The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set

by Owen R O'Neill

  Seeing their destroyer disappear in a blaze of light and their frigate a tumbling hulk, they broke raggedly and burned hard for the safety of their orbital base. Within a minute, the LMAC and the corvette guarding the packet followed them. Minx’s flight came in unopposed and effected the rescue without further incident.

  The three of them glided down the passageway together. There was a debriefing to go to before she could collapse completely, but Baz was busy with his xel; messages were already flying far and wide. He scrolled through several and grinned at her. “Oh my god! It was a boggart! Y’know you just made history, Kris? No one’s ever beaten a boggart before. Not ever!”

  “Knock it off, Baz,” Kris said, vaguely embarrassed by his effusions. “You guys made the torp runs—I didn’t really do anything.”

  Baz laughed out loud. “God! Listen to yourself! You didn’t do anything! Yeah, right.” Still laughing, he shook his head and held up his xel. “You know why they bolted?”

  Kris shook her head.

  “They thought they were being boggarted! They thought giving them light capital ships was a sucker play and we got something even better!” He laughed again, louder. “Lord, I can’t wait to see their faces when they find out . . .”

  Chapter Nineteen

  CEF Academy Orbital Campus

  Deimos, Mars, Sol

  The victory was a nine-days’ wonder throughout the Academy, but by the evening of the second day it had become a singularly uncomfortable one as well. The faces Basmartin couldn’t wait to see were every bit as astonished as might be wished or even more so, but the gratification that had been expected was not forthcoming. Official scoring was delayed, pending the outcome of a formal hearing, to be held on Deimos the day after tomorrow, into the precise circumstances of the victory. By firing on two ships in ambush position first, Kris had interpreted the rules of engagement rather liberally, and that, combined with a lack of any reliable info about how she’d accomplished it, had the rumor mill churning at full speed, producing a flood of speculation in which Kris had already been reprimanded, expelled, crucified, or exonerated and given a formal cheer.

  The hearing was the outcome—the reluctant outcome, for formal hearings were not comfortable for either students or staff and the Commandant especially felt they did not tend toward the smooth running of the institution—of an AM meeting, downside at the main Cape York campus, involving the Commandant, Kris’s instructors, and other concerned staff (which was most of them). It produced a consensus that while Kris had certainly acted aggressively, she had not transgressed the bounds allowed to an active, zealous officer when confronted with an ambush. Beyond that, only three things were clear: that a hearing was unavoidable, that there was no firm evidence of wrongdoing, and that Kris’s explanation to Commander Buthelezi, while offered with every appearance of frankness and sincerity, could not be attempted to be believed. The meeting broke up in an atmosphere of singular dissatisfaction, all the more burdensome for having no specific focus for its discontent, and the staff left with little more than a feeling that they were being handled in some obscure way, and that they resented it.

  Naomi Buthelezi lingered at the request of Commandant Hoste. Ambrose Hoste had a reputation as a fine mathematician and a good administrator, and he’d been known as a solid fighting captain in his younger days but no kind of fire eater. A spare man of medium height with the flesh lying close over the angular bones of his long, deeply-lined, amiable face, he often projected a grandfatherly air but he certainly was not doing so now. He was just a year from retirement, his tenure had been unremarkable and he very much wanted to keep it so—the prospect of scandal was wonderfully disagreeable—and the dissatisfaction of the meeting affected him most severely.

  After the room finally emptied, he let that dissatisfaction settle more deeply on his narrow, aged features. Hoste and Naomi were old shipmates—she had served as his flag lieutenant during his last active command—and this, in addition to her being Superintendent of Student Affairs, allowed a rare degree of openness between them, an openness which he now called upon.

  “Naomi, in all candor, do you think she’s lying?”

