Huron stood, to better address the display and explained the particulars of the incident rapidly and concisely, using the ATC log data and telemetry for illustration. Taliaferro followed with interest, showing no problem in keeping up, and asking only a few cogent questions. Huron brought his testimony to a close.
“That helps.” Taliaferro considered the holographic volume minutely. “We didn’t have a very good idea of the initial bearing. Those damn drones are the Mother’s own bitch to detect at high altitude but you can pick them up near launch by the turbulence they create if nothing else. Not too many places they could have launched from that we wouldn’t have seen it and given it was a short endurance hypersonic drone, we should be able to narrow things down quite a bit now. He blanked the display. “And that was some damn pretty flying, by the way.”
Huron smiled a polite thank you, not clarifying who’d actually done it. They had already discussed the obvious issues: that Huron’s flyer had been checked for bugs and tell-tales; that he himself had not known he planned to fly until that AM, that his flyer was fairly distinctive; that the drone debris were not. None of it was very satisfying. Taliaferro had picked up on the non-adaptive fuse on his own and remarked the peculiarity of it. “Damn peculiar” was, in fact, his summation.
At the end, he fixed Huron with a considering eye. “Tell me, Lieutenant. If you were going to assassinate someone, is this the way you’d try to go about it?” Huron allowed that was unlikely. “I agree.” Taliaferro pulled his chin. “The way I’m seeing this, we keep investigating it as an attempt on your life. If it wasn’t and they had another goal in mind and they think we’re fishing in the wrong pond, we may flush ‘em out a bit. Maybe we get lucky. Maybe convince ‘em to underestimate us. I think I’ll go make a couple of slightly obtuse public statements. And of course, I’d appreciate any results your people can pass along.”
Huron promised they would, as far as they were able.
“Thanks. Other than that . . .” Taliaferro spread his hands. “I think we’re done here for now.”
They stood and shook hands again. “Keep your eyes on the skyline, Lieutenant,” Taliaferro said as Huron turned to leave. “My gut tells me that whatever the hell’s going on, this business is gonna get worse before it gets even worse.”
* * *
The calling card lit up with Mariwen’s image and Kris tapped ACCEPT, feeling a little anxious. “Hi Kris,” Mariwen began. She looked a little uncertain too. “I wanted to call and apologize for being so abrupt last time. I didn’t mean to get off the line so quickly. I’m sorry. I know I should have called sooner—I wanted to but . . .”
“It’s okay. I know you’re busy.”
Mariwen rolled her eyes. “It’s insane. The media won’t leave me alone and testifying at these hearings has me all in knots. Lora’s—” She stopped suddenly. “And then this attack, all the security. Lora brought in these new people—she doesn’t think I’m safe . . .” Another halt, a strained laugh with something worrisome about the edges. “My god! Listen to me! I haven’t even asked how you are. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Really? Good. I just worried”—Mariwen glanced away—“I mean . . . it seemed you were seeing a lot of Lieutenant Huron, so I, um . . .” She stalled to visibly collect herself. “Anyway. I’m sorry I’m such a mess. Look, what I really wanted to do was ask if you wanted to go out for an evening. Would you?”
“Go out?” Kris bit the inside of her lip. “Go out where?”
Mariwen laughed. “Anywhere! I just thought it would be nice to spend an evening together. Have dinner, maybe see a show. Go shopping—”
“Shopping?”
“Yeah.” Mariwen brightened, that old twinkle starting to come back. “You know, girl stuff.”
Kris did not know. Mariwen detected the confusion under the blankness, but not its cause. Her face fell a couple of millimeters. “I, ah . . . I don’t want to intrude. If you have plans . . .”
A tiny flash of insight blossomed in Kris’s brain. “Oh, no! I mean you aren’t. It’s nothing—I don’t have any plans.”
“Then would you like to?”
Kris gathered her courage, fought down the rising nerves. Shows? Shopping? “Sure. It sounds like fun.”
“Great! I’ll pick you up in a hour, okay? Do you have anything to wear?”
