So saying, he extended a roll of genuine paper across the desk; a roll bound up with official crimson tape. Her heart quickened.
“Among the traditional prerogatives allowed a retiring admiral, the most welcome is rewarding a deserving officer. So it pleases me to give you this. Undeniably, it’s been far too long in coming—for while we all know the Admiralty is never wrong, it is often hellish slow.” As she accepted the roll, something like the old glint returned to his eyes and he said, “Allow me to be the first to congratulate you on your promotion, Captain.”
“Thank you, sir”—her voice crisp, hinting at joy mingled with relief. Did this mean Latham wasn’t slotted to replace her as DSI-PLESEC?
But before that joy could even spread its wings, the admiral’s next words crushed it. “You’ll find your new orders in there, as well. It’s not usual for a new captain to be ONI’s senior liaison officer to the Terran Navy, but we’re all agreed you well deserve it. You’ve done excellent work here—maybe you can succeed in getting them stirred up a little over there.”
Stirred up? At Terran Navy HQ? As an exalted nonentity in one of the most comfortable and least effective billets in the Service? Her heart plunged to the bottom of her stomach.
“Thank you, sir”—keeping her voice from being wooden with supreme effort. Burton thought he was giving her a plum—he’d probably fought hard for it—there was nothing she could do or say . . .
“Latham—you know him—is coming in with the Admiral, and it shouldn’t take much to get him up to speed. He’s always been a quick study, so there won’t be anything to detain you here unduly. You’ll see that we’ve arranged a ninety-day furlough for you, as well. Go enjoy it.”
Trin had long ago mastered the art of assuming any expression her profession required, even well-tempered delight, but she still found it hard. “I’ll do my best, sir.”
Ninety days to waste on Terra? What the hell was she going to find to do? Maybe throw herself into the Grand Canyon, that rather pathetic gash in the ground, compared to some places she’d been.
True, Nick was on Terra. According to his last message, he was hopping about the Pacific indulging his passion for sport fishing to the fullest. She despised fishing. Still and all, as long as she didn’t actually have to set foot on one of those goddamned silly little boats . . .
“I sincerely appreciate your opinion of me.”
“Well, that’s done then.” Burton heaved to his feet, and extended his now empty, open hand. Trin rose to meet it. “It’s been a pleasure serving with you. Best of fortune, Captain.”
“Thank you, sir. Likewise, certainly. I wish you every happiness.”
He nodded, twitched his smile and noticed the folio she was clutching with a white-knuckled grip, apparently for the first time. “Was there something you wanted to go over? Not rushing you, am I?
“No, sir”—swallowing quickly. “These are some—reports I need to—return this AM.”
Burton looked a trifle relieved. “Very well then. I won’t detain you. Do carry on. And keep up the good work.”
“Yes, sir. I will.”
~ ~ ~
36 days earlier
Molokai, Hawaiian Federal District
West-Pac Administrative Zone, Terra, Sol
Starship hatches cannot be slammed except in conditions of extreme emergency, nor does ship life give one much opportunity for throwing things, and having objects—especially breakable ones—bounce around in null-gee is quite ill advised, in any case. So Kris had never developed the habit of taking out stress, anger, or extreme frustration in this direct physical way, and it was well for the sake of the several expensive and fragile items within easy reach that she had not, for right now she was experiencing all three.
Standing in the atrium of Huron’s Molokai beach house, she was not quite to the livid state yet, but on the flight down from Lunar 1, her temper had soured rather than improved and that was not a good sign. So for the moment, just standing there, trying to control her breathing and feeling her short nails punch crescents in her palms was all she could manage.
They were engaged to spend this weekend together, and maybe that wasn’t a very clever thing to have agreed to. If she’d decided to opt out and stay on Luna, he certainly would have smiled and agreed. Like always.
That might’ve been worse. On reporting in early that AM, Lunar time, she’d learned that her transfer to Survey had been delayed yet again. Despite her “sterling” record (as the message termed it) and the Admiralty’s promise, she was still behind all the “highly qualified senior applicants for the available positions.” Unquote.
