The Bonds of Orion (Loralynn Kennakris Book 5)

by Owen R. O’Neill

  “So what do I call you?”

  “Suit yourself. Anything but bitch ’ll do.” The colonel glanced around. “What were ya doin’ out here in the freezing-ass AM all by yourself anyway?”

  “None of yer goddamned business. What were you doing out here alone?”

  “None of your goddamned business.”

  That got Kris to smile. “Same thing, huh?”

  “I expect. Girls’ side of the mountain, y’know.”

  * * *

  Whatever degree the tension had relaxed on the hike back abruptly shifted when the four of them reached the base camp. Seeing Sutton standing with a small group of her people, the colonel stopped and for a long moment became stock-still. Alerted by the sudden hush, Sutton turned and advanced a few steps.

  “Colonel” giving her a precise salute.

  Colonel Yeager returned it, a rigid, automatic motion. After a few seconds where the effort to master her emotions shown plain on her face, she spoke in a voice so tight, it nearly cracked. “I didn’t think to see you again, Major.”

  “You nearly didn’t, ma’am.” Sutton kept his voice quiet and his hands at his sides.

  “But you have the Devil’s own luck, Jon.” How much it was anger or relief that made her jaw clench that way, or a war between them and the other emotions that darkened her eyes, he could not say. She held his gaze a moment longer. “Taking off like that . . . The people ”

  “You got my note, ma’am?”

  At that, her voice changed tone slightly. “I did.”

  “Nothing but the truth, Colonel. Never wavered. No matter what.”

  She nodded, and her jaw moved as if she was grinding her molars. “Y’know about the new game plan?”

  “They told us.”

  “Y’know what’s gotta happen now?”

  “They told us.” There a subtle change in his repetition as some of the subdued tension reasserted itself.

  “This isn’t gonna be as simple as looks.”

  “No, Colonel. I’m afraid not.”

  Answering with a grunt, she walked up to Huron, waiting some meters away. “Commander, as you’ve been read in on the state of affairs, you’ll appreciate why we can’t accept your hospitality right now.”

  “So I understand, Colonel,” Huron answered evenly. He’d been observing from afar and noted how much the colonel was on edge. That was communicating itself to her people, and the friction between them and his didn’t need to escalate. “I suggest you come up top and speak with Colonel Lewis.”

  “Who’s Colonel Lewis?”

  “Lieutenant Colonel Minerva Lewis.”

  Colonel Yeager cocked her head, hands on her belt. “She was captain last I knew.”

  Huron took in the colonel’s stance with a carefully neutral expression. “Times change.”

  * * *

  Battlecruiser bulkheads are robust, but it was doubtful even battleship armor could’ve kept in the argument that broke out in Min’s quarters on board LSS Artemisia. The fuse had been burning ever since Colonel Yeager so unexpectedly encountered Kris. Meeting Sutton increased the strain, and by the time the shuttle settled into the docking clamps on Artemisia’s boat deck, detonation was inevitable. All that was lacking was a target.

  But not for long. Min hadn’t expected Colonel Yeager to be in the best frame of mind, and she initially laid herself out to be perfectly agreeable. The battlecruiser’s sensor section had discovered early that AM that the separatists were in control of the capital and the Halith forces were holed up in the south, but news of the POWs, relayed by Huron from the shuttle as soon as it got within tight-beam range, came as a complete surprise and upset all of their calculations.

  That upset overflowed into their meeting, and as they talked, Colonel Yeager’s visage got darker and her tone grew more heated, until she burst out in a voice clearly audible out in the passageway.

  “Look, goddammit! We didn’t ask you to come piss on the parade. What the fuck are you gonna do now? Did you bring lift for nine thousand people? I didn’t think so. I had two transports in orbit until you showed up. The rest should make starfall today, but as soon as they detect you here, they’ll bolt like those other two! It took me a month to get things wired on this! It’ll take another month probably more to get it rewired. Y’think the Doms’ll sit on their ass all the time? It’s a fucking miracle they aren’t here now!”

