The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set

by Owen R O'Neill

  “You do appear to have insights we lack.”

  “No—” Kris chewed her lip. Where’d they get this idea she was some fucking miracle worker? “Look, the Inner Trifid was Trench’s sandbox. The fix was in, the Feds took their end—it was business. Hydra’s not like that. We went there—a couple of times a cycle maybe—but just to bid when they had a big lot sale or for maintenance stopovers or to crew up or . . . other stuff. It’s mostly all Bannerman anyway, so it’s not like you can just bang in there and hit someplace.” She shifted, antsy and restless. “So—I . . . still don’t know what you guys want.”

  “Well, there’s Thing One and Thing Two.” Which was about the weirdest thing she’d heard him say (out of his decided penchant for saying weird things), because Thing One and Thing Two were characters from a bedtime story her father would act out for her when she was little. Fragments of the ancient rhyme began to flit about in her mind and she shook her head, distracted and annoyed.

  “Thing One,” Huron continued, “is that since we rolled up the Inner Trifid, the slavers have moved more aggressively into the Hydra. Indications are there’s more cooperation going on there than in the past with the Tyrsenians taking an even bigger role. We’re not quite sure who’s in bed with who and to what degree—it’s likely things are shifting about quite a bit. I appreciate that you don’t have the keys like you did for the Inner Trifid, but what you know is still likely to be of help. That routine in there was to present your bona fides and convince them you are an asset we need to employ.”

  “I’m an asset.”

  “In their terminology.”

  “So what’s Thing Two?”

  “The part they don’t know about.”

  “They don’t?” That scarcely seemed possible.

  “This is where things get—eh, ticklish.”

  “Whazzat mean?” Nothing good, she supposed.

  “Thing Two is Mankho.”

  A tingling warmed her cheeks and scampered down her arms to her fingers. So she was right after all. “I dunno anything about Mankho.”

  “Not directly, no,” Huron said, speaking gingerly. “But Trench was associated with him to a degree—that’s how Mariwen ended up on Harlot’s Ruse.”

  She tried not to wince, and he did a good job of not noticing that she tried.

  “After Lacaille, Mankho went to ground—we have no leads. He’s shut down almost anything we could use to track him. But slaves are his main line. We know he’s still active, and now that the nexus has shifted, we think there’s a decent chance almost all his trade is going through the Hydra. But we don’t know where, and we don’t know who. Though it’s likely to be people who dealt with Trench.”

  “So . . .” Kris swallowed. “You want me to see if I can ID any of Trench’s buddies you might sweep up.”

  “Or anything else. We understand what you said about long-term slaves, but there are different possibilities here. We don’t have the time to conduct comprehensive interrogations of whoever we get, and we don’t have a good enough idea where to start looking. We also lack the time to do the kind of workup that could give us these answers, so it all boiled down to asking you. That’s a compliment, by the way.” Noting the look on her face.

  “So how’s all this gonna play?”

  “Ostensibly, we’re after Thing One. That’s in the works and a task group is already fitting out. Deployment is slated to last two months. If you agree, I’ve been authorized by the admiral to submit a recommendation to SECNAV that you be rated midshipman to accompany the mission as an advisor.”

  “With you?”

  “I’m the assigned ops officer, so yes. You and I will be the only ones who know about Thing Two.”

  “So what happens if I say no?”

  “We saddle up and take our best shot. And I’ll have a few more private questions, if that’s okay.”

  “Ah . . . Okay.”

  “This is no cakewalk, Kris. This is throwing you into the deep end.”

  That coaxed out a smile. “Without a paddle?”

  “Something along those lines, yes.”

  Kris shrugged. “Well, shit, then. I didn’t have plans anyway.”

  “Take your time. The Navy Department is going to balk at rating a midshipman, and who knows what other objections they might gin up. They like things orthodox and this is anything but. And these assignments can be tedious as all hell—right up until they become a shit storm in an airlock. That’s what the recruiting propaganda calls an adventure. On the other hand”—he spread both of his—“maybe we get lucky.”

  She echoed the gesture. “So what do you want me to do?”

