Ballistic

by Marko Kloos

  Solveig ate her meal deliberately, mindful of the potential for sauce splattering her clean blue suit. She wanted to be annoyed at the fact that she cared about not making a mess in front of Detective Berg. It meant acknowledging to herself that she found him attractive. But it was an unexpected and almost pleasant annoyance.

  “What about you? Working late tonight?” he asked.

  “I want to tell you I am so busy that I don’t have time for leisure. That I only go home to sleep. The sort of thing you’re supposed to say as a corporate executive.”

  She looked around as if to make sure nobody was listening in, then lowered her voice a little to pretend she was sharing a secret.

  “The truth is that the food in our executive kitchen is boring. So I sneak out for dinner sometimes.”

  “You’re a vice president at Ragnar,” Berg said. “I’m sure they could make you whatever you told them.”

  “That’s not a good use of executive power,” Solveig replied. “It’s not my personal kitchen. It’s the company kitchen. Besides, it’s a good excuse to get some fresh air.”

  He nodded and took a few bites of his own food. She watched him pick up the glistening black noodles of his dish with the sticks, then expertly wind them into a ball before putting them into his mouth.

  “Do you live in the city?” he asked.

  Solveig shook her head.

  “No, I’m staying at the family place. At least until I get a feel for this routine. I just started three months ago. I’m still trying to find the right rate of swing for this pendulum.”

  “That’s a good way to put it,” he said. “I’m not sure I could move into the same place with my parents again. I was glad to be away. It’s nice to see them every few months, but we all do better when we have our own space. I barely spend time at home anyway. And when I do, it’s at the strangest hours. It would drive them crazy after a while.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “I have a place in the outer ring, near the spaceport. Sometimes I stay late, or I don’t want to deal with the tube travel, and then I just rent a sleeping pod in the city for the night.”

  Solveig suddenly felt keenly aware of the gap in life circumstances that existed between her and almost everyone else who was close to her age. She had a company gyrofoil standing by to ferry her back home to sleep, to a huge family estate with a security detachment, dozens of rooms, and a fully staffed kitchen with its own vegetable gardens and fishponds. He had to take a long tube ride home because he couldn’t afford a place inside the main city ring, and when he stayed out in the city overnight, it was by necessity and not choice. Things that were adventures or acts of rebellion for her were just regular life for normal people.

  “The investigation was a dead end, by the way,” he said around a mouthful of noodles.

  “The investigation,” Solveig repeated.

  “The one I helped conduct at Ragnar when I questioned you. Three months ago. The glove from Lagertha Land Systems. It was a dead end. In case you’re wondering if I’m just trying to get information out of you.”

  “Oh. I figured you would have been by to ask more questions if it wasn’t resolved.”

  “It was like you said. Lagertha closed down after the war, and the military records can’t tell us who received that glove.”

  “So we are both just civilians right now,” she said.

  “Off the clock and off the record,” he confirmed. “No legal or ethical pitfalls.”

  They continued their meal. She kept sneaking glances at him when his attention was on his noodles to wind them up for another bite. Detective Berg’s brown hair was lightly curled, and it looked a little too unruly for a police officer. She suspected he got a lot of comments about it at work. It could be that he was duplicitous, that he was trying to use her as an easy wedge to get more intelligence about Ragnar Industries. But she was very good at smelling out intent. It had been a necessary survival skill for most of her life. And from the way he was glancing at her whenever he thought she was paying attention to her own food or the surroundings, she suspected she had his intent figured out with a fair degree of accuracy.

  Besides, sometimes it was fun to throw caution to the wind.

  “Off the record,” she said. “You have a personal comtab with you?”

  He looked surprised, but then he nodded and pulled the device out of a pocket. He held it up to show her, the questioning expression still on his face. She took her own comtab out and tapped it against his.

  “That’s my private node, not the business one. For the next time you are off the clock and in the mood for some spicy food. And you feel like having company. No legal or ethical pitfalls.”

  Berg looked at the node information flashing across his screen. She had formulated the offer in casual terms. If he wasn’t interested, or if he was with someone else, it would be easy for him to be politely noncommittal without rejecting her outright.

  He smiled and tucked his comtab away again.

  “I will take you up on that.”

  She barely avoided being late for her ride home. When she stepped through the rooftop access door, it was 2128 hours. Tonight, ninety minutes had passed much more quickly than usual.

  On the rooftop landing pad, Edric was waiting for her next to the gyrofoil that would bring her home. Solveig stopped at the edge of the pad for a moment and turned to look at the city. The sun had set, leaving only a faint streak of purple and red at the horizon. Down in the streets, thousands of AI-controlled pods formed never-ending rivers of blinking lights that crisscrossed each other and converged in the distance. The evening air carried the smells of the city, ozone and warm steel and sunbaked photovoltaic glass.

  “Good evening, Miss Solveig,” Edric said when she walked over to the gyrofoil’s open door. “You look like you had a good day.”

  “How so, Edric?” she asked.

  “You look pleased.”

  Edric climbed into the cabin behind her and closed the door. A few moments later, the pilot started the rotors and lifted off into the night sky. Solveig checked her reflection in the window next to her seat. There was a little smile stuck in the corners of her mouth after all, she saw, one that wasn’t usually there after a long day at Ragnar.

