Orion's Price (Loralynn Kennakris Book 6)

by Owen R. O’Neill

  But it had been fulfilled this time, once he gained his bed, and anger boiled through him at being yanked from this uncertain refuge, banishing the last vestiges of sleep. A glance at the chrono told him it was the beginning of his work day and a look at his console (lifting himself with both arms so he could) told him the importunate alert was one he’d rarely ever seen.

  Halith had not given Lessing a job, but what might be more aptly called a function, by which he justified his existence. When General Heydrich had been placed in charge of Halith’s POW system, he saw the large prisoner population now under his control as a valuable asset that could be exploited. One form this exploitation took was the establishment of a breeding program to ‘enrich’ Halith’s slave population through the use of female POWs. Lessing had been appointed a local district manager in this program. The position conferred no more than a crumb of authority, but it imposed no great responsibility either and, Lessing thought, appealed to that peculiarly Halith sense of humor which found it droll to put a crippled eunuch in charge of overseeing the selection of breeding candidates.

  This alert, however, now that he’d had a chance to consider it, might well portend something more than the monotonous box-checking and file scanning that usually occupied his day. Prodded out of his apathy, he made it from his sleeping pallet to his console in much less than his usual time.

  What he saw when he opened the flagged file left him dumbstruck. The file came with a request for management review of a top-tier candidate—this was what had triggered the alert that woke him—and that in itself was rare enough. But the reason for the request, labeled simply as “genetic anomaly” in the candidate’s file, was beyond all expectation; indeed, inconceivable, to the point where he began to doubt what he was seeing.

  What he thought he saw, and now desperately wished he could confirm, was no “genetic anomaly”, but markers of a League technology so secret that he, a grand senator’s chief of staff and former head of security, had never seen it actually employed. In the normal course of events, he probably never would have been briefed on it, but Grimbles’ last trip, which was to take him into a war zone, brought the topic up because Grimbles and some members of his staff were privy to things that made it imperative that they not fall into enemy hands with that knowledge intact.

  The usual method for dealing with this situation was a tripwire: a neurological implant which, in the event of interrogation, prevented any information from being extracted by destroying the brain that contained it. Lessing was, himself, tripwired. But some individuals, grand senators among them, were considered valuable enough to spare them this fatal outcome, and for them, an alternative existed.

  Through the use of special memory modules, a person could be given an alternate identity to be triggered in the event of capture. To match this new identity, nanocytes were injected that changed the person’s appearance: eye, hair and skin color, weight, and face by acting on the soft tissue to alter the mouth, nose, ears and, to a lesser but noticeable extent, the shape of the face itself. The advantages of this method over visosculpting were that it was fully reversible and left no scars. The disadvantage was the time required: the process took several weeks, depending on the degree of alteration, three being typical. Recipients obviously had to be kept out of the public eye, but as long cruises were often involved, this was a tractable issue and extended vacations could also be made to serve.

  The necessary complement to this technology was a way to locate and restore the person’s original identity, when that became possible. Several methods existed to do this and Lessing was trying to come to terms with the fact he might have just encountered the most confidential one: a core-jack (the name always made him shake his head). The current generation of core-jacks acted as transponders, but the older ones acted like a simple beacon for their mates. The mates, which were implanted in trusted persons (ordinarily family members who were not at risk) acted as receivers. The two types of core-jacks could be distinguished, and markers for the woman whose file he’d been sent matched the older type. Further, it was a receiver implant, not a beacon.

  That meant, assuming he was right, she was not the recipient of a cloaked identity but a close relative of someone who was. Which didn’t make sense. The woman was a prisoner of war, currently in the custody of Admiral Caneris, and the whole point of these implants was to give them to people who were not at risk. If there was an answer to this conundrum, it probably lay in the fact that the implant had only been activated within the past year. Or so it appeared. But that made no sense either—the implant itself was at least twenty years old. Core-jacks never activated themselves and, from all he understood, a receiver implant that old probably couldn’t be activated. Maybe he was just reading the data wrong.

