The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set

by Owen R O'Neill

  “Will it arm?”

  “We’ll find out.” Grenades were armed by launch shock—it made them safer to handle—but he thought a good hard rap might do the trick. Gomez selected an HE variant and set it to a five-second delay, wishing he could risk using an incendiary. But in this confined space—a space they had to occupy for at least another few minutes . . . bad idea. He ejected the grenade into his hand. “Ready?”

  Carson nodded. Gomez swung the grenade in an overhand arc and slammed it against the bare floor as hard as he could. The arming ring blinked red.

  “Sweet!”

  Allowing himself the trace of a grin, Gomez hooked it towards the stairwell. It bounced off the far wall and rattled down the steps. Two seconds later a fiery jet erupted through the opening. The whole building shook and then the stairwell collapsed in a fountain of dust and smoking debris.

  “That oughta choke the bastards,” Carson cackled as they climbed the walls. For a few minutes maybe, Gomez thought as he placed his charges. Carson placed his as well, making a rough square a meter and a half on each side, a little out from the corner. They pulled back and Gomez set them off with a typical dull, flat pop. Cracks appeared, chips rained down. That was all. Swearing, Gomez pulled the plasma knife from his thigh pocket and probed the widest crevice, a good arm’s length out. The ceiling was plasticrete, a good fifteen centimeters thick; it sparked and smoked as the blade burned into it. More chips flew and then chunks began to fall. Carson had his knife out too, prying at a fissure nearer the wall, and suddenly the whole section, broken along the diagonal, slumped. Together, they levered their knives into the break and twisted. The blades buzzed and crackled, throwing a broad shower of sparks, and all at once a triangular slab shifted, then fell with a crash. The other half, unsupported, followed and Gomez levered himself through the opening onto the rooftop—and almost directly into the path of a soldier who was stepping off the ladder coming up from the second-floor roof, carrying a crate of mortar rounds.

  Turning at the noise of the falling blocks, he gaped and dropped his burden, but in the instant before he could yell or draw his weapon, Gomez sank the plasma knife into his chest. The hissing blade cut through to the spine and he toppled into the hole, narrowly missing Carson, who was just reaching for the broken rim. The man’s two companions at the roof’s southern edge twisted around as one and had hardly more time to regret the fatal mistake of leaning their rifles against the parapet before Gomez’s sidearm barked twice.

  “Hey look! A mortar!” Carson cried as they dragged the bodies to one side. It was—a light two-inch man-portable mortar. Seven boxes of rounds were already open beside it.

  “Set it up,” snapped Gomez—Carson was being unnecessarily gleeful. “I’m gonna raise Bravo.” His system was giving him a position fix now but not much else. He could tell Aries was down and that Bravo had retreated to some rocky ground east of the road; Delta was not showing up at all. He keyed his mike on. “Bravo, this is Six—report status.” He repeated it twice before he got an answer.

  “Six, this is Walsh. Ananian is down! We got ten effectives here. Must’a been two—three hundred of the fuckers came outta nowhere! Another group of about fifty tried to push around us to the north but we took ‘em out. We’re in deep shit here!”

  “Where are the hostiles? Where exactly?”

  “They’re in this gully along the far side of the road. Can you see ‘em from where you are?”

  “Negative. What’s your ammo status?” He heard Walsh calling for an ammo check. “Two mags per man and only eight grenades left.” Bravo had carried eight magazines and fifteen grenades per man into this operation and had expended most of it in a fight that wasn’t ten minutes old yet.

  “Listen, Walsh. We’re on the roof of the main compound building. We’re going to put some fire on that gully. I need to know exactly where they are, understand? Can you spot them for me? Link it to Carson also.”

  “Roger, Six. I’ll mark ‘em for you.”

  “When we get those rounds in effect, you break due east for the high ground there. Save your ammo and do not—repeat do not—converge on X-ray.” If they got to Sergeant Howarth and Delta, he had to assume they knew where the extraction point was too. “You read, Walsh?”

  “I read you, sir.”

