The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set

by Owen R O'Neill

  “Mariwen,” Kris coaxed. “Come on. Come here.” She couldn’t feel much yet beyond the familiar sense of anticipation, but they couldn’t be more than a minute away and whatever was happening to Mariwen was clearly worse than just nerves. She slid her arms around Mariwen’s waist and pulled her into the bunk as the gravity started to fall. Holding her tight with one arm, she secured both of them with the other hand.

  “I got you,” she breathed into Mariwen’s ear. “I’m here. I’ve got you.” Most people had some reaction to translation, usually just a moment of disorientation or vertigo. For a few, it was a lot worse, but Kris had never seen anything this bad. She hugged Mariwen’s vibrating body as hard as she dared, took a deep breath as she felt the first tingle flash across her skin, and the ship dropped.

  Mariwen might have screamed—she couldn’t be sure. She was lost to the hot pulsing thrill that sang along her nerves, wave after wave that made her gasp and her body shake as she took the strain of the exquisite pressure that kept building and building and . . . Light flared behind her eyes, a searing incandescence that burned right through her. Kris felt Mariwen’s body rigid against hers as her arms tightened and she thought god don’t hurt her—don’t hurt her and then the tension broke; a vast measureless release that wrenched a deep moan out of Kris and left her trembling. Mariwen turned in her arms and Kris’s face was awash in the dark sea of her hair and she couldn’t tell which of them was shaking more.

  “Sorry,” she husked out. “Did I hurt you?”

  “No,” Mariwen answered in an unsteady voice. “No. I’m . . . okay.” Kris eased her grip and lifted her head to see Mariwen’s eyes, wide and dark and tear-stained, looking at her: astonishment mingled with apprehension. “Did you . . .? It almost felt like you—”

  “No,” Kris cut her off, glad the red glow hid the color in her face. Her reaction was rare, but she'd never felt self-conscious about it before. “They’ll bring up the gravity in a moment. Sure you’re alright?”

  Mariwen nodded, voiceless, and they felt the tug of the gravity coming on. The captain was bringing it up gently and they sank slowly into the bunk. Kris released the straps and rolled onto her back, still breathing heavily. Mariwen brought a hand toward Kris’s face but stopped, pulling her quivering fingers back to her own dry lips. “Thank you.”

  Kris sighed and closed her eyes. “Don’t mention it.”

  Chapter Eight

  Cassandra Station

  Nedaema, Pleiades Sector

  Two weeks in rehab on Cassandra Station, orbiting the cloud-streaked green and blue orb of Nedaema, was not nearly as bad as it could have been, but by this point Kris was thoroughly done with it. For the first few days, she’d had Mariwen for company but then a compact, short haired, pixie-faced women arrived, Lora Comargo, Kris assumed—they had not been introduced—and Mariwen left within the hour with only a rushed goodbye. Kris was more than a little miffed at the special treatment but Mariwen was a citizen and a celebrity so it was hardly surprising, even if it still felt monstrously unfair.

  After that Kris had plenty of time to enjoy the food, resent the shrinks—who showed an unusual and, she thought, overly persistent interest in her—and get bored. She was given access to a system but not a xel so she could only get on-line in her quarters, and she couldn’t access everything, but her share of the clouds still contained much more than she’d ever seen before.

  What she saw first was a shock. The clouds were alive with news of Mariwen’s rescue; it trumped the coverage of the Grand Senate deliberations on which colonies would be granted voting rights this session, of a shuttle accident that killed six and injured a dozen more, and of the verdict in long-running court case about adulterated foodstuffs. Even news of some global sporting event didn’t make the headlines. The stories were hasty, sensationalized and badly distorted, and made the bile rise in Kris’s throat. She blocked the news feeds and took to viewing almost anything else, up to and including encyclopedia entries about her new host planet. Nedaema was the first foreign society she’d been exposed to, and after reading up on it she came to the conclusion that it was indeed, as she muttered to herself while lying in bed one night, really fucking foreign.

