Orion's Price (Loralynn Kennakris Book 6)

by Owen R. O’Neill

  “So why doesn’t this Lord Geris do it?”

  Trin swirled her wine and observed its legs. “Because he’s a muddler. Because it means sticking his neck out. Because it means putting himself square between Heydrich and Caneris. That could be unhealthy. Now I believe”—with a tilted smile that indicated she was about to offer an out-of-school opinion—“that Caneris has been quietly courting Geris for some time. Caneris has some interesting allies. There’s this fellow named Danilov, f'rinstance—”

  Mariwen coughed quietly and took her own sip. “Sorry.”

  “Yes. Anyhow, I think he’s been courting Geris—especially since the duel—but the first rule here is: don’t scare the muddlers.”

  Mariwen sighed. This didn’t seem to be getting them anywhere at all, as fascinating as it no doubt was.

  “Right.” Trin set her glass down with extra care. “Being a muddler and having a wife from New California can also make him—Lord Geris, I mean—susceptible to . . . influences.”

  “Influences.”

  “Yes. The Halith tend to have a rather archaic view of homosexuality. Especially in women.”

  Oh. Mariwen considered her glass and drained the last centimeter remaining in it.

  “When she was living on New California, his wife usually went by the name Sonja Chappell. But her full name is Sonja Yekaterina Chappell Dvergsdal-Heberlein.”

  Mariwen winced as somewhere in the burial grounds of her mind, that unwieldy name disturbed the bones of a memory.

  “She’s your ex-girlfriend, Ms. Rathor. She’s Kat.”

  Neither spoke as the bits of the mosaic Trin had cast abroad resolved themselves. That the image produced was not pleasant to contemplate was beside the point. Mariwen had seen worse; she had imagined much worse. Nonetheless, the degree of detachment as she spoke surprised even her. “So we’re talking about blackmailing Lord Geris with the fact his wife and I were lovers?”

  “To say that would be premature at this point. What matters is that Geris dotes on his wife and she appears to be sincerely attached to him, so there could be a lot of wiggle room here.”

  “But in that case . . . wouldn’t he know?”

  “About her past? Frankly, we don’t know what he knows. He certainly knows something—that’s part of the allure and in subtle ways, he uses it. You see, Geris’ power is personal—it’s not his wealth or his pedigree, though he’s rich enough, and certainly well-enough bred. But he’s not from the top echelon of the Halith Aristocracy and he doesn’t directly control any critical assets. His influence comes from his abilities as a conciliator and go-between. He’s gifted politician and a charming fellow, but a lot of that charm comes from having a beautiful young wife who appears to dote on him and is an excellent hostess with an intriguing past.

  “Sonja Geris is an exotic in Halith society and that conveys considerable prestige to her husband—as long as she no longer acts like an exotic. From the Halith perspective, he seduced her away from both decadent New California and other women. That’s great as long as she’s stayed at home. If she’s run off the line somewhere more recently, he risks becoming a laughingstock—the foolish blind doting husband who’s being deceived by a promiscuous lesbian. That would kill his career—to say the least—and it wouldn’t be pleasant for her, either.”

  “Are you saying you think Kat—I mean Sonja—ran off the line with me after she was married?”

  “I wouldn’t go close to that far, but there are indications of what I’m going to call irregularities. I do know you met several times after she was married—they were back and forth quite a lot before the Alecto Initiative blew. Geris headed up the Halith delegation for about three years. We don’t know any more than that—but you do. Or . . . I’m sorry—I should say you might.”

  “And we got along?”

  “In public, yes. And there are . . . episodes that are unaccounted for.”

  “Oh . . .”

  “I can’t overemphasize the severe risk you’ll be running if you decide to go through with this, Ms. Rathor. Not so much from the procedure itself—though there is risk there as well—but from the consequences of your memories themselves being recovered. I must also add that we can’t know if any of your memories will actually prove useful until we try to recover them, so this could all be for nothing. And finally I must tell you that, the way things look at this point, the chances we will get our people back—eventually—are decent.”

  “But not Kris.”

