“But can you do that in a week?” Huron broke in. “I thought –”
“No, you can’t,” Taliaferro interrupted. “But they didn’t have her a week. Six weeks is more like it. They must’ve taken her just after she and Lora Comargo got to Hestia.” Taliaferro paused, flicked the ash from his cigarette onto his desk. The air-conditioning kicked up to deal with the smoke and he scooped up the ash with a slightly embarrassed air. It smeared.
“They killed Lora Comargo right after interrogating her, of course. That gave them time to finish visosculpting the double and then send her back with the real one’s ID and a cover story a day or so before the pick became public. That way, it’s all over the media and the new Lora didn’t have to do anything that might muss her cover. She could hole-up, be reclusive—if she acted a bit off, people’d call it spousal distress.” Taliaferro brushed the ash off his hand into the trash. “Like I said, clever.”
“Even so, that seems like a long time to fool people,” Huron observed.
Taliaferro shrugged. “Not really. Vacation, y’know. No mail, no calls. Privacy bots handling everything. Nothing suspicious about that.” He made a sour face, took his cigarette in his fingers again and regarded doubtfully.
“Damn,” he muttered and stubbed it out in the ashtray. The ashtray gulped and swallowed the butt. “Chemical interrogation can tell you a lot—let ‘em get all the details of the cover just right. They used memory modules in the double—kinda risky to implement, but we know how much they care about that. Work good when they work.”
“So what went wrong? Us capturing the ship before they were ready?”
“No.” Taliaferro scratched at the halo of hair around his mahogany scalp; fluffing it up then smoothing it down again. “They were going to release her in few days anyway. Y’all just made it more melodramatic. Of course, I expect they weren’t thrilled with you taking out Anton Trench and his ship—”
Kris looked up. “Anton? His name was Anton?”
“Yeah. Didn’t you know?”
“No.”
“Yeah. Big slaver muck-muck. Anyway, I think that probably played right into their hands actually. High-profile rescue, her testimony she’d only been held for a week, Lora Comargo back here doing the traumatized spouse thing—we weren’t as careful as we might have been.” Taliaferro started fishing in and patting his pockets. “No. What went wrong is you, Ms. Kennakris.”
“Me?”
“Yes, ma’am. You see, it’s almost impossible to get someone to drop the hammer on their, um . . . their lover.”
“Me!” Kris sputtered. “But I wasn’t—I’m mean, we never . . .”
Taliaferro smiled crookedly. “Well fortunately, I guess, that doesn’t matter much—the fact of your relationship, I mean. What mattered is that she thought of you that way. You see, one reason they had to kill Lora Comargo and replace her with their gal was to isolate Ms. Rathor sexually—make sure nobody showed up and did what you did. And of course they needed to keep tabs on her, that sort of thing. Needed to be able to set her off at the right time, too. Implants don’t always take, you know.” Taliaferro dug inside a coat pocket. Kris saw his fingers wriggling fruitlessly through the thick fabric. “But then she met you. They didn’t figure on that, of course. No way to. The two of you hit it off, so to speak, and so when you showed up and indicated your intentions—shall we say—it worked. It broke the implant. That’s why they panicked and tried to kill you when they found out about you two. Kinda stupid of them really—especially with that damned drone.”
“What were they planning to do with it?” Huron asked.
“The drone? Don’t think it was part of plan—haven’t unraveled all that yet. No, it looks like they got panicky and someone saw an opportunity for a twofer and went for it. Bad call.”
Kris and Huron looked at each other and Taliaferro said, “Ah, here’s that little sucker.” He pulled a thin card from some hidden recess of his coat and held it out to Kris. There were some numbers on it.
“What’s this?”
“Number and map reference of the hospital.”
“Hospital?”
“Mariwen Rathor’s room. Since you’re a friend.” Kris held the card like a flower petal. “They don’t give out calling cards. Her personal number’s restricted. Best I could do.”
Kris nodded. “Yeah. Thanks.”
Taliaferro stood, took his overcoat off the back of his desk chair and made motions as if to leave. “Well, if that’s all . . .”
