Ballistic

by Marko Kloos

“If you weren’t going to take the shot, I wasn’t going to either,” Idina said. “You’re better at not pulling triggers than I am.”

  Dahl smiled at her statement.

  “You are not so terrible at it yourself. That young fool gets to live out the rest of his life. In exchange for a year in the detention facility. Someday he will look back at this and realize just how low a price that was.”

  Idina checked the time. She had dismissed her platoon three hours ago already, and the next JSP platoon on the roster was now out on patrol in the city with their Gretian counterparts, a new pair of patrol supervisors in the air above them. Technically, she had sat in on that interrogation on her free time.

  “I need to head back to the base and check in with Lieutenant Liu before he sends the quick-reaction unit after me,” she said. “I’ll see you at 0800 for patrol.”

  “Take some rest,” Dahl said. “Today was not a bad day.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Idina said. “Not a bad day at all.”

  When she walked across the atrium to the elevators, her legs started to ache, as if she had given them permission to show their fatigue by thinking about the end of her shift. A passing Gretian police sergeant glanced at the kukri on her left side with curiosity, then gave her a friendly nod. On her right side, the pistol counterbalanced the blade. The familiar weight of her gear usually comforted her, but tonight it felt like she was back in Pallas gravity. Maybe she was starting to tire of it all.

  Back at JSP Base Sandvik, the company building was lit up in purple and gold, the colors of Pallas. The buildings of the JSP companies all had white exteriors, and the Hadeans had started a fad last month by projecting stripes of orange light on the front of their building at night to make the structure look like the flag of Hades. All the other companies had followed suit in short order: Acheroni yellow, Oceanian blue, Rhodian red. The Palladian CO had held out longest, but it seemed that even Major Malik wasn’t immune to peer pressure. She suspected that he had most likely started to play along just to preserve the uniformity of the battalion square’s appearance, even if the new trend was a little gaudy.

  Lieutenant Liu’s office was empty, and the door was locked. Idina shuffled off to her own office to log the day and sign off for the night.

  “Color Sergeant Chaudhary,” Major Malik said when she walked past his door. She stopped and turned on her heel.

  “Sorry, sir. I thought everyone had left for the evening. Lieutenant Liu’s office is closed.”

  “Everyone but me and Second Platoon, it seems. Come in, please.”

  “Sir.”

  She stepped into the company commander’s office. He was a hands-off sort of leader and trusted his lieutenants and senior sergeants to run their platoons without constant micromanaging. With her ever-changing patrol shift rotation, she hadn’t talked to him directly in a month or more.

  “I’m late off patrol because we had to do an interrogation at the Gretian HQ. The stadium suspect with the weapon,” she said.

  “Yes, I saw that in the logs. Good work. You don’t spend much time in the air, do you?”

  “No, sir. Much easier to get good intel on the ground.”

  “I’ve checked the roster history. You’ve put in a lot of extra time since Principal Square. More than any other platoon sergeant.”

  “I’m not much for sitting around the base and polishing my kukri, sir.”

  “That makes two of us,” he said. “But that’s mostly what I seem to be doing with my time these days. Have a seat, Colors.”

  Idina did as she was told and watched as the major turned around and looked out of his window at the battalion square and its newly multicolored assembly of buildings.

  “I predict that light show will last until the next Palladian rotates in as battalion commander,” he said. “How have you been feeling lately?”

  The question took her off guard.

  “Fine, sir,” she said, trying to gauge his intent. Was she in for a dressing-down?

  “Lieutenant Liu has shared some concerns about you. He forwarded me your medical data from the last few weeks.” He opened a screen and showed her a data page.

  “There is nothing wrong with me, sir.”

  “Your vital statistics say otherwise, Sergeant. Your muscle mass loss is right at the limit, and your lung capacity is down by almost a double-digit percentage. You’ve been off Pallas for too long.”

  “I have two months left in this tour, sir,” she said.

  “You’ve done your last two tours back-to-back,” Major Malik said. “Two consecutive tours off-world is the hard limit. But this looks to me like you’ve hit your limit a little early. Maybe it’s the pace you’ve been keeping up since Principal Square. Maybe it’s your age. Infantry duty is hard on the body. But if you don’t return to Pallas soon, you’ll be medically unfit for duty in a few months. At your age and time in service, it would be hard to catch up. You’d have to spend too much time rebuilding muscle and getting your bone density back up for brigade medical to clear you for infantry duty again. They may just decide that you’ve done your share and transfer you to an admin unit.”

  The thought horrified her.

  “Sir. I have no intention of spending my time until retirement as a recruiter. Or curating the brigade museum. I’m an infantry sergeant.”

  “Then you will gladly follow the order I am about to give you. The next replenishment group from Pallas arrives at the end of this week. When they return home, you will be going with them. Corporal Noor from Blue Section is about to get his sergeant stripes. I will have Lieutenant Liu bump him up to platoon NCO for the remainder of Fifth Platoon’s deployment.”

  Idina tried not to show her shock.

  “Sir, I can’t go home now. There’s still work to be done.”

