The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set

by Owen R O'Neill

  Most of this had been covered in the meeting, and Trin waited for the punch line.

  With a knowing smile, he delivered it. “And then there’s Mankho. If we could get a line on his whereabouts, we could queer their pitch on this ultimatum nonsense, couldn’t we?”

  “Yessir”—with a nascent smile as the picture began to come into focus.

  “I have a notion that slavers have a damn sight better idea where he is than the Bannermans do. We’ve never considered slavers much of a resource in that regard, but I’m thinking it may be time to expand our horizons. What do you think?”

  Trin was already thinking, and had been since he uttered Mankho’s name. “It has a lot of merit, sir. I don’t imagine you’ll be including this in the standard op-plan?”

  “After what happened on Lacaille? No.”

  That answered Trin’s unspoken question.

  “So someone would need to be assigned to carry out this part of the operation. Someone not directly under Captain Lawrence, but assigned in an advisory capacity?” PrenTalien replied to that with a nod. “Commander Huron would be a logical choice, I believe.”

  “I agree there,” the admiral said. Huron had been promoted to lieutenant commander five months ago and assigned to Task Force 34 as Lo Gai’s staff operations officer. It was perfectly reasonable that on a delicate mission of this type the admiral’s ops officer would go along, although of course he could not be, in effect, demoted to serve on the senior captain’s staff, even if the captain was allowed a commodore’s billet. “So you think it’s doable?”

  “Well, sir, there are a lot of questions that would have to be answered. We would need a much better understanding than we currently have of slavers just to determine who is worth interrogating. We don’t have the time or the resources to just round up slavers and send them back for interrogation. We need a reliable means of triage to have any chance of recovering useful data.”

  “What’s it take to do that? Develop a decent triage method?”

  “Our data on slavers is all top-level. Slavers tend to deal on a personal basis, face-to-face, not through organized institutional networks. So we’d need someone who knows who’s who in the slaver community.” Trin paused. “I can only think of one person who might have any insight there.”

  “That girl, if I take your meaning.” PrenTalien had clearly been following the same logic to the same conclusion. “The one who supplied all that data. The medicos had their knickers in a twist over her. What was her name?”

  “Loralynn Kennakris, sir.”

  “That’s right. Knew Huron pretty well too, as I heard.”

  Trin allowed herself a look of guarded pique. “Yes, sir. But not in the way commonly assumed. And she’s a cadet now. A flight-officer candidate.”

  “So I recall. Made a bit of rumble at the time.” The admiral blanked the charts and squeezed past her and back to his seat, where he appeared to be considering the slim stack of reports he’d retained. “You really think she could help?”

  “Commander Huron would be the best person to assess that, I think, sir.”

  PrenTalien nodded and tapped the page under his hand; Jackson Holder’s letter, she saw.

  “Well enough. Have a sit-down with him and see what he thinks. He’ll be here day after tomorrow for the Quarterlies, in any case.”

  Trin could pretty well guess what Huron would think. “Yes, sir. I’ll do that.”

  “Russ will have to be read in, of course,” PrenTalien added with the air of an afterthought. “And I imagine CID will want their hack, too.”

  “We’ll have to inform them, at least, sir. Given the subject matter.”

  He continued to squint at the letter, scanning a finger down the passages. “Let’s hope they won’t want to clutter things up too much.”

  “I don’t think they’ll interfere. If we play it right.”

  “Very good.” He looked up with a smile. “Keep me in the loop and we’ll see where this leads.” Trin gathered up her materials and prepared to leave. “Say,” he forestalled her. “How’s Nick doing? You see much of him lately?”

  “Off and on, sir.” Trin shifted the bundle to her other arm. Nick and the admiral were old, old friends, but this was no mere casual pleasantry. “Have you heard from him recently?”

  “Emailed me this AM, in fact. Wanted to know what odds I’d accept to take Vasquez over Yu in the upcoming, should they both make it to the finals.”

  Most people seemed to take that as a foregone conclusion, which was about the extent of Trin’s knowledge of the affair. But the real import was that Nick was also being markedly silent about his suspicions. “And how did you respond, sir?”

  “Haven’t yet. A lot of people have gone broke betting against old Fred. But then I recall the thumpings Vasquez would hand out back when.” His recollections here were far from academic, as Joss PrenTalien was the only flag officer in League history to win the All-Forces Unarmed Combat Tournament. He’d met both of them on the mat numerous times and retained a most lively appreciation of their skills. “What do you think?”

  She smiled, for the question was an in-joke between them. “I’m afraid that transcends my professional expertise, sir.”

  “I’ll have to mull it over then.” Still smiling, he stuffed the documents into a folio. “Carry on, Commander. Now it seems I must go waste precious moments that will never be recovered answering that beastly letter.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  CEF HQ, Mare Nemeton

  Nedaema, Pleiades Sector

  “I know it was my suggestion.” Trin Wesselby poured herself another cup of black coffee. “Just because it’s the only way I can think of to go about this doesn’t mean it’s a good way.”

