The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set

by Owen R O'Neill

  “Almost certainly,” the Ambassador emended.

  A much more interesting name was Korliss Hellman, a prominent Bannerman financier known to do ‘unofficial diplomacy’ on behalf of Halith, who had set up a bank to help slavers handle their business. Nestor Mankho had been a client. (His partner in this endeavor was a semi-retired official from the Andaman finance ministry, Orlando Kagan-Lazar, who’d arranged for the bank to be formed under the seal of the Sultan’s government. His name, regrettably, could not be part of the ultimatum.)

  Next to Hellman’s name was the word Accredited. This raised even the speaker’s distinctly arched eyebrows. The ambassador spread his hands with a pained smile.

  “The gentleman has been accredited by the Halith government.” He then produced a credential, showing that the Dominion of Halith had indeed seen fit to enroll the Honorable Korliss Hellman as a special envoy, and grant him full diplomatic immunity. The instruments allowing for this were attached. “Obviously, we are powerless.” He extended the documents.

  The Speaker did not bother to even glance at them. “Obviously.”

  Speaker Gauthier leaned back in her leather upholstered chair, regarded her magnificent hand-carved desk, and thought of probes and fig leaves. The Bannerman ambassador took his leave ten minutes later.

  The next day, the Halith Ambassador announced that he was returning to Halith Evandor by order of his government for urgent consultations. He regretted that the subject matter could not be revealed. The Speaker regretted his hasty departure. Neither he nor Speaker Gautier mentioned the ultimatum by name. The remainder of the interview did not last five minutes.

  Late that evening, a priority call from DCID informed her that unusual activity had been detected on the Halith Supreme Staff’s Morganatic nets—their ultra-secured command channels.

  Early the next morning, she was awakened by another call, this one from the Director of ONI, with the news that the Halith Imperial Navy had dispatched the elite Prince Vorland Fleet to Janin Station in Tau Verde, which covered Halith’s end of the Novaya Zemlya transit. The Kerberos Fleet, commonly regarded as the bastard stepchild of the Imperial Navy and formerly homeported at Janin, had been recalled.

  Hazen Gauthier thanked the Director in a soft strained voice, hung up the connection, and then sat unmoving in her nightgown until the rising sun began to warm the Carrara marble facing stones on the east side of her residence, and her maid rang to ask if she’d rather have coffee or tea with her breakfast.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  LSS Kestrel w/ LHC Flechette in company

  exiting the Tarsus Gates, Outworld’s Border Zone

  LSS Kestrel dropped into real space-time three light-hours away from Rephidim’s primary with LHC Flechette bundled in tight. As the pent-up translation energy bled off in a violent storm of neutrinos, the statis field binding the two ships dissolved and their keels unlocked as their grav plants went into standby mode. Despite the gravitic baffles that directed much of Kestrel’s translation energy into deep space, the maneuver may not have answered in a heavily patrolled and monitored system, like Tau Verde or Sol, but Rephidim had no sensors even close to that good. All they would see, if anyone bothered to look, was a slightly more vigorous than normal corvette coming in-system.

  They also might note that the corvette was a little tubby, as corvettes went, but not enough to excite comment. Slavers frequently modified corvettes with bigger drives and larger holds, sometimes building them up almost to the mass of a trans-atmospheric freighter. Flechette’s increased mass was due to having one of Kestrel’s assault shuttles clamped on, covered by a belly skin in case Rephidim OTC (or anyone else on the planet) had a decent imaging radar. The intel data said no one did, but there was no point in betting your life on that—this op offered plenty of opportunities for betting your life in other ways.

  Kestrel parted company to take station in the parking orbit her astrogation section had worked out around one of the nearby gas giants, while Flechette breezed along. It would take about one day cycle to make orbit, and her flight crew for this part of the trip had been lent to her by Kestrel, so Warrant Officer Wojakowski and Sergeant Donnerkill could man the shuttle. That meant a total of sixteen people onboard, checking their gear and doing their best to stay off each other’s toes.

