The Bonds of Orion

by Owen R. O’Neill

  Ever since Kris had discovered the joys of real baths, back on Nedaema, soaking in untold gallons of warm water had been her chief vice. Soaking in a truly palatial tub like this one raised the experience to new heights, and soaking in such a tub with Mariwen threatened to undo reality itself. Kris had dutifully scrubbed Mariwen’s back, but Mariwen was not one to let a favor go unreturned, nor did she confine herself to Kris’ back, and now, as Kris floated with only her head and neck exposed, she felt distinctly lightheaded and was trying to restrain, without much success, an embarrassing urge to giggle.

  Mariwen lounged against the opposite side of the tub, her skin, the color of caramel the moment before it burns, making a charming contrast against the tub’s creamy marble. She was submerged to her chin but had one long perfect leg up on the coping with the other insinuated between Kris’ thighs, and Kris had just learned that Mariwen could do things with her toes that she was sure were misdemeanors and very likely felonious. And Mariwen, her dark eyes heavy-lidded and smoldering and her smile distinctly smug, certainly knew it.

  “You are a wicked, wicked girl,” Kris murmured. “How did you learn to do that?”

  “Trade secret,” Mariwen answered, rubbing her instep along Kris’ adductors and feeling the aftershocks deep in the muscle. “If I tell you, you’ll be trapped in this tub forever.”

  “Is that a promise?”

  “Now don’t you go changing the rules.”

  “Alright,” Kris sighed and pulled herself into a sitting position. “But I demand my revenge.”

  Mariwen laughed. Her foot grazed Kris’ submerged knee as it escaped and then resurfaced at the side of the tub opposite its mate.

  “Be my guest.”

  Chapter 2

  ELSEC HQ, Weyland Station

  Vesta, Eltanin Sector

  “Come on in, Rafe,” the admiral greeted him. “Have a seat.” Joss PrenTalien was unusually affable this AM, and as he stepped through the entry and settled in the proffered chair, Huron wondered what was wrong he thought he probably knew.

  “I suppose there’s no sense in trying to pretty this up,” PrenTalien began, closing the memo on his desk. “Trafalgar’s going in for refit.” That was what Huron expected the rumor had been circulating for some weeks so he was not unprepared, and a lifetime of political training had made him adept at concealing his feelings, especially disappointment. “The good news is that it’s confirmed that she’ll be getting the new wing of Phoenixes as soon as she’s ready.”

  Huron had expected that also. The FX-54 Phoenix was the newest CEF advanced interdiction fighter. He had flown the prototypes: splendid birds, challenging and apt to be crank in unskilled hands but damn near irresistible if well handled. “And because of the refit’s taking longer than originally thought, they’re going to assign her the first wing of Valkyries when those are ready.”

  That was news. The XR-69 Valkyrie was a highly advanced, fully stealthed, long-range recon fighter, slated to eventually replace the old SR-5 Phantoms. Kris would be overjoyed to learn that, if she was still first in line for the command. Huron didn’t know how big an if that was; Kris was quite junior to be given the lead wing of a new fighter class.

  “How long is the refit expected to take, sir?”

  “Five–six months or so. Seems the deck handling isn’t quite up to the Phoenixes big, finicky beasts those. A great job of foresight there.” PrenTalien snorted. “Of course, now that they decided to add the Valkyries, it might be even longer if those are delayed. But” he waved his hand to shoo away that disturbing possibility “it looks like things are on schedule for once. So we have a prayer of getting Trafalgar back in action during our lifetimes.”

  “I certainly hope so, sir.” Being picked for group leader on that big carrier was the apotheosis of a flight officer’s career, rather as commanding the dreadnaught Ardennes PrenTalien’s flagship was for a fleet officer, or the battlecruiser Athena Nike was for an incorrigible pirate like Vice Admiral Lo Gai Sabr, Ninth Fleet’s CO.