Being consigned indefinitely to Lieutenant Grassley’s pinched little domain was really the least of it—just the spark to her already primed temper. She knew that. The real problem was she seemed to be losing her grip—on Rafe, her career . . . on everything. It was all turning into some strange, amorphous entity that became more insubstantial the harder she tried to hold on to it.
It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. And it seemed to be saying she just didn’t belong here. When things were good—and they were usually good—they were awesome. But that wasn’t the same as belonging.
Maybe I’m just not cut out for this fairytale shit.
The sound of Huron’s boots coming from the other room made her look up. His boots. Huron didn’t wear boots unless he was in uniform, and he didn’t wear his uniform here unless . . .
He came around the corner with a steely look on his face and a flimsy in his hand. “Have you seen this?”—holding out the sheet of plaspaper.
That was uncharacteristically brusque. Maybe he’d heard about her transfer but seeing the look on her face, no. Huron would never look like that over a personnel matter. It would take something like—
She took the flimsy and glanced at it.
—like this: an all-hands flash alert bulletin direct from CNO.
“It’s started.” It sounded unnatural to her ears as he spoke. A terrible cold rush made her shiver.
“Two days ago. The Ilion Fleet, at very least. Sounds like the initial assault was repulsed. Grand Fleet is deploying. Seventh has sortied and is on its way to Kepler. I don’t have word on Third Fleet yet, but if they know, they’ll be reinforcing Wogan’s Reef and New Madras, assuming they’re not there already.”
“Is that all we’re doing?” Looking over the flimsy, her voice was almost shrill. “Are we taking the offensive anywhere? If Ilion’s engaged at Regulus, how are they covering Tau Verde? Where Lo Gai? Can’t he end run through Callindra and hit Tau Verde from behind? Isn’t that why we got the fuckin’ Bannermans on our side?!”
“Kris, this message isn’t an hour old yet.”
“But we gotta be doing something!”
“We are doing something. We’re holding Regulus—”
“You fuckin’ think that’s good enough?”
“Let me finish—”
“Huron, we’re at war! You gotta get me assigned! You can’t let me rot on that fuckin’ moon!”
His face hardened, becoming emotionless—almost pitiless.
“Kris, until you learn to chill it down, we can and we will. We don’t have orders yet. Now take a deep breath, get in line, and hurry up ‘n wait with the rest of us.”
The look she shot back was that of a sudden stranger.
“Oh fuck that. Sir.”
Four: Points of Departure
33 Days Earlier
Denver Heights, Colorado
Western Federal District, Terra, Sol
“What are these things?” Trin Wesselby inclined her head at the fragrantly steaming mound of slightly larger than bite-sized morsels that had just appeared on their table. They looked disturbingly like the limbs of a small animal.
“Buffalo wings,” Nick Taliaferro answered, forking several onto his plate. They were cozily ensconced in a private booth in the basement of H’Omerta’s, one of Nick’s new favorite haunts. Trin hadn’t been there before.
“Buffalos are large even-toed ungulates, Nick. A type of bovine.”
“You don’t say?”
“They don’t have wings.”
Watching Trin with a quizzical expression, Nick tried to gauge if she really meant it. “I thought you grew up in Socorro. Wasn’t your dad a professor at the University of New Mexico?”
“Technically a visiting professor—lapsed cultures—and we left when I was eight. Being Nedaeman, he kept oikos, and mom went along with it.” In the ancient Greek, oikos meant household and described the basic social unit of the Athenian city-state. On Nedaema, the word had come to be adopted as the name for domestic law, and especially for the body of dietary statutes that mandated vegetarianism.
“They’re from Buffalo. Not buffalos,” said Nick, having concluded she might not be pulling his leg after all.
Trin pinched her mouth into a frown as she selected one of the sticky members, gleaming with a reddish sauce.
“The city—not the critter. Y’know, up in the Great Lakes region.”
“Yes. I know.” She bit into the crisp coating, enlivened with a tangy sweetness that masked a delayed capsicum kick. Her eyes widened. “Nick, this is chicken.”
