Absolution

Chapter 1

Trace hated everything about the situation.

The pale blonde teenager hated being back in the Icem System. She’d run away from home for reasons, after all. She especially hated being back at Denton, though she had to admit she’d never actually seen her home planet from orbit before.

By the time Tracy “Trace” Bardacki—then Tracy Finley, prior to her adoption—had been in orbit of Denton, the reality of the “help” she’d received in running away had become clear. She hadn’t had access to windows or cameras.

She’d been kidnapped, trafficked and slated to be sold as a virgin. Then she’d met her dads. They’d rescued her—Trace had escaped on her own, but she was still clear on who’d rescued her.

They’d saved her, protected her and destroyed the monsters who’d kidnapped her. Then they’d adopted her, and she’d found home for the first time in her conscious memory.

So, she absolutely hated the fact that they were walking through the hallways of Icem’s main orbital, an orbital elevator mid-station above Denton named Icem High Home Station, toward a meeting with her original foster parents.

She hated everything. She hated the station. She hated that she was afraid. She hated that her dads were stressed.

She even hated the outfit she was wearing. Not in itself, per se—a friendly babysitter in her preteen years had instilled a laser-sharp sense of low-cost fashion into her, and she figured she’d done a good job with the long skirt and light sweater combination she was wearing over her shipsuit—but in that she’d spent so much thought on what to wear to meet her former “parents.”

“Breathe, Trace,” Evridiki “EB” Bardacki murmured to her. “No matter what happens, you’re not going anywhere you don’t want to.”

“I know, Dad-E,” she admitted. “But I’m still…” She swallowed.

“Afraid,” Dad-V—Vena “Vexer” Dolezal—finished for her. Her second father—EB’s fiancé and the navigator on their ship—gripped her shoulder.

“We’re all a bit concerned,” Vexer continued after a moment. “But you’re not going anywhere you don’t choose to, Trace. Like EB said. This’ll just…lay things out clearly and make sure there’s no trouble in the future.”

“Nothing changes unless you want it to,” EB confirmed. “So, all I’m really expecting out of this is a very expensive dinner on someone else’s credit.”

Trace giggled at that, but she looked past her adoptive dads and shivered as she realized they’d arrived. The Glorious Dragoon Restaurant loomed in front of them, marked by a twice-life-size statue of a figure she recognized as a Napoleonic War–era cavalryman.

“I’d heard about this place,” she told them. “The Vortanis had one dinner here—with the party leader after Sarah got elected to Parliament.”

And the party leader, so far as Trace knew, had paid for that. Her foster parents had been on the high side of “comfortably affluent,” but even they hadn’t come to the Glorious Dragoon on their own budget.

The best restaurant on or off the planet had a reputation and charged the prices to uphold it.

#

To Trace’s surprise, stepping inside the ten-meter-tall façade of the restaurant—clearly originally three storefronts in the three-story promenade—put them into a surprisingly small and ordinary waiting room, with an artificial stupid hologram greeting guests cheerfully.

“Welcome to the Glorious Dragoon,” the hologram greeted the three of them. “Do you have a reservation?”

“Meeting another party,” EB told the machine.

That was the only thing he said, but Trace was learning to follow the electronic datasphere around her. Thanks to her neurosurgeon former foster father, she had a unique set of hardware and software in her head—experiments that were almost certainly illegal and definitely unethical.

Combining those with the extra hardware that the Siya U Hestî trafficking cartel had put in her head to allow her to act as an unknowing data courier, and the software that EB had “borrowed” when he fled his home system of Apollo one step ahead of assassins…

She had discovered a natural talent for computers, too, but the hardware and software went a long way toward making her a competent hacker and data analyst. Even at thirteen, she had enough software running in her headware that she could “see” the data transfer as her dad sent their reservation code over to the AS.

“Of course,” the hologram confirmed. “Em Bardacki and two guests. If you will follow me.”

To Trace’s surprise, the hologram stepped off its plinth and started walking across the room. A moment’s examination revealed a series of concealed projectors to allow it to do just that—but given that the projectors were the most expensive part of a virtual greeter, the hologram moving across the room was showing off.