  “No. Not Kris.”

  “So I really don’t have a choice, do I?”

  “Ms. Rathor, we always have choices.”

  “Then, Captain, you don’t know her like I do.”

  “That’s fair to say. Is there anything else I can tell you?”

  Mariwen had been avoiding eye contact for the past few minutes, but she made it now and both her look and her tone recalled a certain fighter pilot more than Trin would have thought possible.

  “Yes. I’m fucking serious and I need to know you are too.”

  It was impossible not to be moved by that look, nor did Trin try to pretend she wasn’t. “You can depend on that.”

  Trin waited for some sign to mark the epoch she sensed was passing, but there was none.

  Then Mariwen said, in a voice much more like her own, “So how soon can we get started?”

  Chapter 6

  Denver Heights, Colorado

  Western Federal District, Terra, Sol

  They’d installed Mariwen in the bed in the spare room with three racks of equipment about the foot. Trin Wesselby attached the leads to Mariwen’s skin and positioned the open helmet-like scanner while the tech ran diagnostics on the equipment and calibrated it. When he was satisfied, he retreated to Trin’s office, where they’d set up the master console, while Trin verified the scanner was reading out correctly and inserted a drip into Mariwen’s left wrist.

  She started to explain the procedure and what Mariwen should expect, but she hadn’t gotten more than thirty seconds into it when Mariwen stopped her. “It really doesn’t matter,” she said in a soft and over-controlled voice. “Please just . . . just—get on with it.”

  “All right,” Trin agreed and started the drip. It had dawned on her that she was nervous and that was the primary motivation behind her desire to explain the procedure. She hadn’t done anything like this in years, her previous subjects had not exactly been cooperative—far from it—nor had she much cared what would be left over when she was finished with them. She checked Mariwen’s vitals and used the interval to try to enforce a measure of calm. They had to run a baseline before they started the procedure and Trin still was cycling through the displays on the various units when the tech appeared in the doorway, making silent animated gestures. Trin muttered an epithet to herself, looked down at Mariwen and put a hand on her forehead. The skin was cold and already clammy with perspiration.

  “We have to run a baseline,” she said truthfully. “Nothing will happen while we do that, but it will take a few minutes. I have to go to make sure everything is working correctly.” That last sentence was stretching a point.

  “But you’ll be back when we start?”

  “Absolutely. I’ll be with you the entire time.”

  Mariwen nodded—a jerky movement—and closed her eyes. Trin got up and followed the tech to her office. Once inside she closed the door and turned to face him.

  “What is it?” Her voice was stiff with an effort not to snap. The tech, Cy Lindstrom, was one of the best she knew; a real artist at taking apart a human brain and she’d been lucky to get him. But he wasn’t experienced at what they were about to attempt: recovering years of memories masked by extensive rehabilitation. That would have applied to anyone, since reversing therapeutic memory suppression was almost never done—the very legality of the operation was dubious and it certainly violated almost every currently recognized tenet of medical ethics. However, it was close enough—in principle—to what he normally did that she’d been
feeling confident about their prospects until she saw the look on his face.

  Lindstrom gestured broadly at the display on the master console. “Ma’am, we got a Grade-A case of fuck-all, here.” Like many of the people who inhabited the shadowy realm of SPEC-Ops, Lindstrom, who bore the ambiguous rank of specialist—he would have been a warrant officer if he’d occupied a normal navy billet—had a tendency toward indiscipline. Trin made allowances for that, but right now her temper was far from its most forgiving.

  “Please be specific.” Her tone made him flinch and he urged her closer to the display. It showed a complex 3D pattern of colors, textures and arcs representing not the physical synapses of Mariwen’s brain, but the logical architecture of information stored in and shared by them.

