The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set

by Owen R O'Neill

  “She?”

  “Yeah—the loan was to a woman. Probably why Corcoran didn’t like it. Some of ‘em are strange about that.”

  “Oh.” Apparently guy was not a gender-specific term in the Outworlds. Huron turned the xel towards him, skimmed the record—it was long and detailed. “Good work, Kris.” He paused. “There’s one more thing, though.”

  Kris grimaced. “What?”

  “One of us has to talk to Kym—assess what else she knows. And tell her what’s in store for her when she gets to Sol.” He paused again. “Had she ever been off Lacaille before?”

  “I don’t think so. Didn’t sound like it.” Kym had said she was from some minor township in the southern temperate zone. Not the sort of place people went star-faring from.

  “What about Kap-Yar?”

  “Where?”

  “The main city. Lacaille’s starport.”

  “Dunno. Maybe not.”

  Probably not, Huron considered. Lacaille had been a middling prosperous Bannerman colony, but its nominal independence had not been good for it. Without the influx of subsidies (and it was likely the Bannermans let the colony go to stop paying those subsidies), the economy had started to slide and was still sliding. The ruling junta was a textbook example of gangster government, to the extent there was government at all. It was no surprise that they had invited Nestor Mankho, or that he was comfortable there. The degree of adjustment required to live on any League planet—

  He shook his head.

  “Huh?” Kris’s voice broke off his contemplations.

  “Nothing. Random thought. Which would you rather?”

  The tension in her neck was sending painful roots down into her back and across her shoulders. She’d never regretted not having access to a tub so much in her life.

  “I’ll talk to her.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “But when we get back. Those rehab people—”

  “Sol’s not Nedaema.” Though in fact, he wasn’t sure how much difference that really made.

  “And she’ll get paid, right? Like I was?”

  That was a gray area, Kym not being a League citizen, or taken from a League-controlled planet or from League-registered vessel. But there were ways around that. “She’ll get paid.”

  “Alright.” Kris nodded, stretching her neck, hoping it would crack. “That it?”

  “That’s it.”

  Finally, the stubborn vertebra popped, appallingly loud. “Okay. I gotta go take a shower now.”

  Chapter Nine

  LSS Retribution

  Killian's Reach, Hydra Region

  They had been at it for hours—too many hours—and Kym’s answers were growing ever more vague and troubled. She was flagging badly, her spirits failing. Kris understood: the stream of faces, voice samples, and vids affected her too, and she was feeling guilty about pushing the young girl so hard.

  On reviewing everything Kym told them in the first interview, they’d concluded that the friend who accompanied the woman on the second loan could be key: the timing was too suspicious. Kym wanted to help; she persisted with the best will in the world, but it was no use. She couldn’t clearly identify anyone, and now her descriptions were starting to diverge, painful memories stirred up in a muddle that confused times, places, incidents . . . Kris decided to call it quits.

  She shut down the holographic projector, swept the desktop clean, closed the files, logged out of the ship’s libraries and furled her xel. Kym huddled on her bunk looking desolate. They’d moved her into this compartment so she could have a space to herself; the privacy also made debriefing easier.

  “Thanks, Kym.” Kris pocketed the xel and started to get up.

  “Sorry I din’t do well.”

  Kris looked over but Kym would not meet her eyes. “You did fine, Kym. Really.”

  “You gotta leave now?”

  Kris stopped and resettled slowly into her seat. “No. Not just yet.”

  Kym squirmed to the edge of the bunk. “What’s gonna happen to me?”

  “Nothing you don’t want to happen.” Kym didn’t seem satisfied with the answer. Kris changed tack. “Any family—friends?” Since Lacaille was a Bannerman client, there were no registries to check. But slavers didn’t raid Bannerman clients.

  Kym shook her head, then shrugged.

  Kris felt a chill settle in the pit of her stomach. “Who sold you, Kym?”

  That forlorn little head shake again. “Papa got in trouble with the local boss over money. We’d two bad years and he had to borrow again for planting.” She looked at Kris for a sign of comprehension.

