The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set

by Owen R O'Neill

Luna, Sol

  “This is for those of you who are new here.” Commander Trin Wesselby, standing at the head of the briefing room’s long table, looked out at her audience and caught the eyes of each of those newcomers in turn: two ensigns and a lieutenant from the CGHQ’s GS2 section, and three civilian specialists from CID’s tech-exploit department. This AM she’d set aside the straitlaced starchiness she usually affected during duty hours, and the severity of her expression seemed to arise from something altogether different. Exactly what was not apparent, although it was clear you wouldn’t want to meet it unexpectedly in a dark alley. Huron and Sergeant Major Yu were both acquainted with Trin in this mode, but hid the knowledge behind their carefully reserved and professional expressions—the others resolved to pay close attention.

  Commander Wesselby was not unaware of the effect she was having—her primness was largely theoretical and never more than skin deep—and she continued with a hint of satisfaction in her voice, if not her expression. “The target, as I’m sure you’re aware, is Nestor Mankho.” Mankho’s image appeared on the briefing screen, and she tapped it between the eyes. The revelation that Kris had met Mankho, the details she’d been able to provide of his compound and what she’d seen of the surroundings had touched off a minor maelstrom of activity. A hasty written request to stand up a team to evaluate the potential for another operation against Mankho—strictly CEF this time—had been approved, and Huron had gotten it appended to his acting order for the Hydra operation so he could lead it. Trin, who’d been back on Mars, fretting at CEF CGHQ Nereus, caught a fast packet back and, at Huron’s request, Yu had been granted leave to come along. The team was built on the fly.

  At the moment, that team consisted of Huron, Yu, Lieutenant Ashley Crismon with Ensigns Jaelin and McCaffrey from GS2, and the three civilians led by Mitchell “Mick” Quennell, who had a reputation as one of the CID’s best tech analysts. Trin was not part of it: for one thing, as DSI-PLESIG she was staff, not a line officer; for another she ranked Huron, which could have caused complications.

  “For the last two decades,” she went on, “Mankho has been pretty much the poster child for evil—and deservedly so. His résumé reads like something written for an archvillain out of central casting. His humble beginnings: kidnapping, assassinations, gun running and dealing in slaves. Then forming the Black Army, moving to Rephidim and declaring his own state there. And finally, the attack on Knydos, expressive of the hubris that causes his downfall”—she said it with a smirk—“as always happens with a good villain. If only he looked the part, the story would have been perfect.”

  Indeed, Evil’s Poster Child was something of a nondescript: roundish face with a wide forehead, sallow complexion, thin mouth, chin slightly weak and dark eyes a bit small with drooping lids. His hair was thinning and his nose was neither beaked nor broad. A face of no particular age that said nothing of its origins and was seldom noticed, exciting no comment if it was, and easily forgotten.

  “The problem is that, even if he looks like a mild-mannered accountant, he’s so iconized that we’ve lost our grip on him—the narrative has come to dominate the reality. Too much, we’ve come to see him as the abstract terrorist mastermind, concocting fiendish plots that are doomed to fail, because in the narrative, that’s what always happens. This last plot—to bomb the Grand Senate hearings—is a perfect case in point. Brilliantly clever and foiled at the last second—literally—by the hand of Fate.” She scanned her audience once more, mouth twisted in a wry expression. “Or something. That is why it’s important to remind ourselves of where Mankho came from, and how he got to be where he is.”

  The image on the screen faded and was replaced by another. “So let me take you back to another archvillain—and he does look the part.” He did. A fierce dark bearded face with its hawk-like nose and narrow piercing eyes, a shocking light blue and deep-socketed under dominating brows; a cruel mouth and dark wavy hair receding sharply to widow’s peak above the high broad forehead, alive with a brutal vitality.

  “This, of course, is Shamir Azrael Mureyev, the Amur separatist leader. You might recall that back in thirteenth year of the last war, when things were starting to go poorly for Halith, the separatists on Amu Daria made a serious bid for independence—an effort we showed some sympathy for at the time.” She did not need to elaborate: they all knew those expressions of sympathy had taken the form of intelligence support and shipments of weapons—Sergeant Major Yu had been personally involved.