  “I would not like to believe it, Ambrose,” answered Naomi, who had taken a liking to her gifted, withdrawn, oddly magnetic student. “She’s performed exceptionally well in most things prior to this, and while she’s not particularly popular, the others still look to her as a leader. You’ve seen the results of War Week. She tends to dominate whatever team she’s on even though I think she’d rather not, and even when some of the other team members resent it. But they still fall in with her—it’s still her plan that ends up being adopted, even when someone else is nominally the exercise leader.”

  “Yes.” Hoste pulled at his jaw. Kris had won every engagement she’d been involved in, often in overwhelming fashion, although in several cases the cost had been rather higher than usually considered acceptable. “I fear it may be distorting—that the cadets may not feel the need to exert themselves around her.”

  “I’m not sure that’s exactly true,” Naomi demurred. “In some cases, she seems to inspire them to some remarkable efforts—the torpedo attacks by Cadets Basmartin and Tanner in this last exercise is a particular example—but when it comes to exerting independent leadership, I fear you’re right.”

  “Yes,” he began, “it would be unfortunate if the preferred solution to tactical problems devolved to asking the opinion of one cadet. But . . .” They were in danger of getting rather far afield here and Hoste waved distractedly at the digression. “But about this claim she’s making. Is it at all credible?”

  “Well, if it isn’t, we have to accept that she beat the system in some other way. She was not in contact with anyone outside Blue Team before the exercise began. There were no data transmissions to her xel, and when she began the exercise, all she did was link the nav data from one of the corvettes to her simulator—perfectly allowable.”

  “And the corvettes were not primed to produce those new convolutions? We’re certain of that?”

  “The referees insist that data integrity was maintained and there was no way for someone to upload those new convolutions for her. And even if someone did manage it and then deleted the data set, they’d have to have recreated all the logs and all the signatures for us to not find some trace of it—that just doesn’t seem possible. So frankly, Ambrose, either she’s telling the truth or we have to face the fact that she and some accomplice managed to defeat all our security and leave no trace behind. I can’t say which I find more incredible.”

  Those had been always the only possible options; that, however, did nothing to improve the Commandant’s outlook. “But have you ever heard of such a thing?”

  “I asked Commander Olson that. He said that he’d heard similar claims made for a few very experienced officers—there was one long-retired officer, I don’t recall his name, who reportedly did something similar at the beginning of the last war—but Olson said he had never met anyone who could do it, nor did he know anyone who had. So it seems it may be possible, but certainly the capability is very rare.”

  “Very experienced officers.” Hoste looked slowly from side to side, but whatever he sought was not in reach. “There were reservations, you know, about admitting her—strong, I believe, in some quarters—but they were overruled. Her records are sealed.” This he had learned from his request prior to the AM’s meeting for the standard background check on Kennakris (Loralynn), of Parson’s Acre Colony. The terse memo he’d received in response was open now on his desk. He drummed his thumb on his chair arm.

  “How are the cadets taking it?”

  “As far as I can tell, about half seem to think that since the scenario was no-win, cheating to get around it was fine, even laudable. Most of the rest resent it, but I suspect that’s because they can’t figure out how she did it. And some probably also resent that she had the guts to go through with it.”

  “Well, a damned awkward business, at all
events.” The drumming stopped; he consulted the memo. It told him nothing new. “You say she has not many friends?”

  “That’s my impression. She’s not easy to approach and frankly she tends to make people feel ill at ease.”

  Hoste was certainly beginning to appreciate that. “Thank you, Naomi. I suppose it’s time to talk to Sergeant Major Yu.”

  When it came to making people feel ill-at-ease, few succeeded better than Sergeant Major Yu. In part, it was his semi-legendary status as the senior member of the Strike Rangers; in part, it was his record of accomplishment, which had been amassed over more than half a century and would take an afternoon to read out; and partly it was Yu himself—he was the iconic sergeant major to the teeth, imposing resistless military perfection on all around him.