  But all that to one side. What really mattered was that the admiral might—increasingly, he was coming to believe did—have in custody a close relative of one of the League’s most exalted persons. A woman whom (and here he struggled against the lure of wishful thinking) the League would spare no effort to get back.

  Was Caneris aware of this? Clearly, he knew something. He would not have used his privilege as Lord OverHallin to keep this woman out of the regular POW system and conceal her identity—even General Heydrich could not learn who she was, or get so much as an image of her, without an executive order—unless he thought her extremely valuable. And that was enough.

  Perhaps Fate had at long last decided to play fair with him. Perhaps, if he played these new cards right, he could get out of this shithole he was in. He might even—and here wishful thinking beckoned more dangerously than ever—win the real jackpot: a ticket home.

  Chapter 14

  Denver Heights, Colorado

  Western Federal District, Terra, Sol

  “So nothing’s happened yet, as far as we know. They haven’t made any announcements—not a sign. If the proconsul knew Huron was a POW, they’d be trumpeting it. There’s no point in keeping that quiet. So we have to conclude Caneris still has them and is shielding them from the Council.” Trin handed Nick another beer and seeing his crimped expression at the use of the word conclude—they both knew she really meant assume—glanced out her apartment’s wide panorama windows. It was getting late in the day; the sun hanging over the western mountains was just preparing to settle down in a thick bed of hot orange cloud.

  Getting late . . . She pushed that thought aside with some difficulty. Ops never used to feel like this: the doubts that festered; the unpleasant tingle between her shoulder blades at the thought of what they were about do; the nagging fear that she was losing her edge. Or worse, her objectively. Those days with Mariwen had altered her, in ways she didn’t yet quite grasp, but now was not the time to let it be affecting her like this.

  “So what’s your opinion?”

  “My professional opinion?” Nick asked as he popped open the beer.

  “Of course.”

  “In my professional opinion, I’m glad I’m retired”—taking a healthy swig.

  “Nick, we’re not sending her there to break into Supreme Staff headquarters or assassinate somebody—”

  “Only engage in a little freelance blackmail of a high-level Council member.”

  “Only as a last resort”—biting back the more acerbic reply that was on the tip of her tongue.

  “Yeah. That.” Nick set down his beer and took his turn considering the impending sunset.

  “Nick, if there’s anyone who can convince Sonja Geris to bring this up with her husband, it’s Mariwen. And if there is anyone who can convince Geris to pursue it, it’s his wife.”

  “You make it sound very tidy. Y’know . . .” He paused, still looking out the windows. The sunset was working up to the height of its glory. “It’s always the simple ones that get me nervy. Like Pohjola in ’06. That was your third time out, wasn’t it?”

  “There’s no reason to get nasty here, Nick,” Trin said, somewhat regretting her diplomatic impulse. “This isn’t anything like
what happened on Pohjola. We have Paavo’s people to backstop this and see to it she doesn’t make any horrible blunders. All that’s required is to get Mariwen and Sonja Geris together for a few hours. If that fails, we reel her in and see what Paavo’s people can do with whatever we’ve got left in our hand.”

  “At the risk of?”

  “Nick, I gave her my word.”

  That went home. Nick nodded slowly and drained the beer. “Well, when you put it that way, where do we start?” Field agents weren’t made in months or even a year. They had days, or at best a couple of weeks.

  “We can make her aware of a few basic principles. Try to keep her out of obvious tight spots and show her ways to deal with those she might get into.”

  “Kneecaps,” Nick muttered.

  “You know best there.”

  With a grunt, Nick put the empty bottle on the table between them. “She’ll have to be tripwired. How d’ya think she’ll react to that?”

  “I don’t expect her to be overjoyed,” Trin said dryly. Nor was she overjoyed at the thought of bringing it up. To suggest to Mariwen, after all she’d been through, that she accept yet another invasion of her brain—one that would melt it if things went wrong—seemed like adding insult to injury. But to send Mariwen off on a mission like this without some safeguard was unthinkable. “I do expect she’ll deal with it. Like she has everything else.”

