Ocean's Echo (The Resolution Universe)

by Everina Maxwell

Tennal had been briefly introduced to them earlier that day and the two of them had not gotten on, but if that was going to be anyone’s problem, it wasn’t going to be Tennal’s.

The warrant officer glared at him, a tic jumping in their forehead. “Show me these regulations.” “Of course. Let me just—here we are—” This time, the text that filled the wall was ant-sized. Page after page of laws and codes crammed in, highlighted here and there in blue. Tennal hadn’t read half of them—he only ever learned enough about any one field to be dangerous—but he was fairly sure they backed him up. “So that seems clear,” Tennal said blandly.

Tennal had once managed to pretend to be a nice, amenable person for one of his exes. He’d kept up the act for two whole weeks before he’d cracked under the strain and reverted to his normal personality, and that had been the end of that relationship. The ex was married to two bankers now, and the three of them together still added up to less of an asshole than Tennal. It was hard to turn yourself into somebody else.

Stress, anxiety, boredom: normal reactions for a group that had just been yelled at, even if it was by Surit, which was a bit like a recruitment poster had come to life in order to be gently disappointed in you.

Surit spent the early shift checking on the code patch (successful), the crew (jumpy), and the newly mended drive (radiating innocence, to the extent that hardware could).

Surit said, with finality, “Just because someone else is okay doesn’t mean you had to be.”

But Surit and Zin weren’t the kind of personalities that made it into power, were they? To be in power, you needed to be a weasel.

“I don’t think it’s illegal if everyone else is breaking the law,” Basavi said, a sentence Surit did not agree with but, under the circumstances, wasn’t going to dispute.

If you’d asked him what made normal people clean up their act, he wouldn’t have said spite, but if it worked, he’d take it.

“We have solved your situation for you,” Tennal announced grandly. “You haven’t!” Zin said. “You absolutely haven’t!” “We have fucked up the situation,” Tennal amended, just as grandly, “in a new and interesting way.”