  “Beg pardon, ma’am.” He picked up his stylus and highlighted an area near the center of the display. “Now if you look here, that’s the implant scarring. It’s probably mostly from the salvage-fuse they used to get her to start shooting, not the actual implant itself. All these”—he circled a broad volume speckled with flocks of tiny red triangles—“are artifacts of the memory manipulation they did to cover up the implant—you can see how deep they went, ma’am—worse’n I’ve seen. But the problem’s here.” He zoomed in on an area dominated by a chaotic jumble of colors and tangled lines. “This is what happened when the implant smashed. It took out all this and bled over into these regions here and here. Frankly, I don’t know how they got her back so well. With things scrammed this bad, you’d normally be happy if they could feed themselves.”

  He either didn’t notice—or managed to ignore—Trin’s expression as he brought up another window. “So that’s what they had to put back together. Whoever it was did a hell of a job, but they had to work heavy. They respliced this whole region. See how there’s a ton of aliasing going on? Especially all through this.” He looked up at Trin. “She’s been having flashbacks, hasn’t she?”

  Trin nodded, mute.

  “Okay, now here’s the masking they implemented—you can see how they did it. It’s coarse and it’s wide. Gotta be—see all the looping? Now what we’re proposing to do is break all these splices in here and let the knots they looped out rebuild their paths naturally. This is beyond ugly, Captain. We can’t read those knots, but you gotta know it’s gawd-awful. We really think she can handle it?”

  “How’s she doing?”

  He switched to the biometrics screen. “Well, look. She’s way south of scared outta her wits—heart rate, breathing, PSKs, core temp. You could barbeque with all the stress compounds she’s got running through her system.”

  “She’s keeping it together, though.”

  “Barely. For now. You got that much faith in her?”

  Trin considered. She knew the risk she was taking here, especially with a woman she’d just met. But her linchpin was that she didn’t have to know her. Huron knew her and Kris knew her, and Trin had seen how both of them felt about her. Indeed, Trin was certain that the gap between Mariwen and her fighter-pilot lover was not nearly as wide as it first appeared. If it had been, Trin would have never allowed things to go beyond the public brush-off she’d given Mariwen back in her office.

  And there was also the fact that Mariwen had recovered—against all expectations and all odds. That argued for a strength of will as great as any Trin had ever encountered. But the final key bit of evidence was ironically from Nestor Mankho himself. You simply could not take a shrinking violet and implant her the way Mankho’s people had and expect it to work. His whole scheme to get her to carry out the bombing of the Grand Senate hearings on Nedaema depended on Mariwen being strong enough and killer enough to be able to do it—no implant could function where those qualities were weak. And that was what Trin was sure she’d seen flash in Mariwen’s eyes.

  “Yes, Specialist. I have that much faith in her. We proceed.”

  “Alright Captain.” Lindstrom finished uploading the last parameters. “Keep a bucket handy.”

  Trin walked back into the room where Mariwen waited, her hands crumpling the crisp white sheets. “Is there a problem?” she asked in that same soft dead-flat voice.

  “No. No problem.” Trin knew her smile was artificial and knew Mariwen knew it. She couldn’t help that. Her last question to Cy Lindstrom before she left was if they could add a mild paralytic to the drip. A sedative was clearly out of the question, but a mild paralytic would at least counteract some of the more painful physical reactions. Lindstrom had frowned and chewed his lip. Paralytics were supposed to only effect the motor centers, but in a case as delicate as this, where they could not be sure just how deep they’d end up going, he didn’t like adding another unknown variable to an already hellishly complex situation. Reluctantly, Trin had to agree.

  She came up to the side of the bed and set her xel on a side table. They’d patched the master console through it so she could start and stop the procedure from here, while Lindstrom controlled it in the other room.

  “There’s usually physical effects in a procedure like this,” she said, feeling slightly traitorous.

  Mariwen caught the note and seemed almost amused in spite of everything. “Is that like a doctor telling me I might experience ‘some discomfort’?”

  “I’m afraid it is,” she admitted, taking the question as a positive sign. “So I’m going to hold you through this. You don’t mind, I hope?”

  “No. I—ah . . . Thank you.” She squirmed over to make more room in the bed and Trin felt a minor twinge in her chest from the look Mariwen gave her as she did so. She slipped in beside Mariwen and put an arm around her shoulders.

