Ballistic (The Palladium Wars), стр. 89

He took a quick little sip from his glass and put it down on the counter with a sharp click of glass on wood.

“I beg to differ. When it comes to anything Ragnar, it’s very much my business. Regardless of what those Alliance people put into writing. And you are the future of Ragnar. Only you, Solveig.”

Then nothing I do will ever fail to be your business, she thought, and the sudden anger she felt warmed her middle better and far more quickly than the wine had. This wasn’t even about Aden, and he was treating it like a personal betrayal, just because she had dared to make a judgment call that disagreed with his.

“I like him. I think he likes me. He seems like a good man. I may sleep with him in the future, or I may not. But that’s my choice to make, not yours.”

“We will talk about that when you’re back home,” Falk said.

She closed her eyes briefly and took a slow, deliberate breath. This was a fork in the road, and her next statement would put her on one of two paths. If she stepped the way she had always done, she could feign acquiescence and recognize his sovereignty over every aspect of her life, resign herself to getting her way only whenever she could tiptoe past him. She’d have to be content with sneaking the ice cream from the freezer at night occasionally.

Or she could step the other way, on a new path she’d never taken before. She could be more like him, but in the way he would least appreciate. That path had far more thorns and brambles on it. But whatever she would find at the end would be hers to claim entirely, whether it was good or bad.

She made her decision, and as soon as she opened her mouth, the contentment she felt made it clear that it had been the right one.

“I love you, Papa. You know that. And I respect your opinions and your counsel. But my love life is absolutely none of your business, either now or after I get back home. And I will not discuss this any further. Good night.”

She gave him a stern glare and wiped the screen away to terminate the vidcom.

Her father was not used to people ending talks with him. He was the one who terminated the connection, and only when he felt that you knew he was done with you. Solveig knew that there was probably a whisky glass exploding against one of the walls in the bar right now. His fury would be red-hot when she got back from Acheron. But she knew that if she had yielded to him on this, it would have been a universal adapter for him to attach himself to every part of her life and never let go again.

Solveig put down her wineglass and shut off her private comtab before her father could send another vidcom request. She got up and walked over to the panoramic windows to look out over the city and let her emotions ebb a little. The anger at her father’s intrusion was battling it out with the relief she felt that his network of snoops had followed the wrong track, leading her father to Detective Berg instead of Aden. The tiredness she had felt when she had walked into her suite was gone now, and she knew that she’d need either a good, brisk run or another glass of wine to wind down enough for bed again. After a few moments of consideration, Solveig decided to choose the easier option. Going for a run in a strange city in the middle of the night wouldn’t make her security detail happy.

She had just topped off her wineglass at the bar when the door chime sounded. She looked over at the screen that materialized in front of the door to show her who was outside. It was Cuthbert. He was holding his comtab and wearing a concerned expression.

“What is it, Cuthbert?” she asked. “If that’s my father trying to talk to me, tell him I’m not taking any more comms tonight.”

Cuthbert looked up from his comtab and shook his head. She couldn’t recall the last time she had seen him flustered or upset, but he was clearly in crisis mode.

“It’s not your father, Miss Ragnar. May I come in? Something awful has happened.”

Solveig gestured at the door to allow him access, and it retracted silently. Cuthbert walked into her suite and past the bar nook into the living area, where he activated the information system and opened a screen that filled the wall on one side of the room completely. He dismissed the hotel’s courtesy service feed and brought up several news feeds, then flicked them to arrange the screen into quarters. All showed variations of the same visuals: a large, roiling cloud rising into the sky, and a huge building on fire. The scenery was unfamiliar to Solveig, but the planetary background looked like Rhodia—fields of volcanic rock and gravel, and low, barren, snow-capped mountains in the distance. Text updates were scrolling past at the bottom of each screen quarter, too fast for Solveig to try to make sense of the Acheroni script.

“What is going on, Cuthbert?”

“Someone dropped a nuclear weapon on Rhodia, Miss Ragnar. It’s all over the Mnemosyne. It hit one of their arcologies.”

“Gods,” Solveig said. She put down her wineglass and walked over into the living space. Cuthbert was furiously working the text-entry field on his comtab in between glances at the news feeds.

“I’ve summoned the others to your suite, Miss Ragnar. I hope that is all right. You have the biggest space.”

“That’s perfectly fine, Cuthbert. Now what in the worlds is going on? Who would drop a nuke on the Rhodians? The war’s been over for five years.”

“I don’t know who would do such a thing. I just know that it happened. And that it’s very, very bad news.”

That sounds like the understatement of