  At five hours from orbit, they would make their number and state their intention: take on stores in exchange for some cargo they were carrying, doing an on-orbit swap—all perfectly unremarkable. They had a list with the names of likely vendors and would send out for bids when they settled into a comfortable 105-minute orbit. Adding a few hard-to-get items to the bid list would delay any replies for up to a day and that, along with the usual dickering, would buy them plenty of time—several days at least.

  They needed that time for two reasons. First, CAT 5 would drop in about a hundred kilometers from Mankho’s compound, to avoid any surveillance, and it would take two days to cover the distance on foot. Second, they needed Mankho to get warmed up and engaged in one of his ‘productions’, or other event they could take advantage of, and that was expected to take a day or two. By the time they made orbit, Vasquez would be arriving downside at his compound, which would start that clock. The team would deploy from the corvette over the northern pole, where the coverage of the planetary orbital tracking sensors was poor, and Rephidim’s unusually active ionosphere gave some extra cover.

  All this was carefully explained to Kris, and made perfect sense. It was the deploying part the whole explanation was kind of light on. You just didn’t step out of a corvette a hundred-fifty klicks up . . . did you?

  She was about to raise this minor issue when Huron told her, with a look of detached unconcern: “Kris, this insertion business can get a little hairy, so you’ll drop tethered to me.”

  Oh, that sounds just great, Kris thought. “How the hell does this work anyway?” There were few events more conspicuous than a solid body hitting atmosphere at several kilometers per second; a rock the size of her fist could light up most of a hemisphere.

  “Nanobot reentry shield,” he replied with a grin. “It takes the reentry energy and uses it to make more bots, which increases drag and slows you down. Acts as a phase-conjugate mirror against energy weapons—low-grade but better than nothing—and a background-matching transponder or a blackbody against sensor freqs. Damn clever engineering. Works pretty well unless they’ve got prime UWB equipment, in which case things get more interesting.”

  But Kris was stuck on the first part. At the amounts of kinetic energy they were talking about that was a lot of nanobots. “But how’s it work? Sure you got lots of energy, but what d’ya use for the structure? You can’t just make stuff outta air.”

  “You might be surprised about that. But the seeding material’s in the reentry pack. It’s furled silicon-laced graphene.”

  “You make a shield outta graphene and air? How’s that hold together hitting atmo at five klicks a second?”

  “Closer to six.”

  “Whatever. This stuff is gonna keep us from burning up? What’s the silicon do? Is it silicene? Do the bots spin off nanofibers or something?”

  “For god’s sake, Kris,” Huron cut her off, laughing. “Do I look like an engineer to you?”

  Kris swallowed her other questions, displeased with the aftertaste. “How big do these things get?”

  “It all depends—a klick or two across maybe.”

  Jeezus Christ! She almost bit her tongue trying not to stare, open-mouthed.

  “Converts to an active parafoil at about a thousand meters unless you wanna be really sneaky, in which case you can set it lower.”

  “How much lower?” This whole thing was beginning to sound very suspicious.

  “Well, Yu came in at a hundred once.”

  “A hundred meters!?”

  “A hundred feet, actually. They gave him a medal.”

  Now Kris did stare at Huron, perfectly speechless. Then: “And what are we gonna do?”


  “I have to talk to Fred about that.” With a grin again. Damn that grin—her suspicions got quite a bit darker.

  “Huron, how many times have you done this?”

  “Well, now that you bring it up . . . none.”

  “Are you fuckin’ kidding me!?”

  “I did read a manual though—”

  Oh my good fuckin’ gawd— “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” she hissed, very low.

  “In for a penny, in for a pound, Kris. You already had a lot on your mind.”

  You jag-fuckin’ rip-shit little—

  “Would it have made a difference? You can still stay onboard, Kris. No one will look down on you—we know you didn’t sign up for this. We can improvise something. It’s your choice.”

  Fine, asshole—put it all on me . . . No, that wasn’t fair—Oh fuck fair—No goddammit. She shook her head like a terrier shedding cold water. “No . . . sir. I told you I’m not copping out on this op. But . . .”

