The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set

by Owen R O'Neill

  The image rippled as the shock wave rocked the Ilya Turabian. A glowing cloud of plasma spread across the screen, a convulsing, bright orange flower, cooling eventually to red, then to infrared and invisibility.

  Kris drew a long shaky breath, suddenly tired, and not at all as exultant as she’d expected to be. The explosion had burned something out of her, and all she felt was hollow.

  Hey Huron. I thought you might be lonely, so I decided to send you some friends. We’re all friends afterwards, aren’t we? I think I read that somewhere—if not, sorry. Ignore Heydrich anyway—he’s probably still a shit. By the way, if ya wanna wait, I’ll be along in a few.

  The black spaces between the stars ate the thought and sent no echo back.

  “Well, Captain,” she said aloud, turning her eyes from the now empty vista—empty but for an expanding debris cloud, winking like ice chips in the thin reddish light. “You a believer yet?”

  The captain’s face was turned away from the screen; evidently he’d been watching after all. His profile was striated along anguished lines, and the pallid skin glistened with sweat. She watched as color crept back into his cheeks in uneven blotches, like badly applied make-up on a corpse. At last, he turned to face the screen, his eyes livid in the sickly face.

  “Lieutenant”—he made it into the deadliest word he knew—“those blast doors will open. And when they do—”

  “Oh, I know what comes next,” Kris snapped tiredly. “Don’t even fuck’n bother.” His lips curled around a retort, but he never got it out. Someone off screen interrupted him; Kris thought she heard the word “company.” The captain swung his head the other way in the jerky, harassed manner of a man assailed from all sides at once. The screen blanked.

  Must’ve noticed his friends, Kris reckoned. He sure didn’t seem very happy. Of course, he had to explain why he just blew up a major installation. Bet his superiors don’t have any sense of humor either. Well, she’d better see what was going on, too. No telling how the other ships would react to Ilya suddenly fragging her own base.

  The tactical display, when she glanced at it, showed mostly chaos. Two of the corvettes were tumbling helplessly out of control—they must have been hit by the shock wave before they could get their shields up. One of the destroyers had been in too close and was wallowing drunkenly now, the scanners showing heavy blast damage to its port side.

  Kris clucked her tongue. Bad reflexes, guys.

  The other destroyer had reacted in time and was forming up in a defensive array with the intact corvettes. Scanners didn’t show any weapons warming up; they weren’t planning an immediate attack. Of course, that could change in a hurry. She changed the scanner refresh rate to real time. Her eyes flicked over to the hyperwave commsets.

  As soon as they get themselves sorted out, I bet they start screaming bloody murder.

  At that moment, the terminals lit up, message alerts beeping and blinking. Yep, that’s them. She flipped on the bridge voice channel.

  “Bridge? CIC. Your friends out there are acting kinda pissed off. I don’t think they understand. If you’ve got your comm-net up, you might explain things to them, unless you wanna be plasma, too. That, of course, is fine with me.” She paused, thinking.

  I still need time to send a message to PrenTalien.

  “I’ll take the shields down, in case they’re getting twitchy. Gesture of good faith, y’know. Oh—and by the way—don’t break orbit. I don’t think they’d like that, and I certainly wouldn’t. For an encore, I’m investigating all the fun things you can do with the nice collection of adaptive mines you got here.” No one bothered to reply. She switched off the comm.

  Don’t wanna talk to me, huh? Can’t imagine why. But the racket outside the blast doors had stopped. Maybe I’ve made some progress. She glanced around absently. Well, time to phone home. She got up, prepared for the pain that flared with the movement, but not prepared enough. Grasping the console for support, she stood motionless, head down.

  Oh mothafucker. Not a good time for this . . .

  Breathing deeply, she fought to get her stomach back under control. The hot, flashing waves of sickness receded. Sucking in air through her mouth, she made it to one of the hyperwaves, lowering herself into it slowly. Sitting made her feel better. Now to see if she could make this damn foreign shit work. She cleared off the flurry of incoming messages, their blinking alarms still angrily demanding a reply, and brought up the unfamiliar menus. Reading them over, she decided the Halith did their best work with weapons interfaces—their comms gear was kinda clumsy.