  For example, she learned that there was only one major continent that covered about half of the northern hemisphere. The capitol Mare Nemeton, on its west coast, was one of the few cities on it. Mare wasn’t part of the name but the term for city; the plural was marii. Relatively few people—less than the population of Nemeton—lived in the interior, most of them on enormous farms. The rest of the population—about 6.9 billion—lived on the multitude of islands, some large but many quite small, that lay on the equator and in the southern temperate zone.

  The economy of the islands was based on knowledge work, light industry, and the arts. Arts were heavily subsidized, especially poetry. Politically, the islands were arranged into themoi, each having representation in a legislative body called the Proxenoi Council who were elected by a popular vote of all citizens of the theme, no matter what class. Members of the body were called proxenos, and a proxenos was never called mister or ma’am but brother or ally when met formally. There was also a senate whose membership was much more exclusive, but unlike most worlds, this body did not supply Nedaema’s Grand Senators—those, it turned out, came from the proxenoi.

  The head of government had the distinctly weird title of the Archon; he was chosen by the senate. The head of state had the ever weirder title of the Scholiast; he was addressed as the Scholai in public and only used his given name. The current office holder was the Scholai Michael. The Scholiast was chosen by complicated means from among the membership of something called the Synalogue, the origins of which Kris could not bring herself to care about, even in an advanced state of boredom. She gathered from the captions of the pics that they were concerned with the law and favored ‘textual analysis’—whatever that was—or had, once upon a time.

  And Nedaemans didn’t eat meat either, except for certain religious observances. At this point she had logged off, gone to bed, and expressed her judgment of Nedaema’s foreignness.

  Now she was waiting to be cleared out of the rehab facility, with her discharge ticket in her lap and a credit chit drawn against the promised first disbursement of her Repatriation Act money. Like everything here it was taking ten times longer than any rational procedure should, but Kris was of the opinion that Nedaemans had far too much time on their hands and were therefore in the habit of wasting it.

  They were, she had noticed, perpetually busy—talking, messaging, surfing, all while watching three or more entertainments in different floating windows—but they hardly ever seemed to get anything done on schedule (unpleasant medical appointments always excepted) or without a great deal of yakking. But they did create excellent food, lack of real meat notwithstanding.

  Tapping her foot and wondering how long she could wait before she could ask again without getting a rude answer, she did not notice Huron coming through the doors. “Good morning, Ms. Kennakris,” he called, startling her. “How’d you like to make this place just a happy memory?”

  “Oh hi, ah—Lieutenant.” She had not been addressed so formally by him before and was unsure how to respond. “Umm . . . yes, please. I’d like that.”

  “Excellent.” He walked up, plucked her discharge ticket out of her lap, strode over to the reception desk and showed it to the security staff there. “So we are all in order now? Very good. Thank you.”

  He flicked the ticket onto their desk, turned his back, keyed open the big main doors, stood back a foot, and swept his arm through the entrance, saying distinctly, “After you, ma’am.” Kris rose and exited with what she hoped was a properly nonchalant bearing. Huron swung in behind her as the security people stared after them, still blinking.

  As they walked down the main concourse under the naked arches and girdlers of Cassandra Station’s titanium and crysteel skeleton, all sparkling in the distinctly even, carefully modulated illum
ination, Kris could hear Huron muttering under his breath. Just what he was muttering, she could not make out but she was confident she heard Jesus Christ and Goddamn clusterfuck. Huron noticed her watching him and slowed his stride.

  “Breath the free air again, Kris—even if it is canned.”

  “Thanks.” She smiled, a little timidly. She had seen Huron in several moods before, but this imposing uncompromising imperiousness was not one of them. What Kris did not know—could not know—was that Huron had just spent a rather unpleasant three-quarters of this morning with Dr. Quillan, three Nedaeman shrinks, the director of the rehab facility and his two deputies.

  They had repeatedly shown him reams of data, carefully laid out and annotated, and expressed to him, in terms adapted to the meanest understanding, their reservations about Kris. Hostile tendencies and a history of violence headed their objections, but there were also anomalies in a few of her responses and a disquieting ability to retreat into some inner space their techniques could not reach nor their theories adequately explain. But the main issue, as Huron saw it, was just plain dull impenetrable prejudice and a profound ignorance of the real universe outside their gilded bubble.

