The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set

by Owen R O'Neill

  “Sure,” she’d said automatically. She hadn’t bothered to consider what she planned to do with it, but they’d evidently concluded that having a fast slaver-built corvette on hand was a useful thing.

  The three men smiled. Would a year suit?

  “Sure,” she repeated.

  In view of current circumstances—meaning the war—would she like half to be paid in advance?

  “Fine”—whatever.

  They asked her to sign a new agreement. She did and left the room with a new source of income and her head spinning. Had she been aware of the backstage maneuvers that had gone on due to the op’s mostly off-the-books nature, including the official cover story regarding Marko’s death, and compounded by Huron’s strictly unofficial letter, her head would still have spun, though perhaps in the opposite direction.

  As it was, she had not quite shaken off the dazed feeling when she arrived at the Academy, where she’d spent much of that morning getting up to speed with the developments during her absence. Hot-bunking was one of those developments: the problem of accommodating twice the usual number of cadets here at the main campus had been solved by the simple expedient of doubling room occupancy and having them sleep in shifts. Other changes, like the end of purely academic coursework, were more welcome—most of the rest, not so much.

  Yet these were mild reactions compared this sense she’d stepped back into some kind of a theme park where what they did—what she’d done before she left—was an elaborate make-believe with training wheels—a feeling so disorienting as to be almost dream-like. When two cadets she vaguely knew passed her in the corridor on the way here, she overheard their earnest chatter about tests—tests? War games? What the fuck? Suddenly recalling her fervent desire to graduate Number 1 was a strange hollow sensation, impossible to comprehend. Were they gonna stop all the game playing and get real here? Did anyone even know what that meant?

  “What’sa matter with your shoulder?” Tanner asked, noticing how she was moving it as she ate.

  “Nothing.” The break was well on its way to being healed, but it was still stiff and she wasn’t quite used to not favoring it. “Dinged it some. That’s all.”

  “You’ve come from out there,” Singh-Whalen cut in abruptly. “Is it true? Are we really abandoning Crucis?”

  Kris, who’d heard the status reports firsthand on her way back, was most unwilling to be the bearer of bad news. “I dunno anything you guys don’t.”

  “Must really be bad then,” Shyli said, half under her breath.

  Kris kept her eyes on her food. “Say,” she asked after a moment. “Where’s Minx and Baz?”

  To Kris’s great relief, Tanner embraced the change of subject with both arms. “At their solos. We’re all up before the selection committee start of next week. There’s lots of new instructors, too. They’re running things ‘round the clock. It’s insane—you got no idea . . .”

  “Don’t be mad at ‘em,” Tanner said as they walked back to their dorm. “They’re good people—Shyli’s nice—and they do treat us like mushrooms here.”

  “I’m not mad.” Kris glanced back over her shoulder, uncomfortably aware of her disconnected attitude. “Was I bein’ a shit?”

  “It’s okay. No one expects you to talk a lot.”

  “Didn’t mean to be.”

  “Don’t worry ‘bout it. Uh—” Now Tanner glanced back. “Did’ja hear about the Outworlds? They put that on the Boards.”

  Kris nodded. However reluctant the League might be about announcing the impending loss of Crucis Sector, they had no similar qualms about the Outworlds. Of course, the Trifid Frontier Force was needed elsewhere—no one would seriously expect them to expend precious resources defending a colonial backwater.

  “You got people there?”

  Kris bit the inside of her lip. “Not anymore.”

  * * *

  “You think Kris has changed?” Basmartin asked Tanner during a rare private moment in their dorm the next AM. They were reviewing the scores of their solos, the final hurdle before getting their assignments from the selection committee. Baz had scored in the top three percent. Tanner had done about as well as he expected. He set his tablet aside with a sigh that belied his professed insouciance for getting into the Advanced program. They all knew the quota and while they hadn’t heard yet—it was a safe bet that they would shortly—he was pretty sure Minx had topped him by a few percent. She always did well on tests.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Y’know. Colder.”

  “She never was much of what you’d call a beacon of sweetness and light.”

  Baz frowned. Sometimes it was okay when Tanner got flip like that—something it wasn’t.