  “I’m gonna try to raise Hermes.” The corvette should be in range any minute but if he didn’t get them in five, he’d fire the shrike. “Link us to that spot and when you go, stay low and move fast.”

  “What about you, sir?”

  “I’ll come find you. Get ready. Six out.” He killed the link and was setting an auto-ping for Hermes as Carson tapped his arm. “Look down there,” he said. “Those vehicles got wheels on ‘em.” Gomez risked a glance over the parapet. Soldiers were still swarming around: he saw the group just inside the gate climbing into two air-lorries and another mortar team unloading from one of the trucks Carson was talking about. There were six of them in a line along the west side of the compound toward the gate, big wheeled trucks. Wheels meant hydrocarbon fuel.

  “Light ‘em up?” Carson asked.

  Gomez nodded and Carson rose up, fired two incendiary grenades into the line and ducked back down again as they detonated. The sky lit over the compound as the trucks’ fuel tanks exploded with an enormous brilliance, great gouts of flame shot through with black objects rising amid pillars of smoke. Burning debris crashed about them, twisted metal and melted plastic and more ghastly things as Walsh’s spotting info flashed on his HUD. He rolled over to where Carson hunched. “Got it?”

  Carson nodded. He had the mortar ready and they fed the coordinates to it and calculated the spread while smoke swirled thick around them. Neither paid any attention to the holocaust going on below them: one air-lorry had been engulfed by the blast and its fuel cells rapidly cooked off, adding to the carnage; the other had careened into the wall and overturned. The few survivors were huddled at the compound’s far end—many burned, all shocked and stunned, none paying any attention to the activities on the roof, where together Gomez and Carson yanked the safety pins from the first two mortar rounds.

  They fed those rounds into the tube and then more in smooth succession. A light mortar with a two-man team was usually capable of firing eight rounds a minute but they exceeded this, dropping on the enemy position antipersonnel, high explosive or even cloaking rounds as they came to hand. For three minutes, they kept it up and were down to the last case of ammo when Carson looked to the north and, the freshening breeze that heralded half-light having thinned the smoke, saw a quartet of lights approaching. Moments later they heard the peculiar, undulating whine of air-sliders, and Carson cried enthusiastically, “It’s Delta!”

  Gomez, looking north, also felt a burst of elation that lasted only until he realized the air-sliders were not registering on his IFF at all—and Carson stood up. The 20-mm chain guns slung under each slider’s belly opened up and Gomez saw Carson’s face jerk forward, its elated grin unchanged as his torso vaporized beneath it. Vaulting over the parapet, he felt a tremendous blow above his left knee that spun him around in midair.

  He landed on the roof below with a heavy thud, his armor taking most of the impact. His ears were ringing but he felt them ringing as a dense pressure inside his skull, and there was everywhere this heavy silence blanketing everything. With a vast effort, he rolled himself onto his back. The faintly lightening sky shimmered overhead as his eyes focused erratically and he felt the tickle of sweat running down his neck and there was a dull burning ache in his left leg and a feeling of wet heat except he knew he had no left leg anymore and somewhere in the back of his mind he also knew that was his femoral artery bleeding out for all the vasoconstrictors could do and he thought in a vague detached sort of way This is what shock feels like, and then No this isn’t shock and Are they clear yet?

  Infinitely thankful he’d kept his rifle slung instead of setting it aside, he pulled it across his body and, fumbling because his hands were going
numb, chambered a last round into the grenade launcher. The drag of gravity on his arms was shocking as he lifted it, fixed the butt in the gravel of the roof and pulled the trigger. The shrike fired, a light explosive charge taking it up to fifty meters where the tiny rockets would ignite and boost it clear of the atmosphere in just over a minute. There, it would detonate, sending out a distress signal that would bring any League ship within thirty light-minutes running.

  The rifle fell sideways unnoticed and he saw, or maybe just imagined he saw, the tiny rocket motors streaking away into the stars and goddammit his fucking leg was starting to hurt and the little rockets were going out and everything else with them . . .