  “Yes?”

  She glared at the deck, struggling with the savage frown that darkened her face. “I just wish . . . A penny for a pound? What’s that shit mean, anyway?”

  “It means that once you get into a fighter’s cockpit, flying’s gonna seem like a dockyard holiday.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes of stark terror that lasted an eon, followed an hour and half of sheer exhilaration that could have gone on forever. That was Kris’s personal experience of reentry.

  They’d deployed from the corvette and used suit thrusters to decelerate to suborbital velocity, but hitting even the most tenuous atmosphere at 5.7 km/sec was like doing a belly flop into a pond from five meters up. Kris—who’d never been in a body of water bigger than a bathtub—could not have appreciated the comparison, nor did she appreciate the tremendous slap when it occurred. The suit took most of it, but if she hadn’t been scared out her wits, she would have been surprised that she still had all her teeth.

  Worse was to come: hitting the eddies, voids, and pockets of slightly denser atmosphere all along the boundary with space at that speed brought her excruciatingly well acquainted with what the members of CAT 5 called ‘rock and roll’ or ‘the good part’. During ‘the good part’ she wasn’t just tethered to Huron—she was clamped onto him like a limpet.

  But then the unseen nanobot reentry shield began to have effect, and the ride smoothed out as they entered the slightly denser air a few klicks down. The paralyzing terror began to fade as her frontal lobes came to believe that they were neither going to burn up nor auger in, and her limbs started to relax their cataleptic hold. By the time they crossed over the south pole, she was holding Huron by the hand, streaking northwards towards the morning which was just about to break.

  They crossed the equator with the unlit world below showing a rim of molten brass as the primary approached the western horizon from below (Rephidim rotating counter to Earth). She couldn’t see Huron’s face through the darkened visor, but the grip of his fingers communicated a thrill matching the one that had her heart beating fast, high in her chest.

  At 15-degrees north, they cut the terminator and emerged fully into the light, then left it behind as the reentry shield took a deeper bite. They were perceptibly descending now, a long glide that would take them another thirty degrees of latitude farther north and ten degrees of longitude to the west. At sixteen thousand meters altitude, their speed dropped to subsonic. At twelve thousand, the turbulent margins of the jet stream caught them up in a swirling dance where they joined hands and pirouetted together through the denser air, the rush she felt making her laugh for pure joy.

  The parafoils formed at a comfortable six hundred meters, and when they landed a few minutes later, within two hundred meters of their mark, the radiant grin was still on her face as she unsealed her helmet and took it off.

  “Fuck’n meow! Ya think they’d let us do that again?”

  Huron, his helmet off and his smile almost as broad, shook his head in wonderment. “I suppose you could ask the sergeant major for an application.”

  There was no time for leisurely reflection, however. The parasails reconfigured themselves into what amounted to a low-grade security enclosure to shield them from the prying eyes of any overhead sensors, but it would only last about twenty minutes. Within that time, they had to get out of their suits and into their combat armor and deal with all their gear. Two equipment canisters had been dropped with them: one held their armor, the section automatic weapon and extra ammo (they’d dropped with their personal weapons), along with their packs containing rations, camo-shelters and medical supplies. The second had EW systems, sapper and satchel charges, along with other demolition equipment, and a mole.

  The mole had been brought along because of the fence surrounding Mankho’s compound. It was a digging robot and a quite wonderful one at that. Through most soil types, it could burrow at two meters per minute and had the endurance to go a klick or two on one charge. It could leave a tunnel big enough a crawl through, or ‘swim’ through the dirt. It was accompanied by small bots that ran about on the surface to take care of seismic detectors and the like; the CATs called these lizards.

  Using lizards involved some evident risks, but Rephidim was very active geologically, meaning seismic sensors would have to be set to a relatively high threshold to keep from producing a stream of false alarms. Sounder data had told then that the soil around Mankho’s compound was such that the mole could achieve a decent rate of progress while maintaining an acceptable safety margin against detection. Just as importantly, the data showed that the fence went down only two meters and didn’t follow the profile of the underlying hard strata, leaving numerous places the mole could tunnel under without having to cut part of the fence at any point, which greatly simplified things.

