“Off sulking, I think,” Baz offered.
“She did get gawd-a’mighty pinched by the suit plumbing,” Tanner temporized. “That smarts.”
“Too fucking bad,” Kris snapped.
“It was just a drill, y’know.” Tanner couched the observation in his most reasonable tone.
“This time.” She flexed her elbow and winced. It did feel like things were grinding together in there . . .
“You really should get that looked at,” Baz said.
“Yeah. Okay.” She stood up and wavered briefly from the head rush. “I’ll . . . I’ll see you guys after breakfast.”
* * *
“Where’d Kris get her ship-time?” Tanner asked as they walked to the mess hall. Kris’s reactions obviously couldn’t be explained by their few weeks of ship drill. Basmartin shrugged, but Minx, now following them several steps back and looking thoroughly sour and sullen, answered, “Didn’t you know? She was a slave.”
“What?” Basmartin and Tanner said it in unison, facing about as they walked.
“That’s right,” Minx affirmed with an unbecoming smirk. “She was on this slave ship for like eight years.”
“Eight years?” Tanner shook his head. Minx wasn’t given to lying, exactly—but he would not put it past her to stretch the facts a little around the edges. “No one’s ever been repatriated after eight years before.”
“Well, that’s what they say,” Minx emphasized. “Nobody’s seen any proof, you know.”
“Proof,” Basmartin muttered, as if the word left a bad taste in his mouth.
“She would have been just a kid,” Tanner said. “Is that the reason they admitted her? Some kind of program?”
“Of course not.” Minx twisted her full, mobile mouth to one side.
“What do you mean by of course not?” Baz asked caustically.
“They don’t admit slaves. So they had her records sealed.”
“Who had?” Tanner swiveled his head between them. “Who’s this they?”
“The Huron family, of course!” Rolling her eyes at Tanner’s imbecility.
“The Huron family? Are we talking sealing records or getting her in here?”
“Both!” Minx smiled with something close to malignant triumph. “Don’t you get it? They had her records sealed so no one could check, and then she was sponsored by Grand Senator Huron.”
“Look,” Baz snapped. “We’ve all heard plenty of crap about Kris and Lieutenant Huron on Nedaema.”
“It’s not crap. They did meet after she was repatriated, and they were together”—she gave it a slow, sweetly acid inflection—“while she was on Nedaema, after she cleared Rehab. And he did get his dad to sponsor her and take care of her records and everything else.”
Baz regarded Minx narrowly. “Who told you all this?”
“Jaz Quillan.”
Tanner and Basmartin exchanged a look.
“Jaz Quillan and I were roommates at the University of New California. She’s Commander Quillan’s daughter. He’s the doctor who did the original psycheval on Kris. He was there when she was in Rehab on—”
“And he just happened to tell his daughter all the details of a confidential evaluation of one of his patients?”
“She wasn’t a patient,” Minx shot back, nettled by Basmartin’s tone. “She was a slave. All repatriated slaves get a psycheval done and are scanned for implants—it goes in their file.”
“It’s still private—”
“She only knew because Huron threatened the director of Rehab on Cassandra Station. Her dad was in the process of filing a formal complaint. She heard him talking about it.”
“He threatened the guy who runs Rehab on Cassandra?”
“Yes! And that’s what she told me. The director had serious problems with some of the results they were seeing and her dad agreed, and the next thing you know, Lieutenant Huron shows up and gets her out of Rehab, and then her files are sealed, and then they get her into the Academy.”
Baz and Tanner exchanged another look—this was all too implausible to make up.
“So what happened to his complaint?” Tanner wanted to know. “A formal complaint like that’s a big deal—even for somebody like Huron.”
“He never filed it. The director asked him not to.”
Baz shook his head, chin wrinkling. “Are you trying to say the Huron family threatened this director to get him to shut down your roommate’s father?”
“No—I’m not saying that.” Minx put her hands on her hips, her head cocked to one side, still wearing that smirk. “I’m just saying that’s why they treat her like they do. She’s special.”
“I guess so,” drawled Tanner. “The number of times she’s saved your lily-white ass.”