  She saw an option called EXIT BUFFER. She selected it to see what it was. It turned out to be about a week’s worth of messages. She cycled through them rapidly, until one caught her eye and jarred her to a stop. It was an after-action report. She read it over, devouring the second-by-second recitation of events in the dry militarize, each replayed vividly in her mind's eye. When she reached the last paragraph, hot salty liquid welled up to sting her hazel eyes.

  It read:

  . . . Craft #1 attempted a rolling evasion which was not successful. Plasma fire struck the port-aft quarter of the target craft and resulted in hull depressurization, followed approx. 27 sec later by hull fragmentation. The pilot accomplished a successful ejection. At this juncture, Craft #2 broke off attack and attempted an escape. Pursuit was mounted with all diligence; however, we regret to report that, despite heavy damage to the target, this attempt was successful. ejected pilot of Craft #1 and craft debris were subsequently recovered . . .

  He’s alive? He’s alive . . . The words circled around in her brain, around and around—Huron, you’re alive—holding up a glimmer of something to hope for, an echo of might-have-been.

  Now, stop that, goddammit.

  Kris straightened up, wiping the tears off her lashes.

  Yeah. Okay. Alright.

  She forced herself back to trying to decipher the hyperwave’s operation. After plodding through several menus and a poorly written documentation screen, she finally got something that looked like a tuning menu. She picked an open channel and selected the CEF guard band as the exit frequency. That should light up receivers everywhere. Painstakingly, she typed her message.

  {timetag}. EMERGENCY ALL FRIENDLY. EMERGENCY ALL FRIENDLY. Kennakris, Loralynn, LTJG sending—#LTK 059 413—REPEAT—Kennakris, Loralynn, LTJG sending—#LTK 059 413. HALITH have planned invasion of Regulus—REPEAT—HALITH have planned invasion of Regulus. SECRET Treaty has been concluded with MAXOR to abet invasion. Current status of invasion plans unknown. Data dump to follow this transmission; will contain Halith messages, this ship. also TACTICON files. Am on board IHS ILYA TURABIAN. Am secured in CIC. CITADEL is engaged. Personal condition: Poor. Be Advised: Do not attempt pick-up. Have detected enemy fleet in-bound, force structure unknown, intentions unknown. Last known bearing vector 013/169. Have destroyed ASYLUM STATION on personal initiative. ASYLUM is DOWN—repeat—ASYLUM is DOWN. If counter to orders, I apologize—

  She paused. The hyperwave delay from here to PrenTalien’s last known position was about fifteen minutes; that was short enough to ask for an acknowledgement.

  —THIS IS A CLEAN TRANSMIT. Acknowledge on this channel, parameters to follow—VERIFY Recognition key 1-88-XO-7 Gypsy Dancer—

  She typed in the channel and pulse-code parameters laboriously, stopped, bit her lip, and attached a personal note:

  —Tell Huron (Rafael, [L], LCDR; #1AK 067 903) to go to Romney’s and knock back one with my name on it. Sorry I made such a mess of things. Hope you understand—END—repeat—End End##

  She hit a button labeled PROCESS. The console beeped obligingly and a working icon lit up. It seemed to grind for a long time, but just about when she’d decided she must have botched it, the working icon blinked out and a message, READY TO SEND, CLEAR TRANSMIT lit up. She pressed the SEND key. About five seconds later, another message popped up: TRANSMISSION COMPLETE.

  It would take about forty minutes, she figured, for PrenTalien
’s acknowledgement to come back—providing, of course, he didn’t screw around. If he was leery, deep-probing would confirm the destruction of Asylum Station. That wouldn’t take more than a few minutes and should answer any doubts about the message’s validity. Three-quarters of an hour to kill . . .

  She looked around CIC—at the five corpses, the blood drying sticky-tacky among the scattered crystal crumbs of the shot-out console screens. The deep-radar operator still slumped at his ruined instrument, a wide pool of blood congealing at the feet of his chair. The first casualty just inside the hatch, face down in its own bloody pond. Two mangled corpses sprawled by the Tacticon, one with its head facing the wrong way, the other with little head at all. And, of course, Heydrich.

