The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set

by Owen R O'Neill

  But it wrong. Just fucking wrong.

  Kris sat back on her heels, thoroughly discontented. She was wasting time. That goddamn marine was gonna come back here any second. The shower was clean inside and her scan suggested it hadn’t been used in a while. She leaned in, zoomed to max, set the filters to UV and flashed the seam around the bottom. Hot damn! Was that dust deep in the minute crevice? An ultrasonic shower shouldn’t accumulate dust in the seams—unless it hadn’t been used in a long, long time.

  Had this thing ever been used? Should she test it? She leaned farther in to inspect the controls. They looked perfectly normal, of course. Her gloved hand stopped short of the actuator. There was dust in that seam. She looked down. The drain. A real shower had to have a real drain. She knelt over it. Every suit of combat armor carried a plasma knife and a multi-bladed survival tool in the thigh pockets. She took out the survival tool, flipped open a flat blade and pried at the drain cover. It yielded without much struggle. The drain went down only a few centimeters before a right-angle bend. That didn’t seem right either. She shined her UV and IR lamps down the drain and snapped a composite.

  Dust sparkled. Lots of dust. Dust took forever to accumulate on a starship. The shower was a fake.

  She crawled out. Now all she had to do was find the releases. There oughta be two and they couldn’t be farther apart than a person could reach. The obvious place was the outside corners on the base. She felt around but her gloves were too thick. Backing up, she put her helmet to the floor and studied the corners. There was a very faint depression in each, like a mold mark. She put her thumbs against them and pressed. Nothing. She pressed and held. There was a faint hissing noise and the shower floor raised a couple of centimeters.

  With a sudden shock, Kris realized she had no idea who or what was waiting down there. She scuttled back, drew her sidearm, cocked it and then, drawing a tense breath, swiftly levered the floor up, swinging her pistol into the opening.

  A gasp and a muted girlish yelp. Then nothing. Heart pounding high in her throat, Kris risked a glance over the rim. There was a well below, about a meter deep, with a young girl in a light EVA suit curled at the bottom of it, both arms shielding her face. A helmet lay next to her with a couple of air bottles.

  “Hey!” Kris called softly. “S’Okay. Come on up.”

  The girl cowered and Kris heard a faint whimper. The suit speaker would be distorting her voice and she was still pointing a gun at her. Idiot! She opened her visor and pulled the gun back. “S’Okay,” she repeated. “Everything’s jake now. You can come outta there.”

  The girl looked up—she had startling green eyes in a smooth young face, deathly pale. “S’kay?” she whimpered, her full bloodless lips barely moving.

  Kris reached out a hand. “S’Okay. C’mon.”

  The girl ignored her hand, regarding it with suspicion, but rolled into a crouch and eased to her feet. As her head cleared the edge, Kris heard a grinding thump from behind; the girl shrieked and dropped. Kris spun just in time to see a body squirming from a tight slot where the bunk had been—the thump was it falling to the deck—a body with a sidearm in its right hand. She got a hasty impression of a thin angular face, sallow from years on-ship, steel-gray hair cut close and heavy, sweeping eyebrows above narrow blue eyes, wide in astonishment.

  “You!” he hissed. Kris slammed her visor down and swung her gun up. A flash, a terrible hammer blow that snapped her head back as she fired twice reflexively; shocking blindness. Swearing exploded, dimly heard through the bell-like ringing in her skull. Her vision came back all warped amid oscillating bands of light and dark. She made out blood streaming from a furrow down the length of his forearm, the gun wavering in his hand, his blue eyes on fire with hatred more than pain.

  She fired twice more. The first shot smashed against the bulkhead; the second went right through the snarling, thin-lipped mouth, spraying teeth out the back of his head in an explosion of atomized tissue and skull fragments. Blackness overwhelmed her, and she slumped.

