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  PRAISE FOR THE PALLADIUM WARS

  “Fans of the Expanse series will enjoy this engaging and fast-moving combination of corporate machinations, police procedural, and interstellar naval combat.”

  —Booklist

  “A series you should start if you are a fan of grounded space opera with a military lean. The Palladium Wars comes at straight-up military fiction from an angle that keeps it interesting.”

  —Locus magazine

  “I gulped down Ballistic in one long read, staying awake half the night, and now I want the next one!”

  —George R. R. Martin

  ALSO BY MARKO KLOOS

  FRONTLINES

  Terms of Enlistment

  Lines of Departure

  Angles of Attack

  Chains of Command

  Fields of Fire

  Points of Impact

  Orders of Battle

  Measures of Absolution (A Frontlines Kindle novella)

  “Lucky Thirteen” (A Frontlines Kindle short story)

  The Palladium Wars

  Aftershocks

  Ballistic

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2021 by Marko Kloos

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542027250 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 154202725X (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542027243 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542027241 (paperback)

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  First edition

  For Robin, the gravitational center of my universe.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1 ADEN

  CHAPTER 2 IDINA

  CHAPTER 3 DUNSTAN

  CHAPTER 4 SOLVEIG

  CHAPTER 5 ADEN

  CHAPTER 6 IDINA

  CHAPTER 7 DUNSTAN

  CHAPTER 8 SOLVEIG

  CHAPTER 9 ADEN

  CHAPTER 10 IDINA

  CHAPTER 11 DUNSTAN

  CHAPTER 12 SOLVEIG

  CHAPTER 13 ADEN

  CHAPTER 14 IDINA

  CHAPTER 15 DUNSTAN

  CHAPTER 16 SOLVEIG

  CHAPTER 17 ADEN

  CHAPTER 18 IDINA

  CHAPTER 19 DUNSTAN

  CHAPTER 20 SOLVEIG

  CHAPTER 21 ADEN

  CHAPTER 22 IDINA

  CHAPTER 23 DUNSTAN

  CHAPTER 24 SOLVEIG

  EPILOGUE ADEN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  ADEN

  “I remember you,” the voice said from the back of the room.

  Aden turned around to look at the only other customer in the shop, an older woman who had been glancing at him ever since he had walked into the place a minute ago to buy breakfast. It was an automated shop, prepared food placed in transparent compartments along three of the four walls for customers to browse, so there was no clerk to overhear them. But Aden still felt an unwelcome rush of anxiety.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I remember you,” she repeated. “I remember your face. From liberation day.”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean,” Aden said, careful to keep his discomfort out of his voice.

  “I scanned ID tags at the spaceport for the prisoner transport,” she said. “I don’t remember your name, but I am pretty good with faces. You were with the Blackguards. I assigned you to one of the shuttles.”

  Aden forced a surprised smile that he hoped looked nonchalant.

  “I think your memory is playing tricks on you. I’m a local. I was home on Chryseis on liberation day. Getting drunk with the rest of the city when the last fuzzhead left.”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed. He had inflected his Oceanian with just enough of his mother’s Chryseis timbre that it must have shaken her conviction at least a little.

  “Which part of the city?” she asked.

  “Second canal belt, right off Civic Square.”

  “Fancy part of town,” the woman said. She seemed to appraise him anew with the fresh information in her mind. “I lived on Chryseis for three years. Out on the eighth belt.”

  “By the university quarter,” he guessed, and she nodded.

  “Well,” she said. “Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me. Maybe I remember your face from there. Either that, or you have a twin who was in the fuzzhead military. My apologies. Nobody wants to be mistaken for one of those people.”

  Aden shrugged with a smile.

  “No offense taken. It was a strange time. Seems like a bad dream after all these years.”

  She nodded and mirrored his smile, but hers didn’t quite reach her eyes. Aden returned his attention to the wall of food compartments, but having been identified by a local had unsettled him, and he just wanted to get out of the shop as quickly as possible without looking like he was running away. He picked two meals in what he hoped didn’t seem like a random fashion and opened the compartments with his ID pass, making sure to be obvious about it so the woman behind him could see his Oceanian identification. He collected the trays, stacked them on top of each other, and walked out, giving the woman a friendly nod as he passed her. When he was outside in the sun, he glanced back and saw that she was following him with her gaze, the suspicion still evident on her face. He turned right and strolled down the leaf’s main artery, doing his best to make his walk casual and unhurried.

  Out by the ocean wall of the nearby seaside park, he saw a warship for the first time since the end of the war.