“Why’d she start shooting?” Kris asked suddenly.
Taliaferro paused in the middle of an awkward-looking gesture, his heavy, mobile lips twisted down in distaste. “Oh that. Salvage-fused.”
Huron went a little gray. Kris just looked confused. “What fused?”
“Salvage-fused,” Taliaferro repeated, shrugging his overcoat the rest of the way on. “That’s something I guess we’re gonna have to pay more attention to now. It’s an old term they used to apply to nukes. The idea was to always set them off, even when they missed. Might do some collateral damage that way. In this case, if the mission gets botched, the idea is to get them—the subject, you understand—to pull a weapon and do as much damage as possible. Damn difficult to find too, because it doesn’t depend on suppressing an inhibitor—which we can test for—but on jacking up the will to survive—which we can’t. Anyway, that wasn’t the point this time. They were sneakier than that.”
“How so?” Huron asked, almost against his will.
“They salvage-fused the EMP device, too. It was rigged to go off the moment she died. If she couldn’t plant it, they fixed her up to force us to kill her and set off the bomb that way. The portico was plenty close enough—it would have done a hell of a job.”
Taliaferro absently fished out another cigarette and started to light it. “Yep, they had it fixed all around. Undetectable explosives, homemade EMP, a VIP plant. Probably laughed themselves sick over how brilliant they were.”
He changed his mind again, threw the cigarette in the trash, ran a hand over his scalp. “Trying to stop that.” It took a moment for Kris to realize he was talking about the cigarette. “Anyway, looks like it would have worked too, except for you, Ms. Kennakris. I hope you appreciate what you’ve accomplished here.”
Kris had a sour taste in her mouth. If those fucking guards had been able to shoot worth a shit, she wouldn't have had time to accomplish anything at all.
“Suppose there's that too,” Taliaferro said and Kris jerked, realizing she'd been muttering out loud. But Taliaferro seemed to take it seriously, because he went on. "Somebody engaging in gunplay on the Exhibit Hall steps was about the one threat that wasn't in the security plan. Aerial attack or trying to breach the perimeter with a 50-tonne lorry—yeah, but not a woman popping off with a sidearm. So you could say she had the element of surprise." He shrugged. “Then again, who wants to go through life as the guy who dropped Mariwen Rathor? Probably spoil my aim.”
Kris grimaced and wiped her lips across the back of her hand. “Is that why they picked her?”
Taliaferro made a wide, helpless gesture. “Yeah, that could've been part of it. Maybe. Who knows? There's any number of reasons that make sense: high profile, good access, lots of connections . . . fun.”
“What happened to them?”
“The fake Miss Comargo and the rest? Oh, we bagged them. We’re pumping them dry now.” A sudden frown crossed his face. “You don’t want to see them, do you?”
“No.”
“Good. I don’t think there’s gonna be much left to talk to anyway.”
Kris stared at the card cupped in her palm. “So what happens now?”
“To whom?”
“Mariwen.”
“Well, she’s in rehab. Be there for a while, I expect. She won’t be charged with anything, if that’s what you mean.”
“Will she be alright?”
That helpless gesture again. “I don’t know how alright she’ll be. She’s gonn
a have some pretty shit to live with—if you’ll pardon my French. But we’ve got the best doctors and techs there are working with her. I think they’ll get her straightened around okay. A lot of it’s up to her. But I think she’ll pull through.” He reached for his hat. “Eventually.”
She turned the card over. “When can I see her?”
“That’s up to her and the docs—not me. I’m just a cop.” He picked up the hat and pulled it on, then turned to Huron. “Oh. Trin Wesselby gave me a message for you, Lieutenant. Said to be sure I told you Mankho had a code name for this caper. Called it the Alecto Initiative. Seems he’s a classically educated cove too. She said you’d find that . . . interesting.”
“Thanks,” Huron replied with no tone in his voice at all.
Taliaferro tipped the brim to them. “Well . . . Good day, Ms. Kennakris. Lieutenant.”
