by Marko Kloos
“Please,” Solveig said. “He is with the police force.” Then she parsed the doctor’s statement.
“The last few days? How long have I been here?”
“Three days, Miss Ragnar.”
Solveig felt a lightness in her head that she knew had nothing to do with medication.
“You know who I am. Does my father know I am here?”
“He has been staying in one of the family suites here since they brought you in. He asked to be notified as soon as you were awake.”
Solveig closed her eyes and focused on her breathing. When she opened them again, Dr. Larsen was still there, holding the empty cup, looking at her patiently.
“Do me a favor,” she told the doctor. “Wait thirty minutes before you let him know. I need to sort myself out before I talk to him.”
“As you wish,” Dr. Larsen said. “If the pain comes back, you have a manual override on the autodoc. Just tell it you are hurting.”
“Thank you,” Solveig replied and closed her eyes again to give the doctor a window to excuse herself. The pain was indeed starting to return in earnest, but she had no intention of dulling her senses with narcotics, not when her father was on the way to see her. She listened as Dr. Larsen left the room and opened her eyes again when she heard the door close.
There was a row of windows to her right, and a sliding door that led out onto a balcony. Her room was high up in the tower, and the view of the sunlit countryside beyond the Sandvik outskirts was beautiful. She was glad that her windows were facing out of the city instead of giving her a panorama of the skyline.
“Room, open the balcony door,” she said.
The door slid open on silent tracks and let in a gust of temperate late-summer air. From outside, the distant noises of life in the outskirts drifted into the room. Solveig closed her eyes once more to calm herself with the smells and sounds of normalcy, and she quickly drifted off to sleep again despite her intentions to stay alert.
When she woke up again, it was to the sound of a familiar voice. She opened her eyes to see her father pacing out on the balcony, talking to a screen projection from his comtab in a low but intense voice.
“You know I don’t believe a single gods-damned thing you are telling me, right?”
The voice of her father’s conversation partner was just quiet enough through the Alon panes of the windows that she couldn’t understand the other side of the exchange, but Falk sounded as white-hot angry as she had ever seen him. If he got loud, he was mad, and best handled with care. If he got quiet and focused like he was right now, his anger was nuclear fury, and anyone who got in his way would be incinerated where they stood. There was no bluster in him at the moment, just the intensity of a time that Solveig had thought to be long in the past. Hearing his voice like this sent a chill down her spine.
“No, you aren’t being forthright. You are trying to float on excuses. You should know me better than that, friend. Give me what I want. I’m in the medical center at my daughter’s bedside. My daughter who almost died because of this.”
She listened as the other person spoke, but she could make out only disconnected sentence fragments.
“That is your problem, not mine. And it’s going to be the very least of your problems if I do not have a head on a plate very soon.”
Falk swiped the screen projection away with an angry gesture that looked like he was about to hurl his comtab off the balcony. Then he put his device away and turned to look out over the outskirts, running his hands through his hair as he stood at the translucent safety barrier.
When he came back into the room, he looked at her and did a double take, clearly expecting to see her still asleep.
“Solveig,” he said. There was more emotion in his voice than she had heard from him in a long time.
“I’m still here, Papa,” she said. The momentary flash of guilt on his face unsettled her.
He rushed over to her bedside and took her hand into both of his.
“I am so sorry,” he said. “I am sorry I wasn’t there for you. None of this should have happened to you.”
“It shouldn’t have happened to anyone,” she said softly. “Cuthbert died. He tried to protect me. I would be dead without him.”
“I know, Solveig. I know.”
To her surprise, she could see tears welling up in the corners of his eyes, tears that he wasn’t trying to hide or wipe away immediately as an unwelcome sign of emotional incontinence.
“Where is Stefan? He got me out with Cuthbert. They both saved my life together. He was right next to me when I got shot.”
Falk flinched a little when she said “I got shot.” He shook his head, and a tear ran down his left cheek. This time he reached up and wiped it away with the sleeve of his tunic.
“I don’t know. I really don’t. They brought you in by yourself. They said you had a fifty-fifty chance of making it through surgery. I came here straight from the house, and I have been here ever since.”
“I want to know if Stefan is okay,” she said. “I need you to find that out for me.”
“I will,” he said. “I’m sorry if something happened to him. I hope he is all right.”
“It wouldn’t be your fault,” Solveig said. She felt a strange sense of calm now, a feeling of detached control she had never experienced around her father.
“You getting hurt is my fault,” Falk said. “I never should have acted against my instincts. Letting you go off without a proper security escort.”
“They weren’t after me, Papa. They were just killing people randomly. They were shooting at anyone who moved. I am sure they didn’t even know who I was.”
“No,” Falk said, and a familiar dark shadow flitted across his gaze. “I’m sure they had no idea. But they will.”
She looked at him, her blue eyes probing his. There was something about his demeanor that made her feel a coldness at the base of her spine, a chill that was working its way upward, blotting out the pain in her lower back and chilling her to the core.
“What happened, Papa? What did you do?”
