Ballistic (The Palladium Wars), стр. 72
She read Aden’s message again.
Hey, shorty. Having stationary downtime for the next two weeks. Can we meet in the Syne?
Maybe, but it’s hard to get away right now. I’m on Acheron for the company. Corporate escort everywhere, she replied.
She sent the response into the Mnemosyne and walked over to the window of the sanitary suite. It was a piece of Alon that had been coated with a one-way optical layer. Outside, the street was bustling with surface traffic, pedestrians and transit pods streaming by in dense flows. She watched the scene while she turned the comtab in her hands slowly. Aden’s reply came a few moments later.
You’re on ACHERON? I’m in Coriolis City right now. We’re spending two whole weeks here. Our ride is getting overhauled in the shipyard. Can we meet? In person this time?
Solveig did a double take, and the shock of the surprise felt like someone had electrified her brain stem. They were on the same planet, at the same time. Her habitual paranoia about her father’s control and surveillance schemes made her want to erase the comtab and throw it out on the spot. This was too fortunate a coincidence. Six months ago, she would have killed the Mnemosyne conversation, wiped the node address, and flushed the comtab down the sanitary commode. But Aden had used the right one-time code she had given him after their last meeting in the Mnemosyne a month ago. Her sudden excitement at the unexpected possibility of a face-to-face meeting won out over her suspicions.
Who knows when we’ll be on the same planet again? she thought. I told him I don’t want to wait another seventeen years.
Negotiating a new contract, she wrote back. I’ll be here for a little while. But they packed my schedule. And I have one of Papa’s little birds following me around. Let me see what I can do.
That would be fantastic, Aden replied. But don’t take any chances. There’s always the Syne later.
Solveig flicked the message string off her comtab screen and tucked the device back into her pocket. Outside of an Acheroni intelligence agency office, this was probably the least private place on the planet for her. Hashing out the details of a meeting with Aden here in this building would be a dumb thing to do. Right now she still had plausible deniability on her side.
On the way back to the conference room, Solveig found that the rush of her short clandestine conversation with her brother gave her step a bit of bounce it hadn’t had earlier. Now she was eager to get on with the negotiations and move on with the day. Just like that, the morning had turned from irritating to exciting. It was a chore to work around her father’s control mechanisms all the time, but it gave her a dopamine rush whenever she got away with something without his knowledge, and it had taken her a long time to admit to herself that she actually enjoyed the cat-and-mouse game more often than not. And the higher the stakes, the more satisfaction she got out of playing. This wasn’t just stealing a liter of ice cream from the service-kitchen freezer right underneath the watchful eyes of the security network sensors and eating it under the bedcovers at night. In the eyes of her father, her secret contact with Aden would be a major betrayal. Falk Ragnar would suspect an insurrection, accuse them of plotting to take over everything behind his back, when all she wanted was to get to know her brother a little better after seventeen years of his absence from her life.
When she walked back into the conference room, all eyes were on her, and she realized that the proceedings had completely ground to a halt while they’d waited for her to return. She was the keystone of the meeting for both the Ragnar and Hanzo people in the room. The Ragnar people would not dare to speak for her because they knew what would happen if she complained to her father about any of them. And to the Hanzo people, she was Ragnar, and everyone else in the delegation was a water bearer at best.
If someone else had gone in my stead, they would have continued with Gisbert talking for the company, she thought. I’m the only one in the delegation who doesn’t have an acceptable substitute. Because of the name.
For the first time in her tenure at Ragnar Industries, Solveig considered that maybe her family name meant that her father’s power over her was limited as well.
What is he going to do if he finds out I’ve been talking to Aden? Is he going to disown me? Exile me?
She sat down and nodded to thank the people at the table for excusing the interruption. Then she looked at her corporate comtab again to focus on the matter at hand, the negotiation of the new contracts between Hanzo and Ragnar. But the thought had nestled in the back of her brain, and now it refused to dissipate.
I’m the only Ragnar left who can be here in his stead. Maybe he needs me more than I need any of this.
They broke for lunch and then returned to the negotiating table in the afternoon, but Solveig was pleased to see that the schedule had a five-hour gap between the conclusion of the day’s business and the planned formal dinner with their hosts tonight. In the early afternoon, the Ragnar delegation packed up their compads and their meeting notes to head back to their hotel. It was corporate policy for Ragnar to stay off-site and not in accommodations offered by the hosting company, in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety and safeguard the employees against electronic eavesdropping as much as possible.
The hotel was right in the middle of the busy entertainment district, a thirty-floor slice of a commercial tower that adjoined a shopping and recreational