  “But in the meantime, there’s this,” PrenTalien opened up another memo and pointed at it. Huron leaned over to scan the memo briefly, endeavoring to keep his face appropriately neutral. What he saw surprised him, and for once in a pleasant way. It was a posting to Karelia as an advisor, specifically as a flight instructor, but that was not the surprise. There’d been rumors of things going on regarding Karelia ever since the success of Overlight, but this went beyond them. Quite far beyond them, in fact.

  PrenTalien was pretty good at reading neutral expressions, and he leaned back and folded his hands. “So you didn’t know about this. Can’t tell you how gratified I am to have surprised you. That’s damn hard to do, y’know.”

  “Yes, sir” letting his embryonic smile develop itself. The surprise was a series of full-scale fleet maneuvers, to be held between Ninth Fleet and the Karelia Navy. The Karelians were about to launch their first strike carriers (all they’d had before this were four old CEF light carriers for in-system defense), giving them a significant power-projection capability for the first time in their history. And of course, there was only one target the Karelians would possibly want to project power at. With their navy capable of interstellar operations, the long-awaited and longed-for day was finally in sight: the invasion of the Halith core systems and an end to the war.

  But more than this, it promised the destruction of the key element the prime mover, linchpin and heart of the interstellar slave trade and the whole monstrous system it supported. That promise transcended everything for Huron and many others, and most especially for one person who wanted that heart dead, smashed, demolished and annihilated more passionately than all the rest.

  With an unusual degree of restraint, even for him, and much greater than that required to douse his disappointment over Trafalgar’s refit, he waited for what PrenTalien had to say next.

  “We aren’t advertising any of this, of course,” the admiral said. “The whole upshot here is to demonstrate Overlight was no fluke. That we can plant a fleet anywhere, any time. Keep the buggers on watch fore and aft; left, right and center force ’em to pull their horns in where we can get a good hold and throttle ’em a bit before we slice the jugular.”

  That was an uncommon expression for the admiral; his favored one was “get ’em by the balls and kick ’em in the ass”, but Huron allowed that strangulation sounded more strategic and less tactical, as the other tended to imply. But it would also take longer, and while it could be argued to be surer in the end, it also allowed more time for unwelcome developments to rear their ugly heads and things to go wrong. This damped his enthusiasm a trifle, but only a trifle, and he continued to listen attentively.

  “And there’s this,” PrenTalien opened up another memo and pointed at it. “Before these maneuvers get underway, it was thought desirable to sharpen their flight crews a bit. You would seem to be the obvious choice.” Leaning forward, Huron scanned the memo briefly, still working to keep his face appropriately neutral. It was a request for a ‘qualified individual’ to be sent to Karelia as a flight instructor. “It’s also been suggested that, ah” here the admiral uncharacteristically paused “Commander Kennakris be sent along as assistant instructor.”

  Huron’s eyes widened a little at that. Kris was an excellent pilot probably the best in the CEF, he could admit without a twinge but she had no experience at all as a flight instructor. Huron began to wonder if someone felt it politic to send an aggressive, turbulent, increasing renowned and unemployed fighter pilot far away to get her out of the public eye for a while a notion that he’d already considered might apply to himself. Maybe they were counting on her relationship with him to seal the offer. Of course, similar motives (albeit absent the relationship angle) had been responsible for sending Kris to Iona and they all knew how that had turned out.

  “As you know,” PrenTalien was saying, “she’s overdue for a staff posting there was talk of assigning her to the Academy, but the Commandant resisted. Didn’t t
hink she was ready.” The first part was certainly true: the CEF regularly rotated their front-line pilots into training billets, both to pass along their experience to new pilots and give them a break from action. Up until Iona, Kris had been kept on active duty much longer than normal, and while the Commandant’s objection was mere gloss, Huron could see several reasons why he might be reluctant to have Kris on staff.

  “Are there particular reasons he thinks that?” Huron asked, testing the waters to see how deeply PrenTalien might venture into them.

