The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set

by Owen R O'Neill

  Moreover, the closest analogue to Halith’s government, the text said, was the Roman republic of the Classical era—even some of the titles were borrowed—not any of the imperial models. Yet the Halith aristocracy appeared to fetishize something called the Warsaw Pact, a treaty organization comprised of authoritarian states on Old Earth that was a dismal failure, not lasting even fifty years. The Pact’s dominant empire, often referred to only by its initials, had set itself against the Anglosphere, which had formed its own organization, NATO, led by North America, and lost the great Cold War, leading to its collapse before it was a century old. Afterwards, the Anglosphere established a global hegemony that evolved into Terra—Earth, dammit!—which it had maintained to the present day.

  Nor were those the only echoes of ancient Terran culture in Halith society. There was an individual named Bonaparte who, just after the beginning of the gunpowder age, briefly ruled much of Europe before being defeated and dying in exile. His rule saw less than two years of peace in twenty and was said to be an economic and demographic disaster, yet he was lionized. There was an ancient Asian admiral—who had the same surname as one of Kris’s math instructors—who was reckoned to be a great leader and strategist, yet her professor of Terran naval history pointed out that his major triumph a sneak attack against an unprepared adversary. Then he led his navy to disaster because he failed to take seriously his adversary’s capabilities, and was soon killed because the enemy had broken his codes.

  And wasn’t it weird that General Ilya Turabian, Halith’s greatest hero and putative founder of their current state, had gotten himself killed by foolishly taking his flagship within range of ground fire during the invasion of a minor planet that should not even have required his personal presence? Wasn’t it weird that the Halith should take as their legendary ancestors, and consciously model themselves on, so many short-lived, violent and failed empires? How was one supposed to explain any of this by the simple fact that the Orion Spur was uniquely well suited to getting around in with bi-polar gravity-lens technology?

  Kris sighed.

  “Hey, what did you get?” Tanner asked from the other side of the room.

  “Huh?” Kris looked up, startled out of the haze of annoyed thoughts.

  “What assignment?”

  “Oh. Halith.”

  “Ow! Harsh. Explain how gravity-lens tech makes people into sadistic militarists.” His gaze dropped back to his tablet’s display and she caught the edge of a grin. “Good luck with that.”

  Kris grunted. “What’d you get?”

  “The crazy-as-fuck Maxor.” Tanner’s grin edged out a bit. “Piece o’ cake.” Crazy as fuck was almost a Term of Art when it came to describing the Maxor, either individually or their whole civilization. Kris could see his point—not that she was bitter about it or anything. She sighed again, somewhat louder, and dropped her tablet into her lap. Her eyes made a brief circuit of the otherwise empty room as she checked the time.

  “Where are Baz and Minx, anyway?”

  “Baz wanted to burn off more of those sim-hours he earned. Minx is probably working someone over to get her report written.” He made a not-quite obscene forking gesture with his fingers. Seeing his expression, Kris mentally deleted not quite.

  “So how’s she gonna defend that orally?”

  “Betcha she’s doin’ that now!” Tanner cackled and Kris rolled her eyes. “Damn!” He pointed back at his tablet. “Says here they don’t believe in integers—or something. Crazy shit! Look!” He flicked the article with his forefinger and her tablet beeped as it appeared over the display. She flattened the icon and it automatically opened with the passage highlighted:

  . . . the Maxor worship an entity whose nature is not to be revealed to outsiders but which is thought by most scholars to be either the concept of Unity or the real-number 0. (Semantic analysis of Maxor texts strongly suggests that they either do not believe in integers or consider them to be blasphemous) . . .

  “Wacky, huh? Crazy as fuck—no, not by half!” Then his xel chimed even as hers did. He opened the message first. “Hey? Baz’s got a tag-team going!” The briefest pause. “Don’t want it, do you?”

  It was obvious he did, but he knew she and Baz were close—they often partnered each other during sim-runs—and besides, her name was at the top of the addressee list. Tanner’s was second. Minx, Kris noted, wasn’t on the list at all.