Nick laughed. “So? This ain’t Nedaema. Besides, it’s well known chickens have a collective soul.” He’d already polished off three and was piling the bones to one side in a little charnel heap.
It wasn’t the condition of avian souls that concerned Trin, but the close resemblance their meal had to non-galliform body parts. She’d spent enough time in various societies to enjoy meat on occasion, but bones were another matter. Holding the wing between a tentative thumb and index finger, she nibbled cautiously.
“So how’d it go?” Nick was asking about her request to be reassigned to an active command. Trin removed the last readily accessible shreds of meat from the bone and looked for somewhere to put it. She didn’t particularly want it on her plate. Nick shoved his plate closer. She added it to the stack and wiped her fingers on a cloth napkin.
“I got a response from a quite pleasant woman. As advisory staff, I’m not subject to immediate call-up. There was no need to cut my furlough short. No need.” She stared spitefully at the plate of wings before selecting another with deliberation. “I have less than a week of furlough left. But the way they spoke, I might as well ask for long leave.”
“How much do you have saved up? Six–eight months?”
“Eleven”—sharp teeth nipping off a fleshy morsel. “Only nine eligible.”
“Would you like another beer?”
“Please.” The spicy chicken wings, she’d discovered, went outstandingly well with the dark beer they were drinking. The bones, she’d just have to deal with. Maybe if she tried not to look . . . “Anything new on your end?”
Nick carefully poured her glass full. “Which d’ya wanna hear first? The bad news? Or the really annoying, not-very-good news?”
“You pick.”
“Okay. The bad news is Ellison never got the memo. So he didn’t know who the new-hire was before he checked out . . .” What Nick unfolded was a banal tale of petty office politics, well adapted for the benefit of any diner who might chance to overhear. What it meant to Trin was rather different.
To begin, Ellison, the seemly persecuted subject of the tale, was their codename for Nestor Mankho’s head, which Nick had retrieved from Cathcar thirteen Terran months before. That he’d personally removed it from Mankho’s body was an irrelevant detail. Mankho had been so earnestly sought not just because he was the leading terrorist warlord, but because it was confidently suspected he knew the identity of the Halith mole. This mole had been protecting Mankho for decades (or so it seemed), spiking one attempt after another to capture him.
Trin and Nick, learning of Mankho’s presence on Cathcar, had engineered a plot to obtain him—or his head, the only portion of interest—under cover of an operation to abolish Cathcar, one of the most important slave-trading ports, and rescue 80,000 slaves detained there. The operation, undertaken at the same time as the Battle of Wogan’s Reef and employing some of Nick’s old marine buddies and an elite mercenary outfit, was a spectacular success, except—as Trin had just learned—in the one essential: Mankho had never known the mole’s true identity. This was the real message in Ellison never got the memo, and being unaware of who the new-hire was.
The whole process had taken so long because while Trin was herself an extremely skilled interrogator (a vocation that applied to a preserved brain just as much as a living one), she could not, in her position, afford the time to extract the desired information. Complicating matters was the fact that Mankho had been tripwired: fitted with neurological implants that would literally cause a brain to melt down if it was subjected to a wide variety of interrogation techniques. Tripwires were even trickier to remove from a preserved brain than a living one, and it had taken Trin months of painstaking work to defang them. At that point, they had turned the head over to Stich Nixon, one of Nick’s team, and practically speaking, the only person they could trust to rifle it for relevant memories.
Nixon was methodical and diligent, the process was delicate and time consuming, and it was only in the past month that Nixon had reached a conclusion he was satisfied with. Working at a far remove from Terra, it had then taken some weeks to communicate these results.
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” Trin said, her voice unnaturally low. “So what’s the annoying, not-very-good news?”
Nick hesitated for a few crucial beats. “Well, there’s somebody who was clued in about the new-hire—Ellison’s ex-wife.”