  “Good point, there.” Nick smiled. “By the way, does she know any of the history here? About Pohjola? Any of that? Might give her a better idea of what’s she getting into?”

  “I haven’t mentioned anything.” That surprised no one—Trin wasn’t given to telling war stories. “But if you think it would help, feel free to tell her anything you like. She’s family now.”

  Nick’s wide mobile mouth twitched wider into a grin. “Does anything include mentioning the torch you’ve been quietly carrying for Rafe all these years?”

  Trin smiled back, accepting the amiable gibe. “Let’s retain some mystery here.”

  Chapter 15

  OverHallin Estate, outside Halevirdon

  Halith Evandor, Orion Spur

  Light, warmth soaking deep into her tissues, and scented air. The un-nameable scents of alien flowers, nodding on their tall stalks, overlaid with the more prosaic yet more comforting aromas of roasting meat and fresh-baked bread. The kitchens along the east side of the courtyard were gearing up for the dinner hour, though it was not yet noon. The AM’s full complement of new loaves—today, long braided loaves known as sitos—were coming out of the huge ovens and being set to cool on innumerable racks, while the cooks switched over to the day’s main course and its many attendant side dishes.

  The admiral was as conservative in his dining habits as he was in all others; the weekly menu was set with naval rigidity: kine (which passed for beef here), roasted; some local fowl, braised, usually in a sauce of native fungi; non-native fish, poached or fried; what they called “boar” which was hunted and unpleasantly gamey; and always begun with pickles and relishes and finished with cheeses and fresh fruit.

  Breakfast was an altogether simpler affair: sutlëchĵ, a kind of porridge made from golden rice boiled in malt beer, and in between (there being no such custom as lunch here), all that bread, smeared with opson (an oddly piquant fermented fish paste) and washed down with oceans of tea or, on the two special High Days at midweek, beer.

  The second of those High Days provided the only variety to the otherwise unvarying fare, the first being the weekly “fasting” day when only sutlëchĵ and sitos with olive oil was served, that last an extravagance which called into question its nominal role as a day of self-denial.

  This day happened to be that second High Day, when the cooks were given free reign, and Kris, keeping her eyes closed and her olfactory sense attuned, had not yet decided whether that was a good thing or not. A society that seemed largely to live off sutlëchĵ, that weird fish paste, tea (which she found astringent) and beer (which she found weak) tended to have strange ideas about food in general.

  Kris ate with the other servants, which spared her the higher flights of the cooks’ fancies that graced the admiral’s table, but enough of those fancies trickled down that sometimes she preferred the simple, unadorned bread.

  She would have been tempted to ask Rafe his opinion on what they were preparing, but he was asleep in a float chair next to the bench she lounged on. His condition had improved—he was eating solid food again—but he still couldn’t walk more than a few steps unaided. It wouldn’t do to wake him. Halith lacked the patches for his damaged immunocyte complex that would’ve gotten him back on his feet within a week; the best they could do was coax things along while the complex sorted itself out. Deep restorative sleep was one of the foremost means to do this coaxing; healthy doses of sunlight was another. Kris had been granted a day of leisure, so they’d spent the AM basking in Halith’s rich golden sunshine and chatting companionably about old things from their past.

  The rambling conversation had covered a fair bit of ground, recalling such events as the palette control that adjusted the decor of Kris’s first apartment in Nemeton, with shocking results; the undiluted marvel of her first solo flight, and her discovery of that most virtuous of all vegetables, the true Terran potato (of which Halith was entirely ignorant). It was a quaint conversation in some ways, and possibly curious, given their present circumstances, for it owed nothing to those circumstances, nor (except perhaps for the cooking aromas) to their surroundings, nor to any thought of the future. They might’ve been most anywhere doing, or having done, most anything.