  Kris shook her head. Somehow, she just wasn’t in the mood tonight.

  “Thanks!” Tanner shut down his tablet and exited with the look of a man going to his salvation.

  Kris sagged back against the pillow at the head of her bunk, brought up the article that Tanner had flicked to her again, and skimmed it with a twisted smile no one would have thought pleasant. She might not have been fully acquainted with the details of Halith’s founding history but she knew what everyone knew about the Maxor: that they were a genetically modified branch of humanity created using old gene-morphing technology back during the Second Colonization Period, not long before the beginning of the Formation Wars. There had always been movements that wanted to resist or reverse the effects humanity inevitably had on its environment, going back to very early times—who insisted on a moral distinction between human and natural. Those movements had become quite powerful during the period when space flight was first invented, but they split over the issue of colonizing other planets when that actually became possible, and split again over the use of terraforming technology during the initial ventures on Mars and then Venus.

  But it wasn’t until the Mars Air Line dramatically altered that planet that the attitudes of the anti-terraforming movements took on an overtly religious aspect. The religious impulse had always been present in the anti-terraformers and their predecessors, but now it became the movement’s foundation. Seeing terraforming as sinful but supporting colonization nonetheless—all of Sol being viewed as beyond redemption—the members of some of these movements opted to use genetic engineering to adapt themselves to the environment of their new chosen homes, rather than the other way around. Their religious fervor allowed them to discount the severe warnings that combinatoric analysis and ergodic theory made about attempting such profound changes to the human genome, and in the end, they created three apparently viable sub-species: the Maxor, the Hural, and the Kychee.

  Apparently viable—that was the key phrase and the article automatically bolded it as she read. The Kychee, who were initially quite prolific, succumbed to insanity in less than ten generations. They were exterminated in a war they started—or nearly so. A parenthetic comment said that records preserved from the era show that a few hundred Kychee specimens were put in cryostasis as study subjects, though all but a handful were destroyed during the Formation Wars. Only nine specimens (some partial) were now known to exist. No great loss there, in Kris’s opinion.

  The Hural, in contrast, succumbed to creeping infertility. When their Homeworld was surveyed at the beginning of the Third Colonization Period, the Hural were declared extinct and their planet was terraformed and recolonized.

  Her cursor grazed a word and another of those stupid bubble notes materialized.

  Despite all official scientific findings in a sizeable literature, the current settlers persist in reporting sightings of Hural survivors. Such sightings are almost universally regarded as just another popular hoax, such as colonists frequently indulge in.

  The note had an image of a Hural male and female. They were short and cute, with big nocturnal-creature eyes, and covered all over with thick dense fur like a calico kitten. Kris found herself hoping the colonists were right. She closed the floating note and went back to skimming.

  The bottom line, obviously, was that only the Maxor had survived to the present day, creating an apparently stable—if highly secretive and deeply xenophobic—civilization that nonetheless was, in the eyes of most humans, crazy as fuck, although the article was too polite to say so.

  All this—as far as the bare bones went—Kri
s had learned during her primary school years. Her first classes at the Academy on the eras of human colonization and on xenobiological history added details and a layer of sophistication, but neither those nor this summary article altered the basic assessment. This was especially true in view of the fact that Kris, while she’d never met a Maxor (only the members of a specially trained corps of female diplomats ever did), had once known a half-Max.

  Human-Maxor interbreeding was difficult, improbable, and everywhere frowned upon (as well as being anathema to the Maxor themselves), but it could and did happen and the unhappy offspring were sometimes met with in the more desolate regions out in the border zones.

  Half-Max were sometimes possessed of strange and exotic mental gifts; they could, under the proper circumstances, be useful and loyal, and somehow Anton Trench had acquired one to be surgeon’s mate on Harlot’s Ruse. What his real name might have been was unknown: he answered to Mangle. How Trench came upon him, what the nature of their deal was, and what Mangle did for him when they went off alone together for weeks at a time, no one knew. He was on the boat for almost two years before suddenly jumping ship at Cathcar. No one knew why he did that either.

