by Marko Kloos
She took her comtab from the Rhodian and authorized the device, then handed it back to him.
“This one, too,” he said and held out her corporate comtab.
Solveig hesitated briefly. Then she authorized the device for limited access. The Rhodians would be able to get the basic information off it, but the executive comtabs were secured with the most advanced encryption money could buy, and if they wanted to dig deeper than just mere location data, they’d need a lot of time and computing power.
The marine took the second comtab and handed it back to one of his comrades, who placed it in a data scanner.
“Thank you for your cooperation,” he said to Solveig.
“Of course,” she said, giving him a curt smile that she had to force. Being courteous to these marines felt a little like being nice to a hostage taker to make sure he wouldn’t hurt her, and she didn’t like the way it made her feel: powerless, cowardly, self-abasing.
They surrendered their devices to the marine one by one, and the scans of all the personal and business comtabs took almost as long as the physical searches. Finally, the Rhodians seemed to be satisfied with the inspection.
“You may take your personal devices and return to your business,” the lead marine said. The Rhodian troops filed out of the compartment and went down the staircase, leaving relieved silence in their wake.
“I am going to have corporate file a complaint with the occupation authority,” Gisbert said when the last soldier was out of sight.
They have 37,000 reasons to tell you off, Solveig thought. They’ll do whatever it takes to feel less scared. And a nuke on a civilian target out of the blue was a perfectly understandable catalyst for fear. But as much as she understood that, being on the receiving end of the Alliance reaction didn’t serve to make her sympathetic to it.
A few minutes later, the bulkhead display showed the docking collar retracting from the side of the Ragnar yacht and withdrawing into the hull of the Rhodian Navy corvette. Solveig saw that even after the thorough inspection, the rail-gun mount of the warship was still pointed at them, the Alliance crew leaving nothing to chance. Whatever trust had been rekindled between Gretia and the rest of the system since the end of the war seemed to have been thoroughly doused by the insurgent attack on Rhodia.
“We are free to maneuver again. Please take your seats, buckle in, and prepare for our final docking approach into the spin station,” one of the pilots announced from the flight deck.
Cuthbert got up and mentioned for Fulco to follow, and the two assistants got out of their seats as well. Cuthbert nodded at Solveig and went to lead the Ragnar staff back down to the deck where they had their assigned seating. On the viewscreen, the Rhodian corvette fired its bow thrusters to nudge the ship away from the Ragnar yacht. Solveig felt a swell of relief when the warship disappeared from her field of vision.
The gravmag system of the yacht compensated for the thrust inertia so effectively that she couldn’t feel the ship moving at all when the pilot reactivated the main drive, but the changing visuals on the viewscreen left no doubt that they were now finally on the last leg of their long trip. Solveig took a sip of water and looked out over the expanse of blue and green that was unfurling below the ship as they made their approach into the station. Right above the planetary horizon, the position lights of dozens of ships were blinking against the backdrop of space like fireflies in a night sky. In a slightly lower orbit, much closer to the yacht and clearly outlined against the cloud cover above the main continent, two more warships were floating in a loose formation, slowly arcing across her field of view like a pair of guard dogs patrolling a yard.
“At least we’re finally going home,” Gisbert said next to her and took a sip from the drink he’d had to put aside at the start of the inspection. Solveig made a noncommittal noise and returned her attention to the viewscreen.
It doesn’t really feel like going home right now, she thought. It feels like checking into a prison.
CHAPTER 5
ADEN
The place where Tristan had set up station was one of the posh resorts that catered to well-to-do tourists. It jutted out into the sea near the tip of the southeastern leaf. Each of the individual condominium pods had its own floating pad out on the water, and the pads were connected to a central access pier with a network of long, slender bridges and suspended walkways that were just wide enough for two people to walk on them side by side.