  The admiral shrugged. “Any number. Obviously, her lack of experience isn’t it we send pilots back to teach all the time who’ve never done it before. Personally, I think he thinks it would be bad for discipline that damned stunt she pulled with the boggart hasn’t exactly been forgotten, you know.”

  The stunt in question was a war game in which Kris had used her very unusual mathematical talents she could perform the jump convolutions needed to plot hyperspace transits in her head, an operation only highly trained navigators could do, and only with the help of sophisticated systems to defeat a no-win scenario, something the Academy regularly sprang on gifted cadets to see how they would react when faced with impossible odds. Cadets called these scenarios ‘boggarts’, and nobody had ever beaten one before; very few even survived them. Huron had fought his to a draw, and that was the previous best effort. Kris had been obliged to face a charge that she’d cheated, which she refuted in a closed and subsequently classified inquiry, and the incident had passed into Academy legend, enhanced by the mystery of exactly how she’d done it. It was therefore not unreasonable to suppose that her presence might inspire cadets in ways the Academy staff would find awkward.

  “And then there’s the Iona business,” PrenTalien concluded. Officially, Iona had been a triumph; unofficially, it had been a poke in the eye to some powerful interests who had lost a great deal of potential revenue and whose feelings were not improved by having to publicly honor those who’d done the poking.

  There was also the little matter of Kris threatening to bombard the planet with starships accelerated to near-relativistic speeds. The fact that Kris had made the threat under extreme circumstances (tossed into a war as the senior surviving CEF officer with no forces worthy of the name at her disposal) was not really the point. Nor was it that she was (he hoped) bluffing. The real point was that the Ionians had believed her, and anyone who could convince a planetary government that had just fought and won a fleet action against a CEF task force to surrender simply by making a verbal threat was not necessarily the most comfortable person to have around.

  PrenTalien appeared to be following Huron’s thoughts, because he smiled and said, “You’d think that they’d appreciate someone who can win a war that way to say nothing of the aftermath.” That aftermath was the Battle of Apollyon Gates, in which Kris, leading a tiny fleet of mercenaries, Ionian tin cans, and three survivors from the CEF force held off Halith’s elite Prince Vorland Fleet long enough for a relief force to arrive. It was the greatest disparity of firepower in a naval engagement since the ancient Battle of Samar her heaviest combatant was a heavy cruiser and it thwarted a major Halith invasion. The awards that followed were copious and public and involved a large amount of official legerdemain. Not only did Kris’ disturbing threat have to be hushed up, but they also had to carefully suppress one of the victory’s key components: a lithomorph (in essence, a sentient rock) that had extraordinary codebreaking powers and combined with Kris’ exceptional abilities (she and the rock were able to meet on common ground, so to speak) to provide a critical edge that helped her win the lopsided battle.

  Huron smiled, not only at the memories, but because at the time PrenTalien hadn’t been so jovial about the shenanigans of his two mid-grade officers. Kris was only a senior lieutenant then, serving at a brevet rank, and he was still a lieutenant commander. But the interval had mellowed those concerns and polished the victory, and in any case, Huron was never convinced that the admiral’s ire had been much more than an official pro forma response demanded by his station.

  PrenTalien heaved himself forward onto his elbows. “But the real point here is that I plan to put Kennakris in for the Valkyrie wing on Trafalgar. She’s junior for it, and no doubt it’ll cause a deal of clack, but she’s earned it. It’ll be easier all around, though, if she agrees to this Karelian assignment. Props up her bona fides that sorta thing. You think she’d be agreeable to that?”

  Huron smiled. “In that case, sir, I believe you hardly need to ask.”

  “I appreciate that. It never pays to presume.” Leaning back again, he drummed his fingers briefly on the desk. “I don’t want to make it official quite yet not the time to focus too much attention on this but if you run into her and want to let her know unofficially, that’s fine. You can tell her from me, she has my word on it.”

  “I’ll certainly do that if I meet up with her. Thank you, sir.”

  “Very good. And to make this official I’ll post it in a day or two you’ll get the group leader slot and that new Phoenix wing. Unless you’d rather have the fighter boss billet.”