  When she walked the path from the landing pad to the main house half an hour later, the music from the house was so loud that she could already hear it halfway across the central terrace. The noise increased exponentially when the front door sensed her approach and opened. An orchestral soundtrack, heavy with percussion and dramatic. Solveig sighed. She knew how her father’s day had been going, and where she would find him tonight.

  “Computer, turn it down seventy percent,” she shouted at the housekeeping AI. The thundering drums lowered their volume to a more tolerable level. She made her way straight to the bar next to the main sitting room. If he wanted company—and on nights like this, he usually did—there was no avoiding him. If she went to bed without stopping to see him, he’d just have her summoned anyway.

  Falk Ragnar sat at the bar, on one of his old-fashioned stools that were covered in ancient leather. A screen projection was floating in front of a wall, taking up the entire side of the room. It was playing three news streams side by side, with the sound turned off.

  “You are going to make yourself deaf, Papa,” she said when she walked in. “Listening to music at that volume.”

  “Cochlear replacements are cheap,” he said. “Takes half an hour. I’ve had it done twice already.”

  He patted the bar stool next to his.

  “Daughter of mine. Come on, have a drink with me before you go to bed. You worked late. You’ve earned one.”

  She could tell by the light slur in his speech that the drink in front of him wasn’t his first tonight, or the second. There was a bottle by his right hand. She recognized the label—Rhodian single malt that was older than she was, a thousand-ag bottle of liquor. As much as her father detested the Rhodians, his hatred did not let
him deny himself the pleasure of their finest and most expensive distillates.

  “Sure,” she said, knowing that he wouldn’t take no for an answer. “But just a little.”

  He took another glass from the overhead rack and put it down on the counter, then poured a finger’s height of liquor into it. Even drunk, he had supreme physical control. He’d sway just like anyone else, but she had never seen him stumble or fall while intoxicated, not even when he’d had an entire bottle by himself, and he never threw up. Solveig sat down on the stool and touched glasses with him. It wasn’t her sort of drink, but she could understand why people enjoyed it. There was an almost infinite complexity to the flavor. She held the sip of liquor on her tongue for a moment and breathed in through her nose before swallowing, just like he had taught her, and he nodded his approval.

  “He should have been like you,” he said. “Aden.”

  She took another sip of the liquor to avoid a reply. There was no good way to bring up Aden with her father, and she was surprised he had broached that subject on his own. Maybe he wasn’t even on his third drink anymore.

  “You went and walked the path. You got top grades. And then you took the chair. The one he was supposed to claim. And instead, he runs off and becomes a soldier.” He emphasized the word like it was the name of a distasteful medical condition.

  “Have you heard anything?” Solveig asked.

  Falk shook his head.

  “He disappeared again. But corporate intel did some digging. He joined up the year he left. Went into military intelligence. Linguistics. Sat out the war on Oceana, if the records have it right. He spent five years in a POW camp on Rhodia. Five years, and not a word to us. Not even a Mnemosyne message. While we were thinking he was dead. Why would he do that, Solveig?”

  He slugged the rest of the liquor in his glass and gently set it down next to the bottle.

  “Have I been a bad father?” he asked without looking at her. “Am I a terrible person?”

  “Absolutely not,” she said. “You’ve always made sure I’ve had everything I needed. I wouldn’t be who I am without you, Papa.”

  It was another learned skill that came with growing up a Ragnar—the ability to sense what an audience wanted to hear, and then delivering it in just the right way to confirm their biases or the validity of their fears. It worked on almost everyone, and when her father was drunk enough, it even worked on him.

  “Why would he throw all of this away and waste his life like that? He could have been running half the planet. Not translating enemy field manuals for the fucking Blackguards. They have software that can do that job. Why would he turn his back on all of this? On you and me?”

  There was no right answer to that question, none that her father would accept, so she didn’t even make the attempt.

  “I was six the year he left,” she said. “I barely even remember him. I can’t tell you why he would. I don’t know who he is. Or who he was.”

  “Fair enough.” Falk looked at the bottle as if considering whether to pour another. He picked up his glass and lightly clinked the bottom of it against the neck of the bottle, then set it down again.

  “What really happened back then?” she asked. “Between the two of you?”

  Her father stared off into the space behind the bar. His jaw muscles flexed slowly. For a few moments, she thought he might be drunk and introspective enough to make a hole in the wall he had been keeping up in front of that part of the family history for seventeen years and allow her a peek through the crack. Then he shook his head.

  “Just silly stuff, now. I’ve told you it was about a girl. Boys that age, it’s always about love. They think they’re the first ones to discover it. Trust me, it wasn’t anything worth seventeen years of silence.”

  He looked at her with glassy eyes and smiled. It was a different smile from his usual toothy display of dominance. There was genuine sadness in it. But she could tell that this was as much authentic, unfiltered emotion as that bottle of liquor could get out of him tonight, and that she had asked the question half a glass too soon.

  “I really shouldn’t keep you up, Solveig. You’ve had a long day. Go get some rest.”