  As the meeting wore on and they reiterated their concerns, insisted on their ambiguous and more-or-less meaningless data, and urged their horrific recommendations, Huron’s expression grew colder, his unfailingly polite responses shorter and there came into his eye and the tone of his voice a certain quality that reminded all present that he was heir to one of the most powerful families in existence, that he was a highly decorated fighter pilot, and that he too harbored hostile tendencies and had a history of violence.

  At last he ended the meeting in a peremptory tone perhaps more suited to upbraiding a tardy new ensign than addressing a group of supposedly august academics, demanding that they commit themselves to a formal review of all their evidence and their recommendations in front of a Grand Senate subcommittee or obey the law that stated repatriated slaves were not to be detained—that being the most benign of their recommendations—without conclusive evidence of their posing a clear and present danger.

  At that, the director and his deputies got white, the other doctors silent, and Quillan, who as a CEF officer was the least exposed to official wrath, sullen. But Quillan also had the least influence on the proceedings and when the director nodded and haltingly allowed that their data were perhaps somewhat indeterminate, Huron treated them all to steely thank you and left the room.

  All this was still on his mind when Kris skipped up alongside him and asked where they were going. Huron stopped, rubbed the bridge of his nose and regretted the obviousness of his foul humor. “Well, I was thinking maybe I could take you down to the beach and see that you get settled properly.” He smiled down at her, only slightly forced. “Unless you’d rather take the bus.”

  “No! No. I’d like to go down with you.” What does he mean about the bus? But she asked, “What do you mean get settled?”

  “Well,” Huron said with a hint of a more natural grin, “the Navy’s generous hospitality is about to come to an end. So you’re going to have to get some accommodations and find a way to keep yourself out of trouble until you figure out what to do.”

  “Oh.” That part hadn’t sunk it yet.

  “Have you had any thoughts on that?”

  Kris’s expression clouded a bit. “Um . . . not really.”

  “Anything you wanted to—ah . . .” Huron broke the question off, realizing a bit late that it was probably not a good idea to bring up her life before she was taken. But his attempt at tardy circumspection was wasted when she looked at him as if she’d read his mind.

  “You mean, was there anything I wanted to do when I was a kid—before Trench got me?” He’d expected her to be angry, but she just gave her head a heartbreaking little shake. “I don’t remember.”

  There was a silence for a few beats while her eyes focused on some inward place and Huron collected himself. Then: “Is there anything you’d like to do now?”

  She brightened, her eyes snapping back to the present. “I’d like to fly.”

  Huron smiled, turned and directed her toward the big hanger bays. “Fly. Flying is good.”

  * * *

  Huron’s ID let them through the main hanger doors and into a hive of activity. A row of transfer shuttles were embarking passengers and as Kris watched, one of them sealed its hatches and to the sound of sirens, a tractor beam lifted it out of the docking clamps and pushed it back into one of the big airlocks. The lock closed and a moment later Kris felt a slight tremor in the crysteel deck as the shuttle boosted away.

  Elsewhere, crews with lift-loaders pulled pallets from shuttle cargo holds or stacked them to be taken aboard. The newly arrived pallets were being processed into bays at the back of the hanger, or loaded onto float trucks, or in some cases, even handed down ladder hatches open in the deck. At the far end of the hanger other crews were prepping some smaller craft for launch and Huron waved at these. “That’s what we’re taking. Number three docking stand.”

  “Okay.” Kris observed it critically. It was a stumpy little vessel with short rounded wings and a couple of canted fins at the tail, rising from an over-sized looking reaction engine.

  “Four-man pinnace. Not armed, of course, but it’ll go like a bat outta hell.” He smiled. “Don’t get any ideas.”

  Kris wasn’t sure just what ideas she wasn’t supposed to get, but she did not have much time to consider the matter as they walked up to the rates who were finishing their prep and running the last checks. Most of them saluted but one just waved. Huron’s response was similarly off-hand.