Chapter Fourteen
CEF Academy Orbital Campus
Deimos, Mars, Sol
“You think she’s telling the truth?”
“Who? Minx?” Tanner looked back at Baz from where he was perched on the door lip of the big refer unit.
“Yeah. About Kris.”
“I dunno. Probably.” Tanner resumed poking the code panel under the reefer’s display. “What do you want? The Boston cream pie or the Black Forest torte?”
“Is that all they got?”
“Looks like.”
“Does it have bananas?”
Tanner jumped off onto the floor. “Does what have bananas?”
“The Boston cream pie. Sometimes they make it with bananas.”
“How the hell should I know? Hand over the pry bar, will ya?”
Baz picked up the heavy bar and passed it to him. “I guess the torte then.”
“Okay. You ready?”
“Ready.”
Tanner wedged the bar into the slight gap between the door and the lip. “Here goes.” Grunting, he gave the bar a heave and the door hissed slightly. “Pop her now!” Baz swung his hammer to expertly rap the side of the door just below the locking cylinder. The refer unit gave a louder hiss, then a sharp click, and the door swung open. Chuckling, Tanner hopped back up on the lip and took a long lean inside. “Why?” he asked as he passed a wrapped package out to Baz.
Baz shrugged, putting the package down on the nearest work table. “Well . . . eight years. That’s just—”
“Hey, I think they got ice cream back here.” Tanner leaned farther in. “It’s hard to say, y’know. She is . . . well, different.”
“Yeah.” Baz accepted another package, frost already forming on the wrapping. “But eight years. I mean . . . what must that have been like?”
Tanner extracted himself from the unit and jumped to the floor again. “I don’t think you wanna know.” He tossed Baz the five-kilo ice cream container. “Let’s lock this thing up.” They slammed the door and listened while it locked and sealed.
“Don’t forget to reset the inventory,” Baz said.
“Shaddup,” Tanner retorted, doing it.
They sat down on the floor and Baz handed Tanner a spoon as they broke open their loot. “What’dya mean?” He asked after his first bite of frozen torte. “Did you know any slaves?”
“Uh-uh,” Tanner mumbled through a mouthful of cream pie. “I never did. But I had this cousin. He shipped out to the Inner Trifid with a private security firm. No bananas, by the way.”
Baz shrugged resignedly. “Private slaving patrols?” He’d never heard of such a thing. Chasing slavers was always government business.
“Nah.” Tanner shoveled in another spoonful of pie.
“He wasn’t . . . I mean—” Baz stopped, flustered, and hurriedly took another bite.
Tanner seemed unoffended. “No, nothing like that. He worked for some port authority. Solon, I think. Or some place. Anyway, they’d have these ships come in regular—you’d spot ‘em as soon as they made orbit. Always cleared customs, no grief—no hassle. Y’know?” He paused. “Want something to drink with that?”
“Whatcha got?”
“I saw some beer over there.”
Tanner hooked a thumb over his shoulder.
“Beer?”
“Oh. Maybe not. Wanna trade?”
“Sure”
They exchanged desserts.
“Anyway,” Tanner continued. “A few times my cousin got tagged to do a little escort work. They’d bring these girls through the underground, y’know—pretty much always girls.” He paused, dangling his spoon for a moment. “Keep ‘em down in the maintenance spaces for a couple of days—shit like that. Said you’d hear ‘em talking sometimes.” He shook his head.
“What?”
Tanner shook his head again, scooped some cherries off the remains of the torte. “Crazy shit.”
Baz put his own spoon down. “Does he still do that?”
“Nope.” Tanner pushed the last bite of torte away. “No, he got killed. Accident. They said.” He reached out and pried open the ice cream container. “Yep. It’s chocolate.”
“Hallelujah!” Baz leaned over and the lights went on, blinding them. “Shit!”
“What the hell are you two doing down here in the kitchens?”
Squinting, they held their hands up against the glare, trying to make out the figure in the doorway. Then Baz dropped his hand. “Hey, Kris,” he said sheepishly. “Ice cream?”