  Commandant Hoste was immune to most of these sources of unease: officers of his seniority were not easily imposed upon, and while two men could not well be more different in temperament, Hoste being from the mathematical navy that liked its probabilities neatly defined and bounded, whereas Yu was from the part that throve in the maelstrom, Hoste had genuine respect and liking for Yu. Yet he did have some cause for unease, because he knew that Yu had sources of information—some official, most not—that were not available to him, and under the present circumstances, and on top of the revelation of the sealed records, he found that profoundly irritating.

  The sergeant major was called into the Commandant’s office and on being told, “At ease, Sergeant Major—no ceremony,” assumed a comfortable parade rest.

  Hoste cleared his throat. “You will not object, if Commander Buthelezi is present for this meeting?”

  “Certainly not, sir.”

  The Commandant folded his hands and considered Yu over them. “You are aware of the, ah, controversy surrounding Cadet Kennakris and the latest exercise—particularly her explanation as to how the victory was accomplished.” It was not a question and, requiring no answer, it received none beyond a very slight inclination of Yu’s head. “So in the interest of expediency, allow me to simply ask: do you find her explanation credible?”

  “I’m afraid I cannot express an opinion of Cadet Kennakris’s abilities in that regard, sir.”

  The answer was delivered with all the precise and civil absence of inflection Hoste expected, and he sighed inwardly. “Have you an opinion you feel you can express?”

  “I would be most surprised if she cheated, sir.”

  “You don’t think she’d cheat even when she’s confronted with a no-win scenario?”

  “I’m not sure she is acquainted with the concept of a no-win scenario, sir.”

  That fascinating comment hung in the space between them for several beats. Hoste glanced at Naomi, who wore a pinched expression. “Sergeant Major . . .” Hoste paused, one pale, narrow finger tapping his chin. “What is your personal assessment of Cadet Kennakris?”

  “Permission to speak candidly, sir?”

  “Certainly, Sergeant Major.”

  “She’s a killer, sir.”

  The Commandant’s eyebrows climbed to a surprising degree, and the commander lost her pinched expression to startlement. “Anything else?” Hoste asked.

  “Yes, sir.” Hoste seemed to detect a change in Yu’s professionally bland visage, a gleam in the small dark eyes that he could not readily identify. Pride? “If something matters enough to her, she’ll go through Hell for it—and Hell will never be the same.”

  Trying hard to detect if Yu was suppressing a smile, the Commandant asked, “Have you any ideas on what such a thing might be?” That question was not strictly within proper bounds; Hoste expected no answer and he got none beyond a mechanical “Afraid not, sir,” and a glimmer of the smile Yu had in fact been suppressing.

  “If I may, Sergeant Major, would you go with her?”

  “Yes, I would, sir.” The smile broke out fully now—Hoste found it distinctly unnerving. “She wants some seasoning, but indeed I would.”

  Hoste nodded. “Thank you, Sergeant Major. It has been most edifying. Carry on.”

  The sergeant major saluted smartly, turned precisely on his booted heel and exited. Hoste emitted a breath ending in a disgruntled sound. “Well now. What do you think of that?”

  Naomi Buthelezi brought her hands together, slowly rubbing her palms. “I think it’s going to be quite the AM.”

  * * *

  “I told you!” Kris slammed the tablet she’d been reading on the mattress of her bunk, and Minx backed up quickly, fetching the backs of her knees up against a chair, which brought her down into the seat with a thump. Tanner put his hand on her shoulder, shieldingly, but Kris subsided.

  Naomi Buthelezi had a keen sense of her students, and in this case her assessment of the cadets’ attitudes was accurate even to the level of Kris’s study. Minx was suspicious and resentful, sure Kris had pulled off a spectacular cheat, the details of which she unaccountably refused to divulge. Tanner was uncomfortably neutral and Basmartin supported her, no matter what he believed—he refused to reveal what that was. Minx therefore assumed he had been in on it since the beginning.