  “Not like this. Something happened when she was gone—I’m sure of it.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “How’d she break her collarbone?”

  “She said she just dinged her shoulder.” Tanner picked his tablet back up and started scrolling through screens again. Getting into Tactical wasn’t so bad. Not really.

  “No. Watch the way she moves it.” Both of Basmartin’s parents were doctors, so he would know. “She broke it, a month or six weeks ago, maybe. She probably dinged her shoulder too.”

  “Accidents happen.”

  “What? You think she just slipped in the shower?”

  Tanner shrugged. “So ask her.”

  Basmartin stared at his tablet another moment before blanking the screen. “Do you know when they’re gonna send out the selection results? I haven’t heard anything announced about it yet.”

  Tanner looked across the small room at him for several seconds. Then he gave his head a little shake. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Chapter Three

  CEF Academy Main Campus

  Cape York, Mars, Sol

  Commander Brett Rappaport, head of the Fighter Track Selection Committee, closed the file on Class 1842 and opened Class 1861. “What’s your count, Charlie?” he asked the woman to his right.

  “Twenty-four left.”

  That squared with his own tally. Nodding, he stirred four profiles into the middle of the table. “This is their highest ranked study. Cadets Basmartin, Brunner, Tanner, and Kennakris.” Reaching out with his stylus, he ticked off two. “Basmartin and Kennakris. No question, I think. Anyone disagree?” No one did. He marked both profiles with an Advanced tag and swept them to one side.

  “Now this Cadet Brunner. Comments?”

  “Technically solid, sir. Learns quickly, good with a plan. Follows up. Generally thorough.”

  “Thanks, Mike. Improvisation?”

  “Not her best area.”

  “Tanner?”

  “Good but he skates at times. He’s got the edge over Brunner when things brew up badly, though. Between them, call it fifty-fifty.”

  “Zale, what do you think about that?”

  “Mostly agree, sir. Tanner does lock it in when he has to. Outside the envelope, Brunner has a tendency to be operationally brittle. Tanner goes all in, as long as he believes in his leader.”

  That was Rappaport’s impression too. “Play that torpedo run he made again.”

  Lieutenant Zale Aquinas reran the video of Tanner’s torpedo attack during his, Basmartin’s and Kris’s now legendary encounter with the boggart. Reviewing the familiar footage, Rappaport nodded and made a note on his ledger. “Send Brunner to Tactical. Tanner needs to be shaped a bit, but I’m nominating him for Advanced. Let’s see if he can rise to the occasion.”

  “You sure, Brett?” asked a man who hadn’t spoken yet. “His scores are a little soft.”

  “I am.” Commander Rappaport checked two boxes and extinguished the four profiles. “It can’t be all about numbers, Pete. Not anymore.”

  * * *

  Kris entered their dorm just as Minx was stuffing two last articles in her duffle and zipping the flap. The rest of her luggage was already by the door. The realized prospect of war had rubbed some of the
brass out of Minx’s personality, but Kris hadn’t seen her look like this before—almost stricken. Suddenly, she wished she’d arrived a minute later.

  Minx clearly had been hoping the same thing. Straightening stiffly, she watched Kris cross to the bunk she shared with Shyli Casanova.

  Kris felt the stare on the back of her neck as she dropped her bag on the footlocker. “Look”—turning after another awkward span of seconds—“that was a tough break.”

  “Uh huh. Yeah.” Minx slung the duffle over her shoulder and reached for the bags by the door. Her eyes skipped once about the room before returning to Kris and then sliding away. “Umm . . . Congratulations. Tell ‘em bye, okay?”

  “Thanks. I will.”

  But Minx was already out the door, jogging down the hallway as fast as her luggage would allow.

  Chapter Four

  Mare Nemeton

  Nedaema, Pleiades Sector

  Pouring herself a second cup of tea, Trin Wesselby logged on to her desk console in her downtown Nemeton apartment. Outside the window, Telos, the largest of Nedaema’s moons, was a silver-blue crescent low on the horizon. Slightly above and to the right was Eidothea, who seemed to be enjoying the monthly flirtation with her companion, to judge from her sweetly blushing peach complexion. But it would fade to a pale buttery yellow soon enough, as the smaller moon approached its zenith. Tomorrow night the inevitable separation would begin, the two moons rising seven minutes apart each day.