  Chapter Three

  NBPS HQ, Mare Nemeton

  Nedaema, Pleiades Sector

  “Anything left in that bottle?” asked the Director of Pleiades Sector Intelligence Group. The Chief Inspector of the Nedaeman Bureau of Public Safety picked up the bottle and shook it gently, listening with an attentive ear. “Two fingers,” he said and reached over his desk to pour one of these into the director’s glass. It was a Hesperian single-malt scotch he was pouring, twelve years old, and a reasonable approximation of the Terran original.

  Commander Trin Wesselby, the new director, lifted her glass and considered its amber depths while Chief Inspector Nikolai Taliaferro emptied the bottle into his own. Trin Wesselby was a short woman with an athletic build who normally looked rather bookish, but now the prim demeanor was nowhere to be seen. Her dark hair, which unlike most female CEF officers she kept long, was down, and the waves introduced by the plain twist she’d worn it up in softened her face remarkably. Combined with the flush that alcohol brought to her cheeks and her small, precisely cut lips, she was perhaps as near to prettiness as her countenance could reach—or would have been if there had been less worry, tension, and sadness in her expression.

  None of this was apparent to Commander Wesselby, however. There was nothing in her glass or elsewhere in the office to bring it home to her, to show the new lines around her pale gray eyes that turned slightly down, or the furrows lately etched into the aristocratic forehead, or the pinch between the dark, straight, thin eyebrows. This was good because it also kept her unaware of the hint of vulnerability that her exhaustion was revealing—she’d rather be hanged first.

  Nick Taliaferro noticed all that, and more, but if he looked like a gruff, old, battered colonial noncom, which is exactly what he’d been—Color Sergeant, Hesperian Royal Marine Corps, Class of ’81, retired—he was also a fairly astute judge of people and thus careful to reveal nothing. “No worries,” he remarked as the last aromatic drops fell with a metronome plit-plit-plit into his glass, now brimming full. “I have another.”

  Drinking was strictly prohibited within the confines of NBPS HQ, where Taliaferro’s office occupied a corner on the sacred Ninth Floor, but the Chief Inspector liberally interpreted this to mean during duty hours, and whatever time it was—he had ceased to take notice some hours ago—it was certainly deep into the graveyard watch and thus well past them. Further, he had not left his office for the past three days, which in his view came near to qualifying it as a temporary residence. Lastly, he no longer cared.

  “Complete write-off?” Trin asked. That’s what the preliminary reports indicated, but there was always a chance, however slim, they might be wrong.

  “Complete. Fifteen bought it during the firefight outside the compound. The other nine managed to evade for a while, but with their corvette taken down, they were eventually surrounded and they ANCAP’d.” ANCAP meant Anti-Capture Protocol, an anodyne way of referring to the charges implanted in the combat helmets of SOFOR teams that vaporized the wearer’s heads in the event of death or capture. With proper equipment, it was possible to extract a surprising amount of data from a decently preserved brain and ANCAPs saw to it there were no brains left to exploit. Such things lay at the heart of Commander Wesselby’s job, but she still could not suppress a shudder.

  “How long were they able to evade?”

  “Standard time? Three days, eleven hours and fifteen minutes. More or less.” Taliaferro had not had to look the numbers up.

  “Three days and eleven hours? But . . .” Trin added some times up mentally—added them up again. The op had been staged out of Beta Crucis and the corvette deployed from New Madras, which lay just outside Bannerman space, a short hop from Lacaille. The CEF maintained a squadron at New Madras, most of which they’d pulled as part of the cover for the operation, leaving just three picket destroyers and the stealth frigate that had delivered the team. Even with the team’s corvette down, the frigate’s captain would have known when they were more than a few hours overdue, and the frigate should have been able to extract the survivors without much difficulty. “Even if they needed authorization, round-trip comms transit between New Madras and Beta Crucis is only about seventeen—hours. What happened?”

  Taliaferro set his glass down on his desk as if putting it out of harm’s way. “What happened was that the CO at Beta Crucis had strict orders not to escalate without NCA authorization, so he appealed to G-Staff. That’s another thirty-two hours right there. G-Staff wouldn’t move without approval from the Nedaeman Secretary of State, who had to consult with the Archon, who spent twelve hours pissing all over himself.” Taliaferro stared at his scotch with his hands folded over his middle and the veins in his size-19 neck swelling. “So by the time the relief arrived in-system, there was nothing to do but request the bodies.”