* * *
The three of them sat around the small oblong table in their room, five kilos of rich chocolate ice cream rapidly diminishing under the onslaught of determined spoons, although Kris had a habit of levering off sizeable chunks that she ate with her fingers. Neither Basmartin nor Tanner knew what to make of this idiosyncrasy and so resolved not to notice it. But there was a question preying on both their minds and when they had chiseled a good quarter of the way through their plunder, Baz finally got up the nerve to ask it.
“Say, Kris . . . How did you know where we were?”
Kris looked up from licking the remnants of her last shard of ice cream off her fingers. “I checked the door access logs. When I saw someone entering the kitchens at this time of night, I figured it was probably you guys.”
Tanner looked at Baz accusingly. “I thought you cleared that.”
“I did. Afterwards. You can’t clear it while you’re in there or it alarms when you try to leave.” He glared at Tanner. “Idiot.”
Tanner made a face and shrugged. Baz looked back at Kris. “So, how’d you get to the door access logs? Those don’t report out anywhere but the security feeds. Except at the entry pad.”
“They’re linked through the environmentals,” Kris replied innocently.
Two spoons froze in midair. “They what?” Speaking as one.
“The environmentals log all the door and hatch accesses, y’know . . . they gotta. What?” Basmartin and Tanner were staring at her with expressions of fixed horror. “What?” She repeated in a querulous tone.
“You hacked into the environmentals?” Basmartin’s voice was a tense, low whisper.
“So? I didn’t do anything. I just checked the logs.”
“Jeezus fucking Christ, Kris!” Tanner breathed. “This is a fucking moon!”
Kris’s gaze ricocheted between them. Baz groaned and dropped his spoon in the frozen chocolate crater. “Kris . . . Kris . . . you can’t hack the environmentals, f’gawd’s sake! They don’t just expel you for that—they send your ass straight to Helpless!”
“What’s Helpless?” Kris asked, dismayed and bewildered. She’d never do anything—couldn’t they understand that? She wouldn’t have even looked at the stupid environmentals if they hadn’t stuck her with that simulated failure during the exercise months ago. When she found out the simulation didn’t allow her to actually deal with the problem, she’d prodded the environmentals to see if she could find a solution that way. She’d been shocked to discover that the system here on Deimos wasn’t that much different than the one on Harlot’s Ruse; it had a ton more modules, obviously, but it was just as old and it had the same core vulnerabilities. So she got in and poked around a little. She’d found out about the door access logs and some other useful things. But of course she’d never tweak anything—that would be unthinkable.
Baz and Tanner looked at the floor and shook their heads. “I don’t believe it,” Tanner muttered.
“She doesn’t know,” Baz said in reply. He raised his head. “It’s really called Helpernion, Kris. It’s a prison—a maximum-security prison. It’s a nickel-iron rogue body that was hollowed out during the Formation Wars as a secret command post. No one who hasn’t been there even knows where it is. It’s where they send terrorists and people like that.”
“I’m not a terrorist!”
“For fuck’s sake, keep your voice down!” Tanner hissed. “Minx could barge in here any second.”
They appeared to be serious. An uncomfortable, clotted feeling started to form in her throat.
“How did you do it?” Tanner asked. Kris told them: a brief and heavily redacted explanation.
Then a strange, hard look came over Basmartin’s face. “Wait . . . you’re kidding, right?” Kris looked into his pale violet eyes. He stared back, his pupils shrunk to black pinholes.
“Um . . .” She began. “Ah . . . yeah, I am. I was just fuck’n with you guys.”
“What?” Tanner exclaimed. He threw his head back with a hand over his face. “Gawd dammit, Kris! Don’t fucking do that!” She couldn’t tell how much was relief and how much was anger. “So how did you find us?”
“I followed you,” Kris lied. “I was coming back from the infirmary an’ I saw you guys way down one ‘a the corridors, so I thought I’d see what’s up. I didn’t know which way you’d gone, so I jus’ wandered ‘round till I saw an open door code.” She swallowed. “That’s all.”
“Damn, you had us going.” Tanner shook his head, exhaling heavily.
“Sorry,” Kris mumbled, staring back into the ice cream. “So where’d you guys get the access codes to the kitchens?”
“Tradition,” Tanner said.
Kris squinted at him.