  “That story’s well-known: Halith responded with an invasion, miscalculated for once, and very quickly got into difficulties. The separatists managed to recruit Mureyev, who was Colonel Ivan Mureyev of the Halith Imperial Ground Forces at the time. He reverted to his birth name, broke the siege of Amur-Plesetsk, and allowed Amu Daria to claim de facto, if not de jure, independence.”

  Trin Wesselby paused to take the room’s temperature. “So why the history lesson? We know what happened next: Novaya Zemlya, the end of the war, and two years later the Banestre Square bombing that Halith SPEC-OPs committed so they could pin the blame on Amu Daria’s provisional government as a pretext to invade. By the way, Admiral Heydrich, the current head of Halith military intelligence—he was a lieutenant commander then—was responsible for that bombing. So you can see things haven’t changed much.

  “In any event, Halith did it right this time, the provisional government surrendered and Mureyev, who’d been defense minister, was declared a terrorist and took refuge off-planet, knocking around the Outworlds until he was killed eight years ago.

  “But before that, there was the HSS Haarlan.” The room stilled at the mention of the most horrific terrorist attack in memory. The Halith-registered cruise ship, Haarlan, had been chartered to take six hundred school children from the Halith core system of Vehren to view the Great Nebula in Orion. Mureyev’s people had managed to hijack the ship during a stopover at Zalamenkar, threatening to kill a child every fifteen minutes until their demands were met. Too far away to send their own teams, the Halith government relied on local forces, who botched the raid, killing only a few of the terrorists while losing half their number and all of the hostages. The murder of six hundred kids, most under the age of ten, created an interstellar sensation and effectively ended any chance of independence for Amu Daria, even though the Amur separatists cut their ties with Mureyev and denounced the attack in the strongest possible terms. It also ended Mureyev’s career as a warlord and terrorist; he became a lone fugitive until he was killed on Meremont's World—not by government agents, but in a dispute over a shipment of illegal aphrodisiacs.

  “And that’s my point,” Trin said. “Why did a successful warlord and planetary hero commit an act so heinous that it completely delegitimized the cause he was fighting for and made him such a pariah that he died years later in what amounts to a whorehouse brawl? Mureyev was never the sort of person you’d take home to mother—his actions on Amu Daria were predictably ruthless, no matter which side he was on—but he never embraced terrorism, and by the local standards, he didn’t allow atrocities either. So what happened?”

  Mureyev’s image faded from the screen and Mankho’s reappeared.

  “That’s right. The mastermind behind the Haarlan hijacking was actually Nestor Mankho.” Trin noted with a small degree of inner satisfaction that she’d surprised all but two people in the room. “So let me thicken the plot some more. We don’t know exactly when Mankho and Mureyev met. There’s some data that indicates it’s likely, though by no means conclusive, that they met on Amu Daria during its brief period of ‘independence.’ Mankho’s an anarchist and Amu Daria was as close as you could get to an anarchist paradise back then.

  “What we do know is that he was palling around with Mureyev on Warshov at least a year before the hijacking, while Mureyev was trying to buy support from the Tyrsenians. We know that during that time, Mankho sold Mureyev on the idea that conventional terrorism was pointless against Halith, because if you attacked them, they
wouldn’t just kill you—they’d kill you and ship your testicles to your mother. And that’s just for openers.

  “Mankho convinced Mureyev that to succeed, he had to pull off something that even Halith wouldn’t do. That would make Mureyev the biggest badass in charted space and give him the leverage necessary to negotiate—or so the argument ran. Mureyev bought off on it and when the Haarlan presented an opportunity, he approved the plan, but at the last minute he flinched. Not about killing the children but about the way they’d kill them. Mankho wanted the kids shot. Mureyev thought it would be better—more antiseptic, at least—to space them. That may seem like an odd thing to make an issue of, but Mankho understood how people would react. He argued that spacing the kids would dilute the impact, and to prove his point, he kidnapped a nine-year old girl—this was before the hijacking—and shot her in the face while she begged for her life. He made a video of the killing and posted it to the clouds on Vehren and Haslar. That video was suppressed but it had the effect he wanted, both on Halith and on Mureyev. This is the video.”

