“If I’m not right, exactly what’s stopping you from pulling the trigger?” Lilliana asked Fortunato.
“My thoughts exactly,” he said. “I know you’ve never been all that great at taking advice, my dear Lilliana, but maybe you should be pursuing a different line of inquiry.”
“Alright, then… what’s your next move?” she asked. “You blast me down, what do you for an encore?”
“Are you actually alluding to your faith in your friends and shipmates being able to avenge your death?” he asked. “That is a worry of mine, on an incidental level, but it’s not the sort of thing I’d expect you to worry about. You’ve always operated under the assumption that the end of your life was the end of the game, to be avoided at all costs. You’ve never taken even the coldest of comfort in the thought of anything that might happen after you’ve… shuffled off.”
“Well, let’s assume you get away cleanly from them,” Lilliana said. “What do you do next? Inside this room, you’ve got me and a gun… but outside, the situation is rapidly spiraling far outside of anyone’s control. Do you think that you’ll be able to take everything back, with your gun and your sword? And do you imagine that when you’re done, you’ll actually want it?”
“Back to this… me and my supposed distaste for success,” Fortunato said.
“I’m not even talking about that,” Lilliana said. “Would you call it success? The Meadows is trashed. Its reputation is going to take a major hit. The appeal of gambling to the common everyday person is that it lets them experience risks in a safe place. Do you think anyone’s going to feel safe when the greatest gambling institution in this stretch of the void turned into a free-fire zone?”
“No guests have been harmed,” Fortunato said.
“Oh? I guess you haven’t even been tracking what’s been going on at the waterpark,” Lilliana said.
“The waterpark has never been my concern,” Fortunato said.
“But it would be,” Lilliana said. “If you threw out all the moneychangers…”
“See, that’s what I’ve been missing!” Fortunato said. “Somebody who understands my classical references.”
“You can’t wash your hands of the satellite operations if there’s no one else to run them,” Lilliana said.
“No, but I can shut them down… a big disaster gives me the perfect excuse to pare away all the extraneous elements the Fickle Finger has attracted over the years. People will be reassured that the restored management will do what it takes to keep them safe when the conglomerate failed.”
“That still leaves you with the problem of The Meadows.”
“Just one casino… one of many.”
“It’s the one that’s synonymous with the Finger… hell, with the very concept of casinos,” Lilliana said. “If it were one of the smaller ones, like Atlanticity, you could maybe close it down and rebrand it. You can’t do that with The Meadows. This is going to stick, and it’s going to stick hard.”
“Well… if the pie is smaller for a number of years, at least there will be fewer people taking slices from it.”
“Oh? So the Lead Soprano isn’t planning on taking a whopping chunk of that pie?”
“He’ll be dealt with,” Fortunato said.
“Even granting that you can root out and remove all his men from the station, that’s not the same thing as beating him. He could effectively lay siege to you, keep you on the defensive all the time… it’s axiomatic that you can’t run a gambling hell and keep gangsters out of it. And the conglomerates that are running the Gaming Commission aren’t self-contained within the station. Even if you somehow managed to win the battle that’s going on right now for control of the Finger, you’d spend every day of the rest of your life fighting to keep it.”
“Well, isn’t that what you say I want? The struggle?”
“The hunt, Fortunato… but you wouldn’t be hunting, you’d be hunted,” Lilliana said. “Hounded. You’d spend your days shut up in a tiny office, watching a thousand screens for the smallest incursion, the slightest sign of treachery. Does that sound like anything you’d want?”
“So what exactly do you suggest I do, instead?” Fortunato asked. “Give up?”
“Think about what exactly you’d be giving up,” Lilliana said. “An unpayable debt to the most powerful mobster in human space? A never-ending fight for survival and control? The bureaucratic headaches that you’d inherit after killing off all the bureaucrats? What part of that sounds like anything you’d enjoy?”
“Yes, well, it’s better than any alternative,” Fortunato said. “Better to go down fighting…”
“Don’t give me that,” Lilliana said. “I know you, and I know that you only talk like that when the drama is flowing fast and furious through your veins. When you have a moment to catch your breath, you’re like me. You want to live. Desperately. Right now, the only way you’re getting out of this alive is by doing the one thing you dislike the thought of possibly as much as dying: letting go. Giving up. The only question is which is more important to you: holding onto what you think is yours until your dying breath, or forestalling that breath for as long as possible?”
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