Loralynn Kennakris 4: Apollyon's Gambit

by Owen R. O'Neill

  It was the personal consequences for Kris that mattered now, and they were equally profound. But to credit her sexual reawakening to her death and resurrection was to oversimplify to a rare degree and even then, the term reawakening was itself not entirely (perhaps not even mostly) accurate. Nor was it just a matter of falling in love (a much more complex process than generally understood, especially by poets). That she lacked the mental framework to parse any of this was less of a handicap than might be supposed because, fundamentally, it was not a thing of words. To say she was in love, and knew herself to be in love, was to say enough.

  * * *

  Sitting now in the coolness of the moments before dawn, reveling in the sea air prickling on her still damp skin, Kris felt all these things rise and fall within her like the tide, now on the ebb, while she listened to Huron preparing breakfast in a fire pit behind her (they’d decided to add some baked clams to the mahi-mahi steaks at the last minute) and watched for the green flash. The green flash at dawn was rarer and harder to catch than the phenomena at sunset, but Huron had observed the glass smooth sea and the crystal clear air and declared the conditions propitious. A green flash rarely lasted more than a second or two, so she kept all her attention fixed on the bearing where the sun would rise. That quarter had been lightening for half an hour already, the stars going to their rest one by one until now Venus was left alone, a live diamond gleaming some sixty degrees above the horizon.

  Kris was so rapt in her attentions that she hardly noticed when Huron a came over and settled on the blanket next to her. “Within two minutes,” he murmured and her left hand crab-walked between them to find his. The horizon was beginning to show a pale band of peach-amber. Her fingers squeezed, felt him return the pressure, and then her breath caught as it came: an intense flare of electric green that shot a spear of color into the pale sky. Almost as quickly, it faded to a bright circular segment that lingered for another three whole seconds before being lost in the hot gold rim of the sun nicking the horizon.

  Kris turned to Huron, something of that green still in her eyes, slid her hands into his short hair and pulled their lips together. They both tasted the salt of her tears for the better part of a minute, and finally he kissed the last of them from her flushed checks.

  “How’s breakfast?” she asked, husky-voiced.

  “Clams are baking. Haven’t put the steaks on yet.”

  “Will the clams keep?”—nudging him down with a hand on his solar plexus.

  “Long enough.”

  “Will you?”—sliding up his legs and spreading her thighs above his hips.

  “Define long enough”—with a wink.

  Gripping his stirring erection with slender fingers, she slid it along the widening cleft in her bare slick flesh. Then, holding him still, she slowly pressed down an inch, and squeezed with her pelvic muscles.

  “Six minutes?”

  He sighed through his teeth. “Maybe not if you keep that up.”

  “I’ll be careful then”—letting go and sliding down centimeter by careful centimeter until her hips made firm contact with his. She could feel the subtle throb and pulse of him inside her, deep and insistent; the heat of their skin in contact; the effort he was making to calm his ragged breathing, to not move—to make it last.

  “Shoot for eight? I don’t wanna be greedy here.”

  She rocked forward, giving him more room to maneuver, and leaned down to kiss the vulnerable hollow of his throat. “No. I want you to be greedy.”

  His whole body went rigid at her low, rough murmur and his arms wrapped about her torso, crushing them together. Her painfully aroused nipples rubbing against his chest felt electric; small sweet fires flashed and danced all over her back and thighs as he withdrew half way and pressed into her again: hard, but slow—achingly, tantalizingly slow.

  “Ohhh . . . Fuck—yes—please . . .”

  Grazing the side of her neck with the edges of his teeth, he pulled back a little and abandoned himself to her whispered demand.

  In the end, they compromised on seven. (And the clams were perfect.)