  “There’s always work to be done,” Major Malik said. “We will be here for years to come, Sergeant. We have plenty of people to do it. No need for you to grind yourself down to the bone for this place personally.”

  “I don’t want to leave my platoon early, sir,” she protested, but she knew that it was a futile argument, that the major had made his decision.

  “It’s just two months early, Colors. Noor can handle the platoon. You brought your squad leaders up well.”

  He wiped the projection in front of him away with a flick of his wrist and nodded toward the door.

  “You will be on that flight home in a week, Color Sergeant Chaudhary. That is an order. I suggest you go on light duty until your departure. Go home and recuperate. And if you decide that you still haven’t had enough of this planet, you can put in a request for another JSP assignment. But not until you’ve spent at least a year in normal Pallas gravity. Dismissed, Sergeant.”

  Idina got out of her chair and saluted. The legs that had felt achy and tired earlier now just felt numb, like temporary prosthetics. She turned on her left heel and stiffly walked toward the door.

  “I have to say I am a little surprised, Colors,” Major Malik said when she was at the threshold. “After all that has happened to you, I figured you would be glad to get out of this place a little early.”

  She paused at the door, her mind as numb as her legs felt right now.

  “Things got a little . . . complicated, sir,” she said.

  CHAPTER 8

  SOLVEIG

  “Miss Solveig?”

  Solveig looked up from the data pad she was holding between her hands and turned off the Acheroni language refresher she had been studying for the last half hour. Her assistant Anja stood at the door just outside the threshold, one hand resting on the translucent frame she had just lightly rapped with her knuckles to announce her presence.

  “Yes, Anja?”

  “Edric from security would like to know how late you will be needing the gyrofoil home. He wanted me to remind you that there are new flight restrictions in place now.”

  Solveig looked over to the window, where the sun had mostly settled behind the skyline of Sandvik. She h
adn’t noticed the time because the streets were always lit at the same level—as the sun went down, the illumination of the roadways and buildings increased gradually. Down on street level, the sun never really set. She used to enjoy that about city life, but after a few months of spending her nights back in the countryside, it seemed unnatural.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t kept track of my time very well today,” she said. Anja smiled, but Solveig could tell that her assistant was trying to gauge whether she was being blamed somehow. Solveig wondered if Anja had been here when her father sat in the big chair, then decided that she was probably too young, but she had clearly been around long enough for the corporate culture to imprint on her.

  His spirit is still all over this place, she thought. Everyone’s always jumpy and worried.

  Solveig checked the time. “What’s the new regulation again?”

  “No air traffic over Principal Square after 2100 hours,” Anja replied. “If you wish to stay beyond that time, Edric will have to ferry you to the spaceport in a ground pod for a transit flight home.”

  “Ugh.” Solveig made a face. “That’s on the other end of the city. Too much trouble for a twenty-minute flight home. Tell Edric not to waste his time just because I can’t stick to my own schedule. I’ll be on the rooftop pad at 2030.”

  “Very well, Miss Solveig. I will let him know.”

  Anja withdrew politely and walked down the hallway out of sight. Solveig was the only person on the executive floor who liked to work with her door open. Everyone else kept theirs closed, and many of the department directors and vice presidents turned on their offices’ glass tinting for privacy. Falk Ragnar would have forbidden the practice outside of confidential meetings. It pleased Solveig that at least this little bit of slack had made its way into the attitudes on the top floor, even if it had taken half a decade.

  She put down her data pad and looked at the screen projections above her desk. There was never an end to the flow of data in a company like Ragnar Industries, not even the postwar incarnation that was still operating at half throttle. Ragnar was the hub of hundreds of supply spokes. Every day, many millions of ags’ worth of raw materials and finished goods changed hands, entered inventories and left them again, each transaction creating a digital footprint. As much as the Alliance had squeezed the company as a critical wartime supplier, everyone still needed Alon, and only Ragnar and its subcontractors could produce it. But the size of the network required to keep the flow of goods going was so immense that no single person could possibly have their hands on every lever simultaneously, know every layer and sublayer of the structure. And yet her father had done it for decades. Sometimes she wondered whether he had intentionally set things up to be complex enough that only he would always know exactly which lever to pull to get a specific result. For three months now, Solveig had tried to dig into all the digital strata that made up Ragnar Industries, and she had barely scratched the surface.

  She checked the time again. It was almost 1900 hours, so she had ninety minutes to finish the tasks she had set for herself today. The screens surrounding her kept scrolling information she had requested, data fields overlaid on data fields. Anja’s interruption had pulled her out of the flow of her Acheroni language lesson, and Solveig decided that she didn’t have a mind for data analysis anymore. The lesson had been on food—ordering in a restaurant—and it had put her in the mood for something spicy. She waved all the screens above her desk surface out of existence with a single gesture and got out of her chair to stretch.

  “Vigdis, I’m stepping out for a bit. Run the dine-in protocol until 2130 hours, please.”