  During those two years, Kris got to know him hardly at all, but got to like him much, much less. Mangle was the stuff of bad dreams and it was in bad dreams that Kris still encountered him. He was a stooped, bitter, twisted, ill-made entity, rather like a gargoyle but with all the charm taken out. As a surgeon’s mate, he was good at what he did—very good—but he got no thanks for that and probably would have resented it if he had. He messed alone, or occasionally with Trench. The crew did their best to avoid him, except for the fact that the idea of Human-Maxor cross-breeding seemed to hold a sick fascination for some of them, especially when they were wasted. Get enough shit into them, add some boredom, and one of the boys would likely start jacking Mangle about his parentage. Most times, Mangle just ignored it, but one day, this tall, skinny kid with bad skin and cheap imitation t’shegir scars didn’t have the sense to shut up. The kid—his name she thought was maybe Taggart but they called him Tag-Rat or Jag-Rat or something like that—started poking Mangle in the middle of his low, thick, sloping forehead and going on about all kinds of crazy shit until he finally asked Mangle how much he missed real Maxor pussy. The next thing you know, Mangle flashed out a scalpel and opened the kid from balls to sternum and side to side. Right there in the mess.

  The kid didn’t even notice at first. And then he just stared for a second. And then he tried to grab his belly and started to scream . . .

  Kris exhaled long and attempted to shake the memory off. She closed the window with a grunt. That tight hot feeling was back, flaring at the top of her stomach. Putting down the tablet, she was groping under her bunk for a bottle half full of gingered pineapple juice she’d brought back from lunch when Minx traipsed in.

  “I didn’t know you drank,” Minx said, looking at the partially obliterated label and then ostentatiously at the chrono on the far wall.

  “It’s pineapple juice.”

  “Sure it is.” Minx flounced over to her bunk, holding onto a tablet, a thick roll of hardcopy and a discontented look. Tanner’s assessment notwithstanding, it appeared her evening hadn’t lived up to expectation, though whether Minx had been stuck with the short end of the stick or the stick itself had failed in its duty, Kris did not care to guess.

  Minx tossed the tablet onto her bunk and the hardcopy roll onto the small, oblong table that was the room’s one concession to a common workspace. The roll unfurled to reveal itself as an actual print magazine. Glancing over, Kris wondered who was paying for it. Minx was certainly comfortably well off, but Kris didn’t think she had the money to squander on that.

  Settling her haunches on her bunk with an unnecessary writhe—Kris, in no mood to be charitable, thought it was probably instinctive by now—Minx flipped the magazine over. There was a big glossy image of Mariwen Rathor on the front.

  “What’s that?” Kris nodding at the magazine as Minx started leafing through it.

  “Oh, it’s the annual,” Minx replied as if that explained everything. “Shi-an.” She held it up and tapped the cover. “It’s a retrospective on Mariwen Rathor—the one who was kidnapped and implanted to shoot the Archon of Nedaema during those big meetings last year, you know.”

  Kris ground her teeth and jammed her clenched left hand under a pillow. “Yeah, I know.” And it was a bomb, you idiot. She was implanted to set off a fucking bomb.

  “Veronique 2M2’s gonna do one too, I hear, but they’re going to wait for the first anniversary.” Minx flipped through a few more pages. “Of course, she was on their cover a million times—she practically made the publication. And it’s really awful what happened to her, but . . .” You weren’t there when she blew the head off a man right next to you—you didn’t see her face over the gun barrel—you didn’t hear her scream when she went down . . . Minx frowned at a two-page image of a laughing Mariwen spinning in a sunset-hued gown as the waves on some black-sand beach swirled about her ankles, and then held it up. “I mean, do you really think she’s that pretty?”

  That thing in the hospital bed? Yeah, what was left was pretty . . . just not human anymore. . . Kris cleared her throat, feeling the churning acid burn beneath her heart. “Well . . . yeah. I liked her.”