To wear? Oh shit...
Mariwen caught the look. “Oh, don’t worry. We’re about the same size—I’ll bring a couple of things. We’ll get you all fixed up! Send a map ref, okay?”
“Sure.” She remembered them showing her that. She was sure she could figure it out again. “Thanks.” She managed to keep the tremor out of her voice. “See you in an hour.”
“Thanks so much! Bye!”
“Bye.” The line dropped, Kris found the map reference and sent it—it was ridiculously easy, really—and then sat on the floor, arms tight around her knees and let the shaking take over.
Dinner. A show. Shopping. Get you all fixed up . . .
Trench liked to take her shopping sometimes. Usually in some city on Cathcar or Solon—she couldn’t recall the names—during maintenance stopovers. He put these electronic bracelets and anklets on her so she wouldn’t run off but mostly so everyone knew exactly what she was. They’d go through shops and kiosks full of stuff Kris had seen in vids. Trench bought her things—clothes, shoes, jewelry. At the kiosks, he liked to make her change clothes outside, trying on new outfits over and over again . . .
Get—You—All—Fixed—Up.
He’d have some people do her hair and make her up. Then he would take her to a show in her new clothes, painted up in striking and garish colors: deep bloody reds and slash of black or gold across one eye. They’d usually do body makeup on her too: neon nipples and swirling fluorescent scrolls on her abdomen with arrows pointing down.
There would be a lot of people there—people like Trench with their girls. When her turn came, he’d put her up on this platform under the harsh spots with the laser lights glittering off her painted flesh and then he and his friends would . . .
Kris dropped her face to her knees. Tears ran hot and her teeth chattered as she shook. Her arms squeezed harder, hugging herself as tight as she could as she tried to breathe.
He’s dead. The fucker’s dead. He can’t do that anymore. She fought for and gained a deep breath. He’s dead . . .
She closed her eyes, dug deep, reaching down for that place—for home—way down inside.
He’s fucking dead . . .
By the time the door chimed, she was almost back to normal. She paged Mariwen in and met her at the apartment door a minute later. Mariwen breezed in with a smile and two shopping bags, saw Kris’s face and froze. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s alright,” Kris said, her voice low and still clotted. “I’ve just been a little stressed.”
Mariwen came over, put her arms around Kris and held tight. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “I know. I know . . .”
Her fingers pressed into Kris’s back, feeling the knotted muscles. She began to rub, firmly, gently, and Kris, her face pressed hard in the juncture of Mariwen’s neck and shoulder, brought her arms up around Mariwen’s waist. Her delicate perfume tickled Kris’s nose—unnamable flowers and alien spice—and she began to relax. After a long minute, Kris let go and Mariwen slid her hands up to Kris’s shoulders. “Better?” Her eyes were still clouded with concern.
Kris nodded.
“Okay.” Mariwen let her go and reached for the bags she’d dropped. “Let’s see what we have.” The bags produced a couple of dresses—one bright and slightly iridescent and one shimmery black, shoes to go with each—and a sober dark suit, exquisitely tailored, with a short jacket, an ivory shell top and lovely matching boots with a moderate heel.
“What do you like?” Mariwen asked and following her eyes said, “Okay, the suit. I’d thought you’d probably like that. It’s an Ajaib-Gher design.”
That
meant nothing to Kris but she nodded agreeably as she made a tactical retreat to bedroom to try it on. When she came out Mariwen beamed. “Perfect!” Then she considered Kris critically, tapping a fingernail on her perfect teeth. “You know,” she began, hedging her statement with a cautious note, “I’ve never seen anyone who needs makeup less than you do, but if you want, we could try a little something.”
Kris took a deep breath and forced a smile. “Sure. Okay.”
Mariwen grinned, took out a small kit and tried a little something: just some dark liner and a subtle bit of shadow to tilt her eyes into the green, and lip gloss. “There!” she proclaimed, happy—even triumphant. “Nice. Are you ready?”