  Yelling, banging, the crash of many boots. Someone shaking her shoulder violently. “Knock it off,” Kris swore at the distorted face—Wagner’s face, she knew, though her eyes refused to focus. Her head hurt like it was being pounded on all sides; the shaking was an agony. “She’s down there.” Kris twitched a hand at the shower stall. Wagner started to rise and Kris clutched after him. “Don’t!” she gasped through the fierce reverberation stabbing her ears. “She’s bad freaked. Get the Chief—”

  She closed her eyes tight against hot waves of nausea that were surging up against the pain in her skull; cold sweat broke out on her cheeks and scalp and her hands tingled. There was the strangest feeling of unnatural weight in her lower body, and she wasn’t quite sure what her legs were doing. She heard orders she did not understand, and someone else was kneeling before her, removing her helmet—that hurt as they roughly moved her head—and peeling back one protesting eyelid.

  Kris batted at the offending hand. “M’Okay. Back off, will ya?”

  “Like hell you are—ma’am,” the marine grunted, brushing aside her feeble attempt to interfere. He noted the unequal pupils and the thick, slurred voice, almost unintelligible, placed an ampoule against the base of her throat and popped it. A wave of intense cold swept through Kris, seeming to erupt from her forehead and flowing down to her knees. She emitted a kind of yowl, a sound of feral protest, but the nausea was fading fast as the drug hit her bloodstream, and the pain, while still intense, had stopped its horrible ebb and flow. Her vision was still distorted and full of lurid electric green spots with yellow haloes around them, but at least it wasn’t doing that awful fucked-up swooping thing so much and she could feel her hands and legs again.

  The marine looked into her eyes with great satisfaction and grunted. “Better. Ya don’t ever wanna puke in your armor, y’know. It’s a real bitch to clean out. Squeeze my hand.” He put his right hand in hers, and she clamped down for all she was worth. “Good.” He pulled his hand free and got to his feet with a stern warning not to try to move for at least five minutes—longer if her vision hadn’t cleared up by then—and she could expect to have a screaming headache. Once she’d been through a full scan back on the ship, they’d probably give her something for it. If the nausea came back bad or she started to have vertigo again or felt like she was going to blackout, she was to ping him instantly or he wouldn’t answer for the consequences.

  Kris tried to thank him, but all she could do was mumble and he was leaving anyway. Two men were pulling the corpse, its lower face a grisly ruin, from the narrow slot behind the bunk—incredible anyone could fit back there—and putting it in a body bag. The chief must’ve gotten the girl out—she had a confused impression of people talking and stepping over her legs—and Huron was next to her. She hadn’t noticed him until now.

  He put a hand very lightly on the shoulder of her armor and she reached across with her other hand and squeezed it.

  “Take it easy, Kris,” he said very low. “That was a hell of a pop you took.” He held up her helmet where she could see it without moving her head. There was a spider web of cracks the size of her palm in the visor just over her right eye. If he’d thought to set his gun to fire a burst . . .

  Which reminded Kris of what she’d wanted to tell Huron when she first saw him. She scanned her eyes left and right; they seemed to be alone. “Corcoran,” she told him under her breath.

  “What?”

  “That guy. Ravel Corcoran.”

  “Slaver captain?”

  “Yeah. Lady Day.”

  “You know him?”

  “Yeah.” Her shoulders twitched. “He and Trench were tight.”

  * * *

  In his stateroom aboard Retribution, Captain Lawrence closed the after-action report filed by Lieutenant Wagner and a flock of other documents, including supporting statements from Chief Zayterland and Gunnery Sergeant Thompson, and the latest sitrep supplied by his TAO. Further examination of the vessel’
s core flies and interrogation of the crew confirmed the identity of the dead captain and the boat as Chiller Down, originally a corvette of Bannerman manufacture. Lady Day was five days behind them, bound for Mantua with an assorted cargo they’d loaded at Pyramus, no more than a hundred slaves. That was all.

  Sir Phillip looked up with a frown that mixed guarded satisfaction with pique in approximately equal parts and met Huron’s eyes across his desktop. “That midshipman of yours is quite the unique animal, Commander. What track did you say she is on?”

  “She is a flight-officer candidate, sir.”

  The captain nodded as if that explained everything. “Not quite the thing, these methods of hers, y’know.”

  “Sir, I don’t defend her methods, but she did find that hidden compartment the survey missed, and she did manage to maintain control of the situation so the girl was recovered without further incident, even with a rather severe concussion.”

