Aden didn’t know anything about Pallas One, but Tristan seemed more than happy to act as tour guide for him. They went to the standard-gravity mercantile concourse, where a few dozen shops offered their wares to tourists and commercial freighter crews.
“The shops with the music playing and the guys in the bright Pallas garb out front, you don’t want to go into those,” Tristan advised. “Those are tourist traps. For the transit crowd that doesn’t have the time to go down to the surface. Authentic Pallas crafts and clothing, for a hefty premium.”
“Authentic, huh?” Aden eyed one of the shops Tristan had indicated.
“Some sucker is going to drop three hundred ags on a genuine hand-forged ceremonial kukri that was probably stamped out of a sheet of recycled scrap metal in a trinket factory on Hades. And when the happy customer carries his purchase out of the shop to take it home and hang it on the wall of his living unit, that shopkeeper is going to replace it with an identical one from a storage bin in the back.”
“What about that honorable Palladian warrior spirit?” Aden asked.
“You want to see some warrior spirit, go buy something from that guy in the bright-blue tunic and then ask to return it for a refund.”
They went to a shop in a side corridor of the concourse Aden never would have ventured into on his own. From what he could tell, the other customers in the place were all freighter crews, cargo hands from the freight-dock level, or maintenance crews in grease-stained overalls. He felt out of place in his nearly new flight suit. Nobody here sold or bought counterfeit kukris or Palladian garb. Instead, the shop offered a wildly diverse mix of goods: comtabs, tool sets, energy cells in all sizes and formats, a variety of food items, and hundreds of other diversions or necessities for a working life in space.
“You’ve done some time,” Tristan observed when Aden had collected his purchases from the dispenser chute at the exit.
“What do you mean?” Aden’s hand briefly froze on the pack of freeze-dried crackers he was about to stuff into his sling pack.
“You’ve been in a detention center. And not just for a week or two.”
“What makes you say that?”
“You shop like a prisoner,” Tristan said and nodded at the small pile of purchases in front of Aden. “Like you’re in a detention commissary. Personal hygiene products. So you don’t have to use the issue stuff and smell like everyone else. Packaged comfort foods. Stuff that doesn’t need equipment to warm up or rehydrate. Little private pleasures you can keep in your locker until you can use them up.”
“Sounds like you know a thing or two about that,” Aden replied, trying to figure out Tristan’s intent.
“A lot of us do. Spacers are a rough lot. We bounce around between six worlds. Six different sets of rules, customs, regulations. It’s not hard to piss off authority.”
“I’ve done some time,” Aden admitted.
“For what?”
“Being in the wrong place at the wrong time. With the wrong people.”
Tristan’s purchases slid out of the dispenser chute into the pickup tray, and he began collecting them without hurry.
“Ah, yes. The number-one cause of incarceration.”
The items in Tristan’s little pile of supplies looked mostly unfamiliar to Aden.
“What is the veteran spacer buying for the ride, then?” he asked.
“Spices. Freeze-dried herbs. Pepper sauce. So I can keep turning those prepackaged galley meals on the ship into something edible. Other than that, I’ve got all the stuff I need.”
Tristan picked up his bag and slung it over his shoulder.
“Never own more things than you can carry off the ship in one hand. It just makes life complicated. Weighs you down.”
Aden smiled. He had already followed that philosophy for the last five years, albeit not by choice.
“I think I have that covered right now,” he said.
When they left the shop, he glanced back at the variety on the shelves. Once, in a previous life, he’d had enough money at his disposal to buy the place empty in a single transaction. If the shop owner told him right now he could pick a thousand ags in merchandise for free, he wouldn’t know what to choose beyond the items he had already purchased. He couldn’t even remember what the old Aden had liked, what he would have bought for a thousand ags in this place. It was like trying to remember details from last night’s fleeting dream. The ID pass in his pocket was a lie, but it marked a break in his life that was real. There was very little left of Aden Robertson, and he didn’t know Aden Ragnar well enough anymore to judge just how much of him had remained. Three lives, three names, and he was less sure of who he really was than he had ever been.
They were all early for the departure. Maya was the last to make it through the docking collar and onto the ship. Aden knew by now that she was always the first to leave and the last to come back, no matter where they had docked in the last three months.
Whenever Captain Decker wanted to call an all-hands meeting, they gathered around the table in the galley because it was the only space on the ship where everyone could sit down together and face each other. Aden didn’t know how long he would have to be a member of the crew for him to stop feeling like he was sitting down at dinner as the houseguest of another family, but three months hadn’t been enough time yet.
“Someone is paying us double rate for a cargo haul,” Decker said when everyone had settled in. “Ship-to-ship pickup somewhere off the beaten path. Discreet delivery to another ship. The client would really like to avoid official entanglements.”
“So we’re running incognito for this one,” Maya clarified.
“We haven’t had to do that in a while. It’s a good way to stay in practice.”
“How
