The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set

by Owen R O'Neill

  None of this impressed Sergeant Major Yu. The Academy admitted almost seventy-two hundred new hopefuls every year, each one every bit as well qualified, every bit as confident, and every year, Yu, as one of the Academy’s senior drill instructors, watched more half of them wash out before the end of the first six-month term; wanna-be pilots first. He held the bronze box out at arm’s length.

  “At the Battle of Anson’s Deep, thirty-eight thousand four hundred and eighty-eight of you bought one of these in an action that lasted thirteen hours and twenty-two minutes. Engaged were six hundred ninety-two ships, eight hundred sixty-four corvettes and attack craft—fighters and small craft beyond your ability to count. And a new bronze box every one-point-two-five-zero seconds.”

  Kris noted that at that rate, they would all be wiped out in almost exactly seventy seconds. Then Yu dropped the box. Six kilos of bronze falling a meter and a half to a metal deck under a full gee makes a resounding crash. The group jumped in spite of itself, and Sergeant Major Yu smiled.

  “Look out there,” he commanded, pointing out a view port at Deimos, a potato-shaped lump that was an unhealthy, mottled pinkish gray in the light of Sol. “There’s a rock over there. Damndest rock you ever saw. Semi-major axis of seven-point-five kilometers, semi-minor axis of six-point-one kilometers, ten-point-four klicks through. Mass of—well, who gives a fuck. That rock—which isn’t worth a shit on a good day—is what they died for and what you are signing up to die for. Not that planet down there”—he waved at Mars far below them—“that you aren’t good enough to set foot on yet, or the world back there”—he pointed over their heads towards distant Earth, now in opposition and just a bright star beyond the bulkheads—“which you aren’t even good enough to look at. We have Home Fleet to take care of those. The likes of you are only fit to look after that rock. And all the other rocks just like it. So,” he said with great satisfaction, “you’re gonna learn to love rocks.”

  A bark of laughter sounded from the back of the group and Yu focused directly on the young man who made it. His sternly carved face relaxed as he called the young man forward. “Good afternoon, Son,” he said mildly.

  “How you doing, Sarge?” He was big, this young candidate, and there were pale patches on his tanned skin where tattoos had recently been removed. He smiled openly at the sergeant major, quite sure of himself. A colonial, Kris thought, and lucky to be accepted. He clearly didn’t think it was luck, though.

  The sergeant major continued to smile affably. “Where’re you from, Son?”

  “Me? I’m from Reunion, Sarge.”

  Yu nodded. “I’m from Lodestone Station myself.” The young man grinned. The sergeant major was just another colonial from the Inner Trifid, same as him. “Glad you’re enjoying the presentation.” The grin widened. “In fact, I think you should stay up here so we can all benefit from your valuable remarks.” The grin faded. “So why don’t you stand there behind me?”

  “Behind you, Sarge?”

  “That’s right, Son. Right here.” Yu pointed to a spot on the deck about a meter back. “You just stand there while I finish so you can make sure things don’t get boring. Can you do that, son? Or are you just another worthless Reunion puke I’ll have to chuck out of this program?”

  Face darkening, the young man stood where he was told.

  “Oh, and one more thing, Boy,” Yu added. “Any time you feel things are lagging here, go ahead and kick my ass.” There was no reply and Yu swiveled his round head to squint at him. “I can count on you, can’t I, Boy? That’s what you’re here for, isn’t? Kick ass and take names? I mean, what the fuck good are you if you can’t even kick an old man’s ass?”

  The young man still said nothing but the rebellious look settled deeper on his features.

  Yu turned back to the group. “So, boys and girls. That rock down there is going to be your home for the next year—if you don’t wash out after three weeks. If you can learn to love it. If you can learn to love lousy food, bad air, and a lack of recreational opportunities—not that you’ll have time for that anyway. But most of all”—the sergeant major paused, sweeping the group with his oddly reptilian gaze—“if you can learn to be a team. The Service lives, eats, sleeps, fights, shits as a team. If you are lucky enough to get liberty, you’ll get drunk and raise hell as a team. Your team will be your family, closer to you than your mother who cried when you decided to come here. You’ll live for your team and when the time comes, you’ll die for it too.”

