The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set

by Owen R O'Neill

  This certainly was the opinion of Trafalgar’s medical director, Dr. Stanton, who entered the wardroom the evening after the battle, triumphantly bearing aloft four gallons of genuine Kentucky bourbon. Having seen that the wounded were as comfortable as his keen ingenuity could make them under the present crowded conditions, he did not scruple to prescribe for his other shipmates. Bolstered by this Hippocratic sanction, affairs proceeded at full tilt, to the point where a young lieutenant-JG treated them to a rousing rendition of—of all things—John Peel. This was followed by the unofficial version of Farewell Hyperion, the Navy anthem, with earthier lyrics that seemed more to the point, and somehow culminated in Lights Out, Miranda.

  Now, as she entered the wardroom, Kris saw her flight mates gathered at their usual places, joined, as they often were, by Senior Lieutenant Geoff N’Komo, the recon wing’s Foxtrot squadron leader and Huron’s best friend. A full day of celebration and its aftereffects had rendered them a relaxed group, except for Tole, who’d made it out of sickbay a day-cycle ahead of Kris and was looking glum. From this, Kris deduced someone must have brought up his relatively minor but embarrassing wound.

  She was right. N’Komo was laughing as Lieutenant-JG Krieger expounded on the details of the incident while consuming enormous forkfuls of food. He was just completing his recitation of Tole’s ejection and recovery when Kris limped up to the table. They all greeted her with genuine warmth, and as she sat, slowly and with extra care, a mess steward slid a bowl of translucent, tepid, colorless glop in front of her and handed her a spoon.

  Kris regarded it skeptically. “What’s this crap supposed to be?”

  “Doctor’s orders,” N’Komo said with a leer.

  “My ass,” Kris muttered.

  The leer deepened. “Nah, it’s actually just amino acids spiked with a few complex carbs.”

  And everyone laughed. Even Kris.

  Then Huron, wearing his usual look of smiling, affable reserve, leaned back, enfolding a steaming cup of coffee in his two hands. “Have you seen the report yet?”

  Kris, consuming a spoonful of glop, shook her head. Tole, welcoming the interruption, skated a xel across to her. “Ya made the highlight reel, that’s fer damn sure. Check it out.”

  Kris did. She swallowed hastily. “It was Banner.”

  “You want to know what else?” Huron asked, sipping slowly. Kris, scanning through the report as she obediently took another spoonful (the stuff wasn’t as bad as it looked), shrugged.

  “You don’t see it?”

  A slow deliberate headshake.

  “Here, let me enhance it for you.” Huron took the xel and fiddled with the display for a moment. “There. Look at that.”

  The spoon stopped halfway to her lips—hung there faintly trembling. “Air?”

  “Yep. That’s an air-trail he’s leaving. Has some node damage too and I wouldn’t give a lot for that section of fuselage ahead of his canopy.”

  “You think he made it back?”

  Glances crossed all around the table. Huron refilled his cup. “Can’t say. You did.”

  “Yeah. I did.” She put the spoon carefully back in the bowl. “So, who’s gonna tell me what this was all about? Or is it still a big secret?”

  Two weeks ago, without any explanation, they’d suddenly been ordered to Karelia—a high-speed transit under maximum security. Arriving at Kalervo Station, orbiting the frigid paradise of Pohjola, they’d exchanged their full complement of fighters for the strangest warbirds any of them had ever seen. There were eighteen of these great ungainly beasts, and along with them came two hundred seventy nameless strangers, who promptly vanished into locked quarters, emerging only to see to the care of their charges, whom the deck crews were not allowed to approach, and whose requirements in the way of fuel, stores and handling (to the extent they were communicated) were wholly outside the crew’s experience.

  It was disruptive, and at times more than a little provoking. Kris and Tole, along with Ensign Charles Dance, who was the other occupant of their berth (there should have been four of them, but Lieutenant-JG Molly Szentpetery had been killed two months ago, and they hadn’t been assigned a replacement yet), found themselves hot-bunking it in a warrant officer’s berth, while the junior officer’s wardroom was summarily taken over without so much as a by-your-leave. The deck crews were forbidden their own holy deck, and left to grumble in the mess and stalk sullenly about the passageways.