  “Were you expecting me to talk you out of it?” Rafe Huron, who was still nursing his first cup, looked at her across its rim.

  The commander returned to her desk and sat with a graceless, agitated motion—as graceless as she could be, Huron thought. Which still set a fairly high standard for most people. If Trin noticed his scrutiny, she didn’t show it. Of course, Trin Wesselby excelled at not showing things.

  “Rafe, we’re basing the concept for this whole op on a single source—”

  “—who is known to have reported reliably in the past,” he finished for her, quoting directly from ONI’s analysis guidelines.

  Shaking her head, Trin slouched back in her chair. “You’re not going to be any help at all. Are you?”

  Huron made a broad gesture with the hand not occupied with his coffee cup. “Trin, if you wanted me to come here and play devil’s advocate, you should’ve put that in the memo. You asked me what I thought, and what I think is the idea has a lot of merit. Yes, it’s dicey. Certainly it’s not the way we’d like to do things. But from what you’ve told me already, hasn’t the likeable ship broken orbit already?”

  Trin orbited her coffee under her nose and set it down. “You have a point.”

  “Of course, it would be good to narrow things down as much as possible. Are you picking up any signals yet? It should be about time.”

  “Yes and no. Yes, we are detecting some faint signals off of Lacaille. No, they don’t tell us much of anything. The corvette was probably destroyed by ground fire, but we don’t know how they detected it. The operative theory is that they didn’t vary their orbit enough. It’s just possible the defense net got a ghost beep off it, and when they came around on the next pass they maintained their track—do that enough times and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out who you are.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “I said that’s the operative theory. Not my theory.”

  “What does everyone else think?”

  “Define everyone.”

  Huron shrugged with an open-handed gesture. When Trin got into this mood, it was usually better just to let her talk.

  “Since Nedaema has a new government and the orgy of finger-pointing has died down, most people have lost interest. A
few outlets are still flogging the story but no one is paying much attention. The official response was initially so incoherent people are pretty well satisfied that it’s just a case of government bungling.”

  She paused, rubbing her lower lip with an index finger. “You know they arrested that guy who put out the mash-up of the firefight, don’t you?”

  “No. I missed that. How’d they justify that?”

  “Badly. First they said the video had enough ‘potentially valid’ details in it to make him a person of interest—unquote. Sent this poor woman out to brief the media on it. Then they got caught when someone ID’d the clips he used to put the whole thing together. So then they said their spokesperson misspoke and hung her out to dry. That only confirmed people’s opinion they were just trying to cover up their incompetence.”

  “Not like the former Archon to bungle something that badly.”

  “He didn’t. The Foreign Secretary was feeling a lot of heat and needed a distraction while she got her story together. Thought she could feed this guy to the media to buy some time and then explain it away afterwards. Typical of a political appointee trying to get clever.”

  “What happened to the guy?”

  “The vid author? He’s still under arrest.”

  “For making a video?”

  “Sort of. Turns out he had a prior conviction for malicious slander and virtual trespassing. Terms of his sentence prohibit him from posting anything to the clouds.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He was on this personal antislavery crusade—”

  “At least his heart was in the right place.”

  “Sort of. He made these ‘documentaries,’ he called them, exposing ‘tools of the slave trade’—real conspiracy theory stuff. He’d go after just about everyone who is anyone.”

  “Did I at least get a cameo?”

  “In a manner of speaking. You and your father were held up as paragons of righteousness.”

  “I think I just got my feelings hurt.”

  “Do tell. Anyway, then he got ambitious and went after Jackson Holder.”

  “That’s ambitious?” The combative CEO of Caelius Protogenos had more enemies than he had hair follicles. Slandering him was a favored way of breaking the ice at cocktail parties.

  “More specifically, he went after Holder’s daughter. Hacked her Zeta account.”

  “Okay. That’s ambitious.”

  “Turns out she’d posted quite a number of private videos there. Intimate get-togethers with a few dozen of her closest friends. That sort of thing. The proceedings tended to get a little outré—even by New Californian standards.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m sure you do. He put together what you might call a highlight reel and included it in one of his documentaries to demonstrate the perfidy of Holder senior and show what he was spending his shareholders’ money on.”

  “Now let me see if I have this right: this guy made a video accusing Jackson Holder of procuring sex slaves for his daughter’s kinky parties?”

  “You should really come over to the intel side, Rafe. Your perspicacity never fails to amaze.”

  That was either a jibe or a genuine compliment. Either way, Huron ignored it. “I’m a little surprised he still has the use of his limbs.”

  “He might be too. Certainly he seems comfortable enough in Nedaeman custody.”

  “So it’s a win-win. What’s the feeling inside the community?” Guiding the conversation back to the subject at hand.

  “Not that much different than outside it.” Trin’s expression had settled into a decided scowl. “The Board still meets—in fact, it met again last week to review the lightspeed data we’re starting to collect. As usual, that generated more heat than light.”

