Orion's Price

by Owen R. O’Neill

  “Much better. Thank you.” She motioned for him to continue.

  “Yeah. So, long story longer, she healed up and got in contact with the local resistance brigade. Being the general’s daughter, they took her on. She spent the rest of that year fighting with them.”

  “How long was that?”

  “Three-quarters ’a Karelian year. Call it three hundred eighty days.”

  “That long.”

  “Yep. It weren’t no picnic.” He paused again. “If you know anything about Karelians, y’know that when they’re up against it, they fight dirty.” He thought he detected Mariwen suppressing a little sigh. “Anyway, she coulda spent the war there—would have—except that the very people you’re going to meet smuggled a high-level Halith defector, name of Count Dönitz, onto Pohjola. We sent a team to get ’im—Fred Yu and Corporal Vasquez led it—and they and Trin naturally became aware of one another. They got her to come on back.”

  Silence as both of them sipped for a minute. Mariwen broke it.

  “How old was she?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “That’s . . . quite a career.”

  “That was the beginning of it. The end . . .” Again, Nick focused on the space between them for a handful of seconds. His face registered a brief many-creased frown. “The end came near the end of the war. They sent her to infiltrate a Halith field-interrogation unit. She did. Became the unit’s ace interrogator.”

  Mariwen flinched. “She interrogated her own people?”

  “She did. Fed lots of nice juicy tidbits into the Dom’s intel organs as interrogation results. Talk about creatin’ hate and discontent.” Nick shook his head. “But that weren’t the mission. The real target was the unit’s CO. A general who ran a large and very effective spy ring which was causing a vast deal of heartburn. Now, fellows like that tend to have certain weaknesses. In the months she was there, Trin got him pretty well wrapped around her pinky—he proposed marriage to her. She paid him back by completely dismantling his network and assassinating him the night she left. With a spike-heeled boot.”

  “Oh.” The syllable fell weightless between them and faded away.

  Nick considered his beer at length. “That’s right.” More soft silence. “After that op, Trin transferred to the analysis side, went to work for Admiral PrenTalien and became the Trin we know today.”

  Mariwen exhaled, blinked, opened her mouth but then shut it again and shook her head. Finally, she said, “She’s certainly . . . I can’t think of an appropriate word.” This last with a rueful smile.

  Nick answered it with a slow smile of his own. “That’s cuz they don’t have one yet.”

  Chapter 19

  OverHallin Estate, outside Halevirdon

  Halith Evandor, Orion Spur

  The sound of her footsteps ricocheted in impatient echoes down the long narrow hallway as Arianna strode along, her heels punishing the polished marble floor. Gripping her xel as if it were the throat of an enemy, her face striated in hard angry lines, she stopped at the tall narrow entrance of one of the estate’s security centers, rapped her passcode on the entry pad and presented her credentials when the system demanded them. Satisfied, the system obligingly slipped the armored door aside with the low hiss of buried hydraulics.

  “Security center” was a rather grandiose title for what was in fact a smallish room, one of several, with places for only four people and rarely staffed by more than two. At present, it was staffed by only one, usual for this time of day, and Arianna’s chin wrinkled as she recognized the man by his inky blue-black hair: Kiril, the youngest member of the admiral’s security staff.

  Kiril swiveled his chair around from the console he’d been facing and smiled. “What service, Domina?”

  That did nothing to relax Arianna’s chin. In no way did she deserve that title and calling her by it, which Kiril habitually did, could be construed as either exaggerated deference or a subtle jibe at her youth and position. She inclined towards the latter. Nature had most mistakenly furnished Kiril with the face and form of an angel—a lean, athletic angel—for there was nothing angelic about him. Not anything in his reputation and specifically not the smile he was favoring her with now.

  Arianna schooled her face into a look of what she hoped was proper hauteur. “A visit request was approved early this AM. I was not informed. Who issued the approval?”

  Kiril dialed back his smile several degrees and returned to his console. A few moments’ tapping brought up the record. He wagged a finger at it. “Tros approved it. It is a request for follow-up from that man who was here yesterday.”

