The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set

by Owen R O'Neill

  Another fleet was added and deployed to Cygnus to protect the Kepler junction, complementing the three assigned to Eltanin, Regulus and the Pleiades, and the Epona Outstation was established to watch over Miranda. The system whereby colonial officers were considered inferior to officers from the Homeworlds, regardless of seniority, was abandoned (over heated objections from the Meridies). The marines were expanded from being little better than a token force to a genuine fighting arm and made independent of the Navy, as was the SRF. Over two hundred years of mossy tradition were being challenged, and it took all of the grand senator’s famous charm (darkened now by the death of Alana from an unheard-of condition when she was pregnant with Rafe—he missed her still, most earnestly, these forty years and more on) to chip away at the accreted customs and lingering prejudices surrounding the CEF.

  Yet chip he did, and progress was made. Still, it was over his vehement warnings that in the year ‘05, the Plenary Council, mismanaging one nasty little war, the Perseid Campaign, which it had started in hopes of weakening the Dominion internally, blundered into a major one in the light of an aggressor.

  Over the next twelve years, the League and Halith fought a seesaw conflict, as the reforms proved their worth. Then, in the year ‘17, Grand Senator Huron was elected Speaker. He brought the Plenary Council to heel and set about swiftly revamping the way the League made war. First, he jumped Admiral Jasmine Kasena, an abrasive former President of the Advanced Warfare College, who was known for her strategic brilliance but had never commanded a fleet in combat and was languishing as head of the General Staff’s Planning Department, over a dozen more experienced and higher-ranking admirals to the post of CNO, and then stood by her while she replaced inefficient senior officers, many of them Homeworlders and some quite influential, with talented juniors, often colonials.

  He was deaf to cries of favoritism when she gave the coveted position of CO, First Fleet, to her good friend and protégé, Vice Admiral Ashlynn Kiamura, a junior fleet commander with a talent for authoring improbable victories, and who, as a cruiser captain, had earned a reputation as a green-eyed, cold-hearted killer. He was equally deaf to howls of impropriety when she promoted a hard-drinking, hard-swearing colonial, Joss PrenTalien, to vice admiral, and made him CO of Fifth Fleet at Regulus, the critical League nexus controlling the routes to Cygnus, Karelia, and the Huygens’s gap.

  By the time Admiral Kasena reached far down the roster to elevate a hirsute, bandy-legged Nepalese, Lo Gai Sabr, another cruiser captain whose crews loved him as much as his enemies feared him, to rear admiral, the grumblers were either pining in (usually) comfortable exile, or running short of breath.

  When she talked the League’s most successful privateer, Yasmin Shariati, an Antiguan rejuvenant who was as beautiful as she was bloodthirsty, into accepting a commission as the only permanently appointed commodore in the Navy, they shook their heads and turned away. And when Admiral Sabr married her, they said that it was fate.

  They were an odd, eclectic bunch—unorthodox, undisciplined, often ill-mannered and always brash; Kasena’s deputy, the dapper, smiling Admiral Westover, was the only polished one among them—and their elders muttered and looked on darkly while the media compared them unfavorably to pirates, commented unfavorably on their many eccentricities, and joyfully pimped the views of pundits predicting disaster. This disdain was returned full-bore. Admiral Kasena was known to hate reporters more than Halith (had said of the latter: “At least they can sometimes shoot straight”), and her general order on media relations read: “Don’t tell them a goddamned thing. When it’s over, tell ‘em who won.”

  Those characteristics aside, they all had several other things in common: they were ruthless, inventive, and had no idea what it meant to quit. Most of all, they knew how to make the enemy afraid. This attracted other officers of similar disposition, and the tenor of the conflict, as well as the tone of the men and women who fought it, began to change. The League took the offensive more often and more successfully, finally not just trading enormous amounts of vacuum at great cost, until even the media began to take note. (Not that this altered Admiral Kasena’s opinion of them one iota.)

  In the meantime, the new Speaker brought all his considerable management expertise to bear on the CEF itself. He reorganized the Byzantine support functions and revamped logistics, eradicating fiefdoms, bypassing middlemen and streamlining supply. The intelligence organs were not spared his scrutiny or his knife either: he pared and slashed, opening up cherished strongholds whose owners had for decades profited by dispensing, or failing to dispense, privileged information. New howls were heard—rampant insecurity, lack of vetting, insufficient oversight—but within a year, the tide of the war turned.

  Within another eighteen months, it tipped, when Admiral Kiamura, outnumbered by more than two to one, broke the Imperial Navy’s back at Anson’s Deep. Ten months later, the Plenary Council ordered an invasion of Halith to force an unconditional surrender. Admiral Kiamura spearheaded the operation through Novaya Zemlya, a major transit linking Wogan’s Reef with the Halith nexus at Tau Verde. For reasons that remained unexplained—and seemed inexplicable—her task force became trapped and was effectively annihilated (less than a thousand survivors were taken prisoner by Halith and later exchanged). Fleet Admiral Kasena took responsibility and resigned. Although Halith remained unable to take the offensive, the disaster forced the League to accept a negotiated peace to end the war.