Kris took a couple of deep slow breaths and smiled more genuinely. “Ready.”
Chapter Twelve
CEF HQ, Mare Nemeton
Nedaema, Pleiades Sector
“Hi, Trin. Got anything new on this?”
Commander Trin Wesselby, acting director, Pleiades Sector Intelligence Group, looked up at Huron and scowled. “Dammit, Huron. Don’t you ever knock?”
Huron reached over and rapped three times on the corner of her desk. “That better?”
The expression in her pale grey eyes told him it was not. Trin Wesselby was a short woman; slim, tidy and precise in speech and manner, but today she was also tired, harassed and fighting cramps, and her patience—not long in the best of times—was correspondingly thin.
“No,” she snapped, reinforcing that look’s message. “But why do I expect you to have suddenly become housetrained?”
“Because of your unfailing optimism. Now do you have anything for your very nearly dear departed? With a little help, I can dodge stealth drones when I have to but I’m wondering what else they may have cooked up.”
She sighed and indicated the chair by her desk. “Well, since you put it like that, do sit down.” Huron did. Wesselby steepled her arms and looked him over interlaced fingers. Unlike most female officers, she kept her dark hair long and the fact that a few disorderly stands had managed to break free of the severe regulation hairstyle spoke volumes. “The short answer is no.”
“What’s the long answer?”
She jerked her head at the console to her right. “Mostly no.” Huron raised an eyebrow and waited. Wesselby dropped her hands, opened a locked drawer and brought out a hardcopy file with a red striped cover. She unsealed it with a finger and sour look. “This is all we have so far. What it means depends on how far back you want to go and which conspiracy theories you’re willing to entertain.” Her mouth quirked left. “And maybe how much you’ve had to drink.”
She started sifting reports out of the file and pushing them across the desk at Huron. “There’s been some message traffic, probably originating from Halith—Zalamankar looks like a good bet—to destinations that are suspicious: Bannerman, the Andamans, and Miranda mostly. We understand Miranda and the Andamans—they’re still trying to make mischief with the local governments.”
Huron’s jaw tightened. The League had already fought one bloody war with the Dominion of Halith—the Halith Empire to most people—and many confidently predicted a second.
“But the Bannermans and, in at least a few cases, the Andamans, have also been in contact with Solon in the Outworlds. It could be innocent but Bannerman is big in the slave trade and we know the Andamans still deal, even though they swear they no longer do, and Solon is a major node. We also think they’ve started moving more shipments through Lacaille, but we can’t prove that yet. We do know money is moving around, in some cases lots of it, through some new handlers, likely from Mantua. And there have been some potentially interesting ship movements, too.”
“Any of this correlated with that message traffic?”
“Of course not.” Wesselby dropped her chin and peered up at him, disappointed. “No one’s that stupid. Unless you’re in a hell of rush, there are plenty of ways to send info around that can’t be traced without a tail.”
“So?”
“So not much. If you’re paranoid, you can make it look like something and a few people have. Most of them being Chapman.” She rolled her eyes. Huron knew exactly what she meant. Dr. Marc Chapman was head of one of her analysis groups. With a wild idea, a whiteboard and a stylus, he could clear a room in a heartbeat. “But there’s this.” She shoved a contact report under his eyes.
He scanned it briefly. “This?”
She nodded, turned the report sideways and cocked her head to look at it. “We got this late last year—our year—from the Ionians. You know they’ve been having difficulties with Andaman and Nicobar over Winnecke IV?” Huron nodded. “They swear there was a meeting on Cor Leonis seven months ago between Korliss Hellman, Nikolai Arutyun, and Nestor Mankho.”
That got Huron’s full attention. “Mankho? The anarchist?” Decades ago, Nestor Mankho had formed a terrorist group called the Black Army that originally had no known state affiliations and no fixed address. It had committed a string of assassinations and some fairly minor bombings until it settled on Rephidim, a cold and inhospitable planet in the Outworld's border zone with a particularly grim settlement history. Once there, Mankho declared his own sovereign territory and began launching large-scale attacks, almost certainly with state support. The last one had almost wiped out the Nedaeman colony of Knydos. After that, the League dedicated a lot of effort to suppressing the Black Army and Mankho hadn’t been heard from in years. There were persistent rumors of his death but most believed he was holed up somewhere in the Methuselah Cluster or the Outer Trifid.
