by Marko Kloos
“All right,” he said. “Then tell me the kind and gentle way to deal with Gisbert. Pretend you’re sitting in the big chair at Ragnar already, and you have no one else to answer to. What do you do?”
Solveig considered his challenge. She knew what he’d do, of course, but she also knew that he expected her to put her own spin on things instead of just telling him what she thought he wanted to hear. As much as he’d elevated Gisbert for being a reliable yes-man, he wouldn’t appreciate that property in his own offspring. The trick in dealing with him was always in fulfilling his expectations without making him think that she was trying for just that. It was a delicate dance, but she had been practicing it for a long time.
“Shuffle him around,” she said. “Give him responsibility of a department that doesn’t deal with external vendors or customers directly so he can’t offend outsiders. Gradually reduce his influence. Make use of the fact that he delegates most of his workload anyway. Make damn sure it feels like a demotion. Ban him from any corporate function that includes alcohol. And if he doesn’t get the strong hint and retire gracefully on his own after a few months in obscurity, I’d look into his corporate network records for an offense that merits termination with cause. There’s always something if you look hard enough.”
Falk grinned. It was the mirthless grin she knew all too well, the toothy one he employed when someone else had drawn a bad card from the deck.
“Not bad, Solveig. Not bad at all. It seems I underestimated your ability to weaponize your irritation.”
He finished his drink and put the glass down on the side table slowly and carefully, as if he wanted to reinforce that he wasn’t impaired in the least.
“When you get back to work, you should take your concerns to Magnus. Report what happened on Acheron. Propose to him what you just told me. You may find him in a receptive mood. And don’t think for a second that you’re being too harsh with Gisbert. Sometimes the rest of the executive floor needs to be reminded of what can happen when you let yourself turn into dead weight.”
“Maybe I will,” Solveig said and turned her glass in her hands. Then she took a sip to fortify herself.
Might as well go on the offensive, she thought. He’ll bring it up sooner or later anyway. Best to meet him on my terms.
“I think we need to continue our conversation,” she continued. “The one I cut short, when you called me on Acheron the night of that attack.”
Her father didn’t react visibly to her change of topic, as if he had been waiting for her to bring up the topic all along. Solveig reminded herself that he’d had two weeks to think about his own strategy. Still, she had expected him to be angry, and the lack of displeasure in his expression was somehow more unnerving than his anger.
“I’ve thought about what I said that night.” He picked up his comtab and poked at the screen. She saw that he was ordering another drink from the AI bartender. “And I think that you were right. I was out of line.”
Solveig was taken aback so thoroughly that she couldn’t manage to keep the surprise out of her face.
“You had every right to tell me off,” he continued. “Maybe it’s because we never really spent much time together since you went off to school. But I let myself forget that you are a grown woman now. You can handle yourself. And you have the right to your own relationships.”
The world has truly flipped upside down, Solveig thought.
“Even if I choose to go out with Detective Berg?” she asked.
Falk grimaced. “I think it’s a big mistake. I still think he’s just trying to squeeze you for back-channel information. But that is your call to make, not mine.”
“Just like that? I can go out without Marten and his crew keeping tabs on me?”
He shook his head.
“Oh, they’ll still keep tabs on you, Solveig. You’re my daughter, you’re the heir to the company, and you’re probably one of the ten most valuable kidnapping targets on the planet. You can’t just run out and act like you’re some anonymous salary girl. But they’ll be a little more in the background from now on.”
Solveig looked at him quizzically, still fully expecting to walk into a setup any moment. If something seems too good to be true, it almost certainly is—she remembered one of her father’s frequent aphorisms.
“Can I ask what made you change your mind on this?”
Behind them, the sliding door opened, and the serving robot came out onto the patio on silent wheels. It stopped in front of Falk, who took the prepared drink from the serving tray and watched the robot as it rolled off again.
“I don’t want to drive you away, Solveig. I need you by my side. And because you are who you are, I know you would find a way to do what you want anyway.”
The anxiety she had been feeling for the last few hours fell away, and it was like taking a deep breath after being underwater for too long. Solveig picked up her glass and took a big sip to conceal the relief she was feeling, but from her father’s little smirk, she knew that it wasn’t fooling him.
“I know I can be demanding,” he said. “But I’m on your side, daughter of mine. Never doubt that.”
She smiled at him, still unsure what to make of this radical change in attitude, her father’s unusual sudden mellowness.
If it’s a ploy, let it be a ploy. For now, I might as well take advantage of the benefits.
“But make no mistake,” he said with a smile of his own. “If he breaks your heart, I’ll have him killed. Father’s prerogative.”
Solveig laughed, but her thoughts rushed back in space and time to a spot in an Acheroni diner three weeks ago where Aden had told her the reason for his flight from home, and a sudden cold trickle crept up her spine at her father’s joke.
CHAPTER 9
ADEN
The first sensation that returned to Aden was the sound of softly gurgling and sloshing liquid.