  He stood. “First, I think we should probably cease inflaming overactive imaginations any more than we already have.”

  “What d’ya mean?”

  “Any chance you know a female cadet, about this tall”—he held his hand at shoulder level—“slim, long black hair, long legs, bit of an attitude?”

  “Sounds like Minx.”

  “Yeah, that would fit.”

  “She fuck’n lurking?”

  “Might call it a reconnaissance in force.”

  “Bitch.”

  “Don’t take it so hard. The envy of the masses, y’know. We’ve got a day—go think about it.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Port Sutherland

  Mars, Sol

  She thought about it—for almost as long as it took to exit the building. In truth, there was never any real question in her mind. Whatever Huron had said about cakewalks and deep ends and airlocks, the overriding fact was that the prospect of so much time on her hands alone filled her with consternation, and that was spiked with the additional worry of where to spend it. As a cadet, she wasn’t allowed to travel out-system without clearance, and the options she faced all struck her as less than congenial.

  Mars, the oldest settled extraterrestrial planet by a century, had in the view of many (especially the descendants of the original colonists) become a bureaucratic hellhole, a charge with substantial truth to it since the League capital of Nereus sprawled across a huge chunk of the narrow equatorial zone, and eight of ten inhabitants worked for the government. Otherwise, human settlement had taken a light hand on Mars, aside from importing enough air to make the atmosphere breathable (close to a billion cubic kilometers of refined gases brought from Venus by the Mars Air Line; perhaps the greatest engineering feat mankind had ever pulled off), and the planet retained its stark beauty, but what mattered to Kris was that it reminded her all too much of Parson’s Acre.

  Venus, on the other hand, was just creepy. When it was originally colonized, Venus still had its dense, highly corrosive atmosphere in which breathable air was a lifting gas, so the first settlements were encapsulated stations floating at high altitudes where the temperature, pressure, and available sunlight were suitable. Although the Venusian atmosphere was now benign and the surface temperature no longer hot enough to melt lead, the Venusians themselves had never lost their taste for floating cities, and if there was one thing Kris disliked more than being in a gravity well, it was being in a gravity well where you could fall thirty kilometers before you hit something.

  The Belt sounded kind of fun, but visas weren’t easy to come by and living space there was at a premium—waiting lists for everything—and her cadet status did not get her preferred treatment like it did on Mars. Earth, which from what little news she followed appeared to be a planet-sized insane asylum, was right out.

  In view of the options, she’d waited what she hoped was a decent interval before telling Huron she was in, and had spent the hours since trying not to get her hopes up. Huron was a hard person to read, but you could always tell when he was serious about something—at least she could. It was certainly true the Admiralty could balk—that any number of things could get in the way—but Huron had looked like he wasn’t about to take no for an answer, and Kris had a strong if rather indistinct faith in that look.

  She hadn’t seen Huron s
ince she’d left Nedaema a little over eight standard months ago. Her acceptance to the Academy had been pretty much a fait accompli, but since she still had to pass the preliminaries, she’d shipped out two months early and taken up residence here in Port Sutherland, the settlement adjacent to the Academy’s main campus at Cape York.

  So when he’d appeared so unexpectedly, promoted to lieutenant commander and now in a staff billet, it was almost as if she hadn’t seen him in years, except that her memories of those weeks on Nedaema were still so sharp. They’d spent quite a bit of time together—because of Mariwen, because she didn’t know another soul on the planet. It was a companionable time for the most part, but there was also a subtle friction that never quite abated; a matching of tempers, mutual respect and intrigue that (or at least, that she thought) was paired with a fair degree of innate understanding of each other.

  She knew he was cautious towards her, and while he was careful not to crowd (occasionally too careful, she sometimes felt), there was also a degree of protectiveness that often irritated her, but it all was mixed up with a strange, inchoate feeling that they were never really going to get out of each other’s company—almost as if, were they both wandering around in a crowded room blindfolded, they’d always end up next to each other.