  “Him?”

  Glancing at her, Kiril replied with a shrug. “He has the authority. Tros had no grounds to refuse.”

  Tros had also made a point not to tell her. Had she not decided to watch the logs today because of that man Lessing examining Kris, she would have missed it. True, this was not her business: as a prisoner of war, Kris was strictly her grandfather’s business. But it was understood that for any visit, she would at least be informed, if only as a courtesy. What was Tros playing at?

  “Did Tros and that man speak?”

  Kiril expanded the record. “There was a conversation of four minutes and thirty-two seconds. Tros blocked the recording.”

  “I see.” Unconsciously, Arianna had begun tapping her foot. There was no reason for Lessing to request a follow-up exam with Kris so soon—no good reason. What had Tros and Lessing discussed during those four minutes and thirty-two seconds? Confronting Tros would be worse than useless. Better if he thought she didn’t know.

  Over Kiril’s shoulder, she checked when Lessing would arrive. Plenty of time. “Kiril, when that man arrives, I want you to conduct him to the room they used last time. And I want you to set up surveillance for the room now.”

  That got him to raise his eyebrows. After a brief but significant pause, he said, “Certainly, Domina. On whose authority?”

  “My authority, Kiril”—matching his questioning tone with her steely one.

  He inclined his head. “Yes . . . but with respect, Domina, the admiral—”

  “Shall be informed by me, Kiril. Do you understand?”

  Taking the measure of her tone, he nodded again. “It shall be done.”

  “And tell no one, Kiril. No one. Log nothing. Am I clear?”

  “Most extremely clear. Domina.”

  “That is well, Kiril.” She went to the entrance and gave him a look over her shoulder. “I will remember this.”

  * * *

  Two and a quarter hours later, Arianna, sitting alone in that same security center, watched Kiril escort Taylor Lessing to the room where Kris waited, having been taken there by Arianna herself. In spite of his youth, Kiril was excellent at what he did—he could never have met the admiral’s exacting standards otherwise—and she had full coverage of the space, zoomable to any point. She had gone to great pains to see that no record of the surveillance would be on anything other than her xel, which she’d mated to the console in host mode with a hardline. Her xel was set to transcribe the audio directly with the volume turned off. Whether these elaborate measures were justified would soon be revealed.

  As Lessing maneuvered his float chair into a vacant corner, she split the screen to show both him and Kris, and enabled track mode. Already she could tell things were different. Lessing’s ravaged face registered a tension that hadn’t been there yesterday and he wasn’t letting his hands lay slack in his lap, but keeping them on the chair arms, where the wasted fingers fought not to fidget. Across from him, Kris sat upright, her face an impenetrable mask but for the yellow blaze in her hazel eyes.

  Lessing’s pale grayish lips moved—altogether too much like the mouth of an oversized amphibian—and the first words that scrolled across the screen shocked and alarmed her. Addressing Kris, he used her name—her full name. There was simply no way he should have known it. Kris was entered in the POW registry only as a sterile serial number. Lessing could not have
retrieved her name from the system—so who had told him? Was that the subject of his four-minute and thirty-two second conversation with Tros? Arianna chewed her lip over the possibilities.

  What came next stilled her brief contemplations: it was blatant, baffling, and criminal. He asked for her help. What help could Kris possibly give him? And what could he mean by saying he could tell her who her parents really are? If Kris didn’t know that—incredible enough in itself—how would he learn it?

  What he said next made her gape in disbelief. If Heydrich found out, he’d be lucky if he had a chance to commit suicide first. Very lucky. Did he think this meeting couldn’t be monitored? Or that they would keep his secret? It was insane . . .

  Kris’s three-word reply appeared on the screen. Despite the gravity of the situation, Arianna clapped three fingers to her sudden grin. That answer was entirely Kris!