Kris and Huron stood outside the NBPS headquarters building, waiting for the cab Kris had paged to take her to the hospital. The weather service had allowed a lovely day, warm with just the right amount of breeze and it fanned her hair as they waited, neither talking. Kris was thinking of the offer Huron had made to her. Huron was thinking about Kris. Both were thinking about Mariwen.
After a few minutes, Huron saw the cab approaching and gestured toward it. “Give her my best . . . If you can.” Kris nodded. The cab brought itself to a smooth stop and sidled over. As it verified her card as its fare, its gull-wing doors popped and she stooped to get in.
“Kris?”
She looked back, a hand on the open door. “Yeah?”
“Why did you go to meet Mariwen that day?”
Kris wet her lips. “I . . . I heard they were leaving afterwards.” She drew a shivering breath. “I thought—I was afraid . . . afraid she wasn’t gonna say goodbye.”
“You didn’t know that she was implanted?”
Kris looked down at pavement. “No. I didn’t.”
She heard Huron draw in a sharp breath and then let it go, slowly. Then she lifted her head, not knowing what to expect but wanting to face it all the same. Their eyes met and there was an understanding there—not complete, but accepting of its incompleteness. He gave her the barest nod.
She climbed into the cab. The doors shut, the little engines revved, and it was gone.
* * *
Kris stepped out into the hallway and carefully closed the door to Mariwen’s room. She wanted to vomit. The doctors had told her what to expect and she had listened, she had believed them, but she had not understood.
There was, it turned out, something worse in the universe than rape, and now Kris had seen it. The husk in the bed, host to a complex web of monitor leads, was perfectly pleasant and physically pretty, answering questions with the carefully nuanced inflections of the better sort of software.
She took her hand off the doorknob, fighting down the bile jumping in her throat. After a few deep breaths, the sick hot tingling in her cheeks started to fade and she reached into her pocket for Huron’s card.
Think about it, Kris, he’d said to her as they had left Taliaferro’s office. It’s hard—we test cadets to destruction at the Academy, and I don’t look down on anyone with the sense to say no. But I think you have something that will really make a difference one day. You don’t owe anyone a damn thing, but if you want it, I’ll see that you get in.
She hit CALL.
A moment later Huron’s image shimmered into existence on the overlay. “Hey, Kris.”
“Hi, Huron. I’m in.”
# # #
Author’s note:
As anyone who has dealt with the military knows, it is an institution that is very fond of acronyms. This fondness is, of course, shared by the government and many industries, but I think it is in the military that this fondness finds its fullest expression. The universe which Loralynn Kennakris inhabits is no different in this regard, and acronyms abound.
Acronyms do serve a useful purpose in making communication more economical but I believe they also serve a social purpose by identifying those who are ‘in the club’ as it were. The merits of this custom are perhaps debatable, but it poses a special problem to authors, who must invite their readers into the club, yet cannot always give them a proper initiation without introducing discordant elements and generally bogging things down, since people who speak ‘acronym’ rarely stop to define their terms.
The time-honored solution is, of course, a glossary but since ours is something of a living document and (like the series) a work in progress, we decided it would be better to offer it on-line, rather than include it at the end of each book. So if you wish be ‘in the club’, you can find our glossary at:
http://www.loralynnkennakris.com/Kennakris_glossary.pdf
Please enjoy.
Sneak Preview: The Morning Which Breaks
Please enjoy this free excerpt from The Morning Which Breaks, the next Loralynn Kennakris novel, coming soon to Amazon Kindle!
Court: Brother John Bates, is not that the morning which breaks yonder?
Bates: I think it be: but we have no great cause to desire the approach of day.
Williams: We see yonder the beginning of the day, but I think we shall never see the end of it…
Shakespeare: Henry V: Act 4, Scene 1
Prologue
Lakskya Compound
Lacaille, Praesepe Cluster
“Bravo, this is Six. Where are those goddamned grenades?” 1st Lieutenant Sebastian Gomez, commander Alpha team, Nedaeman SOFOR 1, hunched in the darkness under an overhang of striated rock as he waited for 2nd Lieutenant Mike Ananian, Bravo section leader, to respond.