“Shit!” The vehement hiss, extraordinary in its bitterness, raised heads and earned disapproving looks from the nearby tables. Trin did not notice. Ellison’s ex-wife was Mankho’s late wife, a woman named Sandrine Onstanyan, who had been killed during an attempt to apprehend Mankho before the war started. Killed by Kris (who’d been assigned to the mission when it was discovered she had been acquainted with Mankho personally) in a misguided attempt to assassinate him when she’d become convinced the operation had failed.
Trin pressed the napkin to her lips. “Anything else you want to tell me?”
There was, and under the circumstances, the telling was convoluted, even a bit tortured. Trin listened, the napkin wadded in one fist, the white fabric making a harsh contrast with her increasingly gray complexion. The burden of what Nick had to say amounted to this:
Mankho had used his wife as a cut-out between himself and handlers of the Halith mole. His wife’s death had severed that connection, and was probably partly responsible for him becoming trapped on Cathcar where he could fall prey to Trin and Nick’s scheme. More to the point, the mole’s handlers, who were directed by a senior Halith intelligence officer, Captain Nikolai Arutyun, had a cutout of their own, a retired Halith actress of flamboyant reputation, Carissa Pagorskav. In line with their penchant for keeping things “all in the family,” Carissa was Arutyun’s longtime mistress, and she and Mankho’s wife were also sexually involved.
Trin knew this last detail because of a young slave named Kym, whom Kris had rescued in during an anti-slaving op in the Hydra. Kym, an extraordinarily pretty girl, had been the “prize bitch” (in slaver terminology) owned by one of Mankho’s subordinates, and his wife had on several occasions borrowed this man’s “property” for her and Carissa’s recreational purposes.
At the time Trin interviewed Kym, that’s all it had appeared to be. Now, it seemed likely that Kym might have more data in her memories on Sandrine’s connection with Carissa, with Mankho—with the whole business—than anyone had conceived. And Kym had long since disappeared into the stellar wastes with a man she’d impulsively decided to marry. All trace of her had been lost.
Tossing the napkin on the table, Trin sipped her beer and wiped the foam off her upper lip with her thumb. “I see. That’s just . . . lovely, isn’t it?” With the same abstracted air, she picked up a buffalo wing and recommenced nibbling.
“True”—severing the wing’s tender flesh with scientific nips. “Would nine months be enough, do you think?”
Nick smiled. “There was this major I knew once, Tank Arneson. You know the Arnesons?”
Still looking distant, Trin shook her head.
“There were a lot of them, and they tended to circulate. Anyway, in the first war, he was taken outta the line and sent back to a staff position on Mars. When his old regiment deployed to Karelia, he applied for long leave—urgent personal business—joined them and took on as a volunteer. Got held up in the Siege of Ladoga, overstayed his leave, and was put in the Dock for being AWOL!”
Nick showed bright white teeth in a booming laugh, at which the other diners again turned their heads, glared, and then resumed their solitary meals or private conversations, some muttering.
“They acquitted him?”
“Oh yeah. His CO testified that a proper order authorizing a change of station had gone astray owing to the ‘pernicious designs of the enemy.’”
“He actually said ‘pernicious designs’?”
“He did. He wanted to say malversation, but then someone told him what it meant.”
Trin, her thoughts much taken up with clear and present malversation, nodded. “It’s a thought, certainly.” She finished that buffalo wing and selected another.
“Good, huh?”
Trin questioned him with an eyebrow.
“The wings.”
“Since this is strictly between us, quite.”
“Excellent. Always happy to help someone expand their horizons.”
~ ~ ~
29 Days Earlier
Crystal City, Outer N-Ring;
Gamma Hydras, Hydra Border Zone
Pleasant sounds, like the soft rhythms of a gamelan playing far off, informed Major Minerva Lewis, CEF Marine Corps, that Lieutenant Althea Quinn of the Tanith Rangers had returned from her evening’s performance. Min rolled off the bed where she’d been loafing in the small apartment they shared on Crystal City’s upper concourse—shared when Min wasn’t on duty at nearby Outbound Station, and Quinn wasn’t touring with her trio or deployed with her outfit—and checked her security bots out of habit.
Loralynn Kennakris 4: Apollyon's Gambit Page 13