Page 36 of Oleander

Each voice arrived carrying the same infection—caution, liability, fear. Hollis prescribed the same cure. Run them. Double shifts. Move supervisors into operating roles. Delay nonessential maintenance. Production was the only message the market respected.

His counsel cleared his throat from the center screen.

“Hollis, if anything happens while staffing is under the mandated threshold—”

“Nothing is going to happen.”

“That’s not an assurance we can give.” Hollis leaned forward.

“It is the assurance I am giving. Your job is to make it legal after I decide what is necessary.” The lawyer’s mouth tightened. Hollis enjoyed that. Discomfort was recognition in its purest form.

He had founded Burton Drilling with leased equipment, borrowed money, and a willingness to enter fields other men considered depleted after his father had nearly run it into the ground. That history had hardened into theology.

He alone saw opportunity. He alone possessed courage. If engineers brought him limits, he called them timid. If accountants brought him exposure, he called them disloyal. If the sea took men after Hollis overruled them, he called the loss unforeseeable.

Dorothy had once admired that certainty. Or he had believed she did. In the first years she had stood beside him at openings, christenings, and charity dinners, smiling while he told the story of himself.

Later, she began asking questions. Why were near misses disappearing from quarterly reports? Why did inspection dates change? Why did families receive settlement papers before funerals?

At first he had treated her concern as sentimentality. Then he found copies in her desk: crew manifests, corrosion surveys, photographs of cracked risers, private emails between executives.

Dorothy had gathered evidence patiently, with the discipline of someone who knew her husband’s attention rested only on threats that announced themselves. By the time Hollis understood what she was doing, she had already distributed the archive.

Her death had not softened him. Grief, when it came, arrived as resentment. He hated her for making him vulnerable, for choosing strangers over him, for converting years of privilege into testimony.

He hated the calm with which she had faced him near the end. Most of all, he hated that she had planned for her own absence. Dorothy had given the records to people Hollis could not identify, ensuring that Platform Nine would outlive every attempt to bury it.

He unlocked his phone and opened the photograph he kept hidden in a folder labeled insurance. Dorothy stood on the Imperium’s foredeck in a blue scarf, one hand on the rail, looking not at the camera but toward the horizon.

“You sanctimonious traitor,” he murmured. He deleted the photograph, then restored it from the recently deleted folder less than a minute later. The contradiction irritated him more than the image.

The market screen chimed.

Burton Drilling had entered a volatility halt. A commentator cited rumors of an authenticated Platform Nine document cache. Hollis muted the broadcast, but captions continued beneath the faces: withheld safety data, potential criminal referral, unidentified whistleblower. His cigar had gone out between his fingers.

“Get communications,” he said. His assistant appeared on another screen. “I want denials from every division. Call the networks. Pull advertising if they repeat this garbage. Find out who used the phrase ‘document cache.’” She began to answer, but Hollis was already dialing his security chief. “Status on Voss?”

There was a pause too slight for an ordinary listener, but Hollis had built his life around detecting hesitation in subordinates.

“Resolved,” the man said.

“That wasn’t my question.” Another pause. The team had recovered Voss’s vehicle, blood, and personal effects. The tide had carried away anything else. “You told me he was dead.”

“We have every reason—”

“Reasons are what incompetent people bring me instead of results.”

Hollis stood. The deck seemed to tilt, though the sea remained calm. If Voss was alive, then the man knew names, accounts, routes, the architecture of Burton’s private enforcement. He knew which executives had been frightened, which witnesses had been followed, which records had been removed before investigators arrived. He knew enough to transform implication into intent.

Hollis crossed to the rail and stared down at the tender idling below. A deckhand glanced up, then quickly away. For the first time that afternoon, the Imperium did not feel like a kingdom. It felt conspicuous. Two hundred feet of polished certainty visible from miles in every direction, its transponders declaring its position, its crew list filed, its fuel purchases recorded.

Calls continued to stack across the screens. A lender demanded updated collateral. A board member wanted an emergency meeting to remove him from all decisions. The Atlas superintendent reported that the fatigued driller had collapsed. On Neptune, a control-room operator had refused a sixteen-hour extension and been escorted from the platform.

Hollis answered each crisis with punishment. Fire the operator. Replace the superintendent. Draw the credit line. Sue the broadcaster. Keep every platform running.

Yet his orders no longer produced the clean silence he expected. People asked for them in writing. One vice president refused and copied the board. The general counsel disconnected from the call, then sent a message preserving his objection. Hollis read it twice. The organization he had trained to absorb his will had begun generating a record against him.

He poured more bourbon and missed the glass. Amber liquid spread across the teak. The steward stepped forward with a cloth.