Loralynn Kennakris 4: Apollyon's Gambit

by Owen R. O'Neill

  Caneris allowed himself a wider smile as they started towards the open door. “Thank you, Jakob.”

  Part I: Alien Skies

  “I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral. But when I follow at my pleasure the serried multitude of the stars in their circular course, my feet no longer touch the Earth . . .”

  ―Ptolemy

  “The moon shines bright: in such a night as this,

  When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,

  And they did make no noise, in such a night . . .”

  ―William Shakespeare

  One: Daybreak

  Day 364, Yr. ‘42

  Oscoda, Michigan

  Great Lakes Province, Terra, Sol

  It had snowed during the night, no more than a few centimeters. Inches, Kris corrected herself—after all this time she still couldn’t get used to the fact they still used inches here—just enough to generously layer the boughs of the tall fir and cedar trees and make fanciful, deep-shadowed humps in the garden below. Beyond the garden wall, Tahquamenon Creek had ice across all its surface but for a thin ribbon of black water in its center, running briskly to merge with the lazy serpentine flow of the Au Sable River a mile further on; descending from there to lose all identity in the vast inky blackness of Lake Huron, barely a ripple on its surface to give back the silvery light of Luna, now descending into the west.

  No promise of dawn. Nothing to warm the cold ghostly half-light that glimmered off the fresh snow and refracted in unearthly shades of violet and chill blue through the icicles decorating the balcony railing, and the wide dark sky above, divided by the luminous river of the Milky Way, mocked her. Half her life spent out there, wandering the transit lanes between those serenely winking points of light, all hung in a measureless abyss that had swallowed more blood than anyone could dream of.

  Leaning against the big bay window, skin tightening with goose bumps from the electric thrill of the cold that bit even through the insulating panes, she thought of her full-dress tunic hanging in the wardrobe behind her with its burden of medals: those few square inches of glory and what they had cost, and the tears ran down her cold cheeks to fall silently to the thick hand-woven Tabriz carpet under her bare feet, while the sobs she could not quite stifle woke the other person in the room.

  “That window opens, you know,” Rafe Huron said. “But it’s about ten-below out there, I think. I’d put a little something on if I were you.”

  Kris turned, smearing the warm salt tears away with the back of her hand. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “You didn’t. I just woke up to enjoy the view.”

  She snorted gently as she turned back to that view, regarding her shadowy reflection in the cold glass: a striking young woman with the high cheekbones and thickly lashed, almond-shaped eyes; proud full lips and a firm jaw, all blurring now as her breath fogged the window.

  From their bed, Huron watched her too, propped on one elbow. The luminates in the room were spectrally keyed to the moonlight outside and bright enough to show the smooth, strong contours of her nude body—long legs, sculpted back, broad shoulders—but not bright enough to show the scars.

  He knew them all quite well by now: the star-shaped spatter on her left shoulder from her dogfight with Jantony Banner; the burn scar down the outside of her right thigh that was almost as old and still fading; the neat round dimple on her lower back just above her left hip and the two ugly ridged whorls on her abdomen—entrance and exit wounds of the Halith 10-mm slug that broke up on entry and had, strictly speaking, killed her. The thin white line high on one cheekbone: her oldest scar and the only one she’d had when he met her—that is, the only one you could see.

  She lifted her chin and tossed her shoulder-length chestnut hair. “You always were a lousy liar, Rafe.”

  “Part of my charm. But I’m not lying.” He assessed her taut back and the set of her shoulders, knotted now with unreadable tension. “What’s the matter?”

  She stepped away from the window, her body sliding into silhouette against the lake and sky beyond. Folding her arms beneath her breasts, she shook her head. “I—um . . .” She let go a breath with a soft noise, gently took another. “Have you . . . ever wanted—really wanted—something you couldn’t have?”

  “Well, there was this pony I asked for on my fifth birthday—”

  “Fuck, Rafe—I’m serious.”

