Falk smiled, this time with genuine pleasure at her invocation of her name and status. She knew that losing the firm was the most grievous wound he had ever suffered, even more so than losing his son or his wife, and putting a balm on that wound would always let her score easy points with him.
Thinking about her brother, Aden, made her excitement flare up again. She’d be off the planet for a little while, and it would be easier to get around Papa’s informant network when she was a few million kilometers away from Gretia. Corporate security had tracked Aden on Gretia, but they had lost him again as soon as they had found him, and as far as Solveig knew, neither Papa nor the company’s intelligence division had discovered his new identity or his current whereabouts. All they knew was that he had left Oceana three months ago.
Maybe I can meet up with him, she thought. Finally see him in person again. They had exchanged brief messages, but he had only told her that he had a new job on a ship, and that he was traveling the system. He was always reluctant to share his exact location because he knew that Ragnar’s corporate intelligence was still looking for him after he had barely escaped them in Adrasteia three months ago. They couldn’t arrest him, but they could blow open his fake ID and take him home to Papa, and that was as good as a prison sentence.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll go to Acheron. And I’ll come back with better terms for the graphene contract.”
“I have no doubt.” Falk grinned broadly. “Thank you for taking my advice.”
“And do you think I can schedule a bit of time for fun stuff? I want to do some sightseeing while I’m there. I hear it’s a pretty exciting place.”
“Of course you can. Once the business is done, your time is yours. And now that you’re swimming in the big pool, you’ll get to learn another family business rule.”
“And what’s that?”
“What happens off-world stays off-world,” he said with a conspiratorial wink.
She responded with what she hoped was a shy smile and ate another spoonful of her corn mash and eggs.
Oh, you can very much count on that, Papa.
CHAPTER 5
ADEN
Pallas One was immense, a floating city in space that looked nothing like any other orbital station Aden had ever seen. It had hundreds of docking berths, some empty, most occupied by ships of all sizes: freighters, passenger shuttles, yachts, and courier ships like Zephyr, and the command modules of the great ore haulers that supplied the other planets with the uranium and palladium that fueled the economies in the Gaia system. Planets without the palladium necessary for large-scale gravmag compensators had to build spin stations if they wanted to operate under gravity, but Pallas could have gravity on anything they wanted in space without having to make it spin, no matter the shape or size.
From the vantage point of Zephyr’s bow sensors, Aden could finally see the cable that tethered the station to a mountainside terrace on the equator of Pallas. A cargo climber left the station as he watched, exterior lights blinking on every corner of the octagonal freight containers attached to the climber’s core. It descended on the cable at a brisk rate of speed, and Aden followed its path until it dropped from view below the edge of the screen projection. Below, the planet loomed, huge and gray and covered in clouds. Even the atmosphere had the color of frozen rock from up here. This place had been the reason for the war, trillions of tons of easily mineable ore and all the known palladium in the system, the grand prize for which Gretia had contested against everyone else. They had held a chunk of it for a year at ludicrous human cost, then lost it all again, and the war along with it. He wondered how many Gretian soldiers were still entombed down there in collapsed tunnels or crushed at the bottom of miles-deep mountain gorges, all dead for less than nothing. Dropping onto that planet into battle from orbit must have felt like jumping into a hell that was beyond even the reach of the gods. It twisted his stomach just to imagine it.
What were they thinking? Aden mused. That anyone could defeat the people who chose to live on that? It doesn’t want us on it. It doesn’t want anyone on it. It looks like it would shrug off all life like a minor case of fleas if it had a mind to do it.
“It’s a sight, isn’t it?” Tristan said next to him, pulling Aden out of his dark thoughts. He nodded slowly in response with what he hoped was a sufficiently awestruck expression.
They coasted into position for the docking maneuver, propelled only by occasional quick bursts from the ship’s thrusters. The helm was under the control of the station’s AI now, but Maya still had her hands near her own flight controls, ready to override Pallas One if anything started to look wrong. Aden had yet to meet a single pilot who fully trusted any AI with their ship.
“Get ready for one g, people. Engaging clamps in three . . . two . . . one,” Maya announced. The hull shuddered lightly with the contact of the clamps locking onto the hard points on Zephyr’s hull.
They had been weightless since Maya cut the main drive a little while ago when the deceleration burn was finished, but as Zephyr engaged the docking clamps and entered Pallas One’s powerful gravmag field, Aden could feel gravity returning gradually, turning the deck flooring into down again.
“In position for hard dock at Alpha Five Three. And here comes the docking collar.” Maya watched the process on the visual feed