“When Tristan goes all out, he does not screw around,” Aden said. He watched a service drone flit overhead on silent rotors and head out over the water to one of the nearby condos. It circled the top of the dome and then disappeared inside to deliver whatever food or drink the guests in residence had ordered.
“This is how he likes to spend his money,” Tess said. “I can’t really criticize him. I spend mine on things that go fast. We all have our vices, right?”
They were following the directions on a screen projection of Aden’s comtab. Tristan had sent them the location and told them that he’d added their comtab IDs to the security locks of the condo, and now they were out on the water, following the branches of the bridges and walkways that connected all the floating buildings of the resort. Everything was oriented so that each condo had an unobstructed view of the ocean. The units were all shaped like seashells, irregular fanlike designs with huge 180-degree windows facing the water. Aden had no idea what one of these places cost to rent for a week, but he suspected it was probably enough to fuel Zephyr for a no-holds-barred speed run from Oceana to Acheron. This wasn’t the sort of resort for people who fixed spaceships, it was for people who owned them.
The walkways above the water were all made from a metal latticework, painted with brilliantly white corrosion-resistant paint, and the space between the struts was covered with wooden slats that afforded glimpses of the water through the cracks between them. To Aden, this was the most ostentatious display of casual wealth he had seen in a while. To someone from Gretia, tree wood was not a precious commodity, but there were no trees on Oceana. Every single one of these wood slabs had to have been delivered from somewhere else via space freighter at ludicrous expense. He stopped in the middle of one of the walkway segments and crouched down to touch the surface with his fingertips. Tess looked down at him with mild amusement.
“Those aren’t real,” she said. “They can’t be.”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I can’t really tell from the feel.”
“They make really convincing synthetic wood. It’s better than the real stuff in every way. And a twentieth of the cost.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Think about how wasteful it would be to spend twenty times the money on something that’s not half as durable. With the seawater, they’d need to replace these every ten years. Or repaint them one by one.”
And that’s how I know they’re real wood, he thought. The wastefulness is the point. This is the sort of place my father would choose for his stay if he ever came here. But Falk Ragnar had only grudgingly spent a few weeks every summer here on the planet of his wife’s birth, and Aden’s sister, Solveig, had told him that when their mother had left him, he had never returned here again. Aden looked up and smiled at Tess. His crewmates were much more knowledgeable than he was when it came to spaceships and spin stations, approach vectors and burn rates, but with the possible exception of Tristan, they didn’t know anything about how rich people thought or why they did what they did. Tess was thinking like a pragmatic engineer, not like someone who could build an estate and spend a few million ags on a private lake and a floating bar just for the purpose of impressing other rich people.
“Come on,” Tess said. “It’s a little hot, and I’m a little thirsty. I don’t want to crack those bottles open before we get to Tristan’s place. Even if he’s probably drinking already.”
“There’s no probably about it,” Aden said.
Tristan’s condo was at the end of a long walkway branch in what lo
oked like the most secluded and private part of the resort, a full ten-minute walk from the main pier. His clamshell had a wide balcony that wrapped around the building, and as they walked up, they could see lounging furniture on it, and a metal staircase and catwalk that led to the water below. Tess walked up to the door and touched the security panel. It changed from red to green with a warm and friendly sounding chime, and the door opened silently.
“Tristan,” Tess called out when they stepped through the door. “We’re here. You better be somewhat dressed. And a towel doesn’t really count.”
Inside, the condominium pod was mostly one big, open room. The design language of the resort’s buildings was continued in here as well, with flowing lines, soft lighting, and hues of mostly white and light blue. The middle of the floor was lowered to form a small pit, which was lined with seating arrangements. In the middle of the pit, a large transparent table was already set for six. On the other side of the living area, there was a kitchen nook that looked like it was about three times the size of the galley on Zephyr. Aden saw that Tristan had been busy preparing ingredients for whatever he was planning to cook for them. A row of little bowls sat on the counter between the kitchen nook and the living area, each with a different chopped or sliced ingredient: peppers, vegetables, seafood, and plenty of stuff Aden didn’t recognize. The tall wraparound windows had no visible frames, and the view of the ocean was unspoiled except for the waist-high Alon rail on the edge of the balcony outside. There was soft music playing over an unseen sound projection system, the jaunty jazz-fusion style that Tristan liked to listen to whenever he was busy in the galley.
