Orion's Price (Loralynn Kennakris Book 6)

by Owen R. O’Neill

  “Ms. Rathor,” he said in a voice no bot would ever be given, “you are the ICE contact for Lieutenant Commander Loralynn Kennakris?”

  An ill-defined dread took horrible form and surged to the surface, rendering her expression blank.

  “I am?”—frantically trying to recall if she’d known that. She didn’t think so. That Kris would list her as her ICE contact was the most . . .

  Her vision started blur with the oncoming tears, but not enough to miss the flicker of annoyance in the man’s close-set eyes. “Are you or are you not acquainted with Loralynn Kennakris? LTK 059 413?”

  “Ah . . . yes”—practically stammering now. “I mean, yes. I am.”

  “Then I regret to inform you Commander Kennakris is missing in action.”

  The cheerfully lit kitchen reeled around Mariwen. “Ex–excuse me?” She gripped the edge of the table to steady herself as the memory of Kris’s last words to her—Practically a vacation. What could go wrong?—blared so loudly as to drown out any reasoned response her prefrontal cortex could try to make. She closed her eyes, hoping it would stop the room spinning. “That’s not . . .” possible. “There must be—” a mistake. “I mean . . . she’s not . . . What happened?”

  “I have no further information. If this office receives any news, you will be informed. Good day, Ms. Rathor.” Before the insulting absurdity of the last sentence could even register, he killed the line.

  Reality strained, twisted, broke, and turned black.

  * * *

  Lights dazzling her eyes in an expanse of white. Her kitchen ceiling. Lying on the floor, and no memory of how she got there.

  Did I faint?

  The inexorable logic of events suggested she must have.

  My knees hurt.

  The right one especially. The pain, blossoming as she thought about it, was an almost welcome thing, reconnecting her to present reality. Getting cautiously to her feet and steadying herself against the counter, she waited until her vision stopped wavering. Moving with a slow halting step and keeping a hand on wall, she made her way to the bedroom and found Antoine’s calling card. Letting herself down carefully on the bed, she tapped CALL on the card.

  “Hi! I wasn’t expect— what’s wrong?”

  Seeing his welcoming smile wiped out as he read her expression, Mariwen gave her head an unsteady shake.

  “It’s Kris.”

  “What’s happened to Kris?”—his face now wearing the guarded expression of someone expecting the worst.

  “I . . . I hoped you could tell me.” A pause; a painful swallow as she struggled to form the words. “OSI called. They told me . . . they said—she’s missing in action.”

  That caused Antoine’s forehead to crease. “But she’s on Karelia, taking part in that fleet exercise.”

  “I know.” Somehow his confusion, great enough to make him state the obvious, calmed her. “That’s all they would say. Do you think you can find out?”

  “I will try. I’m afraid it might take some time.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’m sorry about this, Mara.”

  That’s all he would say until he had real information to report. No hollow reassurances, no I’m sure this all a mistake; no It’s going to be all right. They both knew the value of those statements.

  “I know.”

  “I’ll update you in an hour. Or as soon as I learn something.”

  “Yes.” Her hands tangled unseen in her lap. “Thank you.”

  She watched his lips move, silent; the façade about to crack. “Mara, I—”

  “It’s okay, Chris.” Better if he didn’t say it. “I’ll talk you in an hour.”

  “Yes.” He composed his expression with a visible effort.

  “See you then.”

  “I hope sooner.”

  “So do I.”

  * * *

  An hour, thirty-six hundred heartbeats—or more, at the rate her heart was beating—and every single one her enemy. Trying to distract herself only heightened the sense of why she was attempting it and trying not to check the time every few minutes became a torment. Fixing herself lunch, a pointless exercise for her stomach was closed to any thought of food, the knife slipped for the first time in her life.

  Staring at the dark crimson drops welling from the cut and making brighter tracks across her palm to drip, one by one, with the precision of a metronome onto the polished stone countertop, the caroling of Antoine’s calling card seemed at first a sound from a dream. Shaking herself out of her daze, she pressed a towel to her bleeding hand and tapped to answer the call.

  Antoine’s visage, shimmering into existence in the card, was grim. “I was able to—what happened to your hand?”