  Lessing’s face seemed to slump in on itself, rendering him even more toad-like in Arianna’s view. His jaw champed and his throat moved, but no sound emerged. When at last he spoke, the transcription appeared in a broken cadence—Lessing was drawing out his words for effect.

  Alecto? She’d never heard of it. Asylum—that she’d heard of. The general’s older brother had died there. Kris was there? Was Lessing implying she was somehow involved in Admiral Heydrich’s death? How could he possibly know? No one here knew what really happened at Asylum.

  Forehead wrinkled by a frown, she nibbled a fingertip.

  How could he know any of this?

  Kris moved in her seat, drawing Arianna’s attention. It wasn’t a big shift, just a change in posture, but it transformed her whole attitude and Arianna wondered if anyone could be as dangerous as Kris appeared to be in that instant. The three words of her previous answer reappeared, followed by: “eight ways from Sunday.”

  Chin tucked back into the loose folds of his neck, Lessing signaled the end of the meeting with his cel. She saw his fingers shake. Kiril opened the door not a minute later and escorted Lessing out. Arianna killed the surveillance, verified all the data were on her xel, performed a fast scan of the system for telltales and logged off. Then she stood, breathing quick.

  Grandfather must know all this. At once. He’d thank her for discovering it.

  The tip of her middle finger tapped again her xel.

  Well . . . he probably would.

  She tucked the xel into her tunic’s inner pocket.

  Hopefully, he would.

  * * *

  The admiral’s office, deep within the heart of the estate, was even more spartan than the day cabin of his flagship. The small comforts and reminders of home that graced his cabin were absent here, making it an almost entirely cheerless room, but otherwise—and allowing for the absence of a battle-management console and various situation displays of a purely military character—it was remarkably similar. By mere count of days, Caneris had spent more time aboard ship since his mid-teen years than he had downside, and more than this, the vast majority of events that had marked his life in a significant way had occurred in those ships. Adding that weight to the span of calendar time, it was fair to say the admiral was ninety percent naval and his office was by far the purest expression of this on the grounds. It also reflected, in its layout and organization, his mind—his professional mind: exact, precise, detail-oriented and, if neither inflexible nor hidebound, a mind that was not charmed by innovation.

  Arianna had only been allowed into this inner sanctum within this past year, and she still was not used to it or entirely reconciled to what it meant—or seemed to mean, rather. Her grandfather and the admiral inhabited the same body, spoke in the same voice, had the same mannerisms, but nonetheless seemed to be different beings: one she’d known all her life as a caring parent (albeit a strict one) and one she’d recently met and didn’t yet know well at all.

  On the way here, what faith she’d had that her grandfather would welcome her exercising her own initiative in this way had frayed to the point of hardly supporting any hope at all, for to say she’d exceeded her authority was necessarily an understatement, as she had none. Her course of action, which had seemed so imperative that morning, now took on a sadly rash appearance.

  So when her grandfather greeted her with a congenial smile, she felt the relief down to her toes, especially as smiles did not sit quite naturally on the admiral’s features. But then it occurred to her he might have no idea why she asked to see him . . .

  Invited to speak, she explained what she’d seen and heard in a rush, watching her grandfather’s face take on its much more accustomed stern expression, and pausing when it became almost forbidding.

  “How did the commander respond to his request for assistance?” he asked when she paused.

  Arianna glanced nervously at Kris’s three-word reply on her xel: Go fuck yourself. “Umm. . .” Blushing, she held out the display to where he could read it. “She said this.”

  The glimmer in the admiral’s eye suggested he did not find the answer unexpected. “What then?”

  “He threatened to expose her to General Heydrich.”

  “Indeed?” The forbidding look was back, having been briefly dispelled by Kris’s ‘eloquent’ response. “And what was her reaction to this threat?”

  With a swipe, Arianna scrolled to the next exchange in the transcript and held it up. Caneris read: Go fuck yourself eight ways from Sunday and nodded.

  “He wants to defect,” Arianna said, the color still bright in her cheeks. “Can’t you arrest him?”

