The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set

by Owen R O'Neill

  Accepting the canteen, Kris slaked her parched throat. “Everyone?”

  “Everyone I’ve seen.”

  Kris handed the canteen back and Burdette capped it.

  “Damn few offer to carry the power supply afterward though.”

  As they stood up to resume the march, Marko came over, hefting the mole skin with one hand. He set it down in front of her again. “Y’know? This goddamn thing’s got me all tuckered out. Wanna trade?”

  Kris slung off the pack with the power supply in it, trying not to wince. “Yeah, okay. I’ll go for that.”

  * * *

  The primary was setting in the east when they reached the location selected for that night’s camp. As they set up their camouflage shelters and feasted on self-heating ration packs, Burdette mapped out the perimeter and assigned Fireteam Alpha first watch. Arno Watkins, however, had concerns about local flora and fauna—especially the former.

  “Hey, Top! What’s this I hear about singing bushes that walk around at night and eat things?”

  “It’s true, Watkins,” answered Burdette. “So be goddamned careful what you pick to piss on.”

  This led to a great deal of ribald speculation, which Yu tolerated for about a minute before cutting things short by saying, “Okay—let’s get back online. When you get home from this op, you can hunt up all the bush you want, assuming you can still find some that’ll give you the time of day.”

  Huron, looking at Sergeant Major Yu with a new appreciation, had to hide a grin as order was eventually restored.

  * * *

  They awoke at dawn the next morning under an ugly sky thick with dark roiling clouds. Chewing a ration bar, PFC Rachel Cates surveyed them with a considering eye. “Tut, tut,” she said, giving Kris a wink. “It looks like rain.” Then she ambled off, humming.

  Rain—buckets of it, that turned the lower areas they had to traverse into slurry. By local noon, they were already two hours behind schedule. At last, Yu signaled for them to take a break. Resting behind some boulders on the spine of a narrow ridge that split a wide plain maybe sixty meters below, Kris was gulping a hydration pack she hoped was spiked with enough electrolytes and whatever else to calm the agonized cramps in her legs, and trying to scrape kilos of gray-green greasy muck off her boots. In the last hour, lightning had started to enliven the rainstorm and a few of the team were watching with evident pleasure. Then nearly everyone jumped as three bolts struck the plain below in rapid succession, leaving great hissing circles of steaming earth.

  “Y’know,” Corporal Gergen commented, eyeing the clouds. “Maybe we oughta get off this ridge.”

  Specialist Ioan Resnick stared at him. “The lightning’s hitting down there, Benn. You wanna go down there?”

  Gergen shifted his gaze to a still-steaming patch of dirt down in the flat. “Gotta say, you may have a point.”

  * * *

  The storm ended as abruptly as it began, the clouds swept away as though by an enormous hand. In a sky too thin to show an honest blue, the red dwarf primary burned down with unwholesome vigor and they were all soon sweating in spite of the armor’s environmentals. Tech-Corporal Watkins was not impressed.

  “Who orders the weather on this fuckin’ planet, anyway?”

  Corporal Perez laughed at the notion that a dismal rock like Rephidim would have a weather service, as the Homeworlds and long-established colonies did. “Why don’t you write your senator?”

  “Now why did I think of that? Oh, maybe cuz the three-handed old putz can’t read. You’re a fuckin’ genius, Sam.”

  * * *

  The cracked and riven ground soaked up the deluge, leaving a few sorry mud puddles scattered across the landscape that glinted in the slanting ginger light. Dusk was fast approaching and they were still over an hour behind schedule, but Yu called a halt anyway to have Burdette send out some dragonflies to survey the terrain up ahead. Tiernan and Cates were scouting two klicks forward and could relay the data back, allowing the dragonflies to transmit in line-of-sight mode, which was advisable as they were just twenty klicks from Mankho’s compound.

  “Alright, people,” Yu announced. “We’re gonna take fifteen here.” They’d been pushing hard, but the day’s exertions hadn’t seemed to tell on him at all. Kris sat down right where she was, on a patch of still soggy ground. Huron came over.

  “How’s it going, Kris?” His voice was low and private.