  Mariwen glanced down at the spreading stain on the white cloth. “It’s nothing. The knife slipped. What did you learn?”

  He looked even more grim. “It’s not good, Mara. There’s nothing official on this, but—”

  Oh God. She willed her heart to keep beating. “Is Kris dead? If she’s dead, please just tell me.”

  “As far as we know, she isn’t dead. Rafe is MIA too. I’m trying to get more details. All I have right now is that they were sent on an operation into Halith space. Something went wrong and it appears they were captured.”

  Mariwen felt a savage jolt behind her sternum as her heart did stop. “She was. . . I mean, how likely is that? That she was captured.” She thought she’d been prepared to hear Kris was dead—she was wholly unprepared to wish she was dead.

  “I can’t say yet,” he answered, observing Mariwen closely. “What is it? You’re shaking.”

  “No—it’s . . .” Mariwen scrubbed her hand across her eyes. “Look—I’m sorry.” She swallowed, unable to get words past the constriction in her throat. She fought for—gained—a shuddering breath. “I—I have to see you.”

  “Okay. But I’ll let you know as soon as—”

  “No!” Mariwen shook her head violently. “I have to see you. Right away. Please.”

  “All right. Can you meet me here? That would be best.”

  “Yes. Yes, I want to meet you there.”

  “I’ll have some transport there for you within the hour.”

  “Thanks. Thanks so much.”

  “See you soon, Mara.”

  She nodded, throat closing up around any more words, and cut the link.

  * * *

  “Don’t you realize what they’re going to do to her?” Mariwen was gripping the coffee cup Antoine had just handed her hard enough to chip her nails. She rarely drank coffee—he’d offered her the tea she usually preferred—but today coffee suited her. Maybe it was that she wanted something as black and bitter as her mood. During her flight up to Lunar 1 from the Terran Navy cosmodrome at Beale, her shock had altered into a condensed sort of anger—at the situation, at not being told anything useful—and while it wasn’t entirely rational, because it wasn’t likely there’d be any useful information yet, it was so much better than a paralyzing fear. That anger sparked now in her dark eyes as she gestured at the flimsy on the desk between them with her bandaged hand to punctuate her question.

  The flimsy contained all the details Antoine had been able to unearth in the several hours since they spoke, and if they were sparse and rather disjointed (as well as being expressed in that peculiar official passive voice, mixed with bulleted sentence fragments, unexplained acronyms, and an incongruous use of capitals) they made things clear enough. Kris and Rafe had been sent to rescue Colonel Christina Yeager, who’d planned and carried out the raid on Haslar, second most important of the Halith core systems, that changed the character of the war in those dark days when Halith had reeled off an almost uninterrupted string of victories. Missing and long presumed dead, Colonel Yeager had in fact escaped to Amu Daria, a remote Halith colony, with a small band of survivors.

  Unfortunately, what should have been a straightforward extraction op became fatally complicated by an insurrection that succeeded, with Colonel Ye
ager’s help, in capturing a colonial capital and also liberated nine thousand CEF POWs the Halith had shipped to the planet. Evacuating all the POWs then became the primary mission.

  At this point, Mariwen ignored the details of how Colonel Yeager, Commodore Yasmin Shariati, the operation’s overall commander, and her marine commandant, Colonel Minerva Lewis, accomplished this extraordinary operation on the spur of the moment, and skipped to the last paragraph. In a few terse lines, it stated how Kris and Rafe had undertaken to delay a Halith counterattack that threatened the whole operation. They succeeded but did not return, being lost under unknown circumstances in Amu Daria’s storm-ridden equatorial seas. The arrival of a large invasion fleet under the command of Admiral Joaquin Caneris forced Commodore Shariati to abandon the search. There, the report ended. Antoine had added a verbal postscript. Three days later, a trio of stealth probes Commodore Shariati had left in orbit about Amu Daria detected a distress beacon, and a few hours after that intercepted some Halith comms about two people they recovered from raft near the area where Kris and Rafe had last been reported. Beyond that, nothing else was known.

