“I definitely do.” Zarya stepped closer to Syn so that she could watch Darling in action.

Syn adjusted the volume until it was loud enough for them to hear, but not be overheard by the rest of the room.

Looking so powerful and sexy that she wanted to take a bite out of him, Darling sat stoically on his throne in the council room while the gerents ranted about their mistreatment at his hands.

“You do not make those kinds of decisions without us,” one of the older gerents railed at him. “We control the workers. We’re the ones who set their hours and their pay, not you.”

Darling betrayed no expression whatsoever. He waited calmly for the senator to finish before he posed a question of his own. “And when the workers refuse to heed your orders and enter their plants to do their jobs, who would you call to negotiate?”

Ryn stroked his jaw with his thumb. “That would be you, Majesty,” he said to Darling just in case the others weren’t bright enough to know the answer.

Another senator rose to his feet with a smug expression. “We didn’t need you. We’d have handled it ourselves. The protestors would have been fired and replaced.”

Darling nodded thoughtfully. “On average, how long does it take to train a new worker on equipment and company procedure?”

“Not long,” the first gerent answered. “A few hours. Tops.”

Darling’s face was a mask of bitter amusement. “Obviously, you’ve never had to work a job or run unfamiliar equipment. It takes a few weeks to become comfortable and basically competent. It’s months, if not years before they’re as productive as the current staff, who have been working those jobs, ironically enough, for years. And then there’s the problem of who would train those new workers if all the old workers were fired?”

The gerents didn’t like having logic thrown at them.

Darling glanced around the crowd as they sputtered indignantly. When he spoke again, his voice was calm and level. “By negotiating what, to anyone with a conscience, is a humane work environment and schedule, I saved all of you millions of credits in the long run, and I kept the factories opened without drama. Even if you have to hire a few thousand more employees due to the shortened workday, you’re still better off than you would have been had you fired the existing staffs. Those who are proficient in their jobs will happily train the noobs, and there’s no loss in productivity. I can send you all the statistical charts on the projected savings.”

“You had no right to do this!”

A tic started in Darling’s jaw, but there was no other physical evidence to betray his irritation. “I have no right to protect my people? Is that not, by the very definition, what a governor is supposed to do?”

“You’ve overreached your position!”

Darling frowned. “So none of you are truly angry that I negotiated with the workers? You’re upset because I didn’t drag you out of bed in the middle of the night to have you agree with what I did… Very well. In the future, I’ll make sure to call all of you in and disrupt your days and nights with bullshit. Works for me… Ryn, make a note.”