  Kris nodded. That’s certainly what he would have said. “Your papa’s a farmer?”

  A tiny, distracted nod. “They came while I was out riding the bounds. I got back and they’d tied up Mama and Stacy in the house and—and . . .” raped them, Kris filled in the silence. “And they were taking Papa into the barn . . .”

  Kris let a pain-filled breath out slowly. “And so he sold you to make up his debts.”

  “No.” Kym shook her head and wiped at her eyes with her forearm. “No. I did—me. I told ‘em if they’d leave Papa alone—and Mama and my sister—I’d go. The boss said okay.”

  Oh good fucking Christ. Kris got up and crossed the cabin to sit beside her. Kym scrunched away a little, then stole a look at Kris and put her hands between her knees. Kris slowly put an arm around her shoulders—they were quivering.

  “I’m sorry, Kym.”

  The shaking increased, almost a paroxysm, and then Kym leaned into her. Kris brought her other arm around, encircling the girl. The image of her own father as he sent her off was sharp in Kris’s memory: him standing alone in the swirling red road dust, hand raised, the early morning light slashing across his rutted empty face . . . Had he known? Had he asked? Or had he known not to ask . . .

  “I can’t go back.” A tiny, thin, halting voice, shattering her thoughts. “If I go back, they’ll kill them.”

  Yes, they will.

  “I’m scared—I’m so scared. Please don’t go.”

  Kris tightened her grip around the narrow shoulders, waiting for the tears to come, keeping her own back. They did—a salty, silent flood—and Kris, her own eyes dry and hard, held Kym and said nothing.

  “Fuck, Huron.” Kris was sitting in his cabin that evening, head down, rubbing her brows with the fingertips of both hands. She’d finally coaxed Kym into taking a mild sedative; she was sleeping now, and Kris hoped like hell she wasn’t dreaming. Huron had listened to the story without comment.

  “So, no luck with the woman or the friend she brought along?”

  “No luck.” Kris dropped her hands. “Got anything for a headache?”

  Huron reached over to his console and tapped out a request. “Did she see anyone who reminded her of the woman?”

  “Yeah—kinda.” Kris got slowly to her feet, went to the console, brought up one of the files they’d been trudging through. After a minute’s browsing she put half a dozen pix on the desktop. “She said the woman sorta looked like these here, but she wasn’t any of ‘em.”

  Huron cocked his head. “Interesting.”

  “What’s interesting?”

  Huron highlighted five of the six. “That’s the same woman.”

  Kris looked more closely at the images. Within the limits of surgery it was certainly possible. “Who is she?”

  “Her name is Sandrine Onstanyan, but she was born Byrony Levasseur. She gets a visosculpt every year or two, so pix aren’t much help—those are the latest we have. She’s Nestor Mankho’s wife.”

  “The fucker’s married?” She dragged her palms down her face. “That’s tight. Where’s she from?”

  “Corinth, originally. Why?”

  A shrug, set off with a disgusted grimace. “Dunno. Just curious where they got people so fucked up they’d go for Mankho, I guess.”

  “Corinth’s wealthy—first-gen out of Nedaema. Nice and safe. Most people find it
pleasant.”

  Kris grunted and Huron’s entry pad chimed. He got up to answer it, accepted a small package and handed it to Kris. She tore it open, bolted two pills dry, then looked up to see Huron offering her a glass of water.

  “Oh.” She accepted the glass, drank half for form’s sake, handed it back. “Thanks. Anything else?”

  “Not until we get more on who’s been palling around with Mankho’s wife.”

  “Alright.” Massaging the back of her neck, Kris rolled her shoulders, impatient for the analgesics to kick in.

  “Kris . . .” She looked up at him—anger, disgust, fatigue all plain on her face—and he knew his own was grave and forbidding and tried to gentle it. “Kris, a lot of things in this job are hard. But the hardest is maintaining your objectivity.”

  “I know.” The instructors in her Leadership in Command class had harped on that constantly. “I know I’m not supposed to care about this shit.”