  On the screen, Mankho’s face dissolved to show the little girl huddled on a slab floor, face lifted—drained of color, eyes huge and nakedly open, soft round chin trembling—the sound of her breathing—fast, harsh, catching—her soft pleas that gave way to hiccups—the click of the gun’s action cocking—the sharp flat ringing crack of the gunshot . . . She never screamed.

  “And that, people, is how Nestor Mankho catapulted himself to the top of the terrorist food chain. His theory was perfectly sound, as far as it went. Mureyev, not being a terrorist at heart, couldn’t see when the theory was pushed too far. Remember, Mankho’s an anarchist. He didn’t give a damn about the Amur separatists or anything else. He doesn’t have a cause—he wanted to be the guy who destroyed Shamir Mureyev, ended a planetary movement, and manipulated the Halith government. Not with six hundred victims, but just one—on video. And he did. That’s what we’re dealing with.”

  * * *

  In his spacious temporary office, Huron pulled out a flask, put two plastic cups he’d retrieved from next to the coffee machine on his desk, and poured them both three-quarters full. He pushed one across to Commander Wesselby.

  “After that, I need a drink.”

  “You knew all that,” she said softly, reaching for it. “You’ve seen it before.” As she picked up the cup, he saw her fingers were trembling.

  “Yeah. But it’s not like that makes it any easier.”

  “No.” She sipped, her eyes widening as the raw alcohol bit—but that didn’t account for everything he saw there. “No, it doesn’t.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  CGHQ Main Annex

  Lunar 1, Tycho Prime

  Luna, Sol

  The department secretary rang Huron at his desk as he was putting the final touches on an update to a preliminary report he’d submitted, recommending their proposal be moved from strictly analytic footing to the exploratory phase of an actual operation. Kris had dumped core for them: everything she could recall about Mankho’s facility, the planet it was on, and the trip there and back. The loan had been not quite two years ago, so the data weren’t current, but they also weren’t necessarily outdated, and while only two firm conclusions could be drawn, they were important ones.

  First, that it was a major facility, larger and better equipped than the compound on Lacaille. Indeed, Kris’s description made it sound more like a base from which one might stage substantial operations, not a secondary residence or a temporary bolt hole. That was not to say that Mankho did not have secondary residences or temporary bolt holes, and that after Lacaille he did not retire to one of them, nor that he wasn’t currently moving between several. But the compound Kris described was a major asset. In all likelihood, he’d have held on to it, if he possibly could. Even if he wasn’t there now, locating and exploiting it would almost certainly yield valuable insights.

  Second, the description did not match any facility known to be associated with him. It seemed very likely that this was a new facility, and that meant he’d reestablished himself with some major backers: Bannerman certainly, but also with Halith to a much greater degree than they’d supposed. Taken together, those conclusions implied that Mankho was on the verge of being able to mount major operations again—that the Alecto Initiative could have been just a warm-up exercise.

  That, at least, was how Huron had couched it in his preliminary report. The conclusions were perfectly valid but there was also an undeniable whiff of salesmanship. The fact of the matter was that some influential parties in the League—and thus the CEF—remained deeply ambivalent about Nestor Mankho and the threat he might present: he was, to them, yesterday’s problem or somebody else’s business. The failure on Lacaille and the ongoing kerfuffle over the ultimatum, which had descended into the murk of backroom political hustling and all the nastiness that implied, had done nothing but harden their position.

  To confirm any of their suppositions about where Nestor Mankho was and what he might be up to required conducting reconnaissance, and while it was easy enough to get approval for a research project—the CEF would allow pretty much anything to be studied—reconnaissance meant moving to operational footing.

