Ballistic (The Palladium Wars), стр. 59
“All right,” Decker said when they were all standing in the middle of the atrium. “Drinks tomorrow evening at the usual place. Someone flick Aden the location, please. You know the drill until then.”
“There’s a drill?” Aden asked.
“When we have a week or more somewhere, we spend the first twenty-four hours by ourselves,” Tess explained. “Can be more if you want it to be. Can’t be less. No hanging out, no Mnemosyne messages, no vidcoms. We are stacked in close quarters on the ship for weeks and months. The twenty-four–zero rule is so we get some scheduled time off from each other.”
“And to have a window where you can do all the weird shit you don’t want everyone else to know about,” Tristan added with a craggy smile. “All right, I am off for my scheduled weird shit. See you all tomorrow evening.”
He winked at Aden and walked off without further ceremony.
Maya nodded at them and followed suit, pointedly walking in a different direction than Tristan had. Then Decker and Henry went off in their own trajectories as well and disappeared in the crowd.
“I sent you the location of the bar for tomorrow night,” Tess said. “Try to find your own fun in the meantime. Just don’t get killed. And if you get detained, make sure it’s a low-bond offense, or we won’t be able to get you out. See you tomorrow.”
Then Aden was alone in the middle of the vast expanse of the spaceport atrium, entirely on his own for the first time since he had stepped into the shuttle off Adrasteia with Decker and Henry three months ago to start his job on Zephyr.
After weeks of shipboard life, he didn’t feel ready to throw himself into the bustle of the city beyond without some acclimatization first, so he walked over into the atrium mercantile, where dozens of shops offered travel supplies and tourist mementos. He browsed the goods with no intention of buying, just to get used to having strangers around him again. Then he bought a snack and a drink from a food stand and sat down to eat and give his brain a little bit more time to adjust.
The last time I was here, I was Solveig’s age, he thought. Maybe even younger. He had to think about her precise age—she was born in 900, so she had turned twenty-three in May.
The thought of his sister brought a smile to his face. They had only exchanged brief messages since their Mnemosyne meeting, to keep the electronic intercept opportunities for Ragnar’s corporate security division at a minimum. It had been almost a month since their last quick exchange.
I have two weeks off, he thought. Two weeks in the same location, and the place is littered with Mnemosyne nodes.
Aden got out his comtab and looked at the translucent slab in his hand for a moment without calling up a screen. Then he decided that the opportunity merited the risk. With that much advance notice, maybe his sister could find the time to meet in the Mnemosyne again.
He brought up a message screen.
Hey, shorty. Having stationary downtime for the next two weeks. Can we meet in the Syne?
He sent the note off into the Mnemosyne, where quantum entanglement would ensure that his query would reach his sister’s clandestine comtab before he’d have the time to put the device back into his pocket, the ninety million kilometers between their devices bridged in an instant because the data bits had no mass.
When he got up and walked back into the middle of the atrium, the sky had taken on a vivid orange hue that was streaked with red, yellow, and white. The slight change in backdrop made the cityscape outside look even more dramatic, as if the orange had increased the contrast of the geometric lines against the chaos of the swirling clouds. There was something undeniably energetic and triumphant about the place, a constant memorial to the resilience and ingenuity of humans, who could find a way to thrive even when it meant spending lifetimes suspended between the heavens and the ground.
If you’ve forgotten how to spend your leisure time, this is the place to learn that skill again, Tristan had told him.
Aden shouldered his travel bag and walked toward the exit. He had forgotten how to have fun, but now he had time to kill and a bank ledger full of gratuitous spending money, and he suspected that those were the only ingredients he needed to put the truth of Tristan’s statement to the test.
CHAPTER 16
DUNSTAN
Minotaur was on the prowl.
They were deep in Rhodian space, on a ballistic trajectory well beyond any of the current transfer lanes after a brisk acceleration burn. Dunstan didn’t know who would be waiting for the delivery of the nuclear warhead at the rendezvous coordinates, but he suspected they would find themselves unpleasantly surprised at the nature of the courier vehicle.
“Eleven minutes to turnaround burn,” Bosworth said from his station.
“Anything at all on passive, Mayler?”
“Negative,” the tactical officer said. “If they’re out there, they’ve got their lights off and their reactor on standby.”
“If they’re smart,” Dunstan said. “Once we turn around and light the drive, they’ll see us coming from a long way out. Let’s do our best to look like a fast courier and not like a warship. We won’t be able to see through our drive plume, but neither will they.”
“And then we flip around and light up the neighborhood with the active array, and oops.”
“Let’s hope the surprise will just be on their side, Mayler. I’ve had