  Her grandfather regarded her thoughtfully for a long moment. “That man is, in a sense, already under arrest.” At her perplexed look, he thought a moment longer and added: “He is a defector. His connection was with Admiral Heydrich, when he was head of Intelligence. I believe he was the admiral’s asset for quite a number of years.”

  “Oh.” Her perplexed look shifting in key, Arianna looked down at her feet. Never before had her grandfather entrusted her with such sensitive information.

  “You will appreciate, then, that this situation requires great care in handling.”

  “Yes, sir.” It sounded rather like a dismissal. It also, she had to admit, sounded like “hands off.”

  “Thank you for bringing me this information,” he added and then, taking note of the time, “You have an appointment to keep, I believe. It won’t do to keep the commander waiting.”

  Doing her best not to gape at him like one of her grandmother’s silver-tailed catfish, she nonetheless stood there, opening and closing her mouth a few times, before she could nod once and rocket out of the space, never seeing the gratified look on her grandfather’s face.

  * * *

  “No!” Kris trapped Arianna’s slender wrists and locked her up in a clinch, staring hard into the young angry eyes just a few centimeters away. Those eyes stared fiercely back. “You’re just trying to hit me! Stop trying! Hit me!”

  Arianna’s lips, clamped into a thin bloodless line, twitched, but she said nothing. Kris pushed her back a meter.

  Fuck! She hadn’t meant to be so rough. This session was not going well. She was upset and distracted, she could tell Arianna was angry and frustrated, and she needed to get a fuck’n grip, not take it out on a young girl who didn’t mass fifty kilos and had been sparring only a few weeks.

  As long as they were in Caneris’ custody, she’d felt safe enough—as safe as you could be in enemy hands. Although they’d stopped exchanging POWs (a situation she was largely responsible for, ironically enough), Rafe was too important and the chances were good that some deal would be cut to get him back. But she knew Rafe would never agree to any deal that didn’t solve the whole POW issue—no way would he go back if the deal was just for him. She’d heard enough, mostly from Arianna, to believe Caneris was in favor of a deal. And now he had Rafe for a lever, if he wanted to use it.

  Until that motherfucker showed up and the shit got deep and real. It hasn’t happened yet. Her words of yesterday laughed at her, using Lessing�
��s voice. Well, it’s fuck’n happened now . . .

  “Again.” She took her stance and waited until Arianna assumed hers, crouching there with wire-taut energy. “Attack!”

  The word unleashed a savage flurry of blows. Kris blocked them, backing slowly, holding herself in. This was much more like what she was looking for out of Arianna. Given time, the girl could hold her own against opponents up to twice her size. The thought of time—the future—jolted her and in that instant Arianna’s small hard heel flew up in a kick that caught her full in the face.

  Kris staggered and dropped to one knee. Her lower face felt unaccountably warm and wet and it wasn’t until she saw crimson spots appear on the turf that she began to comprehend. Touching her mouth with questioning fingers, she stared amazed for a instant when they came away red with blood.

  “That’s better”—mumbling the two words.

  “Oh!” Arianna looked mortified. “Oh . . . mother! Your nose! I’m sorry!”

  Kris lifted her tank top in an attempt to stem the flow. “When you drop some jag asshole cuz he richly deserves it, are you gonna apologize to him?”

  Squatting in front of her, Arianna twisted her shoulders in an anxious shrug. “No. I guess not.”

  “Then don’t apologize to me.” The tank top wasn’t doing much good yet. It was looking like a slaughter had taken place, though.

  “We can’t go back with you looking like that.”

  “Tell ’em I tripped.”

  Arianna didn’t look impressed with the suggestion. But she said, “Can I help?”

  “Just gimme a sec here.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “You never dropped your guard like that before.”

  “You’re right.”

  “What happened?”

  “Took my eye off where I was—what I was doing.” The flood showed signs of ebbing. “Let it be a lesson to ya.”

  Arianna didn’t look impressed with that either. “It’s him, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” There didn’t seem to be any point in denying it.