  She knew Huron had a reputation in the Service as a brilliant though occasionally difficult officer. Although his results were unquestionably good, his methods were often unorthodox, he took more liberties than some felt were quite right and he was devilishly difficult to pin down. Huron had a certain lank elegance and he used it to great effect, both to disarm or, if he felt so inclined, to subtly needle. It showed in his look, his manner, and his voice too: a vague drawl, playing with the syllables as they crossed his tongue. He could be meltingly smooth, he could be sickeningly syrupy, he could be cuttingly sharp—sometimes all at once. No one knew which was the real Huron, although a lot of ladies spent uncounted nights in diligent research trying to find out. Despite all the rumors, and an underlying and not-quite-acknowledged sexual tension between them, Kris was not one of those ladies.

  It was complicated. He was complicated, her feelings were complicated and that would have been true even without the complicating factor of Mariwen, whose life she’d supposedly saved and whose current existence—for which she felt wholly responsible—was the cruelest thing she’d ever seen. None of it obeyed any calculus she was familiar with.

  The one thing that stood out from her tangled emotions were the flight lessons Rafe had given her during her last few weeks on Nedaema. She had never felt so wholly alive, so completely free and unburdened as when she was putting a flyer through its evolutions. And what made the whole thing truly astounding was that during their last week of lessons, he’d let her solo. That was not strictly legal, but here again Huron was something of a law unto himself. There were those who avowed he routinely abused his position; he had at least as many enemies as admirers (some even being one and the same), and while he was not nearly as black, or as glowing, as common report painted him, it was true that he let little—essentially nothing—get in his way once he determined he was right.

  And with Kris, he thought he was right. Time would test that assertion, but that was of little consequence then or now, and none at all to Kris. What mattered to her more than anything was that he’d believed in her. It was a gift beyond words, a gift she still could not expand her being enough to fully comprehend. From the first time she saw him in Arizona’s sickbay, he’d treated her as a person—not a commodity or a medical issue or a dangerous curiosity. The chaos of the next few weeks had masked that realization, and it had not really hit her until he’d helped her strap in to his flyer—his flyer!—handed over her helmet and said, “Okay, take her up and turn her loose. I’ve got your wing. Don’t fuck up.”

  That day—the whole week, but that day especially—was the most incredible she’d ever lived. The deep azure sky, the sweetly responsive flyer under her hand, the song of the engines, the tremendous raw power to be gentled or unleashed by the pressure of her fingertips . . . and then, overwhelming even these feelings, the time she’d asked, summoning all her nerve, to go sub-orbital. His voice had come back through her headset, calm, cool and assured: “Roger, Kris. That’s affirmative. Take her over the top.”

  She’d eased back the stick, opened the throttle and the sapphire roof of the sky had disappeared. A perfect darkness opened like a dream, infinitely deep and beckoning. She held her breath as she cut back the engines to switch to thrusters, and all sound died. Silence, the purity of the stars in that eternal night . . . freedom. It only lasted an hour—Nedaeman ATC was on the edge of apoplexy as it was—and she had to shake the tears out of her eyes so she could line up the vector for reentry.

  Finally, sitting there in the cockpit with wet cheeks after they landed, watching Huron walk across the apron with that easy gait, helmet swinging in his hand, whistling off-key and grinning. She could have kissed him. She would have kissed him, except that she never could have made it mean enough.

  * * *

  A little more than ninety-six hours later, Kris had her afternoon bath interrupted by the sound of a calling card. She’d taken rooms at one of Port Sutherland’s better hotels and paid extra for the luxury of a tub and an extended water ration. That still effectively limited her to just two baths a day, but she was entirely good with that.

  Even better, her system had finally made peace with the immunocytes and she was enjoying real food again, mostly mounds of mashed potatoes—the genuine article imported from Terra, not the Martian ones, which were orange and had a strangely sweet character she didn’t especially care for. Between the baths, the manifold joys of eating, and reveling in not being sick, she was feeling positively sybaritic, so much so she hadn’t even started to get bored yet.

  Wrapping her hair in the warm towel so it wouldn’t drip all over the plush carpet—the carpet would just have to deal with the droplets running off the rest of her—she padded into the bedroom and picked up the lit card.