  Huron knew the Board in question: the League had established it at Nedaema’s request to independently investigate the failure of the Lacaille operation. He knew most of the people on it, too. With a few exceptions, generating light was not among their outstanding qualities.

  “So they are falling in with the general consensus?”

  “I think so. The final postmortems aren’t all in yet, but the prevailing opinion seems to be that the op plan was fragile, the team underestimated the opposition or somehow blundered and the Lacaille forces caught them by surprise.”

  Huron agreed with the first and third points.

  “The Messian rep even quoted ‘never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.’ I think Mayfield would have strangled him, if he could have found a protocol that covered it.”

  Carter Mayfield was the deputy head of NDIA’s counterintelligence branch; Huron had testified before him during the Alecto investigation. The idea of the short, stuffy Nedaeman trying to figure out how to strangle a corpulent Messian aristocrat ‘by the book’ was irresistibly droll.

  “I suppose it’s lucky then that Nedaema’s not a dueling culture.”

  “If they were, half the Board would be fertilizer now.” Trin’s scowl twisted at the edges. “Of course, now that I come to think of it . . .”

  Huron cleared his throat diplomatically. “No one’s raising any red flags, then.”

  Trin flipped both hands—exasperation mingled with disgust. “No one’s really looking for them. The new government isn’t interested in digging too far into the failures of the old one, and those people who’ve survived the purges are keeping their heads down. I think there’s a hope that this asinine ultimatum will moot the whole question one way or another and honor will somehow be satisfied.”

  The way things were heading, it certainly did look as though there was a good chance the whole question would be moot—once the shooting started. He nodded. “So I think you’ve just talked yourself into going ahead with this. Based on what you’ve told me, what have we got to lose?”

  Sagging back in her chair, Trin regarded her almost untouched coffee, which had achieved room temperature some time ago. “You are wasted over there. Do you think she’ll agree to cooperate?”

  “Kris? Maybe. If we can avoid treating her like a subhuman who’s just learned to wear shoes.” Kris’s interview with NDIA regarding the Alecto investigation had lasted all of two minutes. The interviewer had seen fit to start off with “Now, young woman, you are in the Homeworlds, and I want to you to understand that it is very, very important that you tell the truth.” Things had gone downhill from there, and the interviewer hadn’t yet reached the verb of her third sentence when Kris got up and left. Personally, Huron, when he’d heard about it, commended her restraint.

  “NDIA won’t be involved,” Trin said succulently; she’d heard the same story.

  “It would be good to keep participants to a minimum, and I imagine the Academy would prefer that anyway. Have they agreed yet, by the way? Hoste is a bit doctrinaire about protocol and he may not be entirely happy about our wanting to hijack a first-year cadet. Especially given the security implications.”

  “I’m going to Nereus on other business, so I plan on talking to them personally—find out their ground rules before we get deeper into this. My faith in v-mail isn’t so high just now.”

  “That’s convenient.”

  “You know how ONI is fond of holding coordination meetings. Besides, I’m a bit overdue for my annual security update.”

  “Come to think of it, I probably am too. Maybe I should tag along. Save a lot of time that way.”

  “Be my guest. As long as you can be reasonably discreet about it.”

  “I suspect it’s time for the admiral to send out a memo upbraiding us lax staff officers for not keeping all our certs current.”

  “That should do it.”

  “What are your thoughts about attending the meeting then? If it happens?”

  “I can’t say yet. This should be as low-profile as possible. We’ll have to include someone from CID, since we’re talking about slaver ops, and SECNAV will want to send a senior navy rep. And you, of course, since you’ll be the mission’s ops offi
cer. I’d like to keep it to that.”

  Three wasn’t too many. SECNAV—Huron did not think they would be a problem. Their operations people weren’t likely to be fussy as long as they saw the right boxes were being checked. Inviting CID was a professional courtesy and also to ensure they didn’t crash the party—and vice versa. But there was still the issue of why they were questioning a cadet on such a sensitive topic in the first place.

  “How do we explain Kris?”

  “As far as ONI and CID are concerned, she’s a PLESIG-vetted asset.”

  “A reliable HUMINT source?”

  “Actually, no. She’s officially listed as just a knowledgeable resource. That way she’s not associated with any specific events.”

  “And d’Harra and the Inner Trifid are still the fruits of tech exploitation.”

  “That’s our story and we’re sticking to it”—with the glimmer of a smile.

  That should fly, Huron thought, if they could avoid getting a busybody with an enthusiasm for connecting the dots. “Any idea who CID might be sending?”

  “If we’re clever about scheduling it and don’t give them any more notice than we absolutely have to, I think we can ensure it will be someone relatively harmless. The higher-ups hate these things.”

  “Excellent. They’re in the middle of War Week right now, so we’ll have to wait until after the end of the term to schedule this anyway. That should provide plenty of flexibility on the timing.”

  “Quite. I’ll keep you in the loop, and once I’ve talked to them, we’ll plan accordingly.”