Waking Gods (Themis Files, #2)

by Sylvain Neuvel

—Do not sell yourself short, Mr. Couture. You have proven yourself quite capable as a soldier in the past. But I did not have an armed assault in mind. A mutiny would be, shall we say, frowned upon, under the circumstances. I was thinking more along the lines of the European labor movement of the nineteenth century. —Yes. We should unionize. That’ll show them. —In the late 1800s, the French anarchist Émile Pouget submitted a report at a labor congress in France in which he advocated for work slowdowns, a strategy that had proved successful in Britain. The British unionists referred to the slowdown policy as Ca’Canny, which did not translate directly into French. However, the French had long likened slow and clumsy work to that of a man wearing wooden shoes, or sabots, and Pouget, in his report, coined the term sabotage. —You want me to break the boat? —If done properly, it would delay your arrival and offer plausible deniability. Please accept my apology. —For what? —For giving French lessons to a French-speaking linguist. —Oh, I didn’t know. I never studied French etymology. —I am aware of that. I still find it impolite to give anyone lessons in their field of specialty.