“How much?”
“Thirty-two point six kilos total. Stacked right against the meeting room wall.” Taliaferro shook his head, and Kris looked up at Huron who was just staring at a blank wall, stone faced.
“That’s the hell of it all.” Taliaferro waved his hand in an encompassing gesture. “Explosive scans—well, you know how they work—damn stuff looks inert—won’t see it. Half a class-C EMP device looks like just a standard high-capacity battery or even a fuel cell. Get a couple or three—whatever you need—wire ‘em up right, set up a small priming charge . . . there ya go.” He let his hand fall to slap on his thigh. “Simple.” With a sigh, he pushed off the desk, walked around behind it and pulled out a drawer, muttered, pulled out another one.
“You mentioned that explosive was experimental.”
“That’s what we thought.”
“So . . .”
“So they sure as hell didn’t get it from some two-bit bomb jockey.”
“Halith?”
Taliaferro located and removed an old-style cigarette pack, teased one out and scratched it to life. “Officially,” he said slowly, “I have no idea.”
“Unofficially?”
Taliaferro shut the drawer with a bang. “Who the hell else?” Kris looked away from the expression on his face.
“Please,” she said, not meeting his eyes, “I’d like to know what happened to Mariwen.”
“Oh, she was implanted, alright.” He twirled the lit cigarette without bringing it near his lips. The ribbon of smoke tickled Kris’s nose. “Damn clever operation. Simple implant, but very extensive memory manipulation—worse’n I’ve seen. Hard to check for that.”
“But the implant tests . . .”
Taliaferro waved the cigarette at her. “The memory stuff must’ve masked it. Stirred her responses enough that our baseline got scrammed or something. Not a lot, mind you—but enough. After all, it’s pretty easy to get somebody to leave a bomb somewhere: all they have to do is forget bombs are dangerous—and this wasn’t even a bomb, exactly. Just an electrical device. Like I said, simple. Simple and neat.”
“But can you do that in a week?” Huron broke in. “I thought—”
“No, you can’t,” Taliaferro interrupted. “But they didn’t have her a week. Six weeks is more like it. They must’ve taken her just after she and Lora Comargo got to Hestia.” Taliaferro paused, flicked the ash from his cigarette onto his desk. The air-conditioning kicked up to deal with the smoke and he scooped up the ash with a slightly embarrassed air. It smeared.
“They killed Lora Comargo right after interrogating her, of course. That gave them time to finish visosculpting the double and then send her back with the real one’s ID and a cover story a day or so before the pick became public. That way, it’s all over the media and the new Lora didn’t have to do anything that might muss her cover. She could hole-up, be reclusive—if she acted a bit off, people’d call it spousal distress.” Taliaferro brushed the ash off his hand into the trash. “Like I said, clever.”
“Even so, that seems like a long time to fool people,” Huron observed.
Taliaferro shrugged. “Not really. Vacation, y’know. No mail, no calls. Privacy bots handling everything. Nothing suspicious about that.” He made a sour face, took his cigarette in his fingers again and regarded doubtfully.
“Damn,” he muttered and stubbed it out in the ashtray. The ashtray gulped and swallowed the butt. “Chemical interrogation can tell you a lot—let ‘em get all the details of the cover just right. They used memory modules in the double—kinda risky to implement, but we know how much they care about that. Work good when they work.”
“So what went wrong? Us capturing the ship before they were ready?”
“No.” Taliaferro scratched at the halo of hair around his mahogany scalp; fluffing it up then smoothing it down again. “They were going to release her in few days anyway. Y’all just made it more melodramatic. Of course, I expect they weren’t thrilled with you taking out Anton Trench and his ship—”
Kris looked up. “Anton? His name was Anton?”
“Yeah. Didn’t you know?”
“No.”
“Yeah. Big slaver muck-muck. Anyway, I think that probably played right into their hands actually. High-profile rescue, her testimony she’d only been held for a week, Lora Comargo back here doing the traumatized spouse thing—we weren’t as careful as we might have been.” Taliaferro started fishing in and patting his pockets. “No. What went wrong is you, Ms. Kennakris.”