“There’s sorta this tradition,” Baz explained, his eyes returning to normal, “with the upperclassmen and this refer unit. We, ah, we did a little recon a while back and then . . . kinda filled in the missing pieces.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“Didn’t wanna get ya in trouble.” Tanner’s look as he offered the excuse was unconvincing. Kris opened her mouth to retort, but the sound of the door opening interrupted her.
“What’s with the ice cream?” Minx asked.
“We won a bet,” Baz answered smoothly. “Want some?”
Minx humphed. Kris pushed herself away from the table. “Here, you can use my spoon,”—wiping it on her fatigues—“I’m finished.”
“Yeah, okay.” Minx accepted the spoon, wiped it again and sat down. “You guys hear the speech?”
“What speech?”
“The Speaker’s speech, of course. He stepped down tonight. They had it on all the monitors. Don’t any of you keep up on current events?” All three of them shook their heads.
“What’d he say?” Asked Baz.
“He talked about that ultimatum they proposed. Said it was a prelude to war.”
“Seriously?” For all the reports and rumors and gossip of the past month, most still thought it wouldn’t amount to much, Baz and Tanner among them. Kris hadn’t bothered to form an opinion.
Minx took a dainty bite of the softening ice cream and nodded.
“Shit,” Tanner breathed. “They really gonna do it?”
Minx shrugged, licking off the spoon before she dipped it again. “With a new Speaker—and I hear the Archon is on his way out—I betcha they do.” Silence as three young minds grappled with the formerly abstract concept to war. Minx seemed to have made hers up.
“Y’know,” she said after the interval, “they commissioned cadets as midshipmen for active service during the last war.”
“Y’know,” Baz said while Tanner was not-so-discreetly rolling his eyes, “they only did that cuz the ca
sualty rates during the first two years were so high they started running out of officers.”
Minx gave an elaborate shrug while she licked up a bite. “That was last time. I think it’d be cool to serve.”
“Oh boy . . .” Tanner sighed under his breath and Baz got up. “Yeah, a real picnic,” he said. “I’m done. Go ahead and finish that.”
Chapter Fifteen
CEF Academy
Deimos, Mars
The government of Nedaema fell. The Archon was removed in a resounding vote of no confidence, and in the general election that followed five weeks later, the pacifists lost half their seats and the former opposition took firm control, the first non-coalition government Nedaema had elected since the turn of the century. Lysander Gayle, the new Archon, used the occasion of his victory announcement to make a fiery speech, and the media came alive with stories of turmoil, havoc and threats of war.
The Bannerman ambassador chose this moment to make an ill-timed and pointedly undiplomatic comment to the Second Secretary of the Nedaeman Foreign Office. It seemed likely that the comment was meant to be private, but it was made in a public forum and overheard. Gayle, suddenly worried about escalating the situation, took no notice, but he reckoned without his friend, Zenda Alpernius, a grand senator from Messier who was facing a stiff reelection challenge. Senator Alpernius calculated that the time was ripe to be incensed, and without consulting Gayle, he no longer being a member of the chamber, revived the specter of his ultimatum, happily languishing in committee since it had done its work. So now the new Archon watched with growing alarm as this bastard stepchild of his ambition began to grow legs.
Speaker Gauthier, mindful of her slim majority and nervous about straining her untried political muscles, temporized. The Bannerman President-for-Life ordered his fleet units at Callindra 69, a fortified outer base, to deploy. In response, the Plenary Council voted to direct CNO to order the CEF Third Fleet, under Vice Admiral Burton, to sortie to Wogan’s Reef, the junction that secured the main transit to Bannerman space from the League’s side.
Fleet Admiral Westover, unwilling to be pulled into a game of brinksmanship by career politicians who had no actual skin in the game (however much they valued their political hides), demurred, pointing out the inherent dangers of such an operation—besides, the ‘training’ exercises PrenTalien had directed Admiral Burton to carry out were already covering that approach—and instead detached Third Fleet’s Task Force 34 under Rear Admiral Lo Gai Sabr and sent it to New Madras to keep an eye on Bannerman activities from there. Critically, he would be much better placed to observe the main Bannerman fleet at Tarakan, as well as cover any moves attempted by Cathcar or Lacaille.
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