  That was all on the surface, however. While nothing pressed at the moment, no clear and present danger threatened, her mind had only to descend a layer to confront a swarm of potential dangers—those were legion. But there had rarely been a time when that wasn’t the case, and never since she turned eleven. She’d been observing and cataloging ever since they arrived, but for now the exercise was purely academic. With Rafe in his current condition, any thought of escape was out of the question. Even if by some miracle she could find them a way off-planet, he’d never survive the voyage to anywhere they’d want to go. When—even if—and how that might change was anybody’s guess.

  What her observations did say was that the admiral ran an exceptionally well-ordered household. More importantly, they also told her that, within the realm of current possibilities, there was no better place for them to be. The admiral conducted his affairs according to a code that struck her as almost chivalric; that provided a fair degree of security and it was the only way for Rafe to get the treatment he needed. Her guilt at being responsible for his condition still nagged, but wallowing in that wasn't going to help either of them, no matter how tempting. The only way to combat it was to keep her ears and eyes open, watch her mouth, and be ready to exploit any opportunities that came her way.

  Yet it wasn’t quite that simple either, as much as she might wish it to be. For one layer further down, at the border of her private mind, there lay the change in her relationship with Rafe; a change that made her at times uneasy for only she was fully aware of it. That he sensed something, she was certain, but he showed no sign of remembering those days they’d spent adrift in a small raft on Amu Daria’s unforgiving seas, his mind laid open by the fever as his immunocyte implant did its level best to kill him. This unshared and unshareable knowledge—the secret burdens of a man who seemed unbreakable—often weighed on her when they talked, giving his tone, his words, his smile, new meaning.

  She, herself, could not describe the change it wrought in her. Guilt was there, yes, and of several different kinds for what she’d put him through when they were together; but also hope because she now knew that, even though it all went wrong, their feelings were neither foolish nor counterfeit, and that seemed to hold out a promise that their relationship could finally be laid to gentle rest.

  Gentle. He’d been gentle with her—infuriatingly so. But knowing what lay behind that impu
lse, his actions became not exactly right—he still shouldn’t have done it—but at least comprehensible. If she’d been able to see how he saw her then, the way she could now, would things have turned out differently between them? And if they had . . .

  She shut down that train of thought and lifted her consciousness back to an awareness of the day. This day. This moment. She might as well enjoy what peace she could find in it. Who knew when she’d get another chance?

  Letting her mind wander again, it chose paths more recent. Arianna had solved the conundrum of her function in the household by appointing Kris her personal trainer. Kris accompanied her on her daily run and, after some coaxing, had started training her in unarmed combat. This latter obviously had to be strictly secret, so they held their sparring sessions at Arianna’s grandmother’s temple, where common decency (as Halith society viewed it) forbade any surveillance.

  Arianna proved to be an apt pupil; the exchange of blows (always careful to leave no visible marks) brought them close, and after these sessions they would lie limp and perspiring in the purple-edged grass and Arianna would talk.

  There could have been few women Kris’s age that were less in touch with the concerns of a teenaged girl, whether from Halith Evandor or anywhere else. But fortunately all she was called upon to do was listen. The value of just listening had impressed itself all the more strongly on Kris after the one time she didn’t. Arianna had been going on at length about the one thing that taxed her most, the custom of arranged marriages among aristocratic families, until Kris, who’d detected that Caneris had genuine love for his granddaughter, had broken in with, “But you can’t think your grandfather would ever do that to you.”

  “He already did,” Arianna huffed and dug out her xel. Unfurling the display, she brought up an image. “See?”

  Kris saw and, the first flush of her vehement reaction at the barbarous custom having dissipated, felt puzzled. It was unthinkable that a man who practically carved his meal plans in stone would overthrow one of his culture’s most hallowed customs. But at the same time, he did want to do right by his granddaughter. From what Arianna had confided to her, the admiral’s marriage had been an unusually happy one, and it seemed obvious he’d want no less for his only grandchild.