The second sensation was a particular smell, a scent that told him he was still alive. Medical centers on Oceana had a very particular olfactory profile, an airy blend of seawater and antiseptic cleanser that he had never smelled anywhere else.
He opened his eyes to soft, warm light. It came from the ceiling overhead, emitted from a few hundred invisible fiber-optic strands. His head felt like he was in the middle of the worst hangover of his life, but he knew it wasn’t a hangover because he wasn’t parched and dry mouthed. When he looked down at himself, he saw that he was in a medical cradle, swaddled in an autodoc suit that was connected to the cradle with a multitude of feed lines and sensor wires.
Over to the right of his medical cradle, Maya was curled up in a chair. Zephyr’s pilot looked like she was asleep, but as soon as he stirred and turned his head, her eyes opened and she looked at him.
“Welcome back,” she said.
“I know this isn’t Valhalla or any of that other afterlife shit,” Aden mumbled.
“How can you be sure?”
“Because you’re here,” he said. “And you don’t believe in any of that stuff.”
“Doesn’t mean I couldn’t end up there by accident.”
He tried to move his legs and arms. They were constrained by the tight autodoc suit and the cradle underneath, but it felt like they were responding the way they should.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“We have been taking turns guarding you. Decker and I.”
A cold and clammy fear crept up his spine.
“What about Tess?”
“She’s fine. They released her yesterday. We got a secure place off the grid. She’s waiting for us there.”
“Yesterday. How long have I been out?” he asked.
“Three days. You weren’t ticking anymore when we hauled you out of the water. They had to restart you a few times. You’re heavier than you look, by the way. Decker and I barely got you back to the surface.”
“Henry and Tristan?”
She looked at the floor for a moment.
“Henry got the wo
rst of it. They had to stitch his liver back together, but he’ll need another. He’ll be out for a good while.”
She looked up and met his gaze.
“Tristan’s gone.”
He hadn’t been prepared for the wave of grief and despair that washed over him. If he hadn’t been in a medical cradle that supported all his limbs in a zero-gravity position, he would have slumped to the floor because he felt that all strength had suddenly drained from his muscles. He had been brought up in a household where showing emotion was a weakness, but there were unbidden tears burning in the corners of his eyes now, and he made no effort to blink them away. Maya watched him with the same calm and collected expression she always had on her face. He had never seen her truly sad or cheerful. Whatever had happened to her, she had learned to keep a tight rein on her emotions.
“We were trying to save him,” he said in a thick voice. “I tried to plug the wound. He wasn’t gone long. Why the hell couldn’t they bring him back, too?”
Maya shook her head.
“He was dead before you even got there. That piece of shit knew exactly where to stick the knife.”
“Did they find him? That bastard with the knives. I dragged him down with me. Did they find his body?”
Maya shook her head.
“The rescue teams looked for a while, but he was gone. He got washed out to sea. Or he’s some freak of nature who can hold his breath for twenty minutes.”
“It should have been me,” Aden said. “Not Tristan. He didn’t deserve it. He never did anything to anybody.”
“It should have been any of us,” Maya said. “Look, we all agreed to take the contract. And then we all agreed to blow it off and hand that fucking contraband nuke to the Rhodies. We voted on it. We made that choice together. It’s just that his face came up on top of the die when it stopped spinning.”
“If we had walked in two minutes earlier . . .” he began.
“Then you’d be dead now, or Tess, or maybe all three of you. Stop thinking about it. There’s no fate. There’s no ‘deserve.’ There’s just random chance. And a universe that doesn’t give a fuck about any of us. You start taking chance personal, you’re on a fast track to losing your mind.”
He wanted to be angry with her, to funnel his grief into another emotion to lessen the breathtaking intensity of it, but he found that he couldn’t. Maya was just being Maya, aloof and analytical, pretending nothing could pierce that armor around her inner core. Or maybe she was right, and nothing ever truly did. Not for the first time, he found himself wondering what had happened to her before she became a pilot, what had caused her to keep everyone out of her orbit. Maybe it was a philosophy thing or a cultural difference he didn’t understand yet.
No wonder she’s such a good pilot, he thought. All logic and numbers, with no inclination to let emotion get control of the stick. And spaceships don’t try to become friends with you.
“So what happens now?” Aden asked. “What do we do?”
Maya rubbed her buzz cut with one hand as she thought about his question.
“Ideally, we go find that bastard and his employers. Get our revenge for Tristan. But I think that’s out of our league. The only one of us who’s good with a blade is Henry, and he’s in medical stasis waiting for a replacement liver right now.”
She looked at him and shrugged.
“We make a pretty lousy crew of plucky rogues, to be honest,” he said, and she smiled. It was a small one, a slight upturn of one side of her mouth, but it was more mirth than he had seen from her in a while.
“We’ll get you out of here, and then we’ll meet up at the safe place. That’s as far as the plan goes right now. After that, we’ll roll the dice again.”
“I think my schedule is clear for that,” he replied.
“The security police will want to talk to you, I think. They already squeezed me and Decker.”