  “Hi, Rafe.”

  “Hello, Kris.” Huron was used to her somewhat eccentric habits when it came to bathing and didn’t bat an eye. “SECNAV’s given us the go-ahead. So how about it? You ready to go catch bad guys?”

  Part II: Retribution

  King Henry V:

  The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,

  And the flesh'd soldier, rough and hard of heart,

  In liberty of bloody hand shall range,

  With conscience wide as hell . . .

  Shakespeare, Henry V: Act 3, Scene 3

  Chapter One

  LSS Retribution

  New Madras Outstation, Hydra Border Zone

  The last time Kris had boarded a CEF naval combatant she’d been carried on by an officer in combat armor and covered in Trench’s blood. Now she stood next to Huron, looking quite tall and handsome in the black dress uniform of an SRF flight officer, in the docking hatch of the cutter that had brought them from the dispatch boat Tyche to the side of the battlecruiser LSS Retribution. Tyche was a true flyer that had lived up to its name: the skipper delivered them in near-record time but at the cost of a rough passage; so rough that Kris, who’d known her share of rough passages, was still feeling a touch green as they waited for the boarding lamprey to latch on and seal to Retribution’s portside main hatch.

  The lock indicators cycled and the pressure blister in the hatch itself confirmed the presence of atmosphere on the other side. Kris pulled her shoulders back and tugged her own dress blues straighter, smoothing the imperceptible wrinkles. Naval Logistics Command had faced something of a conundrum when it came to outfitting a single midshipman. In the last war, the traditional uniform had been revived—an archaic-looking rig topped by, of all things, a shako—but it had been decommissioned immediately afterwards, and to go through the bother of getting approval to use it again and then produce just one, especially on short notice, was patently ridiculous. The compromise reached—a
n ensign’s blue uniform with an epaulet on the left shoulder only and no braid—suited Kris much better. The only peculiar note was that they had replaced the single star on the epaulet that indicated a line officer with a domed pin of the League emblem, an ellipsoidal design representing the League capitol and the thirteen Homeworlds, colloquially known as ‘Mars and Stars’. Kris thought it a trifle gaudy and unmilitary-looking, but she of course had not been consulted.

  Once the conundrum had been resolved, they’d loaded her down with a full kit. Being presented with a full set of ‘Ups & Downs’—Ups were the dark blue uniforms worn aboard ship, while Downs were the ‘reversed’ white uniforms worn when stationed planetside—along with her own suit of combat armor, left Kris somewhat puzzled as to what to do with it all. Cadets were only supplied with a single dress uniform and two working uniforms for everyday use, plus fatigues and an exercise rig. Aside from the dress uniform, those items and the entirety of her personal possessions comfortably filled one large duffle bag. Her new kit took up more than twice that, and then there was the armor to contend with. She didn’t think she could get it all in one trip, which meant making the cutter’s crew wait—an unpleasant prospect. Huron, being a lieutenant commander, had a batman who would look after his baggage, but whatever arrangements the Navy Department had seen fit to make for the only midshipman in the service, they undoubtedly did not include dealing with her gear too. And it would certainly be improper to ask him. But hopefully this boarding business wouldn’t take long and she’d make it back before they got testy.

  The hatches opened to the trill of an alarm, and Kris and Huron launched themselves into a smooth glide through the ten-meter lamprey. They negotiated the gravity gradient at Retribution’s big pressure lock deftly and landed together just inside the main hatch. Each branch of the Service had its own particular flag, with its own name, that was always prominently displayed and commanded the first respects of all visitors, flag officers not excepted. The SRF flew the Black Jack, a swallow-tailed guidon with silver wings above the unit insignia on a black field. The marines had the Red Ensign, a burgundy-and-gold design that retained the archaic sea-anchor-and-chain motif, while CEF warships all wore the Blue Peter, or ‘Old Pete’: a narrow isosceles triangle that had the ‘Mars and Stars’ emblazoned on a royal-blue field which was scattered with small white diamonds representing the colonies.