Ballistic

by Marko Kloos

  What happens off-world stays off-world, she heard her father’s voice. Thanks for the tip, Papa.

  “Sorry I jumped the gun, then,” she said.

  “May I see the service listing?”

  She brought it up on the hotel compad and flicked it over to his device. He consulted it only briefly.

  “Oh, they’re on the approved vendor list,” he said. “That won’t be a problem.”

  “Good. Just don’t tell Marten I made the booking before checking with you. I’ll remember next time.”

  “No trouble at all, Miss Ragnar. Just call me when you get the notice from the front desk, and I’ll be right over.”

  He smiled curtly and left the suite again. Solveig waited until the door had closed behind him. Then she picked up her comtab and looked for a suitable place for her plan. The best spots were in a private business, out of view of the public surveillance systems. It had to be a location that was neither too crowded nor too empty, so she could keep an eye on everything but not stick out too much. And it had to be a place where foreign faces were common and didn’t draw special attention.

  There was a capsule diner just three blocks away. It sat right on one of the major thoroughfares to the nearby recreational complex, and the guest data showed that it was usually half-full at this time of day. Even the food was well reviewed. Solveig noted the address and sent it on to Aden with a message.

  There’s a diner not too far from my hotel. Meet me there in an hour if you can. I may be a few minutes early or late. But I’ll be there.

  As soon as her message had disappeared off her comtab and into the Mnemosyne, Solveig felt a wave of anxiety well up and twist her stomach. If all went as planned, she’d see her brother in the flesh again in just sixty minutes. The jitters she suddenly experienced were worse than any she had ever felt. Playing cat-and-mouse games with corporate security didn’t even register on the scale in comparison. But there was a wild sort of joy to this tension that was never present when she pulled one over on Marten and his crew, or even when she managed to sneak something past her father. Solveig sat down on the lounge chair by the window and forced herself to take slow breaths and get control of her emotions. If she let her nervousness show too much, even Cuthbert would sense that something was off. And if she blew this golden chance to meet Aden, she knew she’d be angry with herself for months.

  When the companion showed up half an hour later and precisely on time, she sent Cuthbert downstairs to the lobby to escort him up to her floor. She knew he would have been able to do his check in the lobby, where it would have made more sense from a security standpoint anyway, but she also knew that his job was mostly to serve as a status indicator, and doing the check in front of her door was part of the appearance. She watched on the door’s observation screen as Cuthbert scanned the companion with the sensors in his comtab and then did a manual pat-down. Finally, he was satisfied that his performance had delivered the expected optics, and he tapped the door chime.

  “Your guest is here, Miss Solveig.”

  She noticed that he had switched to her first name, which he usually didn’t do, and realized that it was part of the discretion protocol. She had always wondered why Acheron had always seemed such a desirable assignment for business trips among the executives. Now she suspected she had at least part of the answer.

  The companion introduced himself as Yejun. He was almost unreasonably fit and handsome, a slender face with a sharply chiseled jawline and stunning green eyes. Under other circumstances, she would have at least considered employing him for the purpose Cuthbert would think she had in mind.

  “Thank you, Cuthbert. Be back to pick up my visitor in an hour, please, and delay all my incoming comms requests with my apologies. Absolutely no disturbances, please. Unless the hotel is burning down around us.”

  “Of course, Miss Solveig,” Cuthbert said and withdrew after one last glance at the companion. She could tell that he wasn’t bothered by the fact that she had hired an attractive distraction, just surprised that she had done it.

  You weren’t expecting that, were you? she thought. He’d be reporting the encounter to her father by way of Marten, of course, and she knew that Papa would look at it as a rite of passage. Part of her suspected that he actually expected and maybe even preferred that she service her urges with high-quality hired work rather than entangle herself in regular relationships. It was certainly a more efficient way to get the sex when you didn’t have the time or will to deal with the emotions.

  She walked Yejun back to the living room of the suite and gestured at the lounge chairs in front of the panoramic window.

  “Sit, please,” she said in Acheroni, which he rewarded with a smile.

  “Gladly,” he replied in fluent Gretian that didn’t have a trace of an accent. “Would you tell me what kind of enjoyment you had in mind this afternoon?”

  He sat down and looked at her expectantly. She had picked him from his holo image on the agency listing, but even the image hadn’t done him justice. On her personal list of encounters, he was easily among the top three most attractive people she had ever met.

  The sacrifices I make for family, she thought.

  “I would like to purchase your discretion for an hour, Yejun.”

  “You already secured that when you requested me.”

  “That’s not quite what I mean. I would like for you to sit here and have a drink or three while you look at the scenery for an hour. Or do whatever else comes to mind. As long as it doesn’t involve answering the door or leaving this suite.”

  He smiled and gave her a puzzled look.

  “I need my security officer to think that I am busy in here with you while I step out behind his back. I will make sure that you get twice the asked fee if I get back here in an hour unnoticed.”

  Yejun smiled again and shook his head lightly.

  “There is no need for that. I will do as you request if that’s what would please you most this afternoon.”