  Breathing too hard to speak, she just shook her head.

  He reached out—she thought to take her pack and grabbed for his wrist to stop him, only to see he was offering her a ration bar.

  “Just suck on it at first,” he said in the same private voice. “It helps.”

  Taking it was trembling fingers, she did, but her stomach closed. There were feelings gnawing deep inside her, growing stronger the closer they got to Mankho’s compound. Holding the sticky rat-bar in unfeeling fingers she put her head to her knees, closed her eyes, and tried to breathe more easily.

  When she opened them, Huron, Burdette and Yu were clustered a together in the lee of a rocky outcropping. Burdette and Huron were discussing something and Yu was talking quietly, evidently getting a report from Tiernan or Cates. She couldn’t have cared less.

  Sergeant Major Yu cut the connection with Cates and scanned the terrain to the east while Burdette checked the readout from the dragonflies. She projected the data on the ground with a map overlay.

  “This is our last hurdle,” Yu said and ran his finger along a river, about five kilometers distant, which was just visible as a narrow winding strip reflecting the strange coppery sky. The river marked the nominal boundary of Mankho’s domain. “Here’s the ford they use for wheeled vehicles,” he went on. “Only about three feet deep. They’re sure to have eyes on it though. Good bet they have eyes on this whole stretch.” He indicated a stretch of river for several klicks in either direction.

  “Suggestion?” Huron asked, following the finger.

  “I think we go down here, a few more klicks downstream.” Yu tapped a point on the projection. “Lots of growth along the banks here—good cover even if they have motion sensors. Paranoid bastard like that, he might.”

  “How do we cross?” The Doppler returns from the dragonflies showed the current swift and gamma-backscatter sounders showed river about three meters deep at that point.

  Yu winked. “Gotta cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  * * *

  In the darkness an hour later, with the dual moons just breaking the horizon, they knelt in the rush-like plants that grew thickly along both sides of the river, watching the wide black water ripple and purl along in front of them. Yu observed the turbulent flow and then examined the banks. “Gotta cross on a line,” he said after a minute. Then added: “Wish they had bigger trees in this fuckin’ place though.”

  Kris had finally managed to choke down most of the rat-bar. It made her queasy at first, but after a few minutes, her equilibrium started to reestablish itself. Now she cast a worried glance at the sergeant major—what exactly did he have in mind?

  Yu turned his head. “Rachel, Sam.” The two marines crawled up next to him. Yu pointed at river, about thirty meters across here. “You two think you can swim that?” They both nodded. “Fine. Marko, Kyle, take lines on three or four of them scrubby things there, low down.” Tiernan and Argento moved off and Kris watched amazed as Perez and Cates stripped. Argento came down and handed the lines across. Perez and Cates each looped a line around their waist, slung their rifles around their necks and slid into the water, quite naked. The others started bundling their castoff gear together.

  “Almost no chance of seeing them in this water,” Yu commented, noticing Kris looking at him.

  “But how will we get across?” she whispered. She didn’t welcome the thought of stripping down and getting into that frigid-looking water—even if she could swim, which she couldn’t, Parson’s Acre being emphatically unsuited to the practice. This probably wasn’t quite t
he right time to bring that up. Maybe she could hold onto something . . .

  “We walk the bottom on a line,” Yu said with a grin. “I just hope this goddamn armor don’t leak too bad.”

  * * *

  It didn’t—as long as the definition of too bad did not include water filling the armor up to the knees. They slogged along, with Fireteam Charlie flanked out and Cates on point, heading for a patch of rocky ground eight kilometers south of the compound. The going was slower now as they followed a more circuitous path, keeping to areas where their armor’s camouflage would be most effective. Reaching their destination two hours before midnight, they established a perimeter and Fireteam Charlie took the first watch. They all laid out their full-spectrum camo-shelters and Burdette set up an array of passive sensors. Then she took out her xel and waited for the first update from Vasquez. It came in, right on schedule. Burdette ran a series of checks against the data and nodded, satisfied.

  “Report?” Yu asked, as Huron and Gunnery Sergeant Lopez joined them.