  “Understood. The dine-in protocol is in effect. Have a good evening,” the AI replied. Solveig had made a few tweaks to the way her personal AI reported her presence in the office to the network whenever she wanted to go out for a bite to eat without a security entourage. If Marten or any of his underlings checked her location in the system, it would still show her in her office, with a privacy flag enabled so they’d know not to disturb her in person. If they came close to the office anyway, the AI would have her seem to wander off to the canteen or one of the exercise facilities downstairs. Her access pass to the building was now temporarily assigned to a fictitious ID so she could leave and return without getting an earful from Marten about security protocol. It wasn’t bulletproof—all that had to happen to blow her little sleight of hand was for Marten to give closer scrutiny to the surveillance data or cross paths with her in one of the entrance lobbies of the building—but she figured the fallout would be tolerable. After all, she was just going out for Acheroni food, not plotting with the competition or trying to steal the company’s cash reserves.

  The summer evening was warm and humid. Solveig walked away from Ragnar Tower on streets that were still busy with activity—people heading home from work late or heading out to enjoy their diversions.

  There was a street nearby where the eateries were closed during the day but open all night, catering to the leisure crowd and the busy people looking for an easy dinner on the way home. There was no theme or system to the agglomeration of food stalls and tiny sit-in places here—Gretian comfort snacks, Oceanian seafood, Acheroni stew shops, all peacefully coexisting shoulder to shoulder on the same strip of real estate. Solveig’s favorite place on this street was an Acheroni joint so narrow that it could only fit a single row of tiny tables inside next to the counter, and on busy nights she had to wait a good while for her turn to order, but she had never been disappointed with the food. She knew that Magnus would have a fit if he saw her in the middle of the evening crowds without a bodyguard. But nobody cared. Nobody knew that her name was on the side of the nearby office tower that stood tallest among all the ones around Principal Square. There was a freedom to her occasional clandestine dinner excursions that made her feel a little like she was at university again, when the weight of responsibility and expectations hadn’t yet settled on her shoulders. There had been no security detail back then. She had just been one of the students, and her father seemed to have deemed her too valuable to venture out into public only when she was of legal age, with a degree that finally qualified her to start at Ragnar and step into the role he had intended for her.

  Solveig ordered her food, then stood in line to wait for its preparation. It was a busy evening, and all the little tables inside were taken. She kept an eye on them as she moved along the line to the pickup station. Sometimes the timing was in her favor, and another guest got ready to vacate their table just as she was ready to claim it.

  The person sitting at the last table in the back had a familiar face. It took her a moment to recognize him because she had only seen it once, three months ago. It was the young police detective who had questioned her on the day before the Principal Square bombing. She had never heard from him again. The police probably had other things to do after the worst terrorist attack in the planet’s history. Just as she started to turn her head away so he wouldn’t recognize her, their eyes locked, and he gave her a friendly nod.

  So much for anonymity, she thought.

  When she had received her food container, the layout of the place required her to make a turn at the very back and walk past all the guest tables on the way out. Nobody was going through the telltale motions of preparing to leave yet.

  “Miss Ragnar,” the detective said when he saw her scanning the line of tables as she walked by. “You can sit here if you want. No offense taken if you don’t.”

  He gestured at the empty seat across the table from him. She knew that on Acheron, where space was always at a premium, it was perfectly acceptable and necessary to share a table with a stranger. But Gretian customs were very different. Offering someone a seat at one’s table was a gesture of high courtesy. Solveig didn’t want to be rude. Besides, eating her food while sitting down was better than eating it on the walk back to the office. She placed her food container on the table and sat down across from the detective.

  “Thank you. B
erg, isn’t it? Criminal Detective Berg.”

  “You have a good memory,” he said. “We met quite a while ago. You must have been busy since then.”

  He was as good-looking as she remembered, unruly brown hair curling down the back of his neck and touching his collar. He wore a purple compression shirt that went well with his green eyes. The formfitting top accentuated the fact that he was in very good shape. Just as she had done three months ago, she briefly wondered if the police had sent him to question her specifically because he was young and handsome. For a moment, the low-grade paranoia programmed into her since childhood made her suspect that he was here on purpose again, that this was a setup to get more information out of her in an informal setting, but then she dismissed the thought as illogical. He had been here first, and he’d had no way of knowing she would step out for dinner tonight at this exact time and choose this place out of a hundred other options on this street.

  He nodded at her food container.

  “I hadn’t marked you for someone who likes spicy food,” he said. “What grade is that?”

  “Five,” she said. “I’m still working my way up the scale. Yours?”

  “Eight. Sometimes nine if I feel daring.” He smiled at the little wince she gave him. “I have to eat out because the smell annoys the other detectives when I bring Acheroni food back to the office. They all have solid, traditional Gretian palates.”

  “Starches, dairy, and meat proteins,” Solveig said. “Salt and sugar and maybe a little pepper.”

  “And gods forbid you use too much of that. They think soy sauce is spicy,” he said.

  She couldn’t suppress a little laugh, and he smiled, obviously pleased to have gotten that reaction out of her.

  “It must be busy for you, too, if you’re still out here at this hour,” she said.

  “Tempers get shorter in the summer. People are outside more. And we just had the first socaball match of the season this afternoon. Thank the gods that Sandvik won. Whenever they lose, we get really busy.”