  “It would,” she said. But only by a hair, she thought with another glance at the obvious topography of abdominal muscles under Yejun’s tightly fitted silk shirt.

  “If anyone finds out I am gone, you can tell them I stepped out for a bit. There is no danger to you. This is just some corporate subterfuge. Mixed in with regrettable family issues.”

  “Believe me, I’ve had to entertain far more complicated requests,” the companion said.

  Cuthbert had retreated to his own room down the skyway and just around the next corner. Solveig closed the screen she had been using to monitor the space on the other side of her suite’s door. Then she put her company compad and her personal device on the little table by the side of the circular bed in the suite’s sleeping section.

  Might as well play the charade all the way, she thought. Maybe I should get a proper background sound, just for fun. Punch up some sexy entertainment on the Mnemosyne and play it on low volume. In case he’s smart enough to know how to tap into my company device.

  Now she only carried her burner comtab, the one she would have to discard and replace after meeting with Aden today. Through a long string of authorizations and data scrubbings that were the digital equivalent of wiping the floor behind herself after every step she took, she had enabled it to allow her access back into the hotel and onto the floor for the next sixty minutes. What little evidence of her absence remained would be wiped clean when she deactivated the node and destroyed the hardware.

  Back at the old game, she thought as she opened her door and looked around in the breezeway outside. Stealing ice cream from the service kitchen in the middle of the night. Piece of cake once you get busted a time or two and learn enough from your screwups.

  The floor had four skylift banks and half a dozen emergency stairwells. She walked to the side of the building that was away from the rooms of the Ragnar delegation. Then she took one of the skylift platforms down to the atrium and strode across to the exits, careful to move with purpose but not so rush
ed as to draw attention. The atrium was a busy place, and nobody paid her any mind as she headed for one of the side exits.

  Once she was outside, it felt like she had just escaped from a detention facility. She’d never be able to shed her access to the Ragnar wealth, but once she stepped out of the cocoon of Ragnar security, the world became a little risky again. It was enjoyable to have that feeling of unpredictability in the back of one’s mind, at least for a while.

  Solveig turned and walked down the street, flowing with the crowds that were out and about for leisure this afternoon. The weather here was consistently pleasant, every day a sunny twenty-two degrees, neither too warm nor too cold. But now that Kee had pointed out the circumstance to her, it really was strange not to feel a breeze, not even in the deep canyons between the buildings. Whenever she did feel a slight movement of air on her face, it invariably came from below, where ventilation grids were set into the streets in regular intervals. After a while, it felt like walking around in a gigantic building, which was of course what the Acheroni cities really were—floors, walls, and roofs, just on a much grander scale.

  The excitement of executing the sleight-of-hand deception with Cuthbert and Yejun had suppressed her anxiety temporarily, but now that she was out of the building and walking toward the diner, the feeling returned with a vengeance, and it got stronger the closer she drew to the place where she would meet her brother in person again for the first time since she was in primary school.

  She checked the time. Nine minutes until the full hour, and only fifty-one minutes until she had to be back in the suite to avoid getting found out by Cuthbert.

  Not even an hour, she thought. That’s all I get right now after seventeen years. And I have to sneak it like a thief. At least I will get to find out why he doesn’t want his old life anymore.

  CHAPTER 19

  ADEN

  It seemed like the peak of vanity to buy expensive new clothes, but it was what felt right to Aden under the circumstances.

  He had spent the last three months in a rumpled flight suit just like the rest of the Zephyr crew, and it really was the most comfortable mode of dress for shipboard life. But the last time he had seen Solveig, at their Mnemosyne meeting three months ago, she had been dressed expensively and impeccably, and he didn’t want to feel like a careless slob next to her. Thankfully, Coriolis City was riddled with opportunities for visitors and travelers to turn their disposable ags into custom-fitted threads, and an hour and a half after he had received Solveig’s message opening the possibility of a face-to-face meeting between them, Aden had purchased a set of bespoke computer-measured clothes that he dearly hoped made him look fashionable and not like a middle-aged man trying to look like a secondary school student again. They were well-made clothes that looked fine to him in the mirror, but he had lost his sense for fashion styles after living in uniforms for the last seventeen years, and he fidgeted with everything for fifteen minutes before he realized that he was just nervous.

  When he left the store, his comtab trilled a notification, and he opened a screen in front of his face without breaking his stride, just like he had seen countless Acheroni do.

  There’s a diner not too far from my hotel. Meet me there in an hour if you can. I may be a few minutes early or late. But I’ll be there.

  The abruptness of the message was a little startling. Solveig’s last message had said that she would look into a possibility to get away, and he had expected at least a few back-and-forths concerning timing and logistics. But talking around the hot porridge had never been a Ragnar family trait, he supposed.

  At least she said “if you can,” he thought with a smile, trying to ignore the nervousness that was now reasserting itself after he had mostly managed to wrestle it under control in the clothing shop.