  From the chair, Minx looked from Baz to Tanner, and not finding the support she sought, hunched down, crossed her arms and threw a leg over her knee, repeating under her breath what she’d said just moments earlier: “What bullshit—it’s a grad course—nobody can do that.”

  Kris watched her over the edge of the tablet she had picked up again. The article she’d been trying to read—an analysis of the famous victory at Anson’s Deep at the end of the last war—had lost all meaning, and her eyes had taken on that dangerous yellow glint.

  Minx measured the chill in the room, mumbled something about needing to go to the library, levered herself out of the chair, grabbed her tablet and left. Kris watched her go, then closed the tablet and swung her legs out of the bunk.

  “Not going to the library, are you?” Basmartin asked from the other side of the room.

  “No.” Kris stood up. “Target practice.”

  Baz put down the tablet he was reading.

  Kris shook her head. “I’m just gonna go see if a simulator’s free.”

  * * *

  The fighter was running, running as hard as he could, and although Kris was gaining, she was not gaining nearly fast enough. There was no finesse now, no maneuvering, just a race against time. She was pushing her damaged engines way past red-line to try to close—the alarms had been scolding her for the last ten minutes—and firing carefully spaced bursts from her plasma cannon in hopes of hitting a drive node, making him veer—anything to close the range.

  That was her only hope now, unless the chase blew its engines first—a not entirely unrealistic possibility; the chase could not be in much better shape than she was. A couple of minutes would decide it either way: in addition to burning her engines, she was burning her emergency fuel reserve, and it would already take a near-miracle to get her home. Very soon, not even that would help.

  An hour ago, Kris had strapped into the simulator and accepted the third single-fighter mission that came up: a convoy op. The objective was to attack and disable two replenishment ships escorted by a corvette and three long-range fighters. It was not the most advanced op, nor was it particularly realistic—no single fighter would ever be tasked to engage such a convoy, and it was pretty unlikely that any such convoy would actually sail—but that was all beside the point.

  The exercise was intended to teach navigation, proper stealth-approach technique and hit-and-run tactics. It was not expected, or even desired, that the replenishment ships should be destroyed—a mobility kill was what was called for—and the fighters and the corvette were there to make the odds too high to allow a conventional attack. But among cadets, the real objective of this exercise was the fabled sweep: disabling both ships and the corvette and destroying all three fighters. It could be done—it had been done on a tiny handful of occasions—but not by Kris. She’d come close several times, but the last success was decades ago
; the cadet who’d done it was Rafael Huron.

  She had come close this time too—but even if she got this last fighter, she would fall short of the mark. Although her stealth attack on the corvette had been a brilliant success and she’d taken down two of the fighters in short order, they’d gotten in several hits that had reduced her shields to thirty percent and damaged a drive node, and her attack on the replenishment ships had left one limping away while the last fighter fled. She had given chase in the hope of destroying the fighter and then returned to finish off the crippled ship. That hope had disappeared long ago, and now Kris was determined to nail the chase if it was the last thing she ever did, which—as far as the simulation was concerned—it very likely would be.

  She pushed her engines harder; the alarms rose to a shriek and a flashing red warning filled almost her entire forward screen. Ignoring both, she drew a final bead on the chase, squeezed the trigger of the plasma cannon and held it. Plasma bursts lanced towards the fleeing fighter, exploding in searing white flowers, far-distant, as the alarms built to a crescendo and the chase suddenly yawed.

  Instantly, she released the trigger and eased back on the throttle. The alarms paused, recomputed and resumed their former, less urgent tones. The chase had lost a drive node—whether to her fire or overloading she could not tell—and was wallowing. She ghosted into neutron gun range, opened fire, watched the twin purple-silver lines stab him in the spar roots. His armor boiled and in a flash, he was gone. But she did not feel the rush, the burst of exultation she usually did when she scored a victory, and it was almost a relief when, moments later, the claxon sounded, the screen went dark and the simulator cracked open.