  “That’s not quite it. Of course, you care—you have too. Caring’s what sets us apart from them. But it’s how you care that matters. It’s not only that the people you care about might not be around tomorrow. It’s also that you might have to be the one who gives the order that gets them killed. And if you can’t do that, a lot more people will die because you didn’t. Bottom line, Kris: you’ve got to care enough to be able to do that—care enough to stay objective.”

  She looked away. “Yeah . . . Okay.”

  He sighed, soft and inaudible. “I hope so. Because this is gonna get worse before it gets better.”

  “But it does get better?”

  “Ask Kym about that someday.”

  * * *

  Towards the beginning of the graveyard watch, Huron walked quietly along the darkened passageway, only the red glow of the deadlights showing, a ship asleep and at peace, and paused outside Kris’s compartment. In the quiet—just the deep thrum of the drives, more felt than heard, and the whisper of the ventilation system punctuated every few minutes by the low bleat of the environmental alarms signifying all’s well—he heard another sound and tapped the entry panel with a hesitant knuckle.

  No response, but the door was not sealed. He tried again, more insistently. The door hissed to one side. He saw her there, crammed into the foot of her rack, as small as she could make herself, fully dressed with her boots still on, the toes barely touching a small, dim, pale circle of light from the overhead. Sobs convulsed her hunched shoulders, nearly silent but occasionally breaking out in a choking sound—the sound he’d heard in the passageway.

  “Kris?”

  “I’m fine.”

  He stepped into the compartment, unwilling to be put off. She raised her face from her knees, her long chestnut hair tangled across it, and her eyes were wet and feral in the darkness.

  “I’m fine. Just leave me the fuck alone.”

  He stopped and something changed in her face, inexpressible and fleeting, and her voice softened to a whisper. “Please. Please just go.”

  Huron nodded, tamping down the unquiet feelings that were clotting in his chest, and backed slowly out the open door into the passageway. The entry pad clicked and cycled to red, and the door closed with a final hiss.

  Chapter Ten

  LSS Retribution

  Killian's Reach, Hydra Region

  Leaning back from his console, Huron tapped his stylus on his knee, grappling with a gnawing sense of frustration that was threatening to become profound. All the pertinent data Retribution owned was arrayed before him, some arranged neatly, some in untidy clumps, and all of it failing him. He’d guessed it would the moment he learned of Kym’s revelations regarding Sandrine Onstanyan, but that was no comfort in view of the new light it cast upon his mission and all the potential ramifications thereof.

  The first issue was that he only had access to the shipboard version of TEARs, the Tech ELINT Analytic Registry: ONI’s comprehensive database of the characteristics of known vessels, weapon and sensor systems, along with a summary appreciation of the capabilities of other navies, friendly and not, their key personalities, and a digest of the last two years’ worth of message traffic. That was what interested him most, but only the Sensitive & Restricted version was released to combatants—the real meat was in the Most Secret & Compartmented version retained at fleet commands and above.

  Unfortunately, even the MSC version of TEARs was unlikely to help much. TEARs did include some data on slavers and their known associates; he’d culled the profiles Kris had shown Kym from there. Sandrine Onstanyan he’d added of his own initiative, she being one of the few women known to be actively involved in the slave trade. Kym’s initial descriptions strongly indicated that neither of the people she’d been loaned to were from slaver society—which incidentally ruled out Mankho himself—and, in fact, the data pointed to them being from the League. That was obviously the most serious possibility, and he’d selected the profiles on that basis.

  But Kym’s belated clarification that the friend Nestor Mankho’s wife had brought along on the second loan was also a women unraveled the few leads he’d thought promising. Now, the only hope for getting a clue about the second woman was querying CID’s Special Assets Analytic Registry. The Defense Intelligence Office, who maintained SAARs for CID, put a redacted version on ARGONET (the multi-service network used to share intelligence products), which Trin could access. That might help but the full version would be much better, especially when it came to people with slaver connections, and he wasn’t confident CID ever shared that with ONI, still less with the sector commands.