  Her brother, putting the pot back into the synthesizer, looked over at her, concern etching a line between his eyebrows. “I’m not sure what you mean. She’s a POW, yes, but at least there’s some hope—”

  “No—no,” Mariwen snapped. “That’s not it! It’s about Asylum. Asylum station. Don’t you know what happened there?”

  Antoine slid into his chair. “Yes,” he answered cautiously. “She and Rafe went on a recon mission—”

  “No! What really happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Mariwen put the untouched coffee on his desk. “Kris told me—the first night we were . . . together. She destroyed the station. The attack—the operation . . . that was a rescue mission. Rafe . . . he—they got there afterwards.”

  “Rescue mission?” Antoine was watching her with narrowed eyes.

  “She was captured. They were holding her on that ship. The—the . . .” She exhaled hard, frustrated. “I can’t remember the name.”

  “The Ilya Turabian?”

  Mariwen nodded emphatically. “Yes—that’s it. The Ilya Turabian. You don’t know this?”

  “You’re saying she was captured? She destroyed the station herself? Admiral PrenTalien mounted a rescue mission to recover her?”

  Mariwen closed her eyes, took a deep breath, fighting for any degree of calm. When she opened her eyes there was a look in them her brother had not seen before and did not much like. “I didn’t know you weren’t aware of any of this. I thought you’d . . . none of this is in your reports?”

  “No. No, it’s not.” He settled back into his chair, profoundly disturbed. “What did she tell you?”

  It took Mariwen long seconds to compose her thoughts. “Something happened—some incident . . . that’s not important, but she was put under arrest and recommended for chemical rehab—please just let me finish”—as he lifted a questioning hand. “She was assigned to a convoy with Rafe and she, I mean, they—he came along—made an unauthorized attack on Asylum station. She was captured but Rafe got away. Somehow she escaped confinement and got control of the ship’s weapon systems and destroyed the station—I don’t know how, she wouldn’t tell me how. Rafe convinced the admiral to mount a rescue operation—that part doesn’t matter—and they made up the story to cover it all up later.” She glared defiantly at her brother, who looked back, stone-faced. The awkward silence stretched out until he looked away, rubbing his jaw.

  “Okay. But that doesn’t—don’t get mad—I’m sorry, it just doesn’t make much sense. I mean—how does one woman take over a pocket dreadnought? How would she defeat the IFF to use the weapons? A ship’s weapons wouldn’t lock on a friendly target and fuses won’t arm—”

  “I told you I don’t know!” Mariwen gestured angrily at his console. “You have access. Look it up!” Antoine held her eyes for an instant, then keyed into the system and typed as Mariwen tried to keep a hold on her temper. It was incredible, it was past belief, but it was true. How could her brother with all his connections and clearances not know about it?

  “Nothing here,” he said, interrupting her thoughts. Glancing at her, he added. “It’s all sealed—after-action reports, prisoner debriefs, all of Kris’s records. Everything.” He frowned, resumed typing, stared, typed again—sat back with a stunned look. “I’ve never even seen this classification channel.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He waved a hand at the screen. “It’s all under some special compartment—not ours. I don’t think it’s even CEF. Might be CID—maybe even the Plenary Counsel.”

  “So you believe me now?”

  He quirked a smile. “My faith has certainly been shaken—I’ll give you that.”

  “Good, because there’s more.” Her brother’s smile unquirked. “She mentioned Admiral Heydrich. You know, the one who was killed?”

  “Yes. Christian Heydrich—he was chief of Halith military intelligence at the time. A very nasty piece of work, too.”

  “She wouldn’t talk about it, but I’m sure something happened.” Given Heydrich’s reputation as a sadist, that something needed no explanation. “And I think she killed him.” Mariwen paused, then met and held her brother’s eyes. “He has a brother, doesn’t he?”

  “He does,” Antoine said slowly. “Tristan—a general in their ground forces. He was the governor of a penal colony before he became the head of their POW organization.”

  “Don’t you see? If he finds out they have Kris—you know what they’ll do to her.”

  “Oh . . .” He exhaled slowly and blanked his console.

  “Chris, we have to—”

  Antoine held up a hand. “Mara, this is . . . I understand—I do . . . but this is a long way outside our domain. Officially, I can’t ask about any of this. We have no access to data at this level in this department. I doubt anyone in Terran security does. We just have to hope—”

  “Hope?” Mariwen slumped back, stunned as if struck. “I’m . . . just supposed to . . . hope?”