  The scene made her feel ill. The dead looked so untidy up close. Kris had hardly ever seen, and never handled, a corpse. Her enemies were specks of light, magnified images on a viewer screen, thousands of kilometers distant. They burned away into plasma more often than not, and if they didn’t, no one tried to collect what remained—at most a sterile cloud of debris. Not like this heavy, inanimate flesh, lying broken and askew, contorted limbs and faces, scattered bits of organs and the heavy, bright, copper smell of blood. She couldn’t just leave them like this . . . could she?

  Unsteadily, she got to her feet, holding onto the chair. The pain was duller this time, an ache rather than a sharp tearing. She managed to take two steps before her stomach rebelled utterly. Falling to her knees, she vomited in a great wracking rush.

  Muddy scarlet. Blood mixed with ground meat flecked with black. She was bleeding inside. A lot.

  Well, that’s no big fuck’n surprise.

  Damn stim-tab was wearing off faster than she expected. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve. Her belly felt like someone had lit a flare in it. For a couple of minutes, she knelt with her head down, curled around the hot bronze pain in her gut. The sick dizziness finally passed, seeming to leak out through the holes in her abdomen.

  She managed to stagger up and lurch blindly towards the nearest chair. The operator’s body, still slumped on the deep-radar console, confronted her suddenly. Faltering, she put her hand on the quiescent shoulder and shoved his small-boned, dark-haired corpse out of the chair. It sagged to the deck, rolling face up.

  Not his—hers. Kris stared at the lovely young face, blue eyes fixed wide in frozen innocence.

  Probably just my age . . .

  Suddenly, she again felt very sick. Hot flushes tingled in her neck and cheeks. With numb fingers, she touched the nameplate on the blood-soaked breast. It read: Sub-Lieutenant Lailani Christopher.

  What the fuck were you doing here? Ya didn’t need to be here. Ya coulda been off makin’ somebody happy and all that kinda good shit and now look at’cha. What a fuck’n mess . . .

  Kris sat heavily in the console chair, trying desperately not to vomit again, and brushed some of the dark brown hair out of the pale, gray, vacant face.

  Sorry. So fucked up. Didn’t wanna—I mean . . . Hot wetness stung her eyes. Shit, not now. Don’t have time to cry now. Will, though. Jus’ wait . . . She closed the blank eyes gently.

  An incoming message light on the hyperwave demanded her attention. She checked the signal parameters. They matched what she’d asked for. By the time tag it had been barely ten minutes. Which was weird. Could she have made a mistake? She hit RECEIVE. The message scrolled down the screen.

  —for Kennakris, Loralynn, LTJG—#LTK 059 413—Acknowledge—VERIFY Recognition key 1-88-XO-7 Gypsy Dancer // 1-77-oX-9 Arabian Princess. Message received and forwarded. Pick-up already underway. Fleet en route to you. All commands alerted. Awaiting data dump, this channel. Stet Parameters. Break 1—

  The second part of the message rippled down.

  —Come to Romney’s yourself. I ain’t doing your drinking for you. LCDR R [L] Huron. END—REPEAT—END END##

  Trembling, she typed an acknowledgement, more than she intended and less than she felt. The tears spilled over and fell like silent vows on the keyboard—tears for him. Tears for her, too.

  It took her a minute to link the Tacticon to the hyperwave terminal. Her vision was oddly confused, crowded around the edges with purple-gray nothingness. When she’d finally managed it, she opened the terminal’s data buffer as wide as it would go, selected READ/REPEAT, code-worded the loop and locked it open. Once the first data dump was complete, the system would automatically and continuously rebroadcast all it could remember. Kris imagined it could remember quite a lot.

  She filled the data buffer first with the messages from the exit buffer and then set up the Tacticon to spool off a core dump loop. That would give them a nasty lot of 1s and 0s to deal with, but the intel folks were supposed to be used to stuff like that. She punched SEND and activated the dump loop. The terminal beeped happily as it gulped the reams of data and beamed them out into N-space.

  Now, nothing to do but wait. Time had adopted an odd elastic quality. Sometimes, it took half an eternity for a bead of sweat to ease down her cheek and drip onto the breast of her fatigues. Sometimes, the numbers on the time display jumped oddly, skipping a whole series of digits. Always, in the background, the hyperwave terminal beeped and chirped happily, digesting and spewing its data again and again.