Tess walked into the living area pit and let herself drop onto one of the cushy-looking couches.
“This is nice,” she proclaimed. “I have no idea how he always finds these posh places. Can you believe some people live like this all the time?”
“I’ve known a few,” Aden replied. Any of the guesthouses on his father’s estate were every bit as nice as this one, even if they lacked the ocean view. And as posh as this condo was, just the Old Earth antiques lining the hallway to his father’s study were probably valuable enough to buy half a dozen of these seashell pods outright.
There was a little sanitary alcove on the wall to the left of the kitchen nook that looked like it led to a bathroom. Next to the alcove, another door stood halfway open. He walked over to it and lightly knocked on the frame.
“Tristan? We’re here. I brought some Rhodian single malt.”
There was no answer from the room. Aden pushed the sliding door open and looked inside. The windows were tinted to their semiopaque state, and the bedroom was shrouded in semidarkness. Tristan was stretched out on the bed, one arm behind his head to prop it up, the other on his chest. His eyes were closed, and he looked like he was comfortably asleep. On the table next to the bed, there was a glass that had two fingers of an amber liquor and a few ice cubes in it.
Aden walked into the bedroom.
“Wake up, man. Henry and Decker will be here any minute. I see you got a bit of a head start on the whisky.”
When he was two steps closer to the bed, the feeling that something wasn’t right asserted itself in his brain, and the sudden, unwelcome burst of adrenaline felt almost like an electric jolt.
“Room, turn off the window tint,” he said. The suite’s AI obeyed and reduced the opaqueness of the windows until the sunlight streamed into the room unfiltered. In the light, Tristan still looked like he was sleeping, but Aden’s heart skipped a beat when he saw that Tristan’s chest wasn’t rising and falling with his breath.
“Tess,” he shouted. Then he rushed over to Tristan and put his hand on the cook’s chest to stir him awake. The fabric of Tristan’s dark robe felt wet under Aden’s fingers. His first thought was that Tristan had spilled some of his drink, but when he turned his hand to look at it, his palm had red smears on it.
Tess barged into the bedroom behind him.
“What’s wrong? What is it?”
“Something’s wrong with Tristan.”
She went to the other side of the bed. When she saw the blood on Aden’s hands, she let out a shaky gasp. She touched Tristan’s neck and held her hand there to feel for a pulse.
“He’s warm, Aden. But I can’t feel a pulse. Gods, I can’t feel a pulse. What the hells happened?”
Aden grabbed Tristan by the shoulders and tried to pull up his upper body. When Tristan’s body shifted slightly, they both saw the blood underneath that had been pooling there for a little while, a dark splotch that looked almost black even in the bright sunlight. The front of Tristan’s robe shifted, and Aden saw where all that blood had originated—a small wound in his chest, just below the sternum. Blood was pouring out silently and without drama, running down both sides of his chest and toward his back.
“Call emergency services,” he said to Tess. “See if there’s a medkit in the bathroom. Grab whatever towels you can find.”
She groaned in despair and let go of Tristan, then ran off toward the living area. Aden looked around for something he could use to staunch the steady flow of blood that was coming from Tristan’s wound, but there was nothing around that seemed suitable except for the pillows, and by the time he had ripped one of the covers into strips, Tess would be back with the proper medkit, which would have a few packets of quick-clot thermal wound sealer in it. Rental places always had medkits in them, and even the basic ones had far better ways in them to plug wounds than torn-off strips of fabric.