  On the other hand, Trin was exceptionally resourceful, and he was sure she had contacts and assets he (thankfully) knew nothing about. The only way to find out was to talk to her in person, and cutting his mission short to do that required a somewhat elastic interpretation of his orders. Lawrence would not mind; while the captain had been most obliging so far, there wasn’t any real question that he’d prefer being left alone to hunt slavers in peace, especially now that he had much better data to do that with. It was the questions an early return might raise in other quarters that were of potential concern.

  That concern could be probably be finessed. More problematic was that Sandrine Onstanyan was starting to look like a weak reed to prop all this on. Her involvement, and its timing, seemed to hint at great things, but she also had a certain reputation. It was clear that Trench, Corcoran, and Mankho were all closely associated. As unpleasant as it was to contemplate (and it was damned unpleasant), Sandrine Onstanyan asking her husband to lean on one of his captains so she could enjoy a day of ‘fun’ with a beautiful young girl was not at all unlikely. Inviting a lady friend along for an encore was not unlikely either. Regardless of his earlier conviction, the reed was bending alarmingly—right before his eyes.

  If he couldn’t get something solid or at least a decent set of alternatives, he’d be obliged to continue the search, perhaps losing valuable weeks. At this point, he was afraid they couldn’t afford that.

  His sources kept him tolerably well informed of the machinations ongoing in the Grand Senate, and it appeared that their original estimates of how long they had before those worthies did the ‘damned-fool thing’ his father had warned about were too sanguine. Not that it was inevitable, but there was also a degree of unpredictability in the other side. Further, it was appearing as though they’d have to walk even more softly on this, and that would make things more difficult and take longer. At a time when he begrudged losing an hour, wherever he looked, days were slipping through his grasp.

  It was unfortunate, to be sure, that they hadn’t managed to take Ravel Corcoran alive. Together with Kym, that would have been an unquestionable success, and the ideal pretext too. Not that he regretted what Kris had done in the slightest. Under the circumstances, any other outcome would’ve been immeasurably worse. He would not trade Kris for Corcoran, no matter what the latter might have been able to tell them. No, not even for Nestor Mankho himself. In fact—

  His s
tylus stopped in mid-tap and hung still for a moment. Then he slid it onto his desk and reached for his xel.

  Chapter Eleven

  LSS Retribution

  Killian's Reach, Hydra Region

  “Ma’am?” The word, spoken behind Kris as she was on her way to answer Huron’s page, made her stiffen. After some toing and froing, the Navy had concluded that this was the proper form of address for a female midshipman, and Kris did not like it one bit. But that wasn’t the sole cause of her reaction—it was also the voice that uttered it. Kris turned to nod to the speaker, Senior Chief Pamela Zayterland. The chief was a highly respected professional who had been serving on starships for longer than Kris had been alive, not someone who should ever be calling a cadet of a whole six-month’s seniority ma’am, no matter what the Navy saw fit to say about that.

  “Hello, Chief”—doing her best to sound somewhat natural. Zayterland did not salute her; the Navy had at least concluded that would be inappropriate. Thank gawd.

  “I wanted to tell you what we found out about that ultrasonic shower unit on the flechette, ma’am,” the chief said. Kris nodded with a fair expression of interest. “They had molecular modulators built into it—good ones. Showed our scanners exactly what we thought should be there.”

  Kris lost her fixedly polite expression. “I didn’t know that.”

  Zayterland was watching her closely, half-suspecting she was telling a polite fib. “Yeah,” the chief said, a little slowly. “We’ve made some mods to our equipment, so we oughta be able to pick that up now, but we’re gonna need new scanners and we gotta be a damn-sight more suspicious after this. They clearly got tricks we haven’t thought of. But now that we know what to look for, I don’t think they’re gonna get away with it anymore.” She paused and gave Kris that piercing look again. “But I was wondering—if you don’t mind my asking—how you knew.”

  Kris had been expecting that, and she explained her suspicions based on the unit’s incongruity and then said, “But it was the dust that clinched it.”