  After a while, the noise from the other side of the blast doors resumed, with increased and ferocious intensity. They were serious now. It sounded like gravitic arc cutters. She pulled out the flechette pistol and checked the load. Four rounds left. She wasn’t going back to that interrogation room, whatever happened. In all probability, Admiral Heydrich and Sergeant Manes had no shortage of eager protégés waiting to fill their boots.

  Learn to choke down the disappointment, ya fuckers.

  The pitch of the cutters increased. Progress was sounding quite rapid. The enemy, it seemed, was at hand. She imagined she could hear their voices now, over the racket of the cutting tools, itching to get at her. Kris looked at Lieutenant Lailani Christopher’s stiffening body and found the word enemy stuck in her throat. She could—she would—end up stiffening next to Lailani in no more than a few minutes.

  A nice, useless insight, that.

  Suddenly the voice circuit of the entry-pad crackled to life. “Lieutenant Loralynn Kennakris! Lieutenant Loralynn Kennakris!” it barked at her. She raised the pistol, snarled “Shut the fuck up,” and shot the speaker out. Three rounds left.

  Not much time now, and she still had a chore to finish. Getting up from the deep-radar console, she managed to drag all the bodies over to the hatchway, straighten the twisted limbs, and lay them all out, right and proper, wrists and ankles crossed, the way she’d once seen them do back home when she was nine. Or maybe ten. The effort wracked her gut and she vomited again, but in the end she got them all shifted. Last, she shook out her collection of purloined handkerchiefs and spread them over the still faces. Even Heydrich’s. Her last erg of energy burned, she collapsed into the Tacticon chair behind the array of dead bodies.

  This is fuck’n insane, she mocked herself, feeling distinctly light-headed.

  It’s classical, herself answered. Heroes always die with the bodies of their enemies piled at their feet.

  Oh, so you’re a hero again? Self-anointed?

  Somebody’s gotta be, don’cha think?

  Huron’s gonna laugh his ass off.

  Well, it’s better than crying . . .

  She wondered if the air recyclers had gone out—it seemed awfully damned warm all of sudden. Had they figured out a way to pull the CIC power after all? An induction overload maybe?

  Her eyes sought out the indicators. They showed a healthy green. What about the ducts? Was she being gassed? No, the BNC alarms were green, too. Something their own sensors couldn’t detect? Not likely. Besides, the proximity alarms on the duct baffles hadn’t gone off. All the environmental seals still showed okay. Everything showed okay.

  She was okay.

  Scratch away, ya fuckers. I’m waitin’.

  Yeah, she felt
fine. Everything was fine. Which was damn peculiar because overhead, the lights were going out.

  * * *

  Voices, thin and distant, echoing dimly through a cottony nothingness filled with soft gray light. Either angels coming to take her home or vultures coming to feed. She couldn’t tell which and wasn’t sure she cared.

  . . . need three more units here! She’s practically bled out . . .

  Got her—Watch it. Careful now. Shit! Trip, foam that!

  How long you reckon?

  Too fuckin’ long. Goddammit, she’s hemorrhaging again! Drake, clamp! Fuckin’ stim-tabs . . .

  She gonna make it, boss?

  How the hell should I know? Where’s that goddamn scanner?

  Workin’ on it.

  Work faster. Ty, can you tell what’s busted without—

  Yeah . . . Jesus! Intestines chopped all to hell. Big fuckin’ hole in the liver . . .

  Oh shit, we’re losin’ her! Drake, hit her again . . .

  . . . of a bitch! I can’t even find her damn kidney . . .

  Alright, alright, she’s back on line! Can’t tell for how long . . .

  Scanner’s ready, boss.

  Okay. Easy, easy. Yeah, there. Fine. Bring it up.

  Christ, will ya look at that! Damn round broke up. That’s why she’s chewed so bad . . .

  Not good here, boss—hydrostatic shock damage, PZK’s off the scale. How in hell did she break her heel? Toxic shock . . . endocrinologic readings jagged all to hell—that’d be the stim-tab . . . Oh shit, she’s flat lining! I’m goin’ in! Trip, Drake, gimme a hand . . . I need a flood here, somebody—yeah, lift that . . . God dammit! I can’t see . . .