  “Oh.” Trin Wesselby, thinking of those men being hunted through an alien landscape for over three days, waiting for the relief that it was their comrades’ sacred duty to provide, not getting it, being surrounded—out of ammo, out of time, thumb on the ANCAP trigger . . . She swallowed a healthy gulp of scotch, which made her eyes water, which made for a good excuse. “How much telemetry did you recover?”

  “Not nearly as much as we’d like. They made the corvette after the firefight started—once that happened, it was just a matter of time. It seems Halith must have given them a lot more than some fancy explosives.”

  “No idea how they did it?”

  “None—the corvette never saw what hit it. Anything on your end?”

  “We have ears out of course, but it’ll be months before we can expect to get anything. Just scanning for precursors now.” A few seconds of silence trickled by. “We sent a brief to Admiral Westover this AM. He’s on his way here to meet with the Old Man.”

  Taliaferro grunted. Admiral of the Fleet John Carlos Westover had the singular distinction of wearing two exalted hats: Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which was comprised of the senior military commanders of all the Homeworlds. The Old Man he was on his way to see was Admiral Joss PrenTalien, Commander in Chief, Pleiades Sector. Both had reputations for superb competence and neither was known for a forgiving nature. Taliaferro foresaw a number of possible consequences flowing from this meeting—he knew PrenTalien well—and almost all of them would be quite unpleasant for somebody. “So they’ve called in the cavalry or we’re finally getting some adult supervision.”

  “Or both.” One immaculate fingernail tapped slowly on the side of her glass. “The opposition will have a field day with this.”

  In point of fact, the opposition already was. Hints of the debacle had leaked early, the clouds were waking to it, though only as rumors so far, and righteous indignation was already mounting in the expected quarters, wanting only a shred or two of credible evidence to be unleashed. Such evidence was gathering, or even being manufactured, and as in most cases like this, credibility was largely in the eye of the beholder.

  “I hear there’s already a video of the firefight in the clouds,” Taliaferro said. “Any chance it’s real?”

  Trin Wesselby, who had seen it, shook her head. “No. It’s a mash-up—pretty amateurish.”

  “Who do you think? An oppo-group or just kids having fun?”

  “Hard to say. It has to be so
mebody local. Anyone who wanted to make some noise could have patched it together and released it. That’s plenty of people.”

  “I’m surprised they didn’t ask you to suppress it.”

  “They did. We could too: the new interdiction bots are quite good, actually. But that’s not a capability we’re ready to turn loose in the wild just to deal with the Archon’s PR problems.”

  Taliaferro nodded. The Archon had maintained that terrorism was a criminal matter; that the perpetrators were to be apprehended and put on trial. It was a risky position and he had only been able to sustain it because the opposition had split between a minority of pacifists, who resisted any non-diplomatic measures, and a larger block that insisted that Lacaille be held accountable and either hand over Mankho and all his supporters for a military trial and execution, or face the consequences—which were clearly meant to include regime change.

  The proponents of this latter position were hamstrung by Archon holding what he thought was his diplomatic ace-in-the-hole: the threat of Bannerman intervention. Lacaille was a former Bannerman colony and this threat was further backstopped by the knowledge (the most secret and confidential knowledge) that Halith had supported Mankho’s plot. It was by making use of these threats (quite privately, for neither had been—and the Halith connection certainly could not be—publicly acknowledged) that the Archon maintained his majority.

  But it was a frail majority and would not likely stand the strain exerted by the killing of twenty-four elite Nedaeman soldiers. The outrage that was even now building would certainly sideline the pacifists and likely peel off enough of his supporters to call for a vote of confidence that the Archon, unable to fully explain his rationale for engaging in what had been shown to be foolish and risky half-measures, would be ill-placed to survive. So Trin Wesselby rather thought that he was about to find his ace-in-the-hole turned into Scylla against the Halith Charybdis, and she could not find it in herself to weep for that. Far from it.