The union, the grey voice on the radio crackled, was planning to strike the moment the hiring freeze ended and the pit expansion began. That would mean blockading the North Road, as well as the pit itself, but there were so many layabouts in the woods it would be nearly impossible to prevent scab hiring entirely. Was there a way to make scab money ineligible to exchange for shares? That no one would take scab money, that they might have to be paid in something other than levs, would that be incentive enough? Not to mention if enforcement was involved… if they were, NASU would send ski-planes of trained and tested strike defenders from their Tuktoyaktuk site. She visualized bullet patterns in the sky to sleep that night, with the flashes she knew from video of actual bullets. The next night after the transmission, the shortwave towers had all been sabotaged with icepicks.

Lev seemed genuinely shaken when she cornered him about it. The last thing he wanted was to ever see war again. Instead, when negotiations between the union and the board reached their final détente, Plushenko decided to dump all of his own shares into the ESOP, tipping its ownership over 50%. He liveblogged his staccato reasoning all day on VK such that it was reported as a fit of whimsy, and in any case a breach of fiduciary duty that would quickly be resolved by his father. But before the government had time to prosecute it, the ESOP had been dissolved and reformed as a cooperative, on documentation Polly stayed up two straight nights perfecting. It would be confederated with NASU, and pay taxes to the government of Quebec, and also to the Nemaska Cree band, which had not under any previous arrangement been a tax-collecting body. This didn’t in and of itself give them seats on the board, but new ones, including the current trustee, were duly appointed. Khan Plushenko, overclocked and furious from the Lena River Dam Collapse, found himself with nothing to claw back from the least of his sons, veteran and idealist and hedonist and cripple all in one, who had blocked his number.

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