“No joy here, Six,” Ananian came back. “The fuckers are late.” Lieutenant Gomez was well aware they were late—over twenty minutes late—and the unnecessary comment was a sign of the strain the delay was putting on Bravo leader’s temper. Gomez’s temper wasn’t any better: his Op window was closing. Lacaille was in a binary system and it would be half-light in another thirty minutes, when Lacaille’s secondary broke the horizon. While it was just a very bright star compared to the primary, the secondary would increase the ambient light by almost twenty-five percent and Gomez begrudged every extra photon.
But much more important—critically important, in fact—were his team’s extraction windows. The stealth corvette in orbit overhead could not just magically appear and drop its shuttles at any time. It was a slave to the laws of orbital mechanics and unless that goddamned convoy with the grenades showed up in the next ten minutes, he had little chance of making the first window. He could theoretically afford to miss it but that increased the risk enormously, and he certainly could not miss the next. It would be full dawn by the time there would be a third window and if his team wasn’t gone before that, they weren’t going at all.
Everything had gone flawlessly up to now, to the point of making Gomez a trifle nervous so he was not surprised when they finally ran into a hitch, but the convoy being delayed this much was not a hitch he’d foreseen. The plan had allowed a half-hour’s slack for the convoy to reach the point where Bravo could track them. That was a generous window, given that the trucks only had to travel five-hundred twenty klicks from the rendezvous where the cases of grenades had been transshipped. At the truck’s nominal airspeed, the trip should have only taken two and half hours. The corvette had verified that the transfer had indeed gone as planned and on schedule—there was just no good reason that convoy should be this late on so short a trip.
If there was no good reason, that left only bad reasons. Bad reasons meant going with the contingency plan and that meant adjusting his deployments, so he checked them again. His people showed as light green triangles on the topomap projected on his helmet’s faceplate. His own section—call sign Angel to avoid confusion—was lying along this ridge overlooking the compound. Delta section, with the three-man air-sliders they’d use to reach the extraction point, was eight klicks to the north but just a minute away, concealed in some dead ground where the terrain
broke up into a series of ravines. Bravo was over the horizon to the southeast and he couldn’t see them on the plot unless he pushed the power past where he was comfortable.
A klick behind him on a rise to the east was Aries, Sergeant Esteban Howarth, with his 15.4-mm recoil-damped sniper rifle. The big weapon fired terminally guided armor-piercing multimode ammo in three-shot bursts from a hundred-round magazine and had an effective range of five thousand meters. Aries was his lifeline if—make that when—all hell broke loose.
He checked the time—eight more minutes—and eased his own rifle across his lap. It was a standard assault model, firing 9-mm light armor-piercing rounds in selectable bursts or full auto, with a 25-mm grenade launcher slung under the barrel, a configuration that had served for centuries.
The rifle also had the latest tunable UWB scope with a freq-hopping maser and automatic target acquisition, which incorporated some technology invented since he was born, and which Gomez had turned off. He trusted his own eyes more than any automated acquisition system and he liked his gun set on manual for the same reason. Besides, all that fancy crap bled energy and you could never be too sure exactly how good the other guy’s sensor suite was.
Another minute ticked by and Gomez activated his command link. “All units, this is Alpha Six. If package not in sight in five minutes, we are Buster. Repeat: if package not in sight in five minutes, we are Buster.” Buster was the codename for the contingency plan and they all knew it was pretty desperate undertaking.
He really—really—wanted those grenades.
The grenades were not for them—they were bait. Bait intended for a terrorist warlord named Nestor Mankho, asleep in the walled compound three klicks down the slope and across the open flat below. Mankho had been behind an attempt to bomb a series of high-profile Grand Senate hearings in Nemeton last year and Nedaema had literally come within a centimeter of having its government almost wiped out. It was the first operation Mankho had mounted since the Black Army, an anarchist group he’d once led, had been practically annihilated after they attacked the Nedaeman colony of Knydos in the first years after the last war.
Loralynn Kennakris 1: The Alecto Initiative Page 18