  The message had a directory listing for the diner appended to it, and he checked the location on a map of the area. The diner was a good way from where he was right now, but there was no shortage of available transportation in the city, and the map offered a variety of transit options along with their rates and estimated times of arrival. Aden noted with amusement that he could even elect to hire a private gyrofoil that would pick him up on one of several landing pads within three minutes of where he was standing. It would whisk him off to his location in only three additional minutes, if he had the desire to get there very quickly and didn’t mind parting with five hundred ags for the convenience. But his map informed him that at his average walking pace, he could make the location on foot in just forty minutes. He didn’t need to save the money for a transit pod, but he had spent most of the last three months in the tight quarters of a small ship, so he opted for the walk, grateful for the opportunity to exercise his legs and move in straight lines that were longer than just six meters.

  He was half a block from the diner when he got another message on his comtab.

  I’m here. Capsule 47.

  Aden flicked the message away. He stopped and turned toward the windows of the storefront to his right and checked his appearance, then chided himself for the gesture.

  You’re meeting your sister, not going on a date, he thought. She won’t care if you have a wrinkle in your tunic or a hair out of place.

  The diner was an oasis of shade and quiet in the bustle of the district. It was fully automated, with a host console at the entrance and softly lit pathways on the floor to provide directions. He tapped the location for capsule forty-seven, and an orange arrow appeared on the floor in front of the console, pointing into the diner and waiting for him to follow.

  It was strange to be in a restaurant with no conversational din in the background. A few people on their way out passed him as he followed the orange arrow, and they passed each other by without acknowledgment. The dining capsules had doors that could be closed, and most guests had chosen to do so, ensconcing themselves in silence for the duration of their meals and shutting out the world completely. It made sense to him that in a city as densely populated as this one, where the hotel rooms were not much bigger than his living compartment on Zephyr, quiet privacy was a precious commodity, a premium item on the services menu.

  When he reached capsule forty-seven, the door was only slightly ajar. Aden took a deep breath and knocked on the capsule right next to the opening.

  “Come in,” Solveig’s voice answered from the inside. He knew what her adult self sounded like because they had met in holographic form in the Mnemosyne three months ago. But those had been digital avatars, cleaned up and adjusted by the AI to remove commonly perceived flaws and imperfections, ideal versions of themselves smoothed out by a million social and cultural algorithms. This was reality, and there was no easy disconnect option if things got uncomfortable.

  Aden looked over his shoulder, almost convinced he’d find a detachment of Ragnar corporate security people walking toward him and blocking his way out, but there was nobody else in the place except for the two Acheroni guests on their way out who just now passed the host station without looking back. Everything about this place was right out of the intelligence textbook in the chapter “Meeting Places to Avoid.” It was out of public sight, had no obvious secondary exits, and could have been prepared for the meeting days in advance. But he knew that Solveig had picked the place in a hurry out of necessity, and that her biggest concern was to stay out of their father’s field of view, not to avoid enemy spy services. In any case, she was taking a far greater risk with this than he was.

  He opened the door all the way before he could give his doubts any more time to muddle things.

  Solveig sat at the table inside, hands folded in her lap, and she looked up at him as he entered the capsule. They stared at each other for a moment that seemed to stretch in his perception.

  “Hey, shorty,” he finally said, and she got out of her chair and rushed over to where he stood. Then she hugged him with a firmness that bordered on ferocity, and kissed him on the cheek. Aden was momentarily taken aback by the sudden display of unanticipated
affection, but then he returned the hug with equal firmness.

  “Ow,” she said. “The beard scratches.” Then she pulled away and looked at him in appraisal. “But it suits your face. I kind of like it.”

  “You think so?” he said with a smile.

  “Yeah. You look like a proper spacer. You smell like one, too.”

  Aden chuckled. “I’m not sure how to take that. How do spacers smell?”

  “They all smell the same. Like the inside of a spaceship. It’s faint, but it’s there. Maybe it’s something about the filters or the recycled air. Or maybe you all use the same soap.”

  Solveig relaxed her embrace, and he held her at arm’s length to look at her. She was wearing a dark-blue jumpsuit that appeared all business. Her long red hair was gathered up into a loose tail that reached all the way down to the spot between her shoulder blades. He had inherited their father’s height, but she had gotten most of his looks—the shape and color of her eyes, the defined jawline, the minuscule earlobes, just filtered and softened by the genetic card shuffle with their mother’s DNA. Everything was like the image she had presented in the Mnemosyne hologram three months ago, and yet this was completely different. It was like the mass of her body standing right next to his own had a gravitational pull on his heart that the hologram had lacked.

  “Gods, I can’t believe that worked out,” she said. “What are the odds?”

  She gestured toward the other seat at the table.

  “Come, sit. We don’t have a lot of time to talk. I have to be back in my suite in fifty minutes, or even Cuthbert will figure it out.”

  He followed her to the table and sat down. The seats were wide, low-slung benches with cushion pads tied to them, and he had to fold himself a bit to fit into the arrangement.

  “Who’s Cuthbert?”

  “One of Marten’s army of weasels. His new understudy.”

  “Marten’s still around, then,” Aden said darkly.