’d seemed dubious about his request that she lock him up, informing him that if she needed the space to hold the day’s drunkards she would boot him out.

  INCOMING CALL: The Sol Majestic (Montgomery)

  Kenna’s muscles lock. If he stays still, the monitor won’t register his presence. Nobody at the Majestic will know he’s ignoring them. Except he is locked in jail, and the operator wouldn’t have routed the call to an empty cell.

  He’s stalled the decision until the afternoon, but now he will have to go to The Sol Majestic to guess their legacy into oblivion.

  He groans and taps the “answer” button, hoping maybe it’s Montgomery making a private call. But no, the camera angle is high in the kitchen, showing the chefs working on the evening’s service, clad in their striped chef’s outfits, chopping and comparing tastes and reducing sauces and debating.

  Except when the jail cell’s visuals flicker on, the flashing knives still, the staff’s faces going dead with uncomfortable stiffness. They brush off their vest-fronts, jab the ones deep in concentration to look up. Burners are turned low as they stare up at Kenna’s image.

  He ducks his head. He wants the kitchen to proceed as though nothing’s different—though the boy who’ll pronounce judgment upon them has no hope of that. Only two people treat him normally: Benzo looks up from today’s broth to jump up and wave at the camera, and Montgomery thumps the screen as if to ask Is this thing on?

  Montgomery’s goggles barely fit across the distorted landscape of her depressurization-swollen cheeks, her unwashed hair sticking out in all directions. She turns to three of the chefs—chefs who brought him audition dishes last night, why can’t he remember their names?—with the preening confidence of a woman about to settle a bet.

  “Greetings, O Prince!” Her greeting has a strained jocularity to it, an un-Montgomery-like friendliness that sets Kenna on edge. She jerks her thumb toward the chefs, who stand with their arms crossed as though barring Montgomery’s entry to the kitchen. “These yokels refuse to believe we made a decision last night. If you can believe that bullshit.”

  “… The decision,” he echoes.

  “Yeah.” She pulls her goggles down, revealing her imploringly wide honey-drop eyes. “You know. The Wisdom Ceremony decision.”

  Kenna feels the numb weightlessness of placing his fate into someone else’s hands.

  “That—yes,” he says. “A very difficult choice. Yet, I think, perhaps, it would be best if you explained our reasoning to the staff. You’re more conversant in culinary languages…”

  She sags for an instant, and Kenna wonders if he has said the wrong thing—but she nods once, then snaps her goggles on. They click their heels to attention as she chops her flat hand in their direction, calling them out like a sergeant ordering armies into position:

  “Right. Weimer, that potted plant bullshit is fine for an amuse-bouche, but passing that perfume-puff off as a full dish is a travesty and you know it. You find some way to make that into an actual course, we’ll slot that in. Gates, that lacquered duck is tasty, but one bite and we know every flavor in the duck. You don’t sleep until you find a pairing that elevates the dish beyond expensive takeout. Fargo, the broth-that-becomes-a-stew is a nice idea, but that’s not gonna carry the Prince through eighteen courses, so we’ll set that into the table like a bouquet and simplify it into five tastings—reducing it to a flashy palate-cleanser that gets more complex as the meal does. And Bosworth, the Prince’s fuckup is legend now, so you find some way to rust an egg.”

  The thirteen chefs are unified in their dropped jaws, their disbelieving silence. Bosworth, the most stunned at having her dish wiped from the tasting menu, waves both hands in a “Hold on” gesture.

  “Scrimshaw told us the Prince would pick
a chef to run this meal.”

  The cocky tilt of Montgomery’s hips chews up Bosworth’s nervous flailing. “He did. That chef is me.”

  “But you weren’t even auditioning!”

  “So?” Without looking back, she snaps her fingers in Kenna’s direction. “You all saw the videos from last night. He crashed a maker party, shot me into space, then took responsibility for the whole damn thing. Now Captain Lizzie’s taking suggestions for crowd-sourced station improvements. You think a prince like that cares for rules?”

  The adulation they pour through Kenna’s screen unnerves him, until he realizes why: that was the look they’d given Paulius, the first time he’d entered the kitchen.

  Bosworth tears off her hairnet, slams it into a countertop full of diced onions. “You don’t even work here!”

  The kitchen falls quiet except for the sizzle of garlic.

  Montgomery looks down at her chef’s outfit, the front flap hanging open, covered in electric violet blue Bitch mold. Her thin eyebrows constrict in mild vexation—how did that get there?—and then she buttons her vest, taking her time, the snap of each button audible even through the tinny speaker Kenna listens through.

  She fastens the top, conspicuously drawing attention to the black top-chef stripes decorating her breast. Then she strides over to Bosworth’s station, taking rangy long steps like she owns every countertop, to snatch the hairnet off the table.

  Bosworth stays still, bracing for impact. Kenna wonders if Montgomery will shove Bosworth against the stove the same way she slammed Kenna up against the wall.

  Montgomery leans over, snaps the hairnet back across Bosworth’s head, tugs it down into place. She leans in, daring Bosworth to peddle her brand of rebellion:

  “Who,” she says, “told you I didn’t work in this fucking kitchen?”

  There is a single clap. Benzo, at the back, bouncing up and down on his toes, applauding. The clap spreads like wildfire, and the chefs’ backs stiffen in a standing ovation even though they were standing already, stepping away from their stations as if to welcome Montgomery in. Montgomery shakes her head, refusing the acclaim, but even though her head is bowed Kenna sees her suppressing a smile.