  He saw the wet sparkle on her lashes. “I know.” He patted the bed next to him. She shook her head, turned to pace in front of the broad moonlit windows. He looked down, smoothed some wrinkles out of the sheets. “Look, if this is going to be a guessing game, do you mind if I get some coffee first? I’ll be much better at it after I’ve had some coffee.”

  She shot him an angry look.

  “Okay.” He held up one hand. “My apologies. I know you haven’t been happy for a while now. I may be stupid at times but I’m not that dense.”

  Kris silently crossed the room to fold herself into one of the two chairs, an antique upholstered in dark cherry velvet, soft black in this light. Huron waited for her to say something but after the silence had stretched between them for an uncomfortably long moment, he went on. “Okay, unfulfilling assignments, too much gravity, too much Homeworlder society and . . .” He paused. “Mariwen?”

  She looked up, an impenetrable expression in her shadowed eyes. “What?”

  “You talk about her in your sleep.”

  Her eyes skittered sideways and down.

  “Do you wish you’d been her lover?”

  Kris’s eyes came back to his. “Do you wish you’d been her lover?” He shrugged. Her eyes narrowed. “You were. You fucked her.”

  “No, I wasn’t. But yes I did. A long time ago. She was experimenting. That’s all.”

  Kris dropped her face to her bare knees. “So how was it?”

  “Experimental.”

  What was that coloring his voice just now? Something welling up from far below that placid, devil-may-care exterior he used to misdirect and confuse the masses, and sometimes her, and—she felt—sometimes himself. A wound? Never quite healed or cherished for what it meant—or who’d inflicted it?

  “Did you love her?”—raising her head to watch him carefully.

  Huron collapsed back against the pillows and ran his hand down the impression she’d left in the mattress. “Ever try to love a sunset?”

  Unexpectedly, her shoulders started to shake and he heard the harsh choking muffled sobs. For that minute and most of another he waited for them to pass, and when he finally sat up to go to her, Kris said, “Fuck it” in a thick voice and turned her head. The sky was beginning to show a smudge of light in the east.

  “Y’know, I hardly ever saw a real sunset until I came here.” A pause as she brushed some hair out of her eyes. “Is that all she was to you?”

  “Not by choice.” That inflection in his voice again. When Kris had first known him, she would have laughed at the notion any woman—even Mariwen—could break his heart. But now—

  Yeah, you fell for her—fell hard. And she was a lesbian who wanted to walk on the other side, right? And she picked you, cuz you’re like that fairytale prince who does everything perfect—no marks, no mess—just clean and sweet and always the gentleman. Even when it was time to go . . .

  Did you swear you’d never make that mistake again?

  She sniffed and Huron pulled a handkerchief from the drawer of a bedside table and tossed it to her. She caught it and blew her nose twice, closing her eyes again. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be—not for me anyway. Does it bother you we were together?”

  She blew her nose once more, wadded the cloth into a ball and crushed it in one hand. “No—that’s not it. I just . . . I dunno. I mean—you’re both perfect, right? It shoulda all worked out, just like they say.”

  Huron wasn’t surprised at Kris’s neglect of a key chromosomal detail. Kris’s life had forced on her a fluid view of sexuality. Her notions o
f sexual orientation and identity had been formed under the most toxic circumstances imaginable, making them constructs of use, not of self, so that Mariwen’s sexual preference and the feeling she’d be compatible with a man posed no fundamental contradiction.

  “I’m flattered, but the truth is, things don’t work out like they say. There’s a lot more to Mariwen than people realize—they get dazzled by the light and think that’s all she is.”

  But you just called her a sunset—and what’s a sunset? Besides light?

  “I don’t think many people knew Mariwen Rathor well. Maybe no one did. I think that’s why she was so successful—always available but always untouchable.”

  Untouchable? Like you? She tasted the bitterness in that thought and half of her wanted to take it back, even as she thought it. It wasn’t his fault she never fit in here. He’d tried to make a place for her.

  “Yeah.” Then, very softly: “You know how she’s doing?”

  “I can find out if you want.”

