by Marko Kloos
“This way, Major,” he said. “We can take care of business over there in the security room.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. I appreciate that.”
They marched him off, one man in front and one behind, to the curious gazes of the people in the station ring nearby. Tess came running up to the barrier, and Aden felt his face flush with shame.
“What’s going on, Aden? Where are these people taking you?”
“Talk to Decker,” he told her. “She knows. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
The MPs had him ushered into the security office before he could hear her response, and the door closing behind him cut off all the sound from the station ring and the security lock. The MP sergeant was true to his word and didn’t put the restraints around Aden’s wrists until the door was closed. The shackles were lighter than he remembered.
They searched his pockets and the shore-leave bag he was carrying and emptied their contents on one of the tables in the room—his ID pass, his comtab, the spare sets of clothes, and his hygiene kit. He was glad he had left Tristan’s knives in the galley instead of bringing them along because the prospect of getting them confiscated by the Rhodians would have been the one thing that could have tempted him into violence today.
“Looks like you are going back to the POW arcology for a while, Major,” the other MP said.
“It does look that way,” Aden agreed.
“You’re being remarkably calm about that, I have to say.”
Aden glanced at the windows of the security room, which looked out over a stretch of the inner ring’s concourse. Hundreds of people were going about their business out there, catching shuttle connections or making souvenir purchases before their cruises back home. Just a few months ago, he had been one of them, worrying about where he would go and what he would do with his newfound freedom.
Just this morning, we were in a battle with a heavy gun cruiser, he thought. And we lived through it, and I went on to cook a meal for my friends. None of this is going to be anything like running out of air in a rescue pod, or getting stabbed while fighting a professional assassin, or dodging rail-gun fire in a lightweight ship. I can suffer this with a smile. And the gods know that I need to do a little bit of penance.
“There are worse things in life, Sergeant,” he said. “Ready whenever you are.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is the eleventh novel of mine to see publication since 2013. It is—in my completely objective and unbiased opinion—a good novel. But it’s also the one that was by far the hardest to write. Not because the structure is inherently complex (although it took a fair amount of reshuffling color-coded sticky notes on a whiteboard to get the four interweaving storylines just right), but because of when it was written.
I began this book in the spring of 2020, right when the COVID-19 pandemic really started to take off. I blew my deadline for the draft by rather a lot because it felt like sitting down to write was about four times more difficult than usual. On top of the pandemic, 2020 was a singularly chaotic year for politics and civil discourse. All of this combined into what my agent, Evan, called “the blanket of cortisol” under which we were all laboring for most of the year. It turns out that it’s extremely difficult to focus on creative things when your brain is soaked in stress hormones, and all your mental bandwidth is mostly needed to deal with the challenges of living through once-in-a-century kinds of events.
But it did get done—eventually—and whenever I read the completed manuscript, I can’t tell that almost all the writing days were laborious ones.
I’ll make this short instead of rattling off seven paragraphs of names, because so many people deserve my thanks at the moment that this book would be one thousand pages long if I listed them all. If the pandemic has made anything clear to me, it’s that we are all interconnected, and that none of what we do is done in isolation, even if we’re all sitting at home. Thank you to my family and friends, to my colleagues and acquaintances, and to everyone I have chatted with, emailed, Telegrammed, Zoomed, or FaceTimed in 2020. Thank you for staying home, masking up, taking care of your communities, and protecting the health of others. Thank you for maintaining friendships and for looking out for each other, for making sure that we all make it through the darkness together. I love you, and I am very much looking forward to seeing all of you again in person soon.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2018 Robin Kloos
Marko Kloos is the author of two military science fiction series: The Palladium Wars, which includes Aftershocks and Ballistic, and the Frontlines series, which includes, most recently, Orders of Battle. Born in Germany and raised in and around the city of Münster, Marko was previously a soldier, bookseller, freight dockworker, and corporate IT administrator before deciding that he wasn’t cut out for anything except making stuff up for fun and profit. A member of George R. R. Martin’s Wild Cards consortium, Marko writes primarily science fiction and fantasy—his first genre loves ever since his youth, when he spent his allowance on German SF pulp serials. He likes bookstores, kind people, October in New England, fountain pens, and wristwatches. Marko resides at Castle Frostbite in New Hampshire with his wife, two children, and roving pack of voracious dachshunds. For more information visit www.markokloos.com.