  Of course, they had to get the mole there, and that meant lugging it a hundred klicks. It was broken into a dozen sections, one for each member of the team to carry, along with everything else they had. Kris was not officially a member of CAT 5, but she wasn’t officially an officer either, and while officers were by tradition exempted from being beasts of burden, they also—by tradition—shouldered their share of the load.

  So Kris wasn’t terribly surprised when, looking up from stowing her reentry gear in an empty crate (a drone from Kestrel would be down to retrieve it after the op was finished—win, lose or draw), she saw Marko Tiernan approaching. It was how he was approaching that worried her: staggering along with a metal section of the mole that was as almost big as her entire upper body. With a grunt, he set it down in front of her.

  “This ‘un’s for you, midshipman,” he said, dusting his hands and stretching.

  “Just me?” She eyed the mass. Marko topped her by a more than a head and out-massed her by at least fifty kilos. And she was supposed to carry this thing?

  “Yep.” He waggled a finger at the carrying handles. “See? Got it all rigged. Not so bad once ya get used to it.”

  “Oh.” Was he serious?

  He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Unless ya wanna carry that bitty thing over there.”

  She looked where he was pointing. There was a dark gray cylinder by the other crate, about the size of her forearm, with one hemispheric end. Yeah, right. This was clearly some sort of test. Well, if she at least tried, they probably wouldn’t make her carry the damn thing that far. Assuming she could even lift it.

  “No,”—looking down and gauging the weight. “I’ll manage with this.”

  Marko displayed a toothy grin. “Good on ya, midshipman. You have fun now.”

  Sure, asshole. But she flexed her knees, grasped the two handles and heaved. The section shot into the air as she toppled backwards and landed hard on her ass. It was a hollow titanium shell and couldn’t have weighed much more than two kilos. No one laughed, but a few hoarse chuckles were heard, and the grins were near universal.

  Hauling herself to her feet, Kris rubbed what was sure to be a handsome bruise later.
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br />   “Now weren’t that fun?” Marko asked, grin even brighter than before.

  “Stellar,” she muttered. Straightening all the way, she pointed at the gray cylinder. “So what’s that thing?”

  “That? That there’s the power supply. Go on. Pick ‘er up.”

  Limping over, Kris leaned down and tried to pick it up. “Shit!” It must’ve weighed thirty kilos if it weighed a gram.

  “Now ain’t you happy with your choice?”

  Kris looked back at the titanium shell and then down at the power supply. She nudged it with the toe of her boot. “No. I don’t think I am. You’re a burly guy—you struggle along with the big piece. I’m gonna take the bitty thing, after all.”

  Bending again, she grabbed the power supply in both hands and lifted it with a grunt.

  Marko switched his grin to a smile and sketched her a salute. “Yes, ma’am.”

  * * *

  The plan called for them to cover forty klicks that day and another fifty tomorrow, which would get them in the vicinity of the compound to await events. The terrain they would cross was marked by ridges and gullies, and tomorrow there was a river they’d have to cope with, but forty klicks was doable. They’d have to maintain six klicks an hour to do it, however.

  Six klicks an hour was a brisk pace when encumbered with a twenty-five kilo pack plus weaponry and ammo, and that fucking power supply she’d stupidly agreed to carry, even with the armor’s passive assist system, which fed back about ten percent of the energy expended in walking. Kris was sweating freely within half an hour and by the time Yu called the first ten-minute halt, her knees were shaking badly.

  Collapsing on a handy boulder, she popped her helmet visor and panted, sucking in great lungfuls of the sharp air and cursing whatever inner devil had made her want to show off in front of Tiernan. She didn’t even notice Master Sergeant Burdette coming over.

  “You know,” she said, sitting down next to Kris and offering a canteen. “Marko’s been pulling that shit with the mole skin ever since I’ve known him. Everyone falls for it.”