“Me?”
“Yes, ma’am. You see, it’s almost impossible to get someone to drop the hammer on their, um . . . their lover.”
“Me!” Kris sputtered. “But I wasn’t—I’m mean, we never . . .”
Taliaferro smiled crookedly. “Well fortunately, I guess, that doesn’t matter much—the fact of your relationship, I mean. What mattered is that she thought of you that way. You see, one reason they had to kill Lora Comargo and replace her with their gal was to isolate Ms. Rathor sexually—make sure nobody showed up and did what you did. And of course they needed to keep tabs on her, that sort of thing. Needed to be able to set her off at the right time, too. Implants don’t always take, you know.” Taliaferro dug inside a coat pocket. Kris saw his fingers wriggling fruitlessly through the thick fabric. “But then she met you. They didn’t figure on that, of course. No way to. The two of you hit it off, so to speak, and so when you showed up and indicated your intentions—shall we say—it worked. It broke the implant. That’s why they panicked and tried to kill you when they found out about you two. Kinda stupid of them really—especially with that damned drone.”
“What were they planning to do with it?” Huron asked.
“The drone? Don’t think it was part of plan—haven’t unraveled all that yet. No, it looks like they got panicky and someone saw an opportunity for a twofer and went for it. Bad call.”
Kris and Huron looked at each other and Taliaferro said, “Ah, here’s that little sucker.” He pulled a thin card from some hidden recess of his coat and held it out to Kris. There were some numbers on it.
“What’s this?”
“Number and map reference of the hospital.”
“Hospital?”
“Mariwen Rathor’s room. Since you’re a friend.” Kris held the card like a flower petal. “They don’t give out calling cards. Her personal number’s restricted. Best I could do.”
Kris nodded. “Yeah. Thanks.”
Taliaferro stood, took his overcoat off the back of his desk chair and made motions as if to leave. “Well, if that’s all . . .”
“Why’d she start shooting?” Kris asked suddenly.
Taliaferro paused in the middle of an awkward-looking gesture, his heavy, mobile lips twisted down in distaste. “Oh that. Salvage-fused.”
Huron went a little gray. Kris just looked confused. “What fused?”
“Salvage-fused,” Taliaferro repeated, shrugging his overcoat the rest of the way on. “That’s something I guess we’re gonna have to pay more attention to now. It’s an old term they used to apply to nukes. The idea was to always set them off, even when they missed. Might do some collateral damage that way. In this case, if the mission gets botched, the idea is to get them—the subject, you understand—to pull a weapon and do as much damage as possible. Damn difficult to find too, because it doesn’t depend on suppressing an inhibitor—which we can test for—but on jacking up the will to survive—which we can’t. Anyway, that wasn’t the point this time. They were sneakier than that.”
“How so?” Huron asked, almost against his will.
“They salvage-fused the EMP device, too. It was rigged to go off the moment she died. If she couldn’t plant it, they fixed her up to force us to kill her and set off the bomb that way. The portico was plenty close enough—it would have done a hell of a job.”
Taliaferro absently fished out another cigarette and started to light it. “Yep, they had it fixed all around. Undetectable explo
sives, homemade EMP, a VIP plant. Probably laughed themselves sick over how brilliant they were.”
He changed his mind again, threw the cigarette in the trash, ran a hand over his scalp. “Trying to stop that.” It took a moment for Kris to realize he was talking about the cigarette. “Anyway, looks like it would have worked too, except for you, Ms. Kennakris. I hope you appreciate what you’ve accomplished here.”
Kris had a sour taste in her mouth. If those fucking guards had been able to shoot worth a shit, she wouldn't have had time to accomplish anything at all.
“Suppose there's that too,” Taliaferro said and Kris jerked, realizing she'd been muttering out loud. But Taliaferro seemed to take it seriously, because he went on. "Somebody engaging in gunplay on the Exhibit Hall steps was about the one threat that wasn't in the security plan. Aerial attack or trying to breach the perimeter with a 50-tonne lorry—yeah, but not a woman popping off with a sidearm. So you could say she had the element of surprise." He shrugged. “Then again, who wants to go through life as the guy who dropped Mariwen Rathor? Probably spoil my aim.”