“Hey, why do they get to go in?” someone barked from the seats.

“Because they, Em Bathory, have a reservation for now instead of in thirty-six minutes,” the AS said primly. “Please be patient and you may enter the restaurant when we are ready to seat you.”

“You don’t meet many snide stupids,” EB murmured. “This might be interesting.”

Trace’s nervousness stole her speech, and she followed her dads and the hologram up and through a door that looked like it belonged in a stable or a barn. The couldn’t-be-real-wood door slid sideways at the hologram’s gesture, and they were waved in.

“Ah, Em Bardacki, Em Dolezal, young Em Bardacki,” a graying older woman greeted them, stepping up to them as the sliding door closed behind them.

“Welcome to the Glorious Dragoon. Do you need to store coats or bags before I take you to your table?”

Trace barely registered the woman. Her attention was taken by the restaurant itself, which spilled out before them like an opulent fever dream of gold braid and woven tapestries. There had been a passing mention of the Palace of Versailles in some of the history classes she was working through—and if it had looked like this, she suddenly understood the French Revolution.

As a matter of esthetic taste, let alone political power.

#

Their hostess guided them through a maze of tapestries, curtains and furniture that Trace began to realize wasn’t nearly as cohesive as the designers had likely thought it was. Unless she had badly misjudged her classes—and she was distracting herself by checking the station datanet—they’d mixed and matched similarly overly lavish styles from effectively all of Europe from roughly seven centuries of style.

If they’d just managed to mirror the pre-Revolution Palace of Versailles, it might have worked. As it was…it was a chaotic jumble that at least managed to convey a sense of luxury and sumptuousness.

But not style, consistency or sophistication.

Still, the chaos gave Trace the distraction she needed to get through the maze to their table—a claw-footed monstrosity that she suspected didn’t belong to any late-second-millennium style at all. The chairs around it were high-backed creations of wood and velvet—and they were empty.

The immediate anticipation shattered like a broken vase, and Trace found herself gasping for breath. The stress was still present, but she wasn’t going to be facing the Vortanis that exact instant.

Of course, she was now going to have to face them at some unknown point in the immediate future. That wasn’t exactly better.

EB reached over to grip her hand firmly.

“Grab a seat, Trace,” he instructed before glancing over at the hostess. “We were supposed to be meeting another party. Have you heard from them?”

“The reservation is for six in total,” the woman replied brightly, gesturing at the empty chairs around the table. “We haven’t heard anything from the other parties, no.

“Should I have a server bring you menus?”

“Just waters for now, I think,” EB told her. “We wouldn’t want to start without our hosts, after all.”

The hostess nodded and stepped away, vanishing into the chaos of the Glorious Dragoon’s layout with a speed that suggested an ulterior motive to the cacophony.

“If nothing else, I’m not paying for dinner in this place,” the captain said with a chuckle.

“What do we do?” Trace asked.

“We wait, for now,” Vexer told her, taking a seat to one side of her.

She realized that her dads had flanked her protectively and drew reassurance from that.

“Either our hosts arrive or something odd is going on here,” EB said. “I’m starting to wonder if we made the right assumptions after all.”

Trace had no idea what he meant.

“Are you thinking trap?” Vexer asked. “We’re not armed.”

That wasn’t true, though Trace wasn’t going to admit to her parents that she had a self-targeting stunner hidden in her small purse. Her dads were relatively sensible men, but they had multiple reasons to not poke through her stuff to find the weapon.

Plus, she’d have been very surprised if she was the only one of the three with a stunner.

“Whatever we may have on us,” EB told her other dad, “Reggie is in the concourse, and Reggie got himself registered as private security, authorized to carry heavy stunners and light blasters.”

Reginald Kalb was Evasion’s weapons tech, responsible for the defensive turrets on their freighter. He also had some kind of past he didn’t like to talk about—hardly unique aboard Evasion—that had left him very, very capable with small arms.

Not that anyone had told Trace that Reggie was playing backup. Somehow, that made her feel better—even if the absence of their hosts was making all three of them twitchy!