  ~ ~ ~

  209 Days Earlier

  Naval Star Systems Command HQ

  Lunar 1, Tycho Prime, Luna, Sol

  “Welcome aboard, Lieutenant,” Senior Lieutenant Leon Grassley greeted Kris warmly as she saluted and introduced herself. Lieutenant Grassley might be old in grade, he might only be the head of NAVSTARSYSCOM’s Light Fighter Weapons Branch under the Armaments Division of the RM&A (Reliability, Maintainability & Availability) Department, and he might have had only half a dozen people under him until this moment (Kris would up the total to a hearty seven), but he liked to pride himself on running a tight ship. He was not normally so effusive with subordinates, but Kris had illustrious connections and he felt it wise to make the effort.

  “Thank you, sir.” Not knowing what to make of the unprepossessing Grassley, Kris did not relax her rigid posture.

  “We’ll get down to cases in a moment—make introductions—show you the ropes and braces, as it were—but first I should tell you that, staffing being what is it, I can only assign you Petty Officer Shaposhnikov for the time being.”

  “Yessir.” The response was automatic. Her orders had provided very few actual details regarding her new assignment and Kris had no idea whether she should have expected to be assigned one Shaposhnikov or twenty or none at all.

  “He’s solid—I can assure you that—and he’ll get you up to speed quick-smart, even though he’s due to ship out in three months, but by then you’ll be doing swimmingly, I’m sure.”

  Three months? What the fuck? Kris cleared her throat softly.

  Grassley looked up inquiringly. “Is there something you wish to say, Lieutenant?”

  “Well, um—y’see, sir, this is only a two-month billet for me. Until my transfer comes through.”

  “Ah.” Picking up his xel, Grassley opened what she recognized as her personnel file and began skimming it. “So you’re expecting a transfer?”

  “Yessir. To Survey.”

  A crease appeared in one pale cheek as he bit the inside of it. “Survey Command—I see.” The CEF’s Astrographic Survey Command was the favored posting for zealous, adventure-seeking officers during peacetime and competition for the available billets was fierce, especially now. Kris figured Huron could’ve pulled a few strings to get her an immediate posting, but thankfully he hadn’t so much as hinted at doing that. “Two months was your understanding?”

  “That’s correct, sir.” Why did her new boss seem to be having an issue with such an elementary concept? He had a tidy little fishbowl here—maybe he even liked it—probably did—but fer gawd’s sake!

  “Well then.” That crease as he bit his cheek again. “We’ll just have to see what we shall see, shan’t we?”

  ~ ~ ~

  206 Days Earlier

  Oscoda, Michigan,

  Great Lakes Province, Terra, Sol

  “How’d it go with Grassley?” Huron asked. From the look on her face, he already had an idea.

  “You know him?” Kris tossed her cap onto their bed.

  “Never met him, no.”

  “Okay. I guess.” She unsealed her tunic and shrugged it off. “You heading to the rec spaces?”

  Huron was dressed in a tight black exercise rig and undoubtedly on his way to working out. The estate had its own fully equipped gymnasium, but to Kris it would always be the “rec spaces.” Skinning off her undress breeches, she stretched until her vertebra popped. That was a sure sign of much more brewing beneath the surface than she was letting on.

  “Feel like joining me? Or would you rather have a bath?” Those were her two preferred methods of bleeding off stress, and he had a feeling which she’d pick.

  “What are you offering?”—stretching out her shoulders. Sometimes they played low-gee racquetball, other times they’d go a couple of rounds of sparring. In the latter case, “bleeding off stress” was often literal, since once they’d
decided on the rules, there was no pulling punches. Kris looked very much like she wasn’t interested in pulling punches right now. He knew how much she had her heart set on a posting to Survey, and the Admiralty had explicitly promised her that in the wake of the Asylum affair. But in typical fashion, they hadn’t committed themselves to an actual date. When he and Kris had returned from leave, the message that awaited them had assigned her this temporary billet “for 60 days (GAT), or until such time as an appropriate post shall become available.”

  While that could possibly be interpreted as meaning less than two months, Huron had a good idea that it meant the opposite: the baleful influence of the incidents immediately before Asylum had not yet abated. Although the two principals, Commander Cal Mertone and Dr. E.E. Quillan, were no longer in the loop—Mertone had left the CEF to return for his native Messier and Quillan was up on charges that should, at very least, get him dismissed from the Service—other allied parties remained hostile to Kris. Based on some disquieting rumors he’d heard, they might even have gained ground. And the worst thing he could do was get anywhere near it.