  Yu hooked his thumbs in his belt. The young man behind him was affecting a bored look and she wondered how long it would be before he broke out. Not more than a minute, she guessed.

  “Those of you who understand that and make it through the first year—less than half, I expect—will get to move on to the glorious paradise of Cape York, downside on Mars, for your final year. So when you walk under that”—he jerked his thumb at the words over the portal—“you leave your ego on this side, children. Not like that kid back there.”

  She noticed the kid shifting his weight. She guessed he’d had some training. She saw his eyes narrow, his mouth tighten.

  “Kids like that don’t believe in teams—they believe in bossing teams. They think they’re special and they piss out in a week—” All at once the kid moved, right foot lashing out like a spring snapping. What happened next was a confused blur of movement her eye did not follow nor her mind comprehend.

  If what Sergeant Major Yu had actually done wasn’t clear, the result was most emphatically so, for there the young man was, lying on the deck, contorting and gasping, his face gray and his lips almost white. Yu did not spare him a glance, but in the hush that was filled by futile, croaking noises, he waved his hand dismissively. “Oh, don’t worry about him. The kid’ll be fine. Once they rebuild his diaphragm, anyway.”

  The portal opened behind him, revealing the transport shuttle waiting to take them down to Deimos. Yu pointed to it. “Come on, people. Move it. You ain’t gonna get another invitation.”

  They started filing out in a ragged line, hesitantly at first, some steering wide of the weakly twitching, gasping ruin. A couple of corpsmen came out of the bay, picked him up and carried him unceremoniously away.

  As she took her place at the back of the line, Yu came forward and stopped her. His black eyes appraised her briefly. “What’s your name?”

  “Loralynn Kennakris, sir.”

  Yu nodded. “They call you Kris, don’t they?”

  “Mostly, sir.”

  “Well, thank you, Kris, for warning me about that kid. Can’t be too careful with these kids. Sometimes they get lucky.”

  Sure they do, she thought, realizing he’d been reading her the whole time—her face, the tension in her muscles, the size of her pupils, something—to tell what that kid was going to do. And she also realized that out of the fifty-five other people standing there, he’d picked her to focus on.

  Why me?

  Kris looked into Yu’s black eyes for several seconds but they gave nothing away. “Yes, sir.” Glancing after the others, boarding the shuttle through the rear hatch, she ventured, “There’s nothing really wrong with that guy’s diaphragm—he’d be dead. You just knocked the wind out of him. Isn’t that right, sir?”

  Yu smiled, just showing the edges of his teeth. “Good girl, Kris. Go get on board.”

  Chapter Two

  Lakskya Compound

  Lacaille, Praesepe Cluster

  Lieutenant Gomez, lying in a shallow depression a hundred meters from the north wall of Mankho’s compound, and six hundred nine light-years away from Mars, watched as his explosion lit up the sky like a sheet of lightning. The entire compound before him instantly went dark and silent.

  It could not have gone better. Mankho’s people had stopped the convoy just fifty meters from the gate and sauntered out with the security enclosure wide open. He brought his systems out of EMP lockdown as the glow faded, brought his HUD back online and checked his people: everyone was just where
they should be and passive sensors confirmed the compound dead.

  He rose to a crouch and signaled Carson and Mates, the two men who would snatch Mankho with him. The other five were already fanning out to their assigned cover positions. There was no need for orders now: Aries had dropped the two voyeuristic sentries simultaneously with the explosion and his people were deploying with swift, silent precision. In a few minutes it would be all over—but a lot could happen in a few minutes.

  At the drop of his hand, the three of them sprinted forward. Their light combat armor was not powered to stay off the compound’s sensors, but it had a regenerative assist system that allowed them to cover the hundred meters to the wall in just under ten seconds. Gomez made a powerful leap as he approached, timing it so that he touched the wall just past the top of his rise, three meters up. The molygrip gecko pads on his boots, knees, gloves and elbows adhered to the wall instantly. Mates and Carson landed a split second after him and together they swarmed up to the third floor window, some ten meters above.

