Outer Olympus

Outer Olympus: Chapter 10

Despite her five thousand credit suit jacket, designer handbag, golden jewelry, and practiced posture, January Jade was ever so obviously a peasant awash in a world made for nobles. Her bedroom, a servant's quarters not designed for her to be able to do much more than sleep, wash up, and prepare for work, was larger than anywhere she had been able to afford before she started working at the Magistrate's mansion. Her heels clicked against the marble tiles of the hallway; genuine stonework flown up into orbit from Rockwater at great expense. They were not unfamiliar sights to her when she had arrived, however; she had also been flown up from Rockwater at great expense. So much that she had seen every day as a child; green lawns, rock floors, trees lining the perimeter of the estate, morphed from casual fact of life to ludicrous display of opulence here in the L3 Lagrange Sea. She had become numb to such extravagance just as quickly as she had become numb to the sight of the void of space ever present through glass panes above her.

It was still early morning, but the place was already abuzz. Maidservants, corporate lobbyists, Enforcers, technicians, grifters, all moving like insects inside the hive that was the unwelcome brain of Maintenance Six. No evidence remained of the People's Forum that had been here a decade ago, during the time of revolutionary victory (a time January had spent as a file clerk on Rockwater), nor the previous Magistrate's mansion. With its ornate architectural stylings based on what was popular on the Magistrate's distant home world of Quilst, it felt quite unlike any other building on the station, transposed onto the city like an alien parasite. January didn't pause to talk to anyone as she made her way through the mansion's hallways, opening the grand oak doors to the Magistrate's office. Her desk fell under the watchful gaze of a painting of Admiral Horatio Paradigm, a key figure in putting down the Tigress Rebellion a few centuries ago and the last member of the Paradigm house to have any significant repute. In the painting, Horatio stood resolute on the bridge of his command ship, staring forward with grim determination at January fiddling with spreadsheets beneath him. The legacy he'd expected when he won the battle of Aeniad, she was sure.

Things had gotten chaotic around here since the arrival of Specialist-Major Vestal's task force. Politics on Maintenance Six had always been a sort of stable instability; a mess of a few predictable actors making plays for power and succeeding or failing, repeat ad infinitum. A corporation would make a request for special treatment, another would complain, the dockworkers would raise a fuss about it, the more widespread criminal organizations would insist on a cut, and then everything would sink back down to a status quo unchanged but for the shuffling of a few million credits between the hands of the people involved. It always seemed so desperate to the people involved that January wondered if being involved only in scheduling meetings and passing correspondence along meant she was the only person who could see the choreography to the dance. But the tempo of the music had changed, now that a higher authority than Malcolm Paradigm existed in the region. Nobody was sure how to handle it- could Vestal be bribed, or would trying be a one way ticket out an airlock? Was there some way to profit from her arrival, was there any payoff for earning her trust, these were the questions being asked in obvious innuendo in the dozens of digital messages she was sorting through this morning. She had about an hour to sort through these, send some off to other organizations under the magistrate that might handle them, before the Magistrate himself arrived to his office. He liked to style himself an early riser, a hard worker, completely oblivious to how these bits of bravado cascaded to sleep-depriving effect onto those who worked for him. This exhaustion in her, already present as she began to work, was familiar by now. She was good at her job, but she imagined she would be quite a good deal more efficient if her schedule allowed an extra hour of sleep.

On a good day, she'd have filed away every bit of correspondence before Malcolm so much as arose from his bed, filtered it off to some other overworked bureaucrat, and ensure none of his messages needed to meet his direct attention at all, giving the man the time to focus on his ambitions of attaining his Barony rather than actually running the colony. On those days, all January really had to do was act as coordinator to whatever scheme he was currently hatching, playing the double role of enabler and reality check. This tended to be consistently less gruelling work than actually trying to fix problems on the station, something that could often drive the Magistrate to frustrated cruelty.