  “Just rein it in a gawd-damned minute!” Min shot back. Nine thousand people were an ass-load to move on what amounted to no notice, but they had seven ships, and those two absconding transports could likely be made to yield to a persuasive argument. Battlecruisers were good for that, and if it proved to a mite awkward to explain later, she’d had nine thousand damn-fine reasons on her side. “If you’ll wait ”

  The word wait hit square on Yeager’s raw nerves, and she crowded the larger woman. “Colonel, I strongly advise you not to get in my way on this.”

  That got Min to rise up to her full height. “Let me tell you something, Colonel, and let me make it what they call perfectly clear. I have orders in hand. Give me any more shit, and I'll tie you into a double-crown wall knot and shove your ass in my locker till we get home. Stand down, and I’ll chalk this up to the intersession of Providence. What’ll it be?”

  Colonel Yeager was by no means lightly built, but neither was she fully prepared to see Min swell like that, a dangerous light intensifying the color of her pale eyes. “Okay, Colonel. We’ll play this your way.”

  Min relaxed a hair fraction of a hair. “Fine. I’ll have a shuttle prepped for you. Don't make me regret my decision.”

  “I can promise you that.”

  “I'm glad we understand each other.”

  Chapter 22

  IHS Belisarius, approaching Amu Daria

  Epsilon Aquila, Aquila Sector

  As the dreadnought IHS Belisarius continued its long fall through a hole of its own making on its way to Amu Daria, Admiral Caneris sat in his spacious but spare day cabin, waiting and occupying his thoughts by musing on his granddaughter. Once, years ago, Arianna had asked him how hyperlight travel worked. He’d been at pains to produce an explanation that was both cogent and properly adapted to her six-year-old understanding. She’d listened with rapt attention, and when he finished, she screwed her little face into a scowl of profound contemplation. Then she announced: “Like Alice falling down the rabbit hole.”

  He and his late wife had delighted in reading those archaic tales to her; she had delighted in hearing them told over again and again, and her conclusion about the mechanics of hyperlight travel struck him as curiously apt. It had amused him then, and when the instant of translation drew near, he rarely failed to think of it, indulging (when alone, as now) in a private smile.

  Though it did not mark the end of their journey, only the hyperlight portion of it (it would take another day to reach Amu Daria once they translated in), that instant was due in ten hours and forty-six minutes, as he knew from checking the chrono, a handsome antique (his late wife’s gift to him on their first anniversary, which had accompanied him ever since) set in the aft bulkhead. He was checking the chrono rather too often, which annoyed him. There were two principal sins mariners could not indulge, if they were not to run mad. Impatience was one, and getting one’s hopes up was the other. During this journey, he’d been flirting with both.

  The two were conjoined, in this case, because he longed to have this nonsense done with so he could direct his full attention to more urgent affairs, and there appeared to be a possibility of doing precisely that. His last communication from Danilov before he embarked informed him that Danilov’s agent-in-place had identified an appropriately susceptible individual with the requisite skills who worked in the capital’s network operations center, and had succeeded in recruiting him. But there were caveats. The agent had sent a brief dossier on the individual: a native Amu Darian educated on Vehren who, by all reports, had enjoyed the lifestyle there to a high degree. Vehren was the m
ost relaxed of the Halith core systems and, compared to Amu Daria, positively sybaritic. The dossier went on to say that certain aspects of his cloud presence while there suggested a certain “flexibility”.

  It also did not rate him highly reliable; that “he might lack bottom,” in the report’s pungent phrase. However, no more suitable candidates existed within an acceptable timeframe. In view of that timeframe, Danilov’s agent had acted on his own initiative in recruiting him, but he would not proceed with more than pro-forma tasking until he received further instructions. That was acceptable, Caneris and Danilov concurred. The instructions were sent, and now Caneris was awaiting the outcome.