  That peace liberated Karelia and restored Miranda to independence (an unhappy occasion for the large number of Halith settlers who had immigrated there), but the Battle of Novaya Zemlya remained one of the bitterest days the Speaker had ever lived, although he’d now lost two wives, the second that very year in a botched assassination attempt. He’d been close to Admiral Kiamura, whose flagship was destroyed early in the battle. She was not among the few survivors recovered, and the circumstances of her death had never been ascertained.

  In the aftermath, despite the recriminations that inevitably followed a tainted victory, Grand Senator Huron’s grip on the Speakership remained firm. So did his grip on the intelligence apparatus, expanded during the war and coming to include a number of quasi-official, and unofficial, conduits and sources. These he carefully husbanded, as a potent force against enemies both foreign and domestic (there being no shortage of either), and the cream of which—distilled, collated and organized—he’d just handed to Commander Wesselby, coded into the very atoms of an innocuous-looking business card.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ONI Main Annex

  Lunar 1, Tycho Prime

  Luna, Sol

  The cream certainly, though of a singularly unwholesome crop, and how to use it? Trin downloaded the mass to her personal xel, in the privacy of her ONI Annex office, then entered the erasure code, licked her thumb and applied it to the card, thereby returning the spin-locked electrons to ordinary matter, and the card itself to a mere piece of cellulosic paper.

  They had planned for a considerable mass, but what they got exceeded their generous expectations. There was, for example, no reason to believe the woman they sought was from the League; she could just as easily be someone from Bannerman or Halith, or even the Sultanate, though she had not originated there, according to the description Kym provided. Bannerman also seemed unlikely, based on Kym’s initial response to the voice samples they played for her. Bannerman accents were distinctive; what Kym had identified as “kinda sounds like–sorta” were accents from the Meridies Cluster, from New California, and from the east coast of North America, which was so widely distributed throughout Sol as to be almost useless. But Kym also recognized the predominant accent of Halith Evandor, the Dominion’s prime world. That in itself implied the woman had grown up on more than one planet, which suggested a League origin, as Halith used a strict system of internal passports to discourage mobility; or that she had traveled extensively enough to have acquired the polyglot accent that was sometimes met with among old mariners and o
ther professional voyagers.

  Yet another wrinkle was added when Rafe described the problem to his father: the first question the old man had asked was “We are sure this individual has always been female?”

  Rafe admitted that thought hadn’t yet occurred to him, but it seemed most likely. Transsexuals were not that rare, but unless they’d undergone a complete gender morph, they were fairly evident and Kym would almost certainly have noticed. Gender morphing was a long, involved and expensive procedure, requiring extensive hospitalization to monitor the gene splicing (no matter of simply swapping out the inconvenient X or Y chromosome) and especially the skeletomuscular changes, and was done at the youngest possible age, when the plasticity of youth improved the results and ameliorated the discomforts as well as the risks.

  In the League, gender morphing was strictly regulated, being performed only where testing demonstrated a strong need, and adults had to content themselves with the much less radical gender reassignment therapy. A few might travel to jurisdictions where the regulations were more lax, and the truly desperate might seek out the illegal back-alley gender-benders. These charlatans promised a full morph using banned nanocyte technology, but most often delivered a lifetime of crippling pain—if the subject lived at all, which in many cases, they wished they hadn’t.

  Some ‘practitioners’ even went so far as to advertise gender flexing, a supposedly reversible procedure for those eager to walk on the wild side, which they claimed was based on the ‘lost’ secrets of old gene-morphing technology. That this technology had been used to create the Maxor was a dubious recommendation; that the other human subspecies begot with it were all extinct should have been a stark warning, but those who ventured into these outer limits were not concerned with such things. Fortunately for them, the gender flex procedure only separated them from large amounts of cash, unlike the victims of the gender-benders.

  All this argued strongly that their target had not been born male, but the possibility could not be ignored. Given Kris’s revelations about the services slavers offered, they were already casting their net wide into decidedly squalid waters, and now they cast them wider still. Taken together, their efforts had seined up a considerable collection of suspects, most quite low, but some not, and a few quite highly placed indeed, united in their taste for (or addiction to) the sordid, the outrageous, and the extreme.

  It seemed everything they considered broadened their search criteria, rather than narrowing it, and Trin had already been through SAARs as much as was prudent; the thinness of the results had prompted them to approach Huron’s father in the first place. To query it again using a significant portion of the personalities he’d supplied to winnow the candidates risked raising red flags. Yet there were far too many for a standard debriefing.

  There was a solution, and it lay well within Trin’s professional capabilities, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you would ordinarily like to subject a sixteen-year-old girl to, especially not a recently recovered sex slave who’d never been on a developed world before. Huron sat with Trin in her office for one fruitless hour and most of another, arguing pros and cons that could do no more than sooth a raw conscience, at least in Huron’s case, and failing even there. His final suggestion—that they involve Kris as someone Kym trusted—was met with a brisk headshake and a cold look of negation.