  “Quite.” It was not clear which part of Huron’s statement he was agreeing with. “In truth, I find it difficult to quarrel with her results. However . . . there is such a thing as discipline.” On reflection, he seemed to find the remark uncharitable, for he added, “But she is young. No doubt she will come to it in time.” His tone lacked conviction, however, and Huron, deep in his private mind, was afraid he could not entirely disagree.

  Chapter Eight

  LSS Retribution

  Killian's Reach, Hydra Region

  Twenty-eight hours later, the entry panel to Huron’s cabin chimed. He called out “Yes,” and the door opened. Kris stood on the other side, looking haggard. She obviously had not slept, her eyes were red and puffy and the lines around her mouth were deeper than he had seen them.

  “Excuse me, Commander. May I come in for a minute?”

  “Absolutely.” He motioned her inside and the cabin door slid shut. “Go ahead and sit down.”

  Kris nodded, swung out a folding seat from the bulkhead and collapsed into it.

  “How’s the head?”

  “Been better.” Kris shrugged. “Been worse too.”

  “Was there something you wanted—?”

  “That girl—from the fleshex,” she interrupted him. “How old is she?”

  Huron consulted his desktop and opened a report from Chiller Down’s logs. “Sixteen, it says here.”

  “How long since she was taken?”

  “Looks like three standard years and few months. Why?”

  “She’s way pretty, and moving her like that—she had to be a captain’s bitch. A prime bitch. You know what that is, right?”

  Huron frowned. “I think so, but can you be more specific?”

  “You probably don’t see ‘em. They keep us really close.” That us—they keep us—jangled harshly in his ears. “A few get sold or more often traded, but once you’re a captain’s bitch you can’t run. No one will touch you, y’know? And the life has . . . advantages.”

  Huron nodded silently, doing his level best to maintain a neutral expression.

  “One of the big things is that you don’t get passed around a lot—unless they get really pissed at you and post you open-season. But . . .” Kris paused, closed her eyes for a moment before going on. “They have these . . . gatherings. Captains bring their bitches for entertainment. Y’know—appetizers, first course, main course, dessert.” She paused, her eyes sliding away, and wiped her knuckles across her mouth. “This girl would have been main course.” Kris knew all too much about being the main course, but there was no reason to tell Huron that. “That’s where he was goin’—Mantua Solstice Gathering. It’s top-line—huge. Lasts a week or more.”

  Huron leaned forward, a sound forming in his throat.

  Kris shook her head and waved off the interruption. “No. What I mean is . . . lots of deals get done at these things. A lot of business. You might get handed over to seal a deal—probably will.” Huron swallowed: he hated the detached, matter-of-fact tone, the twisted pronouns—you might equaling I was—and leaned back in his seat, waiting for Kris to continue. After a moment, she did. “But here’s the thing. Some of these guys are VIPs—”

  “VIPs?”

  “Yeah. Big buyers, brokers, financials, major sutlers, haven owners . . .”

  “Okay.”

  “So you might get loaned to a VIP—couple of days, maybe a week if it’s really important.”

  “Is Mankho a VIP?”

  “No. Mankho’s up the food chain from those guys—top tier, three-M.” That was a bit of slang Huron knew: Money, Muscle, Materiel. “But anyway, some of these VIPs are Feds—or they bring friends who are Feds. Cops, port security, transit and customs guys. Um—”

  “Payoff or blackmail?”

  “Both, I guess. Sorry, I’m not making this real clear—”

  “It’s okay.”

  “But this is it—you remember what I told ya about goldfish?”

  Huron wasn’t likely to forget that anytime soon. He nodded.

  “Well, the bitches are the ones you want. If you’re a captain’s bitch, you hear a lot of shit. You meet all these people. A girl like that—she’s worth a ton in those circles. If something big was working—if they needed fed-hooks to pull it off, could be she was part of the deal. If they had a mark on the line, maybe she was in on that too. What boats was she on? Just Lady Day?”

  Huron thumbed through the report. “No. Says here she was first on Iron Maiden.”