  That outcome was why Caneris had been paying such close attention to his chrono. They were shallow enough to receive a simple message from Danilov’s agent, and it should arrive at any time. Whether it was positive or negative would not, in the long run, affect the outcome. Amu Daria would be brought to heel, regardless. Over a month ago, Caneris had dispatched General Johann Raeder in a stealth corvette to take command of the remaining troops. If there was anyone who could put the fear of God in shaken troops, it was General Raeder. If the preferred plan failed, Raeder, supported by the force Caneris was bringing with him, would not. There would be peace on Amu Daria. It might be the peace of a dead silence, but it would be peace.

  And it would obviously take time. “Ask anything of me, but time.” Caneris held no very good opinion of Napoleon’s generalship, but he had a point there.

  An alert sounded, the tone belonging to his chief of staff, Captain Nikolaj Jalokin-Olsvig. Answering it, no trace of the relief he felt showed in his voice.

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “Signal received, Admiral. It is positive.”

  “All is in readiness?”

  “Yes it is, sir.”

  “Strike.”

  * * *

  Forty-nine minutes, seventeen seconds later, a tight-beam signal from a hyperwave relay on the outskirts of Amu Daria’s system tickled a trio of satellites in orbit far above the planet. The satellites, which had been sent along with General Raeder in a second corvette and were carefully designed to be undetectable from “DC to daylight” (as the saying went), had been waiting in absolute silence since they arrived. Now they awoke and spread four fins, using simple hydraulics that emitted no photons. Attached to each fin was a gigantic needle, thirty-two meters long and two meters across at its base, made of crysteel. In an operation timed to better than a millisecond, the needles, known as TRIMs (Terminal Reentry Inert Munitions) were released from their clamps so gently as to not disturb their orientation by so much as an arcsecond.

  Compressed gases nudged each of the twelve TRIMs away from their host satellites and, once they were clear, began to decelerate them. The deceleration was modest, but it would accumulate as the TRIMs fell toward the planet below. When they entered the atmosphere six hours, forty-six minutes later at an angle of 69 degrees exactly four hours before IHS Belisarius was scheduled to begin her translation into normal space-time they would be moving at 7.8 km/sec. Thirteen seconds after that, they would concentrate four kilotons of kinetic energy the yield of a modest nuclear device onto their chosen targets.

  * * *

  Sitting in his cube at Xela’s network operations center, Roland Zamora also watched the time with the intensity of the condemned. He felt he’d aged a century in the last ten minutes. Ten minutes ago, the sysadmin for the next shift, Petr Zwickau, should have clocked in, and he hadn’t. The walls of his cube were alive with all the many parameters that kept tabs on the capital’s entire telecommunications infrastructure, including the starport, showing activity, monitoring overall health and identifying potential trouble spots. The capital’s telecoms were a multilayered hodgepodge of networks, patches, extensions and kludges that had accreted ever since the colony’s founding, without rhyme and with very little reason. In other words, a “righteous clusterfuck”, in the phase perennially uttered by Xela’s tech staff, and it had to be watched continuously.

  That at least is what the contract said and, for the most part, it was true. True enough that if Zamora left without a proper handover to Zwickau, there would likely be questions and calls, even though Zwickau’s lack of punctuality was the problem, not him. And he could not absolutely could not afford that today.

  He couldn’t afford it, because lurking in his console, one keystroke away from be uploaded, was a python, a type of worm that would invade the network and strangle the critical processes that governed the city’s automated the defenses and the starport’s operations. He had a ghost-port open to the defense net now, a red-bordered window at the lower-right corner of his desktop. The Halith IT officer in charge had allowed them to set several of those up so they could perform routine maintenance, add patches, and do minor upgrades without the hassle of visiting: getting clearances and day passes and all the attendant bullshit. Whatever qualms the IT officer had had were dealt with by a handsome bribe, and plus, it soon occurred to him, putz that he was, that he could take credit for the work himself when he wanted to.

  Happily, the putz had been killed during the assault on the HQ Complex when the capital fell (Zamora was a bit surprised he stuck around), and folks now in charge (a more fucked-in-the-head bunch of knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers, he’d never seen) wouldn’t know a ghost-port from the ass of one of their mules. So there was no chance they knew about them, or that they’d detect what he was about to release through one of them. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was when the python would activate after upload.