  It was a hydrofoil cruiser, a sleek and ominous dagger shape that was carving a silver line through the shallow waters a few kilometers outside of the city, and it stood out between the smaller leisure craft and commercial fishing boats like an eagle in a chicken coop. Aden watched it glide past the seaside park at the tip of the northeastern leaf. During the war, which had been brief for Oceana until Gretia had subdued and occupied the planet, the Oceanians had used these hydrofoil cruisers to good effect against the attackers, as highly mobile seaborne anti-air platforms and artillery support. The mood in Adrasteia had changed a little in the two weeks since the insurgent attack on Rhodia, but the hydrofoil cruiser off the coast was the first visual indicator that Oceana was preparing for conflict. The tourist crowds from all over the system were thinner than usual, and the chatter on the streets was more subdued.

  Aden stepped around a cluster of Palladians who were showing off the panorama to some far-off friends or relatives via comtab projections, chattering and gesturing. Palladian was the one language in the system in which he could not even guess at the content of a conversation, but the laughs and the facial expressions supplied that information clearly enough. He returned a few smiles from the group and continued his path along the seawall, following the far-off warship with his eyes until it disappeared behind the skyline of the neighboring leaf. The sight of it reinforced the unwelcome memories of the end of the Gretian occupation that had been triggered by his encounter with the suspicious woman at the food shop. An Alliance fleet had shown up in orbit, chased off the garrison force, and landed troops on every Oceanian city to pry off the Gretians. It had been Aden’s last day of freedom for the next five years. The Alliance had achieved complet
e surprise—the morning had started out like this one, a perfect, sunny twenty-degree day with a light breeze, and by noon, the sky had been dark with troop landers and attack craft. Some of the Gretian detachments on other cities had put up brief and futile fights, but the garrison commander on Adrasteia had surrendered almost immediately. After four years of war, Adrasteia had been mostly an R & R area for the troops coming back from the meat grinder at Pallas and the fleet actions in space, and they’d had neither the numbers nor the will for a pointless fight. Before the end of that day, Aden had marched his entire signals intelligence company onto the central island into detainment, past jeering Oceanian civilians and grim-looking Alliance soldiers. The sight of the gunship cruising on the tranquil waters just off the outer edge of the city brought back the feelings of that day—the fear, shame, and anxiety.

  Someone had run up to their column and spit at him that day, and the memory of it came back as vividly as if it had happened an hour ago. The man had meant to spit in his face but had hit the collar of his Blackguards uniform instead, where the spit had trickled down the branch insignia and onto the fabric of the tunic. It was strange—he could clearly remember everything about that incident, and how he had left the spit to dry on his uniform because he didn’t want to smear it into a bigger blotch trying to wipe it off, but he couldn’t remember any encounter that day with the woman he’d just met in the food shop. He barely recalled the registration procedure at the spaceport, where the Alliance marines had corralled them into groups by rank and searched them for contraband before letting the civilians assign them to shuttles.

  Aden shook his head and tried to clear the unwelcome recollections from his mind. The breeze out here on the tip of the northeastern leaf was clean and pleasant, and the warm food in his hands smelled appetizing through the perforated lids of the containers. This was the present, the here and now, and he tried to return his focus to what was in front of him. But as he walked back toward the place where he was staying, he could still feel the gaze of the woman from the shop on the back of his head, and he had to turn around to make sure she wasn’t following him, alerting passersby that a fuzzhead—an occupier, a warmonger—was walking among them again.

  The suite he had rented here on the most scenic part of the leaf was probably a little extravagant for a rookie spacer, but the advice of his friend and crewmate Tristan had been never to be stingy with accommodation, food, or drink, and just be miserly with everything else instead. The room was shaped like a rounded flower petal, jutting out from the side of the resort building in a way that offered a 180-degree view of the ocean without looking into any neighboring suites. Most importantly, resorts that catered to well-to-do people had much enhanced security over budget hotels in the busy part of the city, the sort of places where half a dozen graduating university kids from Rhodia or Acheron would split a basic room to rest their heads in between their drinking or pharmaceutical expeditions into town.

  When he unlocked the door and walked into the suite, the blinds were still drawn, and the place was bathed in semidarkness.

  “Room, open blinds,” he said. “And the balcony door.”

  The blinds silently retracted upward at his command, and the balcony door slid sideways to admit a light gust of sea air from outside.

  “Too bright,” a muffled voice said from the bed in the middle of the main room.

  “It’s midmorning,” Aden said. “I brought some breakfast.”

  The covers on the bed moved, and a tousle-haired Tess raised her head and squinted at him.

  “I don’t think I can get anything down this morning,” she said. “But I do need some water. My mouth tastes like the inside of a wastewater tank.”

  Aden walked over to the kitchen nook and put the meal containers on the counter. Then he pulled a cup off the rack and filled it with cold water from the in-wall dispenser. He walked to the bed and handed the cup to Tess, who took it and emptied it in one long gulp.

  “Food’s over there if you change your mind.” Aden nodded at the counter.