He tried not to show the alarm he suddenly felt.
“What did they ask you about?”
“What do you think? Somebody got stabbed and killed in their city. They want to figure out the why and how. Like they do. You’ll be fine. It’s the Adrasteia police, not the Gretian Blackguards. But remember—nobody in uniform is your friend. Not even the locals. Tell them what happened. No more, no less. It was all on the security sensors anyway.”
She got out of her chair in one lithe and effortless move.
“I’ll let them know you’re up and ready to get out of here. Anything goes weird, hit the alarm on the cradle. I’ll wait for you downstairs in the atrium.”
Maya walked to the door and turned around when she reached it.
“And stop with this shit about wishing you were dead instead of Tristan. If he’s in any of the gods-damned afterlives, you know what he’s saying to you right now about that, don’t you?”
Aden smiled weakly.
“He’s telling me to pull my head out of my ass and be glad I’m still alive. And to find a good bottle and a pretty girl to wink at.”
“Damn right.” She flashed that little smile again. “You got to know him well enough in the end.”
A med tech came in a few minutes later and disconnected Aden’s autodoc suit from the medical cradle, then raised the cradle into a sitting position.
“How are we feeling?” he asked Aden.
“Like someone used my head for a punching bag,” he replied.
“That’s an aftereffect of the medical stasis. It will go away in another hour or two. You’ve had pretty extensive surgery. One collapsed lung, and the other was filled with water when you came in. They had to do a lot of work to get you breathing on your own again.”
The tech took out a comtab and showed it to Aden.
“We got your personal data, but I’d like you to verify the details before we release you.”
Aden looked at the screen, where the personal information of his purchased ID was listed: Aden Jansen, citizen of Oceana, born and raised on Adrasteia. He had memorized his social account number and the vital information of his fake life, of course, but the headache made it difficult to recall the data from memory quickly, so he just glanced at his name and image and nodded.
“That looks right to me,” he said.
“Very well. We are sorry that you required our services, but glad that we could undo the damage that was done to you.”
It’s a very long way from being undone, Aden thought.
“Thank you,” he replied. “Did you manage to rescue any of my things?”
“Unfortunately, we couldn’t save your clothing. But your personal device, your ID pass, and the things you were carrying in your pockets are over there in the wet cell, in the top drawer of the cabinet next to the shower. You’ll also find a set of basic garments in your size.”
Aden breathed a sigh of relief. He didn’t care about the clothes or the stuff in his pockets, but if he had lost his ID pass, getting a new one would have been a hassle. Regular citizens could just walk into their local government service station and have a new pass issued, but he didn’t want to take the chance that the required checks would be more thorough than his bought identity could withstand.
“Thank you,” he said. “Can you get me out of this thing so I can take a shower and get dressed?”
The hot water of the shower made him feel less sore and achy, but it did nothing to calm the uproar in his mind. Of all the members of the crew, Tristan had become the closest to him over the last few months, his recent fling with Tess notwithstanding. Tristan hadn’t been quite old enough to be his father, but Aden had started to think of him as something of an older brother. He had died before Aden had ever found a fitting opportunity to tell him his true origin. Now he would never know if their friendship had been solid enough for forgiveness. He tried to remember the last thing he’d said to Tristan, but now he couldn’t remember their final exchange. Knowing the older man’s love of banter and ribbing, it had probably been something irreverent. That’s what happened when people die
d unexpectedly, and their friends and family didn’t have time to make their peace with it. It was like the universe had swallowed Tristan, and everything that was unfinished between them would remain unfinished forever.
Aden only noticed the new scars on his body when he dried himself off after his shower. One went down his left forearm, from a spot a few centimeters above the wrist all the way to his elbow. The other was much smaller, a thin red line under his rib cage on the left side of his body, the width of a ceramic blade. It looked much less dramatic than the long gash on his arm, but it had been the more serious injury by far. He inspected himself in the mirror while he was drying off. He was starting to look more like a spacer than a soldier, but his leaner build and the short red beard seemed like pretense to him now, like a costume that didn’t quite fit right.
He opened the cabinet drawer and pulled out the generic outfit they had removed for him, off-white overalls and light-blue slip-on shoes. When he was finished putting everything on, he looked in the mirror again. The clothes reminded him unpleasantly of his old prison garb in the POW arcology on Rhodia. He collected his personal things from the drawer and stuffed them into his pockets.
When he walked back into the convalescence suite, someone else was standing in the room with the med tech, a short man with a stubbly beard who managed to look rumpled even though he was wearing a formfitting police bodysuit.
“I’ll leave you to it,” the med tech said. “You are officially discharged. You have subdermal medication dispensers that will stay active for a few days and then dissolve on their own. You should be well on the mend, but let us know if there are any issues or complications.”
“Thank you,” Aden said again. “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
The tech nodded and left the room.
“Glad to see that you are back on your feet, Master Jansen,” the police officer said. “My name is Constable Holst. I’m with the investigative team that is looking into the attack on you and your friends.”