  He didn’t know exactly what would happen once the automated defenses came down, but it was obviously going to be unhealthy for a lot of people and end with the Halith back in charge. The man he was working for had been emphatic about the time the python would trigger: it could not be so much as a second before or after, and since he’d only been told the exact time right before his quarter-time shift, it was a good bet that whatever was going to happen was, in fact, already happening.

  And Zamora had absolutely no intention of being around when it did. He knew that once the Halith were back in charge, he’d be disposable, and he’d arranged a ride off this rock soon after they’d paid for the job. He’d done it very quietly, of course, and he didn’t fear detection there either. His access to the starport’s systems had allowed him the set everything up. But he couldn’t give a departure time to his ride and enter it in the starport’s departure log until he knew when the python would activate, and he hadn’t expected to learn that so late. His ride was already waiting for at the starport, but the window for him to meet it had become uncomfortably tight, and goddamn Zwickau was making it tighter. The moment the python did its thing, the starport would be unable to launch any craft. Ideally, he’d be in orbit by then, boosting far away from the consequences of his actions, and from anyone coming after him.

  But only if that fuck-turd

  “Hey, Rollie!”

  Zamora lurched, almost biting his tongue at Zwickau’s casual greeting from his cube’s doorway.

  Zwickau laughed. “Shit stars! Why’re you so jumpy?”

  “Why’re you late, asshole?”

  “Twelve fucking minutes. Sue me.”

  “Fuck you,” ground out Zamora as he tapped a final keystroke. A tiny icon flashed, signaling that the python had uploaded successfully. He shut the ghost-port, swept his desktop clean, logged off and code-locked his system.

  “I haven’t logged on yet,” Zwickau said with a malicious grin. Per protocol, Zwickau should’ve been in his own cube with his system up before Zamora logged off. For security and accountability, the core processes could only be accessed by one sysadmin at time. Zwickau should have been online to verify that Zamora had logged out properly, and he could access the core processes before Zamora left.

  But to wait for Zwickau to wander down to his cube, unlock his system and log on, while Zamora rebooted his system, logged on and then back out with Zwickau online would take more time th
an he could afford. And it wasn’t like the protocol was invariably followed anyway. No one was gonna bitch about a few minutes. And even if they decided to, he’d be long gone.

  “Suck on it, Zwick. I’m late.” Rising from his seat, he shouldered Zwickau out of the doorway and off down the corridor, moving as fast as he dared.

  “Yeah, you have a gloriously fuck-tacular day, too!” Zwickau yelled after him.

  I will, thought Zamora with a jet of mental venom. And it’ll be god’s own shit-ton better than yours.

  Seven minutes later, in the back of a taxi on his way to the starport, and starting to feel better about his prospects, Zamora heard the very last thing he ever wanted to hear: his cel. Fumbling it out of his coat pocket, he checked the caller and his chest collapsed, a painful implosion that fogged his eyes. But he had to answer it. If he didn’t answer it, all hell would break loose. And maybe it was nothing.

  Hands shaking, he flipped the cel on. “What is it, Zwick?”

  “You fucked up, my friend.” Zwickau’s cheerful voice sent a spasm shooting through Zamora’s clenched stomach. No way could they have found out so soon . . . No way “You didn’t log out of Sepulchre properly. I can’t get into any of the core processes. How ’bout that?”

  Piss-shit-fuck! How had he botched that? He checked the time. He was a little more than five minutes from the starport. Once he got there and got inside, he’d be home-free. All he had to do was keep Zwickau waiting patiently well, just waiting for another ten minutes.

  “Aww fuck . . .” he hissed into the phone for effect. “Okay. I’ll come back. Gimme a few minutes and I’ll be there.”

  “Not even necessary,” Zwickau answered good-naturedly. “Just tell me how to unlock your system, I’ll log you out, and we’re all good.”

  Oh, fuck no! Smothering the gasp almost made him choke. If Zwickau logged onto his console and accessed Sepulchre so he could close it, he’d see the last process executed: uploading the python.