  Trafalgar then proceeded, again at top speed and under complete blackout conditions, to Tuonela, the true back of beyond, where ninety men and women boarded the strange craft and launched into the unknown. The crew of Trafalgar watched them go, most shaking their heads in bafflement, but a few beginning to suspect something momentous has just happened. Kris was one of those few.

  “Which part?” asked N’Komo, with a cat-that-ate-the-canary smile.

  “Those birds. What were they?”—wondering if she’d guessed right.

  “Starclippers,” Tole answered. He’d had a day to catch up on the scuttlebutt that was just now beginning to spread. “Racing yachts,” he added, being helpful.

  “Yeah, I know what a starclipper is.”

  Starclippers were the fastest hypercapable craft ever built. She had heard of them but never seen a real one, as indeed few people ever had, there being fewer than a thousand in existence. These had not looked quite like the published images, due to their modifications, but they weren’t heavily disguised. Kris hadn’t needed the benefit of the scuttlebutt to draw the right conclusions.

  Looking around, she stirred her glop. “So what did we do? Take a poke at Halith with those things?”

  Kris knew that Tuonela, at the very edge of Karelian space, was connected to Syrdar, the outermost of the Halith core systems, by a thin transit route that was uncommonly dangerous. Having a lot of experience running dangerous transits when she’d been held as a slave on Harlot’s Ruse, she had a much greater appreciation of what that meant than most. If that was really what they’d attempted—and why else would you launch armed starclippers from such a gawd-forsaken bit of ether?—those ninety men and women must have been exceptional: exceptionally brave, exceptionally crazy, exceptionally bored with life—any or all three. She figured less than half would make it.

  “You gonna tell her?” N’Komo looked to Huron.

  He leaned forward with his elbows on the table. “Yep. We took a poke at Halith.”

  “Okay.” Kris dutifully ate another spoonful. “Are you gonna give me a hint? Or . . .”

  Huron shrugged, smiled, swirled his coffee, and began. “We’ve been trying to engineer this for about a year now . . .” Ever since the disastrous Battle of Kepler at the beginning of the war, in fact. The Speaker of the Grand Senate, Hazen Gautier, had first expressed the desire to strike Halith a direct blow at a secret meeting of the Plenary Council within a month of Kepler. As defeat followed humiliating defeat, with the subsequent loss of Crucis, where one system after another succumbed to the onslaught, it became ever more important to bolster public morale by demonstrating, somehow, that Halith was also vulnerable to attack. But ten months elapsed before an opportunity presented itself and when it did, Trafalgar was the chosen instrument. That was why she’d been inexplicably saddled with eighteen specialized starclippers.

  Using starclippers to conduct a raid on the Halith core systems was the brainchild of a marine, Colonel Christina Yeager. It might have been unexpected that such a notion would originate in the CEF Marine Corps, but the colonel was the daughter of Ed Yeager, the famous yacht racer, and in the days of her youth, little “Chrissy” had learned a thing or two about handling those fast, finicky beasts from her old man. Furthermore, her family was Karelian, and she had a good idea of what Halith’s reaction would be to a strike, however small, against their “sacred space.”

  “You knew the Colonel, didn’t you?” asked N’Komo, rising from his seat.

  Huron shook his head. “I’ve met her. Our families are friendly. C
an’t say I know her, though.”

  “My mistake,” N’Komo said with a wink that seemed to be aimed at Kris. She had no idea why. Huron had a certain reputation, but . . . “Anybody else want a beer?” N’Komo asked. No one did.

  “So . . . that’s it?” Kris sensed there was much more to the story.

  Huron glanced over at N’Komo, although he was used to being ribbed by his old friend. “Yeah. For the most part, that’s it.”

  That wasn’t it. In fact, it wasn’t even close to it. The rest of the story he was not at liberty to relate and did not, in fact, know in any official sense—which was true of a great deal of what he knew. To begin with, he knew that Fleet Admiral Westover, Chief of Naval Operations for the CEF, had inclined toward the idea, and Admiral Zahir was positively eager to give it a go. But cooler heads in the General Staff’s Operations Department felt themselves duty-bound to rain on the parade. The problem wasn’t dispatching eighteen extremely expensive boats and their crews on a one-way mission to deliver a pin-prick to Syrdar—the chosen target, it being the most vulnerable of Halith’s core systems—but how to get them within range. The only ship in the right place with enough capacity was Trafalgar, and she’d have to completely denude herself of her three fighter wings to cram the starclippers in. G-Staff was understandably reluctant to expose their newest, biggest and fastest fleet carrier to this sort of risk for what was, in effect, an IW mission.