Kris grimaced and wiped her lips across the back of her hand. “Is that why they picked her?”
Taliaferro made a wide, helpless gesture. “Yeah, that could've been part of it. Maybe. Who knows? There's any number of reasons that make sense: high profile, good access, lots of connections . . . fun.”
“What happened to them?”
“The fake Miss Comargo and the rest? Oh, we bagged them. We’re pumping them dry now.” A sudden frown crossed his face. “You don’t want to see them, do you?”
“No.”
“Good. I don’t think there’s gonna be much left to talk to anyway.”
Kris stared at the card cupped in her palm. “So what happens now?”
“To whom?”
“Mariwen.”
“Well, she’s in rehab. Be there for a while, I expect. She won’t be charged with anything, if that’s what you mean.”
“Will she be alright?”
That helpless gesture again. “I don’t know how alright she’ll be. She’s gonna have some pretty shit to live with—if you’ll pardon my French. But we’ve got the best doctors and techs there are working with her. I think they’ll get her straightened around okay. A lot of it’s up to her. But I think she’ll pull through.” He reached for his hat. “Eventually.”
She turned the card over. “When can I see her?”
“That’s up to her and the docs—not me. I’m just a cop.” He picked up the hat and pulled it on, then turned to Huron. “Oh. Trin Wesselby gave me a message for you, Lieutenant. Said to be sure I told you Mankho had a code name for this caper. Called it the Alecto Initiative. Seems he’s a classically educated cove too. She said you’d find that . . . interesting.”
“Thanks,” Huron replied with no tone in his voice at all.
Taliaferro tipped the brim to them. “Well . . . Good day, Ms. Kennakris. Lieutenant.”
Kris and Huron stood outside the NBPS headquarters building, waiting for the cab Kris had paged to take her to the hospital. The weather service had allowed a lovely day, warm with just the right amount of breeze and it fanned her hair as they waited, neither talking. Kris was thinking of the offer Huron had made to her. Huron was thinking about Kris. Both were thinking about Mariwen.
After a few minutes, Huron saw the cab approaching and gestured toward it. “Give her my best . . . If you can.” Kris nodded. The cab brought itself to a smooth stop and sidled over. As it verified her card as its fare, its gull-wing doors popped and she stooped to get in.
“Kris?”
She looked back, a hand on the open door. “Yeah?”
“Why did you go to meet Mariwen that day?”
Kris wet her lips. “I . . . I heard they were leaving afterwards.” She drew a shivering breath. “I thought—I was afraid . . . afraid she wasn’t gonna say goodbye.”
“You didn’t know that she was implanted?”
Kris looked down at pavement. “No. I didn’t.”
She heard Huron draw in a sharp breath and then let it go, slowly. Then she lifted her head, not knowing what to expect but wanting to face it all the same. Their eyes met and there was an understanding there—not complete, but accepting of its incompleteness. He gave her the barest nod.
She climbed into the cab. The doors shut, the little engines revved, and it was gone.
* * *
Kris stepped out into the hallway and carefully closed the door to Mariwen’s room. She wanted to vomit. The doctors had told her what to expect and she had listened, she had believed them, but she had not understood.
There was, it turned out, something worse in the universe than rape, and now Kris had seen it. The husk in the bed, host to a complex web of monitor leads, was perfectly pleasant and physically pretty, answering questions with the carefully nuanced inflections of the better sort of software.
She took her hand off the doorknob, fighting down the bile jumping in her throat. After a few deep breaths, the sick hot tingling in her cheeks started to fade and she reached into her pocket for Huron’s card.
Think about it, Kris, he’d said to her as they had left Taliaferro’s office. It’s hard—we test cadets to destruction at the Academy, and I don’t look down on anyone with the sense to say no. But I think you have something that will really make a difference one day. You don’t owe anyone a damn thing, but if you want it, I’ll see that you get in.