  “Right now, my mind isn’t so much on intake as on output,” she replied. She threw back the covers and swung her legs over the edge of the bed with a groan. Ever since Aden had met her, he had seen her mostly in the artificial illumination of Zephyr’s compartments or the interiors of space stations. Here in the natural sunlight streaming through the windows, she looked more vivid somehow. Her skin had a different tone, and her tattoos looked brighter and more colorful. He watched as she got onto unsteady feet and walked over to the wet cell, past a low table that held the evidence of last night’s indulgences—empty food containers and several bottles of liquor. They hadn’t really made a spoken arrangement to get together after the Zephyr crew disembarked and came down to Adrasteia yesterday, but then their paths had crossed on the northeastern leaf a few hours into their customary twenty-four–zero solitary time, and things had developed rapidly from there.

  “This bathroom is bigger than my whole berth on the ship,” Tess said from the wet cell over the sound of running water.

  “I think it’s bigger than both our berths put together,” Aden replied. He walked over to the balcony door and stood in the opening to enjoy the breeze. Fresh air, the wind ruffling his hair, was what he missed most when he was on the ship, where all the air was continuously recycled. Then his stomach growled and reminded him why he had gone for a morning stroll in the first place. He turned and walked over to the counter to get one of the breakfast meals, then took his food out onto the balcony to eat.

  A few minutes later, Tess came out to join him, the other meal tray in her hand. She was wearing clothes he had never seen on her before, sleek dark trousers and an airy sleeveless tunic that showed off the artwork on her arms.

  “I didn’t think you even owned any clothes that aren’t flight suits,” he said.

  “I got these on Coriolis City before we left,” she said. “You showed up at our bar evening with a new outfit. It made me want to step up my shore-leave game a little. It’s easy to get lazy when you’re on the ship or on a station most of the time. Spacers don’t give a shit about looks.”

  Tess sat down and opened her food container, then propped her feet up on the low railing of the balcony and blinked into the sun. “You know, every time I’m home, I think about how much I’ve missed this place, and that I never want to leave again. And after a week down here, I usually can’t wait to get back into space.”

  “We may be down here for a lot longer than just a week,” Aden said.

  “I know. Until the dust settles.”

  “Or until we run out of money. Whichever comes first,” he replied.

  “We won’t make a killing with just Acheron-to-Oceana runs. That’s only a lucrative route if you’re a 100,000-ton bulk hauler. Protein one way, graphene the other. Not a job for a ship the size of ours.”

  “Then let’s hope the dust settles quickly.”

  Tess gave him an amused glance and took a bite of her food.

  “How likely do you think that is? They’re still putting out the fires on Rhodia.”

  “Not likely,” Aden admitted. “Nukes kick up an awful lot of dust.”

  “Like you said, we may be here for a while. So you may want to think about downgrading your suite a little. Not that I don’t appreciate the amenities.”

  “It’s just for a few days. And if it’s down to a few hundred ags, I’m in deep shit anyway.”

  “Do you have family here you can lean on?” Tess asked.

  Aden thought about her question. His mother was from Chryseis, one of Oceana’s floating cities, but she hadn’t been back in a long time, and her family had all but disowned her when Gretia had gone to war with the rest of the system. Whoever was still around wasn’t likely to give him a warm reception.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But I didn’t exactly leave on good terms. I’ll save that option for desperate times.”

  To his relief, Tess seemed satisfied with his answer and didn’t prob
e any further. As far as most of the crew knew, he had grown up on Oceana and visited Gretia during the long summers, when in truth it had been the other way around. Only Captain Decker knew that he was Gretian, and he hadn’t told her that he had been a Blackguard. Every time Tess asked a question about his personal history, no matter how innocuous, formulating an answer felt like having to walk a tightrope. He tried not to lie to her, to make his answers as ambiguous as possible without arousing suspicion, but he felt bad every time he had to be evasive.

  “One bad contract,” Tess said. “That was all it took. One quick show of hands, and a few weeks later we’re down to one low-profit trade route. If we ever decide to get underway again, with this sword hanging over our heads.”

  She looked up at the cloudless blue sky overhead and sighed. High above them, contrails curved toward Adrasteia, announcing the imminent arrival of another orbital shuttle ferrying travelers and cargo down to the spaceport in the center of the city.

  “It doesn’t feel right.”

  “What’s that?” Aden asked.

  “Zephyr,” Tess replied. “Up there, tied up at the station. She’s not built for that. She’s built for ten-g dashes on the transfer routes. Not for racking up parking fees. She needs to earn her keep.”

  “You’re not just talking about the ship, are you?”

  She looked at him, and the corners of her mouth turned up in the hint of a smile.

  “Could be,” she said. “Maybe I’m not built for that either. She’s just a bunch of alloy and graphene, after all. She’ll weather it better than I will.”

  He watched as she took another bite of her breakfast. By now, he was used to her little idiosyncrasies and habits, like the way she preloaded her fork in between bites, or the way she wiped the corners of her mouth with the inside of her wrist on occasion. She caught him looking at her and gave him a quizzical look.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Aden said. “Just wondering if this is going to be a problem when we’re back up on the ship again.”

  “If what is going to be a problem?”