  Such absurd romantic notions would not have occurred to Commander Wesselby at any time, and especially not now, when she was reviewing her accounts. Aside from the welcome news that Q3MM and Prometheus Development were bucking the current bearish trend—the former had just declared a small but welcome supplemental dividend—and her pre-war decision to divest herself of her holdings in Caelius Protogenos was proving providential, there was a note that Nick had just paid back a dinner tab from last month to the tune of §49.99.

  Among its other interesting characteristics, 4999 was the prime number closest to 5000. Picking up her xel and opening a message Nick had sent her around noon that day, she extracted an exponent and a random seed. The exponent, when applied to the amount of his tab, gave her the address of a single-use lockbox. Running the seed through her key-gen supplied a password and she downloaded the contents via a ghosted connection. The lockbox obediently evaporated.

  The file presented her with what she’d expected: Nick’s current appreciation of their working list of people who might have been involved with the Alecto Initiative. Many had been included in the ultimatum as ‘persons of interest’. Some were left off as being diplomatically untouchable. Others had not yet garnered official attention.

  For most, Nick had nothing new to add. The late Sandrine Onstanyan had been removed, of course, and shortly to join her in digital, as well as physical, oblivion was Clancy Rollins. Trin had suspected the Bannerman’s Ambassador’s statement regarding the former security director’s demise of being a typical diplomatic falsehood, but Nick concurred that he was dead. Orbital traffic analysis had identified his flyer shortly after the fact and Nedaeman OTC had recovered it, thoroughly sanitized. No rendezvous with another craft had been found, although that was not conclusive, since an undetected transfer could still be made, if you didn’t mind drifting for a while. Still, some object whose ephemeris would link the flyer’s trajectory with that of an outbound craft should have been detected, even if it appeared to be no more than a piece of debris.

  Nick’s people had run the entire Nedaeman orbital debris catalog and found no such object, but they did find a small item that had been ejected from his flyer. Based on its radar cross-section, was about the size of the head of an explosive bolt. It had been tagged as catalog entry 57.5947.39-5795.452, and duly removed from orbit during the last OTC debris sweep. However, looking like a bolt head did not mean being a bolt head, so NBPS’s orbital analysis team obtained the raw sensor data and reprocessed it. Cyclostationary techniques revealed that the actual mass of 57.5947.39-5795.452 was between seventy-five and a hundred kilos, at ninety-five percent confidence.

  Thus did it appear that the unfortunate Mr. Rollins had bailed out to catch a ride that did not come and, trying to activate his suit’s emergency beacon, discovered it had been disabled (the suit having no doubt been supplied by the same people who were supposed to pick him up). Or so Nick surmised.

  Trin agreed, with the elaboration that Rollins had certainly made contact in some way with his compatriots, so as to be lured into taking that fatal step. But that was neither here nor there at this point, and the former security director-cum amateur terrorist was long gone, having added his own personal sparkle to the annual light show produced by OTC’s manmade ‘meteor shower’ last winter.

  About Korliss Hellman, now in snug with his Halith hosts (his accreditation had been more or less a crock, not that it mattered); Captain Arutyun, promoted to Admiral Heydrich’s Aide de Camp, and the former Shardine Karmin (enjoying her exotic sexual tastes more privately as Carissa Pagorskav these days); or Orlando Kagan-Lazar, whom the war had placed beyond even Trin’s creative methods, Nick had nothing to add—unsurprisingly, as they were far off his range.

  But he had attached a new name: Cole Pritt, Supervisory Agent of the Hestian Central Bureau of Investigation, and former deputy director of their human-trafficking task force. Ever since the full dimensions of Mariwen Rathor’s kidnapping on Hestia became apparent, the government there had been conducting a most meticulous investigation—or witch hunt, depending on which side you were on—as to how the crime could have been committed. The bulk of Hestia’s economy depended on tourism and having about the biggest celebrity there was snatched cleanly off their planet was crushing the tourism trade and just about everything else. Land values had tanked as the rich no longer wished buy the vast bucolic estates there, as it had been fashionable to do, or they were trying to dump the ones they owned. Hestia’s stock market had slowed to crawl—even first-class paper sometimes not negotiable.

