“Two hours, twenty-nine minutes, thirty-eight seconds from the RP3 beacon to the inner marker,” she said.
Both Henry and Decker whistled softly.
Next to Aden, Tess merely let out a satisfied little chuckle.
“That’s almost a half hour off the old record,” Decker said from above. “Be a good while before anyone beats that run, I think.”
Aden switched the display in front of him to show an outside view of the ship. He knew what Pallas looked like from pictures and Mnemosyne feeds, but it was something different to see the planet from only a few thousand kilometers away, even if it was through yet another camera lens. Pallas was small, the second smallest of Gaia’s planets after Hades, but it looked the most intimidating from space. Maybe that was just his subconscious at work, his knowledge that Gretia had suffered most of its wartime casualties down there on the mountainsides and in the tunnels, but the planet looked unwelcoming—harsh and austere.
“Never been here, huh?” Tristan said when he saw what Aden was viewing.
“Never,” Aden repeated. “Have you been down to the surface?”
“Yes, a few times. Had some leisure time, wanted to see what it was like. And try something other than whatever they serve the tourists up on the stations.”
Tristan pointed at the expanse of the planet that filled up most of the camera’s field of view. It was daylight on the hemisphere below Pallas Three, and Aden could see the mountains down there even from orbit. The sunlight glistened on the ice-covered peaks and the waters of the narrow seas between the mountain chains, higher mountains and deeper seas than anywhere else in the system.
“All the cities are on the equator,” Tristan said. “On terraces halfway up the mountains. Only place where it’s warm enough. The stations are right above, on tethers. Freight climber takes five days to get from the ground to the station. You could see the cable if we came in at a lower approach angle. Acheroni graphene.”
“Five days,” Aden said. “You must have wanted to see the place badly.”
“Oh, they make it worth the trip. Great restaurants in the passenger climbers. And let me tell you, the views are worth it. Gods, and the liquor. Watching a sunset from a bar that’s a thousand kilometers above the mountaintops while sipping a hundred-year-old Rhodian whisky, that’ll almost make you believe in the gods. If the gravity wasn’t such a bitch, I’d retire down there.”
“Tristan’s been everywhere.” Tess stretched in her gravity couch and yawned. “He ranks the planets strictly by food and drink. I think he’s planning to do a travel guide someday.”
“Nobody wants to watch me get drunk on five different planets.”
“Six planets,” Aden corrected.
“You couldn’t get me to drink with Gretians if you gave me a thousand ags and a free week in the finest pleasure house on Acheron,” Tristan said.
Aden felt his cheeks flush, and he was glad that everyone was strapped into their couches and mostly looking at the screens projected in front of the bulkhead instead of sitting around the table on the galley deck, where everyone would have noticed. Nobody on the crew had questioned his fictional background, and the only person who knew—Captain Decker—had kept the information to herself, leaving it up to him to determine when to come clean. Aden didn’t know when that would be, but he knew it wasn’t now, not yet. In the last three months, he had gotten comfortable with the rest of the crew, and he felt they had started to accept him as more than just a temporary addition. But revealing to a mostly Oceanian crew that he had mirror-imaged his actual lineage and citizenship, that he was a Gretian with an Oceanian mother instead of the other way around, would probably cause them to leave him at the next space station. Tristan’s casually hostile remark about Gretians just confirmed Aden’s instinct again. If they found out he had been a Blackguard as well, Aden thought there was a nontrivial chance Henry would just walk him down to the airlock deck and flush him out into space on the spot.
Right now, Aden silently thanked his mother every day for insisting that he learn both Gretian and Oceanian from the time he was old enough to start talking, and for spending months on her home planet with him every year despite his father’s dislike for her extended family visits. Plenty of people in his linguistics classes at the Gretian military academy had learned flawless Oceanian, but to his ears, none of them had really sounded like natives because they didn’t have a local accent. They didn’t sound like they were from anywhere. He sounded like an Oceanian from the city of Chryseis because his mother was one, and she had spoken with him in Oceanian almost exclusively whenever his father wasn’t around. The ability to switch his brain between languages had been as automatic as breathing to him.
His mother had left the family when his sister Solveig was just a little girl, too young to keep building on those neural pathways on her own without a constant conversation partner and model. He had continued to keep in touch with Solveig in the Mnemosyne since he’d reestablished contact with her after his release from prison, and when he had switched to Oceanian with her a few times just to see how much of their mother’s influence had stuck, Solveig had been fluent, but her upbringing had tainted her Oceanian with a prominent Gretian accent.
In the last few months, he had started to think of himself as Oceanian, convinced that it was almost the truth anyway, that his citizenship