  “Whatever you’d like.”

  “Don’t you have a game tomorrow? Um . . . ice hockey?”

  “Not until 1100. Plenty of time to heal up.” He gave her wink. Their sparring sessions rarely resulted in more than bruises or a mild sprain. There’d been the occasional cracked rib, but not for some months now.

  Kris crossed the room to get an exercise suit from the large built-in wardrobe. Tapping her request on the front console (she’d only recently gotten used to the extravagant device, having never seen one before a month ago), it cycled and whirred and produced the desired items. Pulling them on deliberately, she weighed the options. As appealing as the idea of sparring was, maybe it was better to keep things down a notch tonight.

  “Let’s just do racquetball. Best of nine? Or ya wanna go for the full thirteen?”

  “Thirteen. Y’know it’s my lucky number.”

  ~ ~ ~

  205 Days Earlier

  Oscoda, Michigan,

  Great Lakes Province, Terra, Sol

  Huron glided across center ice on a power play, looking right for the pass from his forward. The opposition’s left wing closed fast but Huron cut inside him with a deft move. Caught out of position, the winger spun and threw a high-stick. Huron corralled the puck anyway, dipped his shoulder and the other man was suddenly spinning across the ice on his face. Executing a neat turn to elude the last defenseman, Huron hit a slapshot that Kris swore must have been traveling at near supersonic velocity when it hit the back of the net, having evaded the goaltender’s futilely outstretched glove by an inch. The scorekeeper barked, time was called and Huron skated over to where Kris stood behind his bench.

  “Nice shot,” she offered.

  “Thanks.” He removed his helmet and exchanged it for a towel.

  “You call this a friendly game?”

  “Sure.”

  “Your mouth is bleeding.”

  He dabbed it with the towel. “Doesn’t count unless you lose some teeth.”

  “That guy you put on the ice?”

  “That one might count.”

  The thirty-second warning sounded and she handed over his helmet. “Go get ’em, killer.”

  “Always.”

  “Bath salts and analgesics waiting.”

  He laughed, gave her a quick kiss and resettled the helmet before skating back on the ice.

  Kris smiled, shook her head, and wiped the blood off her lips with her sleeve.

  * * *

  Back in street clothes and encased in parkas against the rising wind that was beginning to moan through the boles of the sugar maples that surrounded the small lake where the hockey game had been played, Kris followed Huron up the gentle slope to a bare knoll where they’d left the slide bike.

  Just why they were slogging through last night’s snow, knee-deep in spots, when there was a perfectly good deiced path not ten meters to their left was one of those little mysteries of their relationship. Huron liked to walk what he called “point to point”—Kris called it “through the wilderness”—pretty much regardless of obstacles. He hadn’t explained why (other than taking the path of least resistance did not seem to be part of his character) and she wasn’t sure why she elected to follow him on these hikes. He never asked her to and certainly wouldn’t object if she demurred, and she’d probably get there first—almost certainly in this case.

  It had nothing to do with demonstrating loyalty or meeting his expectations or showing her affection or anything else that would fit under a glib and easy heading. It was just some sort of compelling illogic that said if he was gonna plow through this bloody awful fuckin’ snow, so would she.

  But maybe not the next time. This shit could be taken too far. Just why the Terran Weather Service thought that northern Michigan need to experience a freeze for the summer solstice was beyond her. Huron had explained that these things were planned far in advance and some of the factors involved, but Parson’s Acre didn’t even have a global weather service—you took whatever the planet dished out—and she couldn’t quite shake the absurd notion that they’d frozen the countryside here for a month just so he and the locals could enjoy a little outdoor hockey out of season. Yeah, totally absurd. But then she’d come to understand that the whole planet—all 4.4 billion people on it—was fuckin’ nuts.