  At this juncture, Lady Luck (or the Goddess Fortuna Major, depending on where you hailed from), who had been notably stingy thus far, served up an ace. Sent on an independent cruise to reconnoiter the Halith defenses at the outskirts of Crucis, the redoubtable Captain Lawrence had captured two ships in a single engagement, the heavy cruiser IHS Polidor and the light cruiser IHS Vistula. Sir Phillip, who prized his dedication to the “old ways,” had fought a running gun battle with the two ships, taking them under fire from his battlecruiser’s 14-inch chase mounts.

  Retribution was one of the few ships in the CEF who still owned these long railguns, and they proved their worth. Disabling the Halith cruisers at stand-off range with unhurried, precisely aimed salvos, his marines boarded Vistula to find that a 14-inch quark-diamond warhead had gone right through CIC, killing all the senior officers and leaving a panicky lieutenant in command. This luckless lieutenant had neglected to properly dispose of Vistula’s IFF system, including her recognition codes and private signals. G-Staff’s “dirty tricks” department (officially GS5.4, the misleadingly named R&D Department) accepted the gift eagerly, but it did have a limited shelf life, as the Imperial Navy was known to recycle their IFF systems quarterly (by the Halith calendar), and GS5.4 was puzzled as to how best to make use of it.

  Coordination was not the rule between the dirty-tricks folks and the more doctrinaire Operations Department, so it fell to an intelligence officer—Huron’s friend, Commander Trin Wesselby, Director of Pleiades Sector Intelligence Group, who was charged with exploiting the captures—to put the pieces together, and she did. Armed with counterfeit IFF systems and legitimately-generated recognition codes, Colonel Yeager’s proposed strike could conceivably be delivered not against Syrdar, but against Haslar, the most vital of the Halith core systems after the prime world of Halith Evandor itself. It would still be no more than a hornet sting, but a hornet sting delivered to an exquisitely sensitive part of Halith's body politic.

  A select team led by Commander Wesselby was tasked with planning the operation, and this went forward under the deepest secrecy. The League’s Plenary Council was not informed beyond a carefully worded message from CNO regarding “potential new opportunities” which was as much misdirection as a legally mandated notice. Even the Speaker of the Grand Senate was herself kept in the dark.

  The concept Trin Wesselby and her team came up with called for TF 34, which had been on loan to Seventh Fleet to shore up Cygnus Sector’s defenses, to be “recalled” to its rightful home in the Pleiades. While GS5.4 was stage-managing this “transit,” TF 34 would travel to Karelia and rendezvous at Kalervo Station with members of the Karelian special forces who would have, in essence, smuggled the starclippers through their own territory.

  Leaving her fighters in the care of Karelian Special Operations Command, Trafalgar would then proceed to Tuonela and—as Kris had guessed—launch the starclippers on the dangerous thin transit route to Syrdar, through which they would pass on their way to Haslar. Where Colonel Yeager and her flight would go after conducting their strike, only they would know. Trin’s people would provide the colonel with all available intelligence on the various separatist movements in Halith’s territory that might be able to aid or shelter them, but how that info was used was up to the colonel.

  After weeks of close, hectic, coffee-and-dim-sum-fueled, round-the-clock work at Outbound Station, where security could be even more tightly controlled than at Pleiades Sector HQ on Nedaema, and supported by private sub rosa diplomacy on the part of the former Speaker and retired Terran grand senator, Rafael Huron IV, who enjoyed close ties with the Karelian government, a plan was submitted to CNO, sealed, in a gold-striped cover, consisting of untraceable hardcopy, two centimeters thick.

  A final meeting on the massive dreadnought LSS Ardennes, the flagship of Admiral Joss PrenTalien, Pleiades Sector’s commander in chief, lasted deep into the graveyard watch. In attendance were Colonel Yeager; Commander Wesselby; Admiral PrenTalien, whose forces would carry out the plan; Admiral Zahir, from whose sector the plan would be launched; and Fleet Admiral Westover, who was officially not within a hundred and fifty light-years.