  “We got a good set of vertices for what she’s seen so far, but that’s only the garaging area and some of a subfloor. Looks like they’ve got her with the others in a holding area.”

  “Any sign of the proprietor?”

  “Not yet. She’s signaling all quiet.”

  Kris, lying a few meters away and listening to interchange, felt anything but quiet.

  Kris was awakened all too shortly afterwards by the sound of Huron’s boots crunching through the thin crust of the cold dry soil. As she opened her eyes, he lifted the edge of her camouflage canopy and said in a low voice, “They’re reporting activity downtown. Might be the proprietor—need you to take a look.”

  “Yeah. A’right.” Her eyes weren’t fully focused and she blinked rapidly to clear them. Through the canopy’s fabric, transparent from the inside, the star-pocked sky at last came into being, with both moons overhead, showing a rusty amber. Drawing her helmet close, she checked the chrono; barely past midnight—another seven hours until first light.

  She’d fallen asleep in her armor (they were all sleeping in their armor this close to Mankho’s compound), so all that was needed was to roll out and strike the shelter. Taking a quick drink from a canteen, she cleared the stickiness out of her mouth as Gunnery Sergeant Lopez came over and settled next to Huron.

  “Toni will take you there,” he said. “Benn and Rachel are out on the line. Good hunting.”

  “Ready, ma’am?” the sergeant asked quietly in her sweetly accented Antiguan voice.

  “Yes.” Picking up her rifle, Kris rolled into a crouch.

  Tapping her shoulder, Lopez pointed. “Around this way then. Keep your head down.”

  Together they moved off, staying low to the ground for the first hundred meters, and then turning north and setting off at an easy jog for Mankho’s compound, just eight klicks away.

  * * *

  Squirming up to the top of a ridge thick with half-meter tufts of dark gray-green native vegetation, dull black in the dim ruddy moonlight, Kris carefully parted the stalks with the barrel of her assault rifle and zoomed the scope to max. The residence was three kilometers away across the barren ground in front of her, and she zeroed in on the big lit second-story window. Early AM was a popular time with Mankho: sometimes for a little ‘light fun’ or maybe just to pace when he got nervy, which seemed to be often. She knew that big space on the second floor—he called it his ‘rec-room’ and held his less private entertainments there. It had stairwells in each of the back corners and a spiral staircase up to a mezzanine level that wrapped around three sides; when last she saw it, he’d installed couches for spectators, and less comfortable, but more inventive, arrangements for participants. None of which were visible from this vantage point.

  She could make out that the furnishings had changed in the last two years, and big new consoles had replaced the pornographic wall decorations. There was a bar at the back that she’d didn’t recall, with a large screen over it. At least, she thought it was a screen. Other possibilities occurred to her, one involving ‘goldfish’, which she didn’t want to think about. Whatever it was, it was blank now and the room was empty. In fact, she didn’t see any signs of life in the compound at all. But the lights were on, so somebody must’ve been in there very recently. She scrunched deeper into the foliage.

  Her patience was rewarded a few minutes later when two men entered from the left side of her view. One was dressed in loose trousers and the other in nothing at all, and both of them were dead ringers for Mankho. Neither was, of course: the trousered one slouched and the naked one held his right hand to his face when he spoke, stroking line from his nose to the left corner of his mouth. With no need to perform, they weren’t making any effort to ape the boss. But they did seem to be conversing animatedly as they crossed the space to the bar. The naked man kept talking while the other rummaged behind it. From the way the talker was now waving one hand, Kris didn’t think they were merely exercising their prerogatives as Mankho’s doubles (assuming they had any), to grab a late-night drink.

  As she watched, both men stiffened suddenly and the rummager glared to his right, hand frozen deep in a niche as a third Mankho walked in. This one was fully dressed and his back was three-quarters to her. Was it him? She crawled forward half a meter but the other two relaxed perceptibly. Not the genuine article either, then—no one relaxed like that at the sight of Mankho. The newcomer went up to the other two, and appeared to deliver a message. As he turned sideways in her field of view, Kris was able to confirm her hasty judgment: three fakes and no proprietor.