  “Ready?” Her finger poised over the glowing green icon on her xel that was pulsing the word START.

  Mariwen nodded. Trin’s finger tapped.

  Chapter 7

  Denver Heights, Colorado

  Western Federal District, Terra, Sol

  Nice eyes . . . or could be. They were wide and blue, but the pupils were shrunk down to pinholes, exaggerating the feverish look. So young though—just a boy. What are you doing here? The thin face with its scraggle of new blond beard twisted as he grunted and puffed over her. His lips writhed back. Bad teeth—where in the universe do humans still have bad teeth? His grunts sounded almost painful and the frenetic uncoordinated pounding was making the steel restraints bite. She barely felt it—her hands, wrists, ankles and feet were numb. It was her shoulders and knees and hips that hurt; deep shooting pains from her arms being pinned to the sides of the narrow table and her legs bent up and clamped so wide apart. She was glad of the pain. If she focused on the pain—thought only of the pain—she could almost ignore the bloated pressure, the ugly noises, the desperate rooting between her legs.

  Almost.

  He’d moved up, changed the angle, and now it was beginning to hurt—really hurt—each time his bony hips slammed hers. Get this over with. She ground her teeth and clamped down with her pelvic muscles. The blue eyes started from his head and a sharp series of hacking cries burst from his gaping mouth as he spasmed inside her.

  A huge hand reached out of nowhere and grabbed his long lank hair, dragging him off her while he still quivered and spurted—hot milky jets over her thighs, the table, the floor.

  “That’s enough, sweet pea. Recess is over.”

  The ugly brutal face loomed over her, grinning. “That’s ’nother one you got to fall in love with ya. Gotta watch that.” His thin lips were almost reptilian and his colorless eyes glittered in the folds of his heavy jowled face. He was the only one who ever touched her with just his hands, and then only testing, and somehow it was worse than all the others who’d lined up to rape her—alone and in pairs and squads.

  Some, like that boy, she almost pitied, most she did her best to ignore, but a few—like him—she hated right through, a feeling she’d never known. He was the first one she’d seen on Hestia when the door to their villa burst open. Lora sat up in bed screaming as they entered the room and she’d watched, paralyzed,
uncomprehending, as he’d taken Lora by the neck and threw her naked to the floor. She remembered how he’d kicked her expertly under the ribs to shut her up, then drawn his sidearm, fired one shot and the 10-mm explosive-tipped round had blown Lora’s skull apart . . .

  He wiped away that horrific image as he probed inside her with two stubby calloused fingers and then three, chuckling. She squeezed her eyes tight shut and gritted her teeth hard against a scream. He wasn’t going to hear her scream or cry—ever. Whatever he did, he wasn’t getting that . . .

  He patted her tense cheek with sticky fingers. “Yep, you’re good for a couple more.” She heard him whistle. “Heads up, there! Last call! Get it while it’s still warm!” And she fanned the rage that was boiling in her gut, a limitless scorching pain that blistered her trachea as it rose . . .

  I’m gonna kill you—fucking kill you . . .

  And vomited again in a violent spasm, pain spearing through her abdomen. Trin Wesselby took her weight, supporting her with one arm while holding her hair away from her face with the other hand. The paroxysm finally subsided and Trin accepted a warm damp towel from Cy Lindstrom who was hovering nearby and gently wiped Mariwen’s face. Mariwen coughed, hawked and spat into the receptacle and sagged back into Trin’s embrace.

  “Better?” Trin asked, gesturing to Lindstrom, who closed the receptacle and flashed it.

  Mariwen nodded weakly, shivering.

  “Would you like to stop for a while?”

  A fierce convulsive shake. “No!” Her voice was a harsh rasp. “No. Get . . . this . . . over—with.”

  Lindstrom caught Trin’s eye and gave her a thumbs-down.

  “Are you sure?”

  “YES!” The almost-scream made Mariwen cough and Trin held her as she groaned and curled around her shattered abdominals. “Don’t—make me . . . stop—please.”

  Lindstrom spread his hands with a look of vigorous disbelief. Trin shot him down with a glare.