  Antoine looked away from the tears welling up in his sister’s eyes. “Look, it’s likely they don’t know—”

  “What do you mean, it’s likely?” She’s wiped away the drops beading on her lashes, a swift, angry gesture.

  Antoine leaned forward, forearms on his desk, looking everywhere but her face. “We captured Ilya with all her surviving crew and when the station exploded it disabled most of the hypercapable ships in company. PrenTalien stopped the two that tried to escape and picked up all the other survivors as well. As far as we know, no one from Asylum made it back to Halith, and since the POW exchange protocols were suspended shortly afterwards, none of Ilya’s crew have been repatriated. No comms were recorded but distress beacons. So unless some messages were sent before PrenTalien arrived in-system, Halith may have no clear idea what actually happened. I mean, it’s been twenty-four years since Novaya Zemlya and we still don’t know what happened to our fleet there.”

  “As far as we know . . .” A low strained darkly bitter voice. “That’s it, then? Wait till the war’s over? Hope they don’t know what happened? Hope Heydrich doesn’t learn who Kris is?”

  Antoine shook his head. “Not necessarily. There are people—Rafe’s father for one—who have been pressing to have the POW exchange protocols revived. And things aren’t going well for Halith. The POW situation must be hurting them more than us. So there’s a real chance that the protocols might be—”

  “How does that help?” Mariwen cut him off. “What if they exchange some of those crew—the ones who were there—before Kris? What if they report what happened? What then?”

  Wordless, Antoine leaned back in his chair, shoulders bowing under the weight of her relentless logic.

  “Chris, I can’t just wait. I can’t. If she was just dead . . . but—not this. Not Heydrich. Not him.”

  His left hand curled into a fist and
he beat it softly on the desktop. “Mara . . .” Just dead . . . he looked across at his sister, so shaken, yet so . . . alive. This—wasn’t this what they hoped for, prayed for, all those years? And now to lose her again? He knew more than he cared to about Tristan Heydrich. Mariwen would only have had access to the publicly available data—she was obviously filling in the gaps from whatever she’s learned from Kris about his late brother; filling them in all too accurately it would seem . . . damn. The rhythmic beating stopped and he looked at Mariwen critically.

  “Are you up for a short trip, Mara? I think I can arrange that much.”

  “Anywhere.” Yes, she would go anywhere—would do anything. He remembered Mariwen when she was young and her heart was set on something. Her heart . . .

  “There’s a woman at Terran Navy headquarters—she’s the senior staff liaison from ONI—Captain Trin Wesselby. Used to be director of SIG over in PLESEC when Admiral PrenTalien was there. She ran the CEF side of the Alecto investigation and she’s a good friend of Rafe’s—knows the family. She’d be the best person to talk to.”

  “She’ll talk to me?”

  “I’m not a hundred percent sure. But I can’t think of anything else. There’s a friend of hers who’s visiting here—retired law enforcement. I worked a few cases with him. I’ll ask him but I can’t guarantee anything.”

  “If she’s a liaison, why can’t you just call? Isn’t that what liaisons do?”

  “She is a liaison. But she’s not our liaison.” Antoine looked uncomfortable, like whatever he was about to say was giving him heartburn. Which was a good bet. “Look, Mara. I don’t ‘know’ this—I mean no one ‘knows’ this—but when she was assigned to HQ, stories went around. She has a bit of reputation, you see.”

  “Chris, what has this got to do wi—”

  “She’s SSO, Mara. During the last war. Word is, she was field operative for SSO—”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Mariwen interrupted with a brusque shake of her head.

  “Of course not. Almost no one does. They don’t put SSO on organization charts. There’s no line item for them in the budget. I don’t think they exist anymore.” He sighed like a man who sees the water rising around his knees and knows there’s nothing left but to take the plunge. “SSO was the Special Services Office. It ran deep-cover ops in Halith-controlled territories, maybe even on Halith Evandor itself. Captain Wesselby was an expert at interrogation. Among . . . well, other things.”