She hit CALL.
A moment later Huron’s image shimmered into existence on the overlay. “Hey, Kris.”
“Hi, Huron. I’m in.”
# # #
The Morning Which Breaks
Prologue
Lakskya Compound
Lacaille, Praesepe Cluster
“Bravo, this is Alpha Six. Where are those goddamned grenades?” 1st Lieutenant Sebastian Gomez, commander Alpha team, Nedaeman SOFOR 1, hunched in the darkness under an overhang of striated rock as he waited for 2nd Lieutenant Mike Ananian, Bravo section leader, to respond.
“No joy here, Six,” Ananian came back. “The fuckers are late.” Lieutenant Gomez was well aware they were late—over thirty minutes late—and the unnecessary comment was a sign of the strain the delay was putting on Bravo leader’s temper. Gomez’s temper wasn’t any better: his op window was closing. It would be half-light in another thirty-six minutes, when Lacaille’s secondary rose, and while it was just a very bright star compared to the primary, it would increase the ambient light by almost twenty percent, and Gomez begrudged every extra photon.
But much more important—critically important, in fact—were his team’s extraction windows. The stealth corvette in orbit overhead could not just magically appear and drop its shuttles at any time. It was a slave to the laws of orbital mechanics, and unless that goddamned convoy with the grenades showed up in the next ten minutes, he had little chance of making the first window. He could theoretically afford to miss it, but that increased the risk enormously, and he certainly could not miss the next. It would be full dawn by the time there would be a third window, and if his team wasn’t gone before that, they weren’t going at all.
Everything had gone flawlessly up to now, to the point of making Gomez a trifle nervous, so he was not surprised when they finally ran into a hitch, but the convoy being delayed this much was not the hitch he’d foreseen. The plan had allowed a half-hour’s slack for the convoy to reach the point where Bravo could track them. That was a generous window, given that the trucks only had to travel five-hundred twenty klicks from the rendezvous where the cases of grenades had been transshipped. At the truck’s nominal airspeed, the trip should have only taken two and a half hours. The corvette had verified that things were on schedule as of its last pass—there was just no good reason that convoy should be this late on a one-hundred-and-fifty-minute trip.
If there was no good reason, that left only bad reasons. Bad reasons meant going with the contingency plan and that meant adjusting his de
ployments, so he checked them again. His people showed as triangles on the topo map projected on his helmet’s faceplate, outlined in light green by his IFF unit. His own section—call sign Angel to avoid confusion—was lying along this ridge overlooking the plain below. Delta section, with the four-man air-sliders they’d use to reach the extraction point, was eight klicks to the north but just a minute away, concealed in some dead ground where the terrain broke up into a series of ravines. Bravo was over the horizon to the southeast, and he couldn’t see them on the plot unless he pushed the power past where he was comfortable.
A klick behind him on a rise to the east was Sergeant Esteban Howarth, codename Aries, with his 15.4-mm recoil-damped sniper rifle. The big weapon fired terminally guided armor-piercing multimode ammo in three-shot bursts from a hundred-round magazine and had an effective range of five-thousand meters. Aries was his lifeline if—make that when—all hell broke loose.
He checked the time—seven more minutes—and eased his own rifle across his lap. It was a standard assault model, firing 9-mm light armor-piercing rounds, with a 25-mm grenade launcher under the barrel that could fire antipersonnel, incendiary or high-explosive grenades. It was an old configuration but one that, like the 12-mm sidearm he wore, had served soldiers well for centuries. The same could be said for the 10-cm sheath knife on his belt but not the plasma knife in his right thigh pocket: those had been invented less than fifty years ago.
The rifle also had the latest tunable ultra-wideband scope with a frequency-hopping maser and automatic target acquisition, which incorporated technology that was still considered developmental. Gomez had turned it off. He trusted his own eyes more than any fancy automated acquisition system and he liked his gun set on manual for the same reason. Besides, all that modern crap bled energy and you could never be too sure exactly how good the other guy’s sensor suite was.
The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set Page 18