  Kris knew he could. When it came to politics, the social morass, or the intelligence side of things, there was little that Rafael Leonidas Huron V could not do. He might only be a lieutenant commander in the Colonial Expeditionary Forces—the same service in which Kris was just a lieutenant—but his wealth and political connections unlocked doors and much else in over a hundred star systems. More to the point, he was still friendly with Mariwen’s family, and was in occasional contact with her brother.

  She ran her fingers through her hair again. “I . . . dunno.”

  “So is Mariwen Rathor the reason you aren’t coming back to bed?”

  A noncommittal shrug in reply. Silence.

  “Begins with?” he prompted.

  She shot him another glare. “You can’t ever be serious, can you? It’s all just a big fuckin’ game to you, right?”

  Huron looked out over the black lake that coincidentally bore his family name at the faint arc of pure December blue that was just beginning to dim the stars near the horizon. “I think I know where we’re headed here and if you can tell me how being serious will make that easier, I’ll do what I can.”

  Kris was also looking out at the daybreak, as if at a cherished and unexpectedly fragile gift. He could just make out her expression in the growing light: terribly sad.

  “If I tell you, will you listen?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not gonna be short.”

  “Take all the time you need.”

  “Okay.” She stopped, searching her thoughts for a cusp, an inflection point—anything—that might be a holdfast in the emotional tide race she was struggling against. “You remember Molokai? About seven months ago . . .”

  ~ ~ ~

  217 Days Earlier

  Molokai, Hawaiian Federal District

  West-Pac Administrative Zone, Terra, Sol

  Kris broke the surface slowly, emerging into a pure clock calm, breathing deeply of the crisp salt-sharp sea air as the vents in her dive inserts automatically opened, and sending minor ripples spreading with geometric perfection across the black silent water to lap against the hull of their five-meter catamaran ten yards away. Luna, almost directly overhead and now come into her full, had her precise reflection sliced into blue-silver arcs along the ripple’s crests. Then everything shattered into confusion as Rafe broached like a playful seal just off the catamaran’s bow and shook his head, casting a wide spray of fine droplets that speckled the surface all around. The flash of his grin, accentuated by the light-amplifying underwater contacts she wore, was clear, although the lens’s AGC was keeping the moonlight to something just above normal brightness.

  He struck out for her with a smooth powerful easy stroke that Kris, who’d learned to swim only two months ago, could not yet hope to match. Parson’s Acre, the colony planet she grew up on, had no bodies of water bigger than a bathtub and even those were precious few, all in the homes of the very rich. In point of fact, Parson’s Acre had no surface water at all: you had to drill for it, often as deep as five hundred meters; and when it snowed during the cold phase (which, due to the planet’s complex orbit, lasted about two standard years, it being in a binary star system), what fell was frozen carbon dioxide, not just crystals of water ice. The daily water ration was a fact of life on Parson’s Acre, just as it had been on Harlot’s Ruse, the slave ship she’d been captive on for eight years before being liberated at the age of twenty.

  That was three years ago, but she still vividly remembered the ecstasy of her first bath on Nedaema after she was freed—the second one she’d ever taken—and the first place she’d ever been that didn’t have a water ration. There were few things she loved better than soaking in a tub full of warm water and the revelation that here on Earth there was an ocean whose water (at least this stretch of it, a mile or so off the northwest coast of Molokai where Huron had a small estate: a mere ten miles of beach front) was naturally at bath temperature had a profound effect on her. So if she could not yet swim as well as her athletic Terran-born lover, she was definitely working on it.

  “How we doin’?” Huron asked as he approached.

  She dropped the spear gun tethered to her left wrist and slicked her hair back. The motion did not go unnoticed, for aside from a light equipment belt and shock knives strapped to each thigh, neither of them were wearing anything more than nature had supplied in the first place. Kris, who’d grown up with hardly any privacy at all, on hearing there was such a thing as a swimsuit, had laughed for five minutes.

  “We got breakfast,” she answered when his eyes returned to her face. “Nice ten-kilo mahi-mahi. I left him on the buoy. You?”