  “Thanks, sir. But I’d prefer not to be a spectator.”

  PrenTalien nodded any other answer would have shocked him. “Now regarding this assignment, we’re still working the wrinkles out there’s some niggling bastards in the Foreign Office we’ve got to neutralize so expect it to be at least a month before everything’s arranged. Personally, I think that’s optimistic. We gotta slow-walk this for the time being to avoid tipping our hand. Meanwhile, you and Kennakris will be granted extended leave. So don’t be in a hurry to respond to messages urgent family business, father’s health that sorta thing. You know the drill.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There is a potential issue” Huron noted the change in tone “and this one is strictly sub rosa.” The admiral lifted his fingers off the desk and held them raised for a moment before curling them into his palm and dropping them into his lap. “How current are you on Amu Daria?”

  Cocking his head slightly, Huron gestured with his open hands. “Not terribly, sir.”

  On its face, that was an odd question. Amu Daria was an ancient settlement that had split off from Syrdar long before the latter became part of the Halith empire. Remote and inhospitable, it was known for two things only: exporting illicit (and semi-licit) drugs, and its fiercely independent denizens who had a long history of rebelling and generally being a thorn in Halith’s side. The last major insurrection had been near the end of the last war when, with the League’s help (Sergeant Major Yu and Corporal Vasquez had both been involved), the Amu Darians had managed to gain their freedom.

  Unhappily, that freedom was also lawless, even anarchic, and Amu Daria soon became a safe haven for terrorists and their ilk, including, for a time, Nestor Mankho. After the negotiated peace that ended that war, Halith was able to devote their full attention to bringing the wayward colony to heel. This they did, with all their accustomed brutality, while the League turned a blind eye. In the aftermath, the surviving separatist factions which had shown such a tendency to quarrel among themselves when not fighting against Halith reverted to their age-old practice of low-level insurgency.

  Huron knew that shortly after the start of the current conflict, proposals had been floated to once again extend covert aid to the separatists, in hopes of distracting Halith and diverting some of their forces. Conscious of both the vipers’ nest these same groups had made of the planet on the previous occasion and the blind eye its members had subsequently turned to their suppression, the Plenary Council turned an equally deaf ear to these new proposals.

  Since then, the only notice that Amu Daria had received was as a potential haven for Colonel Christina Yeager’s band of raiders, who’d made an attack on Haslar, the second-most important of the Halith core systems behind the capital of Halith Evandor itself. That attack produced almost no physical damage but provoked a profound psychological reaction that led to a change in Halith�
��s strategic priorities and, in turn, the Battle of Wogan’s Reef. What happened to Colonel Yeager and her people, none knew. If the survivors had reached Amu Daria (or anywhere else), there had been no word.

  Whether Colonel Yeager’s fate lay behind the admiral’s question or something else, Huron could not venture a guess. The separatists’ fortunes would have risen as Halith’s fell. So perhaps that was it.

  The admiral cleared his throat. “Indications are that things have gotten into a bit of a stir over there. Possibly some new actors might even be some new management.”

  “Reliable management, sir?”

  PrenTalien shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Never can tell with these sorts. But it’s looking serious enough that we’re dispatching the Anandale Rangers along with CAT 5 as part of these maneuvers. In case of . . . eventualities.”

  “Yes, sir.” Covert Action Team 5 would bring Corporal Vasquez and Sergeant Major Yu to the party, and the Anandale Rangers were Lieutenant Colonel Minerva Lewis’ outfit. If those eventualities eventuated, PrenTalien was seeing to it they had their finest black-ops team in place.

  “The Karelians will have the best data on all this, of course. I’m not asking for anything out of school here, but as you will be there ahead of the others, it’s prudent you should be aware.”

  PrenTalien was, of course, aware that Huron’s views on what was out of school and what wasn’t were a trifle elastic, and that his family was originally from Karelia and his father maintained close ties with any number of Karelian organizations, including their elements of their intelligence apparatus.