  The plan was approved and life became, if anything, less enviable for all involved as the deadline imposed by the date Halith would rollover their IFF systems loomed large. Colonel Yeager picked her flight crews with special care. Most were colonials, four of whom had lost their families in the conquest of Crucis Sector. Three were Karelian SOFOR teams, who were let in on the “fun” as a quid pro quo for their cooperation, and eight were almost certainly smugglers before the war had swept them into the military. None were married or had any living immediate family.

  All knew it was a reckless venture, and the chances of a homecoming were vanishingly small. Simulations predicted that they could expect only ten to twelve of the starclippers to survive the transit. There was a one-third chance less than half would. Further, the efficacy of the forged IFF systems could not be tested. The exact capabilities of the surveillance systems around Haslar itself were unknown. Their exit, if they made it that far, was by guess and by God. Yet none of them would have given up the chance to “ride the Elephant”—as CEF mariners put it—for anything else in this world, or the next.

  The operation got underway beneath stygian cover. Fleet commands were not notified. Even Third Fleet’s CO, Vice Admiral Hamish Burton, did not learn of the operation until TF 34 was due to arrive at Outbound Station, and was then required to submit to the indignity of being held incommunicado with all the other station personnel, under strict orders from Admiral PrenTalien.

  Astoundingly, things went off without a hitch, and Trafalgar was even able to make rendezvous seventy-two hours early, allowing them to advance the timeline by that much. This stroke of good fortune was explained by the participants according to their lights: the Karelians credited the good offices of Saint Helen, a young woman who’d helped save Karelia during an invasion by Syrdar centuries before. The smugglers attributed it to the god who looks after fools and drunkards. What Christina Yeager or Trin Wesselby might have thought, they did not share.

  Three Terran months and seven days after Colonel Yeager had proposed the idea, and two months and fourteen days after Trin Wesselby had found a way to make it work, the eighteen starclippers took off, bound for Haslar, and TF 34 set course for Miranda, little guessing what lay in store there.

  Huron got up and refilled his cup. The slightly narrow-eyed look he wore as he rose from his seat, gave Kris an inkling of just how much she was missing.

  “So—for the mo
st part—that’s it,” Kris probed, echoing his last comment.

  “That’s it,” repeated Huron, fooling no one, least of all Kris. Seeing he wasn’t going to budge on this one, she changed the subject.

  “Okay. Then what about the big dance we just had? Can you fill me in? Or do I have to go all 20-Questions on that too?”

  They collectively assured her she did not. Kris’s experience of the battle had been limited to her squadron being scrambled as soon as they dropped into normal space, boosting out to engage the forces of a Dom carrier and then spending the rest of her PM mixing it up in one of the worst dogfights anyone had ever seen. Two and a half days in sickbay—that half-day, she’d been unconscious for—had not done much to enlighten her.

  Now her flight mates—on firmer ground where there was no danger of trespassing on official secrets—were eager to supply this lack. The result was a little disjointed, and at one point Krieger and Tole got into a spirited debate about exactly which ships engaged IHS Revanche, and whether the fatal salvos had been fired by the battlecruiser LSS Intrepid or the heavy cruiser LSS Arizona (the former command of Trafalgar’s captain), leading to raised voices and veiled imputations of disloyalty.

  Huron quelled the debate at this point, pointing out that neither man had been anywhere near the light carrier at the moment she exploded, and somewhat chastened, they continued the narrative, helped along by occasional editorial commentary from N’Komo. What Kris came to understand from it all was this:

  Recovering their fighters from Kalervo Station, they’d jumped back to Miranda and stumbled upon a major engagement in progress. Unbeknownst to them, Halith had launched an operation against Miranda, using the Duke Albrecht Fleet’s Center Force supported by two divisions of the Kerberos fleet, which escorted a large invasion flotilla. Without breaking comms silence, Lo Gai came down the flank of the Halith fleet with all his characteristic energy, caught Count Ivanov just as she was preparing to launch a strike and handled the big carrier cruelly. In doing so, he turned his bored and antsy pilots loose, and they took their collective frustrations out on Prince Valens’ fighter group.