  Solveig knew when she was being dismissed. She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.

  “All right, Papa. Have a good night. I’ll see you at breakfast.”

  She climbed off the bar stool and walked past the screen projections that were still silently shouting out three different newscasts at once, data streams overlaid with data streams, a torrent of structured chaos.

  I wonder if it looks like that in his head all the time, she thought.

  CHAPTER 9

  ADEN

  The dish in front of him, retained in the little cast-iron pan the server had put on the table with a gestured warning against touching the handle, sizzled with the residual heat from cooking. The smell wasn’t unappetizing, but the strong scent of spices almost singed the hairs in his nostrils, and Aden knew that he’d most likely get chemical burns on his tongue from eating whatever was in that shallow pan.

  “If this makes the hangover worse, I am absolutely blaming you,” he told Tristan, who sat across from him, arms folded, elbows on the table surface, an amused expression on his face.

  “It will make you forget about the hangover,” Tristan said. “It can cure anything. Up to and possibly including the pain from a stab wound.”

  “What is it called again?”

  Aden poked the dish with a fork. He could identify the eggs on top, but the ingredients underneath were a mystery. Everything had been blended together into a layer of baked mush that had shades of red, orange, and green.

  “I can’t pronounce the Palladian word, but I can tell you what everyone else calls it. Spacers’ Sunrise.”

  “Spacers’ Sunrise,” Aden repeated.

  “Break up the eggs with your fork and stir them in with the mix. You want to break the yolks and make them run into the mush,” Tristan said.

  A panoramic window ran the length of the wall on the guest-table side of the eatery. It was really a large holographic screen layer, but they had set it into a frame that looked like a bulkhead viewport and then put a thin layer of Alon on top to make the mimicry complete. The screen showed an outside view of the station, Pallas looming underneath, spaceships arriving and departing in a steady stream. Aden wondered if it was a live view or recorded footage played on an endless loop, but he gave up trying to look for repetitive patterns after a minute. It was something that would please space tourists, but he had to admit it was nicer to look at than a naked bulkhead.

  He touched the Alon layer covering the screen and rested his palm on it for a moment. It was cool to the touch and as smooth as polished steel. Every piece of Alon in the system came from his family’s factories, Ragnar Industries’ most important product. He had known all its lucrative properties by the time he was six. Transparent ceramic, 90 percent as hard as diamond, highly resistant to bullets and shrapnel, impervious to corrosion. Only a diamond or another piece of Alon could make a scratch in it. Every spaceship ever built had viewports somewhere, and every viewport was a slab of Alon that had made Ragnar a healthy profit on its way along the chain of manufacture, distribution, and sale. This screen cover was a tiny part of the tether that had tied him to a different destiny once, the tether he had unintentionally transferred to his sister Solveig’s ankle when he left home. Aden withdrew his palm from the Alon layer and picked up his fork again.

  “I still feel like hammered shit,” he told Tristan. “I’m not sure I’m up for culinary experiments.”

  “Just try it,” Tristan said. His craggy face had permanent smile lines etched into it. He was tall and lean, with unruly white hair that always looked like he had just taken off a helmet.

  Aden tried to determine whether he was being set up for a practical joke—make the new guy puke his guts out after a bender, ha ha—or if Tristan was really just sharing some of his extensive knowledge of the system’s c
ulinary cultures without bad intent. It was probably the latter, he decided. Tristan was too good-natured to play mean pranks. And even if it was an initiation ritual of sorts, Aden figured it was best to be a good sport and play along. He gamely filled up a fork, making sure to get equal amounts of egg and mush, and took his first bite.

  The spiciness was a fair bit beyond his usual tolerance level. It made his tongue burn, then the roof of his mouth, then his throat. He felt his nose starting to run almost instantly. But it wasn’t just all nuclear heat. The egg yolks blended with the ingredients in the base dish into a flavor that was surprisingly complex even in its ferocious intensity.

  Tristan watched with a glint in his eyes as Aden swallowed the first bite, then another. After his third bite, he had to put the fork down and tear off a piece of the table liner to wipe his nose, then another to dab the tears from his eyes.

  “Well,” Aden said in a strangled-sounding voice. “You’re right about one thing. I’m not even feeling the hangover anymore.”

  Tristan laughed. “It stops hurting halfway through the pan. And by the time you’re done, you’ll find yourself thinking you might want another.”

  Captain Decker and Henry appeared at the door of the eatery, and Tristan gave them a lazy wave to get their attention. They walked over to Aden and Tristan’s table and sat down on the free chairs. Henry looked at Aden’s dish and said a Palladian word, approval in his voice. Aden assumed it was the native name of the dish.

  “Really, Tristan?” Decker said. “His first time on Pallas One, and you’re taking him to have that for breakfast.”

  “He’s doing fine,” Tristan said. “Better than I thought he would.”

  “I can’t have our new linguist taking up residence in the head on the galley deck for the next two days. Or on IV fluids in the medical bay.”

  “Where are the others?” Tristan asked.

  “Tess has been doing an exterior hull check on the heat sink array on Zephyr since 0600. Maya is off doing Maya things, like she does.”