  As they reached the dark window, he took one side, Carson the other, and Mates moved around them to hang spider-like above. Still no response from the compound. It had only been about thirty seconds since the explosion, but shouldn’t they be hearing something by now? He shoved the thought away—this wasn’t the time to worry about that—and stuck a small hemispheric charge to the window, while across from him, Carson did the same. The charges were preset for standard armor-glass and sensors in their base measured the thickness. Two seconds later there was an anticlimactic pop and a web of fine cracks spread all across the surface. Mates swung down in an acrobatic move, bursting the window inward with a shower of glass crumbs. Gomez and Carson vaulted through the opening and hit the floor of the dark room. Then he heard the screaming.

  The screaming was coming from two naked girls in the middle of a huge, ornate bed in the room’s center, and it took Gomez a split-second to realize they were not screaming at him. The heavy door to the room had burst open and now a hail of gunfire tore through it. Gomez dropped behind the bed, nearly colliding with the girls as they dived off it. Carson lunged for the far corner but Mates, fatally distracted for that instant, caught the burst full in the chest. It lifted him up and slammed him into the wall beside the window, pinning him there for a long, gruesome moment before the wreckage of his body slithered to the floor amidst a welter of blood mottled with gobs of tissue and splinters of bone. Gomez swung his rifle around the foot of the bed and pumped two grenades through the doorway. The explosions shook the walls and blew a hot rush of air into the room that sent unseen items crashing to the floor, and there was silence.

  Except for the ringing in his ears. As that died, he heard a piercing noise behind him, a shrill, broken keening, half-strangled, and Carson across the room, behind a large console of some kind, swearing vehemently but softly through clenched teeth. He spared a glance for the girls. One was an exotic-looking brunette and the other was a pretty blond, and it was the brunette who was making the appalling sound. The blond was holding her, with her hand over the brunette’s mouth trying to keep her quiet, and there was a glistening pool of blood under them. From the outside, a dull rattle punctuated by sharper popping sounds was making itself heard.

  Gunfire. Distant gunfire. That could only be Bravo, and it sounded like they were engaged well away from where they should have been.

  He checked his HUD. It showed all his people exactly where they were supposed to be—three minutes ago. Getting Carson’s attention, he tapped his helmet and mimed a question. Carson shook his head. Fuck. Either the building was shielded or they had an ECM drone overhead. He prayed it wasn’t a drone . . .

  Still nothing outside the room. All dead? Or waiting? He and Carson needed to get out of there now, but Carson couldn’t cover him from where he was. Gomez pointed to the door, signaled three fingers followed by a fist. Carson nodded. Gomez fired a sustained burst through the door as Carson bolted across the open space and slid in beside him.

  “We’ve been fucked, huh Six?” Gomez nodded. It was obvious Mankho wasn’t here and hadn’t been, perhaps not for days. They’d been set up. It didn’t matter how. All that mattered was getting his people clear. He knew, without even looking at his displays, that Hermes was on the far side of the world right now, out of comms range for another ten minutes. It would take twenty minutes after that to get shuttles to the extraction point if they burned in hard—assuming Hermes was still up there . . .

  “What’s the play?”

  He looked at Carson, noticing for the first time the rip in the shoulder of his armor and the dark stains around it. “You hit?”

  “Crease. It’s nothin’. What’s the play? Back out the window or take it forward?”

  “Forward,” Gomez answered. He had no way of knowing what was waiting for them in either direction, but if they’d been set up, the outside perimeter was almost certainly covered. With their retreat cut off, they might as well attack.

  “What about them?” Carson nodded past Gomez’s shoulder at the girls. The brunette was limp now—unconscious or dead, he couldn’t tell—and the blond was whimpering, a soft, smothered sound.

