“Then you will gladly follow the order I am about to give you. The next replenishment group from Pallas arrives at the end of this week. When they return home, you will be going with them. Corporal Noor from Blue Section is about to get his sergeant stripes. I will have Lieutenant Liu bump him up to platoon NCO for the remainder of Fifth Platoon’s deployment.”
Idina tried not to show her shock.
“Sir, I can’t go home now. There’s still work to be done.”
“There’s always work to be done,” Major Malik said. “We will be here for years to come, Sergeant. We have plenty of people to do it. No need for you to grind yourself down to the bone for this place personally.”
“I don’t want to leave my platoon early, sir,” she protested, but she knew that it was a futile argument, that the major had made his decision.
“It’s just two months early, Colors. Noor can handle the platoon. You brought your squad leaders up well.”
He wiped the projection in front of him away with a flick of his wrist and nodded toward the door.
“You will be on that flight home in a week, Color Sergeant Chaudhary. That is an order. I suggest you go on light duty until your departure. Go home and recuperate. And if you decide that you still haven’t had enough of this planet, you can put in a request for another JSP assignment. But not until you’ve spent at least a year in normal Pallas gravity. Dismissed, Sergeant.”
Idina got out of her chair and saluted. The legs that had felt achy and tired earlier now just felt numb, like temporary prosthetics. She turned on her left heel and stiffly walked toward the door.
“I have to say I am a little surprised, Colors,” Major Malik said when she was at the threshold. “After all that has happened to you, I figured you would be glad to get out of this place a little early.”
She paused at the door, her mind as numb as her legs felt right now.
“Things got a little . . . complicated, sir,” she said.
CHAPTER 8
SOLVEIG
“Miss Solveig?”
Solveig looked up from the data pad she was holding between her hands and turned off the Acheroni language refresher she had been studying for the last half hour. Her assistant Anja stood at the door just outside the threshold, one hand resting on the translucent frame she had just lightly rapped with her knuckles to announce her presence.
“Yes, Anja?”
“Edric from security would like to know how late you will be needing the gyrofoil home. He wanted me to remind you that there are new flight restrictions in place now.”
Solveig looked over to the window, where the sun had mostly settled behind the skyline of Sandvik. She hadn’t noticed the time because the streets were always lit at the same level—as the sun went down, the illumination of the roadways and buildings increased gradually. Down on street level, the sun never really set. She used to enjoy that about city life, but after a few months of spending her nights back in the countryside, it seemed unnatural.
“I’m afraid I haven’t kept track of my time very well today,” she said. Anja smiled, but Solveig could tell that her assistant was trying to gauge whether she was being blamed somehow. Solveig wondered if Anja had been here when her father sat in the big chair, then decided that she was probably too young, but she had clearly been around long enough for the corporate culture to imprint on her.
His spirit is still all over this place, she thought. Everyone’s always jumpy and worried.
Solveig checked the time. “What’s the new regulation again?”
“No air traffic over Principal Square after 2100 hours,” Anja replied. “If you wish to stay beyond that time, Edric will have to ferry you to the spaceport in a ground pod for a transit flight home.”
“Ugh.” Solveig made a face. “That’s on the other end of the city. Too much trouble for a twenty-minute flight home. Tell Edric not to waste his time just because I can’t stick to my own schedule. I’ll be on the rooftop pad at 2030.”
“Very well, Miss Solveig. I will let him know.”
Anja withdrew politely and walked down the hallway out of sight. Solveig was the only person on the executive floor who liked to work with her door open. Everyone else kept theirs closed, and many of the department directors and vice presidents turned on their offices’ glass tinting for privacy. Falk Ragnar would have forbidden the practice outside of confidential meetings. It pleased Solveig that at least this little bit of slack had made its way into the attitudes on the top floor, even if it had taken half a decade.
She put down her data pad and looked at the screen projections above her desk. There was never an end to the flow of data in a company like Ragnar Industries, not even the postwar incarnation that was still operating at half throttle. Ragnar was the hub of hundreds of supply spokes. Every day, many millions of ags’ worth of raw materials and finished goods changed hands, entered inventories and left them again, each transaction creating a digital footprint. As much as the Alliance had squeezed the company as a critical wartime supplier, everyone still needed Alon, and only Ragnar and its subcontractors could produce it. But the size of the network required to keep the flow of goods going was so immense that no single person could possibly have their hands on every lever simultaneously, know every layer and sublayer of the structure. And yet her father had done it for decades. Sometimes she wondered whether he had intentionally set things up to be complex enough that only he would always know exactly which lever to pull to get a specific result. For three months now, Solveig had tried