  The words seemed to skim over Minx, who flipped to another page. “I always thought Moira Winters was actually a better model, but she’s not as fashionable, I guess. Or Tyra Nioro. She really should be the top model now.” Minx closed the magazine and tossed it on the table. “It always kinda bugged me how they constantly hyped her sexuality, too. Mariwen’s, y’know. I mean, it’s fine to be a lesbian but . . .”

  Kris stared at Minx, who was well known to be seeing a lot of a female upperclassman, and no one thought what went on between them was platonic. The hand under the pillow balled into a fist. “Did you ever meet her?”

  Minx looked up, surprised. “Who?”

  “Mariwen.”

  Minx’s face pinched in a smirk. “Meet Mariwen Rathor? Seriously. Did you?”

  Well, there was the afternoon we played low-G racquet ball on Arizona’s hanger deck and she won and the morning I held her cuz she’d gotten translation shock real bad and the night I dreamed of Trench and she stayed with me and that evening we went out in Nemeton and she didn’t make me dance . . . Kris nodded.

  “You actually met Mariwen Rathor?”

  “Uh huh. I knew her some.”

  “You knew her.”

  “Yeah. Some.”

  Minx stood up, shaking her head. “Jeezus, Kris. That’s like saying you fucked the pope.” Picking up her tablet off her bunk, she stalked out the door, still muttering.

  Basmartin walked in a moment later. He saw Kris and hooked a thumb towards the corridor. “What’s up with Minx?”

  Kris shook her head and shrugged.

  He crossed to his bunk and, noticing the publication on the table, picked it up. “This hers?”

  Kris nodded.

  “Figures.” He flipped through a few pages with a sour expression. “That has gotta be the most messed-up thing that ever happened to anyone. It’s been, what? Like nine months? I wish they’d just leave her alone.” He put the magazine back on the table, cover down. Sitting on his bunk, he glanced out the door again, shook his head, and started pulling off his boots.

  “Y’know, my folks—they didn’t actually know her—but they met her a couple of times.” He clicked open his locker and one boot arced across the room to land inside with a rattling crash. “My mom hosted this benefit for a new ward at my dad’s hospital, and she came to it, along with a bunch of other people. Few months later, this boatload of refugees came in. Some of them were big fans of hers, so my mom emailed her, thinking maybe she’d send ‘em a pic or note or something. Five days later she showed up—clear from Nedaema. Stayed a week. Met with all of ‘em.” The other boot went crashing into the locker. “My mom said
she was really sweet. Really sweet.”

  Kris, rolling on her back and staring up at the overhead, nodded. The locker clicked shut. Grunting, Basmartin stretched out on his thin, hard mattress.

  “Baz?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s a pope?”

  Chapter Eight

  LSS Ardennes, docked

  Cassandra Station, Nedaema, Pleiades Sector

  Commander Russell R. Raven, staff operations officer to Admiral Joss PrenTalien, CinC-PLESEC, paused outside the door of his boss’s stateroom on the LSS Ardennes to catch his breath. He’d made a hasty trip all the way from CIC, deep amidships, to here, far aft on O1-Deck—a good three-hundred meters on the big dreadnought—at as close to a jog as a senior officer’s dignity would allow, but his physical exertions weren’t entirely to blame for his state. Running a hand through his thick silver-white hair, he pressed the entry pad. The door slid aside and he stepped in, holding out a hardcopy order in his left hand.

  “Did you authorize this, sir?”

  Admiral PrenTalien, finishing up a late, unhurried breakfast at the long table—real wood—which would seat twelve or even fifteen fellow officers or other guests when he chose to entertain, and which dominated the large, luxuriously-appointed day cabin (lush carpet underfoot, elegant chairs in the sitting area just forward and real paintings along the bulkheads, the situation displays cunningly tucked away now that they were in port), was unfazed by the abrupt question. He set down a bone-china coffee cup that looked absurdly small in his huge hand and reached out to take the flimsy and glanced at the heading, which read General Order No. 1, issued by Third Fleet’s CO, Vice Admiral Hamish Burton.

  “I did.” He handed his fleet commander’s order back to Commander Raven, who received it with the look of a man being offered a poisonous snake.