  Trin knew what she was doing and, the sensitivity of the topic aside, a lack of distractions was everything in these matters. Comfort was kind, but it was a distraction by its very nature, and that would interfere with the responses they were hoping to collect. There was no honor to be satisfied in this mode of warfare, just winning and losing—and trying to live with it afterward.

  Huron took out his xel and made the call, giving thanks to Providence he was just a fighter pilot.

  At the appointed time, Kris delivered Kym to Trin’s office, which had a small conference room that would serve their purpose admirably. The look she gave Huron as she surrendered Kym to their tender mercies was one he thought even Trin might have trouble meeting. There was no telling, however, as she was in the other room, completing her setup. For his part, he kept his face impassive, his gestures to a curt nod, and his words to a brusque acknowledgement. He also studiously ignored the murmured exchange between Kris and Kym, just before Kris left with a choppy salute that could have broken an unwary neck.

  Showing Kym into the small room, he made cursory introductions and retired to the main office to prevent interruptions and await developments. Trin resumed her seat after urging Kym into a chair, which she took, tucking her feet up as she habitually did and looking suspicious.

  Commander Wesselby was an experienced interrogator but heretofore, her subjects had all been implacably hostile. The last one—Reid, the late slaver captain—they were keeping on ice (what was left of him anyway), in case his remaining synapses might still yield something useful. This young girl, watching her with a wary expression in her huge, green, and undeniably discerning eyes, was outside her professional experience. And she was willing, more or less. Trin knew from Kym’s file that she had not yet undergone a routine psycheval—the circumstances of her recovery accounted for that, and they would insist on doing one when she entered rehab—so she had no idea whatsoever about the procedure Trin had planned, and all that it entailed. Planned being the key word.

  Trin’s reputation among her service acquaintance was for being as “ruthless as God makes ‘em,” and given what was at stake, she had every intention of going through with the procedure, even if Kym showed signs of balking. It was certainly bound to be unpleasant, perhaps quite unpleasant, but it wasn’t going to permanently scar the girl. Her file made it clear she’d been through much worse.

  Still, willing was better than unwilling, so Trin began her description with the dry, technical aspects, in hopes of making things less threatening. But as the talk progressed, she came to appreciate Huron’s attitude toward Kym, and her resolve began to falter. And by the time she reached the point of describing the components of the small portable kit she was using—five induction probes, much like penlights, and a master probe linked to her xel, through which she’d control the procedure—Trin had decided she would not proceed without Kym’s full consent.

  It was a new feeling, and strange, reposing her faith in a teenage girl she’d just met. The only saving grace of this unexpected softness (if that’s what it was—her mind was unsettled on that point) was that it owed nothing to any perception of weakness in Kym. For all that Kym might be as sweet as a lunar day was long, and at times act younger than her years, Trin sensed that weakness formed no part of her character. Frontier colonies did not breed weakness, whatever else they might do, and no weak girl could survive three years as a slaver captain’s bitch (a phrase Huron’s OPREP had acquainted her with, along with the condition). So it was full of unaccustomed feelings that Trin pointed out the master probe, positioned at eye-level in front of the chair beyond the end of the conference table, with the other probes arrayed about it.

  “This is the device you will be able to see. It lights up red. The light will blink now and then. It may change color and it may appear to move. You might feel lightheaded or dizzy or experience some disorientation, especially with regard to time. That’s perfectly normal. But it you feel vertigo—if the room starts to spin—or if you become strongly nauseated, tell me at once, because we need to stop immediately. Understand?”

  Kym nodded, her face betraying the first signs of impatience. “So what’s it do?”

  Trin opened her mouth to launch into a discussion that would have been far beyond most people and, seized by a sudden inspiration, paused. Picking up her xel, she tapped a series of codes into it and held it out to Kym.

  “Here. I’ll show you.”

  Kym took the unfamiliar device hesitantly, looking askance at Trin as she relocated to the chair with the probes about it. Ideally it would have been a something that allowed the subject to recline, but Trin was just a visitor here, te
mporarily borrowing an office, and even back on Nedaema it would have strained credulity to request having a couch delivered. They would have to make the best of it.

  “This is what I want you to do. See the big green button?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “When I tell you, tap that button. Not until I tell you.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Then I want you to ask me a question. After I answer, hit the red button that says STOP. Okay?”

  “What kinda question?”

  “We’ll start with something simple, like what I had for breakfast two days ago. Okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Ready?”

  “Tap the green button. Then ask me the question.”

  Kym tapped. “What did’ja have for breakfast two days ago?”

  Trin had forgotten for the moment that two days ago was a weekend, and her usual weekend breakfast—toasted peanut-butter sandwiches, grapefruit, and champagne—was one of her more private eccentricities. But she answered truthfully and Kym laughed. Some of the anxiety went out of the room. Kym hit STOP.

  “What’s all this?”—looking confusedly at the xel’s display.

  Trin leaned forward. “This here”—pointing—“means it’s a recent memory. This part tells you it is also sharp, and probably habitual. That is, related to something that happens a lot. This part down here says that I’m telling the truth. I don’t necessarily mean lying”—noting Kym’s look—“I could be confused. I might mistake what I ate for breakfast last weekend with some other day. Clear?”