  “Got her ready?”

  “Yessir, Lieutenant,” the crew chief declared. “She’ll leave a patch, that one will.”

  “Not necessary,” Huron replied smiling, as he made a circuit of the little craft. “Just a little pleasure cruise today.” One of the rates laughed and Kris noticed them looking at her in a way she did not entirely appreciate. “Want to check her out?” Huron was talking to her.

  “What?”

  “Check her out. It’s good rule never to get in a craft you haven’t walked around.” Kris nodded. “Okay.” Huron took her around, pointing out this and that, indicating common things to look for, having her pull and tug and, in some cases, just peer. Satisfied, he popped the hatches just forward of the stubby wings and they climbed in.

  “What was that all about?” she asked after they were strapped in their seats and the hatches had sealed.

  “Safety protocol.”

  “Every passenger get that?”

  “Every passenger should,” he answered as he ran through the preflight checks. “Whether they do or not depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On what they’re worth.”

  He signaled the rates with a salute and a thumbs-up, they cleared away and he released the docking clamps. A tractor beam pushed them into the airlock—it wasn’t quite as smooth as it had looked from the outside—and inner lock sealed. Seconds later, the lock indicators showed green, Huron got launch clearance, the outer doors opened, he engaged the thrusters and they were in space.

  As they dropped clear of the huge station, Kris got her first look of the incredible mass, stretching away left and right and far up, the base a massive convex oval with the bulges of the fusion plants just visible beneath it. All was pearlescent white or sparkling mauve where the harsh light of Nedaema’s primary touched and impenetrable black where it did not.

  Kris had been in space for almost half her life but she had rarely seen space. Whenever they had visited downside, she’d been bundled into a shuttle’s cargo bay and strapped down, not seeing what was outside until they landed and usually not even being told where she was. A few times she’d been let onto the observation deck, but that was rare; the less slaves saw or knew, the better slavers liked it. Trench wouldn’t have taken her downside at all if it hadn’t been for her entertainment value.

 
Now she stared in astonishment at the vastness of it all: the station receding, becoming delicate, even fragile; the slim ivory fusion towers gleaming amid the sparkling lattice of the outer works; the tiny disk of the innermost planet, extraordinarily close in astronomical terms but barely discernible to her eye; the other planets mere points of light. And beyond, the incredible wealth of stars showing every color but pure white; those of the Pleiades cluster, only light-months distant, as bright as moons, while along the ecliptic flowed a gaudy torrent that thinned to a rich spatter of diamond brilliance when she looked away from it—all burning in great glory against the perfect darkness of the cosmos, fourteen-billion light-years deep.

  Huron nosed the craft around and the living blue-green limb of Nedaema rose into view on the forward screen, cloud-streaked and jewel-toned, shading rapidly into darker hues below (they being on the night side), and Kris realized she was holding her breath. Letting it go slowly, she blinked, and not taking her rapt gaze off the view, asked, almost in a whisper as if one dare not speak a thought out loud here, “Huron, do we have to go straight down?”

  “No. We don’t.” His voice was quiet but not a whisper: a voice you would use to wake a lover in the morning. “You’d like to stay up here awhile?” Kris nodded. Huron leaned forward, tapped new commands into a console and they rushed toward the blazing sun rising over the world below.

  Time and again, the little craft fell to the east, Nedaema rotating serenely beneath it. They were in a 63-degree, 98-minute orbit, clear of most traffic and Huron had rolled the pinnace so that to one side the forests and tundra and mountains and the vast island-speckled oceans unrolled below them, now sunlit, now in deep shadow; while above, the stars traced their immortal curves, serene and almost hypnotic.

  Kris watched them both in silence for all of one orbit and part of another until thoughts began to intrude, called up perhaps by the quiet; the intense feeling of being alive yet apart—of boundless freedom yet being fixed in an unfathomable solitude. Memories of the Arizona, particularly of their last day: the celebratory dinner and what was said and by whom and how they all looked and acted came back with an aching clarity, relived almost, but as it were from a great distance—a play seen through a telescope happening in a time at once immediate and everlasting.