  Kris had heard of the captain of Iron Maiden but she didn’t know him. She did recall him being pretty much a bottom feeder. That fit. Either Iron Maiden’s captain was into Corcoran for a fuck-ton and used that girl to settle up, or Corcoran poached her. Knowing him, he probably poached her.

  “Look . . .” Kris shifted restlessly. “Corcoran swung heavy. The way he was movin’ her, had to be a deal workin’. Good bet he was gonna loan her. That happens a lot right before a gathering opens—they have whatcha might call preliminaries. Probably not the first time either.”

  Huron flipped the file closed. “What might she know?”

  Kris tossed her hands to an impatient gesture. “She not gonna know what she knows. But she might recognize a voice or a face or . . . something. These guys are—fucked up. They like to run their mouth—get burly—talk large. And it doesn’t happen so often you don’t remember it. Try to find out if she got loaned, see what she remembers. If she can tag anyone, likely that guy leads to someone else. Somethin’ like this—gotta be way up there. If someone’s dirty—especially if someone’s dirty—she’s your best bet at tagging them.”

  “Will she cooperate?”

  “Dunno. Being a bitch—it’s not like . . . normal. Some girls, they uh—Corcoran could be a real jacked-up, undiluted motherfucker, but that don’t—doesn’t—mean . . . I dunno.”

  “Kris . . . I hate to ask you, but—”

  “You want me to talk to her.”

  “Would you?”

  Kris looked over at him; it was all he could do not to drop his eyes. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

  “Thanks, Kris. Get some rest, alright?”

  Kris nodded, stood up slowly.

  “Would you like something to help you sleep?”

  “No . . . Thanks.” She shook her head, loose strands of hair stirring about the drawn face. “I’ll be okay. Find out what she likes to eat.”

  The next AM, Kris slid into a chair across from the girl and a bowl of fresh strawberries. She was prettier close up—beautiful actually—with lustrous platinum-blond hair waving across those exquisitely shaped green eyes under elegantly arched brows; high cheekbones in a face that hadn’t outgrown its adolescent softness. She had her heels up on her chair with her arms around her knees.

  “What do they call you?”

  “Tiara.” A soft, sweet voice, slightly breathy and not yet fully formed.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Kym.”

  “Hi, Kym. I’m Kris.” She reached a hand halfway to the strawberries. “You mind?” A
shake of the pretty head, refusing to look up. Kris selected a strawberry and bit into it slowly. It was ripe almost to bursting, and she wiped the escaped juice off her chin with her forearm and then licked it off. Kym covertly followed the gesture with her eyes. “You were on Lady Day?” No response. “Ravel Corcoran?” That earned another momentary glance. Kris finished the strawberry. “He had you tagged?” Kris tapped her cheek—that was a popular place to put the organic nanochips.

  Kym shot her a hard look, then gave her head a vigorous shake.

  “Oh. Down there, huh?” Labial tags were uncommon, but she wouldn’t be surprised if Corcoran was partial to them. Slavers thought of labial tags as a kind of joke: not who they owned but what . . .

  Kym squeezed her eyes tight shut and nodded.

  “Fucker.” Kris selected another strawberry. “Trench never tagged me. He liked bracelets.”

  Kym’s head jerked up, green eyes wide. “Trench? You’re . . . you’re that Kris?”

  “Uh huh—Harlot’s Ruse. I don’t think you ever met him. I’d remember you.” Kris held out the strawberry.

  Kym regarded it uncertainly and brought a hand to her lips. “Everyone said you were dead.”

  “Really? Well, they did try pretty hard.” A beat of silence. “They’re good strawberries.”

  Slowly, the girl uncoiled a little from her seat; thin delicate white fingers reaching out, taking the strawberry; biting it, catching the juice on her bare forearm and licking it off. “Thanks.”

  Kris exhaled deeply and tossed her xel on Huron’s desk. Her throat burned and she swallowed twice to ease it. “It’s all on there. Two loans—not Corcoran’s idea. Somebody upstream leaned on him. One about four months before the conference on Nedaema. The other was two weeks before the Lacaille op. She doesn’t know where, but you might be able to figure it out from the cargo. Same guy—but the second time she brought a friend.”