Free A Paradigm of Earth by Candas Jane Dorsey

optimistically named strategy session in the boardroom, Grey was almost shaking with rage. Kowalski wouldn’t shut up, the Boy Wonder—he liked Morgan’s name for him, which had slipped out at that first session—played macho dominance games and lost to the grey man’s implacable authority—but so did Morgan, who had had to accept that Mr. Grey at least would interview Blue. That had made Morgan furious, of course, and the meeting had gone on far too long, with her pigheadedness, and her threats of using her influence over the alien to keep it silent even if it was interviewed, meaning that in the end nothing much had been accomplished.
    But he had to admire her spirit. Slightly.
    If he was honest, which he wished sometimes didn’t come so easy.
    If he were to be really honest, he had to sit down and admit that it wasn’t the stubborn, now-absent Morgan who had enraged him. It was the stubborn, very present Kowalski, now following him into his inner office, still insisting on some wild alien-conspiracy plot when he should have been concentrating on the well-being of this alien child. Dull bigoted Kowalski, with his lumpy blue suit and his lumpy body making a suitable home for his lumpenproletarian mind.
    If that wasn’t insulting the proletariat.
    Luckily, he outranked Kowalski. Grey decided to prove it. He waved Kowalski to a seat in the office.
    He felt suddenly surprised he had never noticed that Kowalski had the thick mouth and sagging cheeks of the type that directors pull from central casting to play movie alcoholics or child molesters—then heard with grim humor his own judgmental thought. Clearly, the irritation he had felt for years had finally boiled over into something that would be perilously close to hatred unless Grey took the situation in hand now.
    He made Kowalski a cup of coffee before he said anything. Ko seemed at ease, but there was sweat on his forehead and his hand left a print on the cracked brown handle of Grey’s coffeepot.
    “You were out of line in the meeting, Ko,” the grey man said mildly, beginning at last.
    “I don’t know how you can say that, Rog,” Ko said. Mr. Grey hated that nickname, wasn’t too fond of his first name at all, preferred Kowalski to address him by his last name, knew Ko knew that, and was enough further irritated to abandon his simulacrum of Zen calm.
    “I think you know, Ko, and I won’t have it. I may make your coffee instead of the other way around, but I rank you, and I don’t want your big mouth between me and the rest of those people at a meeting. I have enough trouble keeping the Boy Wonder from going off half-cocked.”
    “Hey, Inspector , what’s biting you? Rahim was doing his job. A queer and a bunch of other social workers have their hands all over the biggest asset we’ve got. You think that’s not a problem?”
    “Kowalski, get this straight. Your kind of thinking is on the way out in my department, and if you don’t muffle up, you might be riding the same rail.”
    “You’re one of the old guard, Rog. That community policing stuff you cut your rookie teeth on is old hat now.”
    “Equality of policing will never be old hat while I’m in charge, Staff Sergeant. And more to the point, I don’t like having you undercut my moves. If you want to keep your rank, I don’t want to hear another word out of you in any meeting where you shadow me, unless I know you are going to say it in support—or you clear it in advance. Do you understand?”
    “Rog, where’s this coming from? I thought we had a good working relationship here, man.”
    “As long as you follow my orders, Ko, we have a good working relationship. If you start screwing up on me like you did today, we have no relationship at all, and too many more stunts like that and you’ll be busted back to detachment chief in Back-of-Beyond, Newfoundland. Claro?”
    “Yeah, I got it.”
    “Okay, now that’s out of the way. Now that you know what you’re not gonna be doing