“Have you heard anything?” Solveig asked.
Falk shook his head.
“He disappeared again. But corporate intel did some digging. He joined up the year he left. Went into military intelligence. Linguistics. Sat out the war on Oceana, if the records have it right. He spent five years in a POW camp on Rhodia. Five years, and not a word to us. Not even a Mnemosyne message. While we were thinking he was dead. Why would he do that, Solveig?”
He slugged the rest of the liquor in his glass and gently set it down next to the bottle.
“Have I been a bad father?” he asked without looking at her. “Am I a terrible person?”
“Absolutely not,” she said. “You’ve always made sure I’ve had everything I needed. I wouldn’t be who I am without you, Papa.”
It was another learned skill that came with growing up a Ragnar—the ability to sense what an audience wanted to hear, and then delivering it in just the right way to confirm their biases or the validity of their fears. It worked on almost everyone, and when her father was drunk enough, it even worked on him.
“Why would he throw all of this away and waste his life like that? He could have been running half the planet. Not translating enemy field manuals for the fucking Blackguards. They have software that can do that job. Why would he turn his back on all of this? On you and me?”
There was no right answer to that question, none that her father would accept, so she didn’t even make the attempt.
“I was six the year he left,” she said. “I barely even remember him. I can’t tell you why he would. I don’t know who he is. Or who he was.”
“Fair enough.” Falk looked at the bottle as if considering whether to pour another. He picked up his glass and lightly clinked the bottom of it against the neck of the bottle, then set it down again.
“What really happened back then?” she asked. “Between the two of you?”
Her father stared off into the space behind the bar. His jaw muscles flexed slowly. For a few moments, she thought he might be drunk and introspective enough to make a hole in the wall he had been keeping up in front of that part of the family history for seventeen years and allow her a peek through the crack. Then he shook his head.
“Just silly stuff, now. I’ve told you it was about a girl. Boys that age, it’s always about love. They think they’re the first ones to discover it. Trust me, it wasn’t anything worth seventeen years of silence.”
He looked at her with glassy eyes and smiled. It was a different smile from his usual toothy display of dominance. There was genuine sadness in it. But she could tell that this was as much authentic, unfiltered emotion as that bottle of liquor could get out of him tonight, and that she had asked the question half a glass too soon.
“I really shouldn’t keep you up, Solveig. You’ve had a long day. Go get some rest.”
Solveig knew when she was being dismissed. She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.
“All right, Papa. Have a good night. I’ll see you at breakfast.”
She climbed off the bar stool and walked past the screen projections that were still silently shouting out three different newscasts at once, data streams overlaid with data streams, a torrent of structured chaos.
I wonder if it looks like that in his head all the time, she thought.
CHAPTER 9
ADEN
The dish in front of him, retained in the little cast-iron pan the server had put on the table with a gestured warning against touching the handle, sizzled with the residual heat from cooking. The smell wasn’t unappetizing, but the strong scent of spices almost singed the hairs in his nostrils, and Aden knew that he’d most likely get chemical burns on his tongue from eating whatever was in that shallow pan.
“If this makes the hangover worse, I am absolutely blaming you,” he told Tristan, who sat across from him, arms folded, elbows on the table surface, an amused expression on his face.
“It will make you forget about the hangover,” Tristan said. “It can cure anything. Up to and possibly including the pain from a stab wound.”
“What is it called again?”
Aden poked the dish with a fork. He could identify the eggs on top, but the ingredients underneath were a mystery. Everything had been blended together into a layer of baked mush that had shades of red, orange, and green.
“I can’t pronounce the Palladian word, but I can tell you what everyone else calls it. Spacers’ Sunrise.”
“Spacers’ Sunrise,” Aden repeated.
“Break up the eggs with your fork and stir them in with the mix. You want to break the yolks and make them run into the mush,” Tristan said.
A panoramic window ran the length of the wall on the guest-table side of the eatery. It was really a large holographic screen layer, but they had set it into a frame that looked like a bulkhead viewport and then put a thin layer of Alon on top to make the mimicry complete. The screen showed an outside view of the station, Pallas looming underneath, spaceships arriving and departing in a steady stream. Aden wondered if it was a live view or recorded footage played on an endless loop, but he gave up trying to look for repetitive patterns after a minute. It was something that would please space tourists, but he had to admit it was nicer to look at than a naked bulkhead.
He touched the Alon layer covering the screen and rested his palm on it for a moment. It was cool to the touch and as smooth as polished steel. Every piece of Alon in the system came from his family’s factories, Ragnar Industries’ most important product. He had known all its lucrative properties by the