  He turned away. “Can’t.” They were better off here anyway. “Look,” he said after a moment’s pause. “Scans say there’s a mezzanine out there with a half-wall and a stairway to the right. The floor below is supposed to be open space. Access is a stairwell just opposite. I want you to put three grenades through the door, set to three, five and ten meters. I’ll take post next to the stairway and provide cover while you come up. Got it?”

  “We gonna force that stairwell down to the second floor?”

  “No. We clear this floor and see what’s up in the compound. Play it from there.” Carson looked dubious. “You all good?”

  “Not quite, Six. Lemme go first—you lay down the grenades.” Gomez tightened his jaw, contemplating a direct order. Carson shrugged. “If the boys are gonna get outta this shit, they’ll need you a fuck-tonne more than me.”

  As much as he hated it, the logic was compelling. “Alright. Get ready. On two.”

  On two, Gomez leaned out and fired. Carson, timing it a shade too nice for safety, snap rolled through the doorway as the blast of the third explosion slapped at them. There was an exchange of fire even before the reverberations died, and Gomez was through the door and flat down next to him as it ended. Everywhere was the evidence of the grenade’s work: a heap of corpses at the base of the stair and two more beyond it, torn by the hundreds of small metal cubes each APS grenade packed around its core of explosives; an arm by itself a few meters away, still clutching a heavy rifle; blood in a mist on the floor and nearby walls, in spatters and trails down the stairs and across the floor below, the bright acrid smell of it lingering in the air with the heavy stench of C-12. Carson was keeping up a deliberate fire at anything that showed itself in the stairwell across the large open space below.

  “Ten or so down there—maybe more,” he grunted and blew off a hand that incautiously appeared. There was a shriek and a confused thumping as the owner tumbled down the stairwell. Gomez trained his rifle through a break in the wall next to Carson. “Check the compound.”

  He could still hear firing outside, but only rifles and the sharp rattle of a SAW—not the dull thump of mortars or the whine of RPGs. There were windows on either side of the mezzanine; the window to the right overlooked the compound and the building’s flat second-story roof, the one on the left some sloping ground outside the compound to the east. Going out the east window gave him the best chance of linking up with Bravo but the terrain was open that way—too open for them to have much of a chance. Whoever they were up against—it couldn’t just be Mankho’s people and probably not even Lacaille’s meager military; their ground forces were no better than glorified cops—there were way too many of them and they were way too well equipped. But dropping into the compound might be worse.

  Carson scurried to the right-hand window in an alm
ost inhuman crouch, remarkably low to the floor. Moments later he was back, skidding the last few feet. “Compound’s full of runnin’ fucks but I saw three fireteams coverin’ this building. There’s most of a company forming up by the gate and I think they’re settin’ up mortars.”

  Shit. “You see anything uptown?” His use of the codename for Bravo’s position was reflexive.

  “Not really. Just some flashes. Could be they’re sendin’ up seekers.”

  Shit, he repeated inwardly, eyes not leaving the stairwell. They couldn’t go out the windows; remaining in the building bought them less than nothing. That left the—“Roof?”

  “Crack it?” Carson asked. Gomez had no idea how thick it was or exactly what it was made of, but it looked like plasticrete, which was not designed to be blast-proof. And armor-glass was tough stuff. Two charges, though—all that he and Carson had between them—wouldn’t do it. “We’ll need the charges Mates had.”

  “I’ll get ‘em,” Carson said without hesitation.

  Gomez jerked his head sideways. “Go.”

  It took Carson a full minute longer to retrieve the charges than it should have and as he returned, he shut the door with exaggerated care. Crawling up to Gomez, he handed over Mates’ charges without a word. Gomez didn’t ask what the delay had been. Nor did he ask if Carson still had his trauma kit. All he said was, “We gotta clear that stairwell.”

  “You want me to do it?” Carson’s voice was strangely tight. “Bad angle for grenades.”

  “No,” Gomez answered, his tone clipped. If only he had a couple of APS mines—if only he had a lot of things . . . “We’ll lob it.”