  Even in peacetime, that required a CNO stamp and, assuming they found something, approval for any actual attempt on Mankho or one of his compounds would elevate to SECNAV, or the Plenary Council itself. While Huron felt he could count on some support from CNO (Admiral Westover and his father had a long history together and that did not count for nothing), that did not mean his proposal would be met with open arms, because the reconnaissance assets they needed went a ways beyond what PLESEC would ordinarily dedicate to such an operation.

  There was not much help for that, as far as he could determine. Unfortunately, the one thing Kris had not been able to give them was enough detail to narrow down the location, even roughly. Descriptions of the planet itself—the terrain, the vegetation, the day sky, even moons—weren’t much use.

  What they needed was a description of the night sky to get some idea of the visible astronomical bodies, things like nearby nebula, star clusters or bright asterisms that might identify a stellar neighborhood—and they’d been careful not to let her see that.

  That meant they had a very wide field to cover. All they had to go on was the trip’s duration, and that was a weak clue at best. She’d been put on board one of Mankho’s smaller transports at Cathcar and held in lockdown until they arrived. They’d made one stopover, suggesting the route was not a direct one, and one RST transit of about a week, indicating they had gone off the main transit lanes, which was only to be expected. None of it narrowed things down to an appreciable degree.

  Mankho had worn out his welcome on quite a number of worlds during his career. But since the destruction of the Black Army over the Knydos affair, and the Tyrsenians subsequently evicting him from Rephidim, he’d had plenty of time to reestablish himself on any one of the many potentially available planets in the vast, poorly charted volume that their best estimate currently encompassed.

  It was a tall order, and Huron expected a rather tortuous approval process, which at least (and here he knew he was grasping for a silver lining) would give them more time to sort through the reams of possibilities. At present, though, the preliminary report was still wending its way through the command structure, as far as he knew, so it was without much interest that he answered the secretary’s page.

  “Call for you, sir,” the secretary announced in his startling baritone.

  None of his personal acquaintances would call him on his office line at this time of ‘night’ (as Luna regarded it in her artificial day cycle), but it was late PM at CGHQ Nereus. Which probably meant some official busybody had just gotten the report and wanted to complain about his paragraph numbering or the font size he’d picked. Or maybe the addressee list hadn’t been formatted correctly. In fact, he was pretty sure it wasn’t. He sighed.

  “Route it to my console
, please.”

  “Yes, sir. It’s from CNO, sir.”

  Oh hell. That was unusually fast and almost certainly a bad sign. If approval was a tortuous process, denial was more often a short, sharp shock. He steeled himself for disappointment. “Thank you.”

  By CNO, he’d taken the secretary to mean some underling from the CNO’s office, and thus he was caught terribly flatfooted when the visage of the office holder himself appeared on his console.

  “Hello, sir,” he managed to say with a credible degree of aplomb.

  “No ceremony, Rafe,” Fleet Admiral John Carlos Westover answered, smiling at the reaction he’d caused. “Graveyard watch and all that. They have you burning the midnight hydrogen, I see?”

  “No. I think I’m the only one to blame for that, in this case.”

  “Well, don’t overdo it. You see what it’s done to Joss.”

  The backhanded allusion to Westover’s oldest friend and one of the CEF’s most respected admirals—in the view of many occupying that rarefied stratum which included Fleet Admiral Kasena, the near-legendary former CNO, and Admiral Kiamura, the victor of Anson’s Deep—got Huron to crack a smile.

  “I’ll certainly be careful then.”

  “See that you are. Have to leave some oxygen for the rest of us, you understand.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “I have your report here”—getting to the meat of the call. “Very interesting. Do you really think we might finally be able to get an inside track on the bastard?”

  “It will take some more time to evaluate the data we have, but if we can get the assets, I believe it’s looking better than anything we’ve had before.”

  “I agree.” Glancing down, he tapped what must have been his copy of the report. “I don’t need to tell you that if we make this actionable, keep it simple. Elaboration is not your friend.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The Nedaemans must’ve been thinking they were writing a plot for a blockbuster, not an op that had to work in the wild. Anyway—”