  Reaching the crest, they paused together in clouds of icy breath. “Flip ya for who flies,” he said, taking a thick gold coin from his pocket—a Karelian dollar. Why he carried that dollar was another minor mystery. It had some family connection he’d never explained (and she’d never asked), so it might have been tradition or sentiment or a good-luck charm or something else. She’d only learned of its existence after they got together and it only made an appearance when they needed to make snap decisions—like this one.

  “Tails,” Kris said.

  He flipped the coin. She caught it, slapped it on her forearm and displayed the result with a grin.

  A resigned shrug. “Fine. Don’t scare the horses.”

  He activated the bike’s engines with his xel, and it rose up in a cloud of vapor. This particular model wasn’t much for striking terror into equines. It was just a plain Bovarii-Daimler sport bike, not one of the racing models they had back at the stables. Kris had recently bought her own: a beautiful Shiromoto C-1000 Huntsman, the sapphire model with amethyst trim (surprising Huron when she’d picked it out on the floor of the Kyoto showroom—he’d expected her to go for utilitarian black) that you could push to Mach 1.5 at sea-level. You needed about a thousand miles of nice flat terrain to do that, but when you could—as they had last month in Australia’s Northern Territory when they were visiting Huron’s brother Marc—it was a hell of a lot of fun. Around town though, it wasn’t much use.

  Kris swung astride the bike and Huron settled on behind. “Mind if we make a detour?” he asked, gripping her around the waist.

  “What for?”—pitching her voice up above the engine’s thrumming bass purr.

  “Wanted to pick up something for dinner while we’re out.”

  “You’re feeling like cooking?”

  “Thought it might be a change of pace. That okay with you?”

  “Sure. Fine.”

  To Kris, ‘cooking’ assumed two forms: using her xel to produce a meal in an automated kitchen or opening a self-heating ration pack, the latter being what she’d done for most of her life. On relocating to Luna, she’d use a large chunk of the prize money she’d been awarded for Ilya Turabian’s capture to buy a penthouse suite there, in the Pausanias Towers complex overlooking Tranquility Base. It had a very nice kitchen, which was going far to wean her off grabbing whatever prepackaged meal was handy when she wasn’t eating in the mess.

  Now, she was getting used to the idea that Huron actually liked to cook, using pots and pans and an adjustable heat source, something she’d only experienced once before, when she was eight: a brief e
xperiment during one of her father’s almost equally brief marriages. Her acquaintance with Huron up until now—on Nedaema, at the CEF Academy, and aboard ship—hadn’t afforded much opportunity to see this domestic side of him and, while Huron could not be fairly described as domesticated in any sense, the private person he was here in Michigan had some startling contrasts with the SRF officer. It was a little unsettling that they could both inhabit the same skin, but she was trying to get used to that. The cooking part was just weird, but she generally approved of the results.

  “So where are we going?” she asked.

  He reached under her arm and tapped a map reference into the bike’s central console. A destination lit up on the HUD.

  “It’s not far. Watch the ceiling”—which was clearly displayed as three hundred meters.

  “Who’s flyin’ here?”—nudging him with a sharp elbow.

  “Right. Sorry.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, Kris put the bike down in what appeared to be a picturesque tree-lined glade. The snow was only a few inches deep and crisscrossed with numerous tracks, and here and there clusters of multicolored lights danced like will-o’-the-wisps. Oscoda had a large expatriate Karelian community (to which Huron’s family belonged) and ancient Karelian folklore held that will-o’-the-wisps marked the location of treasures deep underground, which could be acquired only when the lights were present. In this case, the lights showed the entrances to the various establishments of Oscoda’s commercial district, which had been constructed during a rage for ‘environeutral’ architecture, which meant subterranean. (Apparently, the subterranean environment was not one that mattered to the adherents.)

  Kris, whose opinion of shopping was not far removed from her opinion of dresses, had not actually set foot in any of the places before, but she certainly wasn’t about to wait in the cold by the bike either. Dismounting, she followed Huron to one of the closer will-o’-the-wisps.