They had been in this position a thousand times, but always with reversed roles—him as the interrogator, trying to pry the truth from her whenever he had busted her for a transgression. She knew the momentary hesitation and the flicker in his gaze all too well. It was something she’d had to train to suppress over the years because he was an expert lie detector.
You’ve turned me into one, too, she thought. Whether you meant to do it or not.
“We’ll talk about it when I get you home,” he said finally. “I had them get the medical suite at the house ready for you.”
Solveig breathed in and out, mindful of the simple act of inhalation and exhalation. There was so much that she had taken for granted, so many things that had never crossed her consciousness before. If she slowed her breath, she could slow her heart rate, and exhale her anxieties along with the spent air in her lungs.
“Papa,” she said. “If you don’t tell me the truth right now, I will not come home. Lie to me, and I will do as Aden did, and you will never see me again.”
He flinched, genuine pain etching his face.
“I know that’s not what you want. It’s not what I want. But it’s what will happen if you keep the truth from me. And I will know if you do. I know you too well.”
He looked at her for a long time, conflict swirling behind those blue eyes of his. Then he got up and paced the room, one circle, in precise and measured steps. When he got back to her bedside, he pulled out the stool the doctor had used earlier, and sat down on it with a sigh that sounded tired and deflated.
“Very well,” he said. “Just don’t think too badly of me. Because everything I have done, I have done for us.”
Solveig met his gaze, feeling calmer than she ever had in his presence.
“Tell me,” she said.
EPILOGUE
ADEN
“Call me a hopeless optimist,” Tess said. “But I think we may jus
t come out all right in this.”
Aden used the heel of his hand to move the kitchen knife up and down in a rocking motion, chopping the peppers he had lined up on the cutting board on the galley counter in front of him. He still wasn’t half as fast as Tristan had been at the same task, but he was getting better every time he tried it, and he found that he enjoyed the practice. When the peppers were cut into sufficiently small bits, he picked up the cutting board and scraped the chunks into the Palladian-style stew that was simmering on the galley stove. He wiped the knife on the edge of the pot and put the lid back on, in case the one-g acceleration provided by Hecate cut out suddenly. Cooking in a spaceship galley was a delicate dance of preparation and logistics more than anything else, and it was only now that he appreciated how easy Tristan had made the job look to the uninitiated.
“Maybe,” Maya said. “We’re still under tow. And our reactor is still fried. The Rhodies have us pretty much by the scruff right now.”
“We helped them put an end to Odin’s Ravens,” Decker said. “If that doesn’t count for something in their book, there’s no fairness and justice left in the world.”
Zephyr was under tow by Hecate, on a straight course back to Rhodia One, which was the space station nearest to the site of their fracas with the insurgent fleet. Back at the spot of their encounter, the Alliance ships Cerberus and Pelican were busy securing prisoners and taking inventory of the ships Hecate had captured in the span of three minutes. Aden still didn’t have any idea about the precise capabilities of the warship that was now towing them back to Rhodia as a courtesy, but he suspected that he didn’t have the technical knowledge to even begin to understand them. Sleipnir was the most modern ship in the Gretian fleet when she had been commissioned just before war’s end, and Hecate had dominated her completely without even launching a single missile or rail-gun slug.
“We’ll come out all right,” Aden agreed. “But we didn’t put an end to Odin’s Ravens. That Tanaka two thirty-nine is still out there.”
“They won’t be able to dock anywhere without triggering red flags,” Tess said. “You can’t just be out there for months and years on end without ever coming back to civilization. They need fuel. Food. An overhaul. Sooner or later they have to go to a place with a dockmaster. One who has a list of wanted ships.”
“They were able to resupply that seventeen-thousand-ton cruiser,” Maya pointed out.
The other three crew members were sitting at the galley table that had seats for six, and whenever Aden glanced in their direction, the empty chairs were obvious markers of Tristan and Henry’s absence. He rinsed the knife in his hand under the thin stream of water from the sink faucet, wiped the blade steel with a cloth rag, and put the knife back in its place in the leather knife wrap that had Tristan’s initials on it.
“That was a dumb move on their part,” Decker said. “Using that beast. Sure, it has a lot of guns. But it’s a fucking warship. Anyone who came across it was going to see that. You can’t just repaint a heavy cruiser and pretend it’s an ore hauler. That Tanaka can pass for a pleasure yacht everywhere it goes.”
Aden put his dishrag on the towel bar in front of the stove and walked around the galley counter to join his crewmates at the table. It didn’t feel good to know that Zephyr couldn’t move under her own power, but they were all still alive after dodging multiple broadsides of tungsten slugs, and Aden couldn’t remember when his life had last felt as vivid and full of sensory details as it did right now.
“Zephyr, Hecate. We are sixty minutes out from docking at Rhodia One,” the intercom announced.
Decker leaned over to the control screen on the wall next to the table and tapped it.
“Understood, Hecate. Thank you for the long-haul tug service.”
“Don’t mention it, Captain. It’s the least we could do.”
“Damn right it is,” Maya muttered under her breath.
“What do we do after we dock?” Aden asked.