  “Found a fine patch of lobsters at about three-hundred feet. Thought a couple’d be good for lunch.”

  He closed to within a meter and she reached out and pulled him closer still with her arms around his neck and her legs about his waist. “Any chance you got an appetite now?”

  His arms slid about her ribs and tightened. “You really have to ask?”

  * * *

  Having orgasms while looking at the full moon through sixteen feet of water, its light silvering the roof of the ocean, was an experience Kris had no vocabulary to describe. To the broad, somewhat ill-defined and vaguely overlapping taxonomic categories she’d previously recognized, sex and fucking, there had recently been added making love. Making love was not a new concept to her—she’d been intellectually aware of it for some time—but it was a new experience, roughly as new as learning to swim and in some ways strangely similar.

  What had just happened, artfully combining both, was also a new experience, though it called upon older ones. Having sex underwater took practice: the key was to get very close, lock limbs with your partner and use your muscles in precisely controlled ways. Sex in null-gee was much the same and so mariners easily adapted to it, but the embrace of the water and its subtle resistance made the experience all the more pleasurable, while for adventurous couples varying the depth, and therefore the light and the pressure and temperature, added a further exquisite dimension (if you were careful not to go so deep as to risk passing out). Modern diving gear obviated any need to surface and so things could go on for quite a long time and specially formulated pelagic lubes saw to it they usually did.

  None of these merely mechanical factors touched the essence, however: the pervasive warmth with all its subtle shifts, the slight electric thrill along exposed skin, the infinitely variable colors, the hypnotic play of light and shadow. But most of all, the utter lack of limits—no horizon even—that allowed you fall forever into the embrace of another; a submergence of a wholly different and more profound kind, in which there was no danger of going too deep.

  * * *

  Kris’s years as a slave—years of abuse, outright rape and occasionally worse than rape—might have been expected to produce a permanent crippling of her sexual drive and a state of near-total aversion. But in Kris’s case, that expectation would be (and was) false: had it been otherwise, she w
ould not have lasted much more than a year. Her position, that of being a prominent slaver captain’s prime bitch, was all that allowed her to survive those eight years and it depended almost entirely on her sexual talents. To Kris, sex was literally a survival skill: a tool, a refuge, and a weapon, and she’d learned rapidly how to employ it with consummate skill. Even when things were at their worst, she’d never lost the ability to find comfort in simple noncoercive sex; stolen moments with other slaves, sometimes men but more often women; people who slid about the margins of her life, rarely named and easily forgotten—but for all that, these anonymous encounters were not wholly counterfeit.

  It was afterwards, in the first months of being immersed in the complex stew of freedom, that the problems started: the severe, physically painful reactions at the thought of sex, which were worst with men, like Ferhat Basmartin and Rafe Huron, she was sexually attracted to. That might have seemed like a contradiction, but in reality it was the predictable result of a tortured web of conflict arising from the desire to share something special with someone she liked, but which she knew merely as an act you did to another to person to get what you needed. As ill-equipped as Kris was to deal with this conflict, it was far from the only source of tension, and when it came, the crash was spectacular—the consequences even more so.

  In a strict medical sense, Kris did not survive them. This fact was recorded in her file under the heading Post-Mortal Status, relating how she had bled out in the CIC of IHS Ilya Turabian, and how she was placed in cryostasis and subsequently revived. A knowing eye would have detected a slightly smug tone in this record: an exceedingly tricky operation successfully completed and the patient had gratified them by making a full recovery, without the least sign of post-mortal cryonic dementia, a lamentably common side effect in such cases.

  Understanding the full context of what had happened aboard Ilya Turabian required access to some of the most secret and confidential reports the League owned: Kris had managed to uncover the secret pact between Halith and the Maxor to carry out an invasion of the League Homeworlds, and on it being revealed, the Maxor had immediately scotched the operation, forcing Halith to accept the new and more punitive peace treaty. This, however, belonged to another realm entirely.