He held one hand on Tristan’s wound and put the other one on top to apply pressure. The last time he’d had to practice his medic skills had been in the Blackguards, where all military intelligence field operatives had received the basic combat medic course. He had always wondered how useful all that knowledge would be under stress, but it had come back to him as if his brain had been waiting for an opportunity to dust off those neuron groups so they could finally fire again in the same pattern. Now he had a reason to be grateful for the constant drills, even if his younger self hadn’t fully appreciated their utility.
“Aden,” Tess called out from the next room. He looked back at her and saw that she was standing just beyond the doorway in the living space area. He opened his mouth to shout back that he was busy, that he was keeping Tristan’s life from seeping out of him any further, but something about the tone of her voice made him hold his tongue.
He put Tristan’s hand in place of his own to cover the wound just the way it had been when he walked in. Then he stood up and rushed over to Tess to see what was rooting her in place.
There was someone else in the condo with them. He was lightly leaning against the wall by the bathroom, putting himself between Tess and the way out. Aden recognized him right away, and from the way Tess had stiffened, he knew that she had as well. He was wearing different clothes, but the handsome face and the haircut were not hard to remember from that night in the Halo 212 club on Acheron two weeks ago. If there had been any doubt about his identity, the two ceramic knives in his right hand were incontrovertible final proof. He held them loosely, like someone would carry a set of silverware, but that didn’t mitigate the threat of their appearance in the slightest. One of those knives had poked a hole in Maya’s side right in front of the whole crew, and even Henry had gauged the man as dangerous enough to stay his own hand on the hilt of his kukri.
For a moment, time seemed to slow—a second or two stretched out into perceptual infinity. Aden looked around for some way of escape, but Milo stood between them and the only way out, and there was no way for them to make the balcony beyond the lounge pit without getting stabbed, even if they could wish the sliding doors open on the way.
“Is there something about me that seems insincere?” Milo asked. His expression was one of light puzzlement. Despite their dire situation, it seemed to irritate Tess enough for her to let out an exasperated little huff.
“I’m not going to play this game,” she said. “The one where I set you up for
clever one-liners.”
“Because I keep having this problem where people seem to doubt the veracity of my statements. And then they seem shocked and surprised when I come to do what I told them I would do,” Milo continued, as if he hadn’t heard Tess’s refusal to answer.
Despite his fear, Aden felt his anger flaring up. Tristan was lying in the room behind them without a heartbeat, and every moment that passed before medics reached him reduced his chances of coming back. But he knew that Milo wouldn’t be moved by any pleas, and Aden was under no illusion about the outcome if he gave in to his anger and tried to fight his way out of this condo, so he had to save that option for last.
“When we met, I gave you two options,” Milo said. The way he was leaning against the wall was infuriatingly casual, his body language that of a mildly bored party guest instead of someone who had come to kill everyone in the room.
“One option was to do as you were told and fly your ship to the coordinates we provided. The other option was to refuse and pay in blood instead. I told you there would be no third option. And now I’m here to collect the payment.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Aden saw that Tess had shifted her weight almost imperceptibly. On the counter to her left, Tristan had laid out his prepared ingredients, and his knife roll sat at the edge of the countertop, the cooking knives neatly lined up and ready to use for the next step.
He’ll never finish cooking that meal for us, Aden thought.
“‘Pay in blood instead,’” Tess said in a mocking voice. “The veracity of your statements. Who the fuck talks like that? You want to kill us, get on with it. But spare us the pretentious shit.”
Aden’s mind cycled through possible solutions, trying to find a way out of this that didn’t end with more blood on the floor, but there was nothing he could think of that could either convince Milo to put his knives away or see him on the losing end of a fight. But Tess seemed to be set on a last-ditch act of defiance, and the only way he saw to keep that from happening was to distract Milo and draw his attention. Every second they could draw breath was one where they still had a shot at fate or chance intervening in some way. He decided to follow the hunch he’d had since he first heard Milo talk, the one that had just now become stronger as the other man had kept up his overly precise and formal diction.
