Ballistic (The Palladium Wars), стр. 79
“Would you come back home?” she asked. “If Papa was not part of the equation, I mean.”
“I don’t know,” Aden said. “I’ve been away for so long, I don’t even really know it anymore. But I do miss you. And sausage rolls. And good wheat ale. But mostly you.”
“Marten’s weasels are still on the lookout for you. Papa says they almost caught up with you in Adrasteia.”
Aden nodded.
“It was when I got this job. They were doing facial recognition to find me in the crowd, at the choke point to the space station. I had to make a run for it.”
“He’s not going to stop looking. Now that he knows you’re still alive.”
“I have no idea why,” he said. “I can’t take over the business. Not anymore. What else does he want with me?”
Solveig shook her head.
“I would say he wants to make good on the mistakes he knows he has made. But I’m not sure he has the ability to self-reflect to that degree. But I can tell that something is eating at him. I see it whenever he gets drunk. But he’s always careful to button up his feelings again in front of me. Even when he’s so loaded that he can’t get off the bar stool without stumbling.”
She checked the time and flinched.
“Hells. I have to be back in twelve minutes, and the walk takes five. Gods, I wish we had more time.”
They left their half-eaten meals on the table and got out of their seats. Then they shared a long hug, and for the second time today, Aden wished he could slow the clock with the force of his will.
“I’ll be on the planet for another two weeks,” he said. “Maybe you can sneak out again.”
“Why don’t you come with me?” she replied, seemingly on impulse.
“What?”
“Come with me. Tell everyone who you are. Catch a ride with us back to Gretia when we are done. We can spend all the time we want together. And we could dare Papa to do something about it. No more need to sneak.”
He laughed at the mental image of the two of them sitting on a couch together and answering Falk’s next vidcom jointly, as if nothing had happened in the last seventeen years.
“Tempting,” he said. “Just the look on his face would almost make it worth it. But I don’t think I’m ready yet. I can’t skip out on my new job. And I know I’m not ready for the fight that would follow. I’m not sure that he is either.”
“If you change your mind, you have my node address,” she said. “And if there are any strings I can pull for you from afar, tell me.”
“I need to do this without the might of Ragnar behind me,” he said. “Just to know that I can. And that I’m not like him.”
“You’ve never been like him,” Solveig said. “I’m the one who has to keep that DNA on a chain. You have no idea how often I look into the mirror and see a shorter version of him. And then I find myself sitting in a conference room at Hanzo, realizing I want to buy the damn building just so I can raze it to the ground, because one of their people just belittled me by accident. And I know that the resemblance isn’t just in the mirror.”
She kissed him on the cheek again and opened the door to leave before he could think of a soothing denial she would find plausible.
“Bye, Aden,” she said as she slipped out of the capsule. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he said to the void she left in the doorframe as she rushed toward the exit.
CHAPTER 20
DUNSTAN
If there was a positive about being a severely crippled ship twenty minutes away from what was likely going to be the last docking maneuver of its long career, it was that Minotaur did not have to concern itself with its emissions control anymore. With most of the comms array assigned to the crew’s Mnemosyne links and personal communications, Dunstan’s vidcom connection to Rhodia’s surface was as clear and sharp as never before.
“How long do you think the handover will take this time?” Mairi asked. Dunstan’s wife was in the kitchen of their living unit in the Caledonia-4 arcology, down on the northern half of the continent, and now well within line of sight of Minotaur’s comms array.
“That’s hard to say. I haven’t come home with a damaged ship since the war. But she’s not getting passed on to another crew. We’ll be off the ship in an hour. And then it depends on how long they want to keep us for debriefing and after-action reports.”
“You’ve already done a double patrol,” Mairi said. “The navy’s had you for six months now. I swear the girls have grown five centimeters since you left.”
“You’re the one who keeps feeding them,” Dunstan said, and his wife rolled her eyes at the well-worn joke. She was trying to go along with his fiction that the engagement had been minor and that Minotaur had never been in real danger, but he could tell she wasn’t buying what he was selling. They had been married for fifteen years, and the five in the middle had been wartime years, when he had been away for most of the time and only seen his family on leave once a year for two weeks. He knew that she still remembered what it had been like when the battered hulls of shot-up frigates and cruisers had returned to Rhodia One on a near-daily basis, half their crews dead or wounded, a seemingly endless stream of broken ships and broken bodies.
Once, a few years after the war, she had told him that she hadn’t slept through a single night while he was deployed, and that the first thing she had done every morning after getting up was to check the unofficial observer reports for the