“The same.” Wesselby flipped over another page of the report. “We never could prove who backed him on the Knydos raid—probably the Bannermans but it could have been the Tyrsenian Alliance, despite the problems they had with him over Rephidim. Anyway, after we put the Black Army out of business he got into the slave trade in a big way. Turns out he wasn’t in the Outworlds at all. He’s been living on Lacaille as an unofficial guest of their security organs.”
Huron grunted. Lacaille was a Bannerman client in the Hydra. The rumors had only been off by fifty-six hundred light-years or so. “How long have we known that?”
“Only a few weeks actually.” She scanned down the page. “I should have mentioned that the meeting was supposedly arranged by one Orlando Kagan-Lazar.” The name meant nothing to Huron. Wesselby sat back and rubbed her palms together slowly. “So what do you think?”
Huron spread his hands. “I think the Ionians are telling us that last year Nestor Mankho met with a high-ranking Halith officer and some guy I haven’t heard of on Andaman’s primary moon, all arranged by another guy I haven’t heard of. And we have message traffic that we think has Halith prints on it going between the places they all reside or do business. Is that it?”
“You don’t know about Korliss Hellman?”
“Should I?”
“Maybe not.” Wesselby fished around in her desktop. “Got a file on him here.”
“Maybe just give me a précis.”
“Okay.” She stopped fishing, picked up a stylus and addressed the open report, making a note. “Korliss Hellman is a prominent Bannerman and known friend of Halith. In the past he’s conducted what you might call a little unofficial diplomacy on, shall we say, sensitive issues. And while he’s not directly involved in the slave trade he does profit from it. He’s a financier and some years ago he got together with the Andamans to set up a bank to help slavers handle their business. We suspect that his bank offers its services to other undesirables as well.”
“And let me guess,” Huron broke in. “This Kagan-Lazar fellow is the Andaman he set up the bank with.”
“Spot on. Kagan-Lazar is a semi-retired official from their finance ministry.”
“Great. And you think Mankho is a client in good standing.”
“Indeed I do.”
“So what is the redoubtable Commander Arutyun up to these days?”
Trin Wesselby smiled thinly. “Well, he’s a captain now and
about a month before this meeting is claimed to have occurred, he was transferred to the staff of Admiral Heydrich.”
Huron’s eyebrows climbed high. “That would be Christian the chief-of-Halith-military-intelligence Heydrich or Tristan the penal-colony-commander Heydrich?”
“The former. Tristan’s a general. ”
“Oh, that’s right.” Huron’s eyebrows resumed their place. “So why do you keep using words like swear and claimed?”
“Because CID insists that Arutyun couldn’t have been on Cor Leonis then. He attended a state function on Halith Evandor within a day of the meeting. They also doubt Hellman could have been there, but they can’t absolutely rule it out. They do allow that Kagan-Lazar may well have met with Mankho though.”
“Just a slave banker having a friendly meeting with a valued client.”
Wesselby nodded, nibbling the end of her stylus. “And the Nedaemans agree based on their own sources and, for that matter, so does ONI. But ONI thinks CID may be wrong about Hellman and that he could have been at the meeting. Naturally, we've been supporting their position.”
“Anything for a good customer.” Huron’s voice was sour. “So where does all this leave us?”
“What was the meeting about? Just slave biz as usual? Or . . .”
“Buying stealth drones to commit assassination or a terrorist attack?”
Wesselby frowned and shook her head, tapping a finger on the desktop. “Current assessment is that Mankho doesn’t have those kind of resources anymore. ONI and CID agree on that, at least. They insist he couldn’t manage an Op like this without state support.”
The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set Page 13