  Heads were rolling right and left throughout the CBI, many surely scapegoats and some perhaps not. Supervisory Agent Pritt had taken over the initial investigation of Mariwen’s kidnapping from one of the former, a department head named Karol van Dyk who, on being dismissed, protested his innocence by blowing his brains out in his office. Pritt had also seemed well on his way to following van Dyk into the herd of scapegoats. He’d been placed on administrative leave without pay for three months, then brought back and demoted.

  But in Pritt’s case, appearances might have been deceiving: around two months before the Alecto Initiative went down, he’d visited Rollins at Eelusis Cosmodrome. Ostensibly, the visit was related to security for the Grand Senate hearings Mankho’s plot had targeted, but the combination of the meeting and van Dyk’s suicide, together with the somewhat banal results of the investigation Pritt took over, piqued Nick’s interest.

  As well it should, Trin thought. This was Nick’s bailiwick, however, and she’d leave that ball in it. What interested her most was the pièce de résistance of the whole download: a biographical summary of Taylor Lessing. The first section told her little she did not expect; it could have applied to any ambitious and gifted political operative, given allowances for the times and planet of origin.

  To begin with, his birth name was one of those long, awkward, non-euphonious and peculiarly Hesperian monikers: Edward Taylor George Earle Calpurnius-Lessing. It was a very distinguished name in the eyes of Hesperian society, and his was an ancient and honorable family. Although perhaps the honor had been somewhat tarnished in recent generations. His father had once been Baron Lessing, as had all his fathers before him, but collapse of the family fortune had caused them to fall below the property threshold for titled nobility, and he’d been forced to sell the barony, becoming, like his son, plain Mr. Lessing.

  What effect this degradation in status had on that son was not clear, but once in college he had jettisoned the excess baggage from his
name, officially shortening it to Taylor Lessing. On graduating, he gravitated to politics, first as staff gopher and then moving into security, as Nick had mentioned. He’d landed a job on Grimbles’ staff before he was thirty, while the future grand senator was still a parliamentary backbencher. The father died not long after, and while Lessing subsequently recovered much of the family fortune, there were no indications that he had petitioned for restoration of the title.

  In his mid-forties, he married (late for a Hesperian peer, but not that late) a lovely nineteen-year-old heiress (young, but not that young) from a parvenu family. It was mildly scandalous. And, it seemed, unhappy. No children, separate vacations after the first year; eventually separate residences. The wife took a good many lovers of both sexes, becoming ever bolder about it. Yet it was probably her increasingly erratic public behavior that led to the final break-up: wild shopping sprees, multiple brushes with the law, drug-induced frenzies and some altercations, a near-fatal flyer accident.

  The divorce proceedings began acrimoniously but were settled rather suddenly. The young wife pocketed a sizeable settlement and disappeared from public life. All that was left was a patchy trail of medical records from a number of rehab facilities. Her current whereabouts were cloaked.

  Contemplatively, Trin sipped her fragrant tea and stroked her upper lip.

  Prior to the divorce, Lessing had made a bid for a seat in parliament, but the imbroglio with his wife sunk it. He returned to Grimbles’ staff after that and never left. Unusual loyalty. Grimbles had been elected to the Grand Senate on his second try. Lessing managed the campaign and thereafter became his chief of staff.

  Except for the drama with the spouse, all very typical, and that was noteworthy only in degree. What followed was less typical, and may have offered a clue to the unhappy marriage. It was a filtered log of Lessing’s cloud activity for the past three years, including a number of ‘sterile’ profiles and some short-lived proxy accounts, through which considerable sums had flowed. It was all anonymized and carefully ghosted, and Trin suspected that an audit of his accounts would show that those sums had never touched them. There was a still a thriving, and largely illegal, sub-economy that ran on cash and barter, and few were entirely innocent of it.