  Goddammit.

  “Ma’am?” The quiet voice of Sergeant Lopez and a tap on her boot made Kris’s heart jump. She twisted around to the sergeant, just below her on the downslope. “Not wise to expose yourself that much.”

  Kris slid backwards off the ridge. “I was just tryin’ to get a better read,” she whispered.

  “Roger that. But be careful. Understand?”

  Face hot, Kris nodded.

  “Post on up then.”

  Shifting back into position, Kris saw the three men finish their discussion and go their separate ways. The lights died. She gave Lopez a thumbs down. Lopez checked in with Gergen and Cates: nothing from their vantage either. They decided they’d wait the watch out.

  The two moons were twelve degrees lower in the sky when Kris heard Lopez pinging Cates and Gergen for an update. They reported no activity in the residence, no extra power drains, no comms. Lopez tapped Kris’s boot again and motioned her off the ridge.

  “No joy, ma’am. I think we’re done here for tonight.”

  The waiting had been bearing down on Kris to the point where she’d had to make a conscious effort to breathe. Now the crushing feeling eased with a deep shuddering breath. Afraid of coughing, she signed Okay.

  “Then head on back, but not the way we came. Take a loop around that big rock pile to the east and follow the gully from there. Roger?”

  “Yes, ma’am”—finding her voice and adding the contra-protocol ma’am unconsciously.

  Lopez took no notice. “Alright. Get going. I’ll cover you.”

  Herd might have been more accurate, at least as Kris saw it, but they got back in good time, and when they arrived, she felt a pang at finding the team awake and in cover positions. At first, she thought it was an alert they weren’t telling her about, but on seeing Gergen and Cates appear wraithlike from the darkness and noting Perez and Argento were missing, she realized it was just Charlie coming in as Alpha took the dawn watch.

  Lopez saw her back to her shelter where Kris safed the rifle. Then she left, with a nod to Huron who came over and knelt beside Kris as she removed her helmet. There was just enough light to allow her dark-adapted eyes to discern his hooded expression, but not what lay behind it.

  “Anything to report?” His murmur was a touch gravelly and she didn’t think it was because he’d been sleeping. Everyone was tense—she could feel it.

&nb
sp; “Three doubles”—keeping her voice to a whisper. “Proprietor himself was a no-show.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Nosir.” The meeting of the three doubles could mean anything—or nothing—and she couldn’t think how to explain it anyway. In fact, she couldn’t think.

  Huron gazed off to the west, where the primary would be rising in a few hours and shifted as if to leave.

  “Uh—sir?”

  “What is it?”

  “We hear anything? This end, I mean?”

  Huron’s eyes flicked back to her. “Vasquez checked in. Overheard enough to think there’s something planned for later this AM. Could be a production.”

  “Has she been—um—introduced yet?”

  The corner of Huron’s mouth twitched down. “Not sure. Someone just gave her a bit of a going-over. Pretty light, she thought—didn’t quite fit the proprietor’s MO.”

  “Oh.” Was that what the fake Mankhos had been talking about?

  He rose from his crouch. “It’s four hours till we move out, Kris. Get comfortable and get some rest.”

  Unsealing the torso unit of her armor, she pulled it off. Get comfortable? Not fuckin’ likely. Her guts were twisting like a bucket of eels.

  She swallowed hard. “Yessir.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  near Nestor Mankho’s Compound

  Rephidim, Outworld’s Border Zone

  Chained spread-eagle to a huge ornate bed, hung about with diaphanous silk curtains, she stared at her refection in the mirrored canopy overhead. She was dressed in a catsuit of black Antiguan glove leather and matching calf boots with iridium fittings. The suit had strategically placed zippers, all gaping opening, and the gold chains at wrist and ankle clashed horribly with the outfit’s silver-white buckles. Mankho sat on edge of the bed, dining on imported seafood from heavily incised gilt platters and feeding her bites now and then, while he talked about his art collection. It floating about them, not decently hung as paintings should be, but twisting slowly in midair as the images in the heavy knurled frames slid from one grotesque scene to another.