“I don’t know what we are going to do,” Tess said. “I’m going to find a Rhodian shipyard that can fix a punctured toroidal confinement loop on a CriTech Model D-5 fusion reactor. And right after that, I am going to find a bar that serves single malt whisky, and I am going to get very, very drunk. You are most welcome to join me. But I am not making any plans beyond that right now.”
“I do believe I will take you up on that,” Aden said with a smile.
“We have an hour,” Decker said. “Is that enough time for that stew to finish cooking?”
“Plenty of time,” he replied.
“All right.”
She looked at the galley space behind him, lost in thought. Then she saw that Aden was watching her and flashed a sad smile.
“I’ll miss him forever,” she said. “But I’m glad you were friends. That pot simmering over there. You, using his knives, chopping those peppers like he used to do. It feels like part of him is still around.”
Aden tried to think of a fitting reply, something profound that would invoke Tristan’s spirit and make her feel better, but there was nothing he could come up with of that would sound right to his own ears at the moment, nothing that wouldn’t seem forced. Instead, he replied to her sad smile with one of his own, and he could see that she understood.
“Ten seconds until release,” Hecate sent.
“Copy,” Maya said. “Standing by on thrusters.”
They were back on the maneuvering deck for the last phase of the docking process. Hecate had towed them to the inner junction of the station, and Zephyr would be able to limp to her assigned berth on her own with her cold-gas thrusters.
“Five. Four. Three. Two. Mark. Towing clamps released. You are clear to maneuver.”
“Confirm towing clamp release, clear to maneuver,” Maya replied. “Thanks for the lift.”
“Good luck, Zephyr. Hecate out.”
“Well, that was that,” Tess said. “Nice fellows, all things considered. Although they could have shown up a minute or two earlier and saved us a fifty-thousand-ag repair bill.”
“They could have shown up a minute or two later and combed through our wreckage, too,” Decker contributed.
Maya took the ship into the inner ring and toward their docking spot with practiced precision. When they slipped into position in their assigned berth, she pushed the control sticks away from her and let out a deep sigh before turning her attention to her screen for the final docking process.
“Green light on the starboard airlock. We have a hard dock on the collar,” she said. “Umbilicals connected, external power and air confirmed. Good to go, everyone.”
“All right,” Tess said and unbuckled her harness. “Rhodia One. We’ll be here for a while. Let’s go find someone to patch us up.”
They got out of their gravity chairs and went over to the ladderwell to climb down to the airlock deck. It felt empty with just the four of them in the airlock, without Henry to take lead and Tristan to remind them for the fiftieth time where the good bars were located on the hospitality ring of the station. Tess waited until they were all in the lock, then punched the unlock code into the control panel for the outer hatch to open the way into the docking collar and the station section beyond.
At the end of the docking section, the usual security lock barred access to the main part of the station. They went through one by one, scanning their ID passes and stepping through the scanner array that checked everyone for illegal weapons or explosives. Aden went last, with the squirmy feeling he always felt in his midsection whenever he had to use his purchased identity to pass official muster.
When he scanned his pass, the screen turned its usual friendly shade of green, and he let out the breath that he’d been holding. He tucked his ID pass back into his pocket and stepped out of the lock.
“Major Robertson,” a voice said next to him.
He turned to see two Rhodian soldiers in military police uniforms, and a feeling of dread washed over him. He hadn’t seen a Rhodian MP since the day of
his release from the POW arcology, and he would have known the reason for their presence at the security lock even if they hadn’t addressed him by the name that belonged to his Blackguard identity. For a brief moment, he had the impulse to fight or run, but he knew that he would never make it off the station even if he managed to overpower or evade these two MPs.
His crewmates were already past the lock, twenty meters inside the station ring and beyond the one-way security barrier, waiting for him to emerge. Tess looked back at him with concern. The twenty meters between them had suddenly extended to half a solar system in width, and he knew that nothing he could do right now would let him bridge that gap.
“Yes,” he said to the MP who had addressed him, replying in Rhodian. “I think I know why you’re here, Sergeant.”
The MP had a screen up above his hand that showed Aden’s military ID in mirror image from his perspective. He was wearing a closely cropped beard now, but the man in the image was unmistakably him, and he decided to cut the proceedings short in front of his friends instead of trying to insist they had the wrong man, only to have his fake ID uncovered in a minute anyway.
“Major, you are under arrest. The charges are violation of your parole, illegal reentry into Rhodian territory, and the use of fraudulent identification.”
Aden forced himself to look away from the security barrier where Tess and the others were waiting for him.
I always knew this would happen sooner or later, he thought. I am who I am and I did what I did, and it was stupid of me to pretend I could just leave that behind like an old uniform. But gods, I wish they weren’t here to see it.
“I don’t dispute those points in any way,” he said to the MP sergeant. “Can I ask for the courtesy of delaying the restraints until I’m out of sight of my crewmates, please?”
The MP looked at him for a moment as if he was looking for a reason to deny the request, but it seemed that he couldn’t find one in Aden’s expression or his attitude.
