Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks

by Owen R. O'Neill

  Stories about these developments circulated through the Chattering Classes and were sagely commented on and speculated about, but there was a general feeling that little would come of it; that the Grand Senate would dilute any proposed action through politically expedient compromises, and that once the media cooled off, the whole affair would reduce itself to just another tempest in a teapot.

  Three-hundred-eighty light-years away, another opinion was heard. “Worse’n a reformed harlot out for blood,” said Chief Inspector Taliaferro to Commander Wesselby during another of their oh-dark-thirty meetings. “If they’d gone in and done this job when we had Mankho’s organization by the short hairs, I’d have cheered for them. But now that they’ve had all this time to refit and recoup and we don’t even know where the son of a bitch is, they wanna barge in and carry on like a Bashan bull.”

  “Or a braying ass full of mischief?”

  “I like that. A braying ass full of mischief—spot on. Where’d you hear that?”

  “Poetry. A braying ass of mischief full. I think that’s how it went.”

  “The Bible?”

  “No. An ancient named Douglass. He was an escaped slave who preached against slavery.”

  “I didn’t know you liked poetry.”

  “I have unsuspected depth. Do you think Gayle’s serious?” Trin disliked politics and followed it only inasmuch as it made her job more difficult when it wasn’t making it impossible.

  “The braying ass?” Nick smiled and Trin looked down, diplomatically covering an inward sigh; she had a feeling she’d be hearing that phrase a lot from now on. “Dunno. I kinda doubt it. If I had to guess I’d say he’s expecting the ultimatum to get hung up in committee. He needed a way to give the Archon the finger in public and see what sort of support he has when it comes to a no-confidence vote. An ultimatum isn’t something people can straddle the gate on.”

  Trin shook her head and then snapped in pure waspish exasperation. “But releasing the Bannerman data! Do they really have no idea what that cost us in terms of assets? What in the hell was he thinking? He set us back years!”

  An amazingly witty remark on the idea that a politician might actually think presented it to Nick’s mind, but taking note of Trin’s expression, he forbore. “The way I heard it, the Archon pretty much told him to his face that he didn’t have the balls to go through with it. Now Gayle is well known for being spine-optional, but the Archon had to go and yank his chain on this one—overplayed his hand.”

  “Boys,” Trin snarled under her breath.

  “You ever meet him?” The question was purely rhetorical: serving CEF intelligence officers did not hobnob with Homeworld politicians.

  “He was a lawyer, wasn’t he?” Trin said, smoothing some strands of hair back distractedly.

  “Colonial law, I think. Got his start as head of this big charitable foundation, doing good works in underdeveloped colonies, y’see. He’s a queer fish—bit of a rabble rouser. Likes to champion this cause or that one—took up the antislavery cudgel for a while—then move on before the real work starts. Made a boatload of money doing it, too.”

  “Charming.”

  “They say he is. He was originally a pacifist too. Then just after the war, he claimed to see the light and switched sides, becoming a big proponent of defense and active measures. More ‘n likely, he just realized that the pacifists were never gonna get him elected Grand Senator. My read, though, is that he’s still a lawyer at heart. Thinks this is all just an academic exercise with real nice fringe benefits. He ain’t gonna take a threat seriously until he comes home to find it soaking in his hot tub, eating his last avocado.”

  An alarm chimed: someone requesting entrance to the building. Taliaferro got up, checked the monitors and excused himself. Two minutes later he was back with a large flat box that emitted wisps of steam. He put the box between them on his desk. “You hungry?”

  Trin leaned forward and inhaled expectantly. “You didn’t.”

  “I’m afraid I did.” He opened the box, revealing a large, flat round of baked dough slathered in red sauce and crowded with small rounds of sausage smothered in cheese, still bubbling.

  “Is that real?” Nedaemans were officially all vegetarians; what meat was allowed to be imported for consumption by foreign residents was strictly monitored, licensed and regulated. Only meat that was cultured according to very specific and exacting standards was permitted and certainly no variety of sausage was on the list.

  “Yep. It pays to know people.” He extracted a slice, the cheese pulling into long, sticky threads and a few drops of hot grease scattering onto his desk.

  “So much for the sacred principle of law enforcement not being above the Law,” Trin muttered, inhaling deeply of the warm, savory aroma.

  “I prefer to think of it as being below the Law. Help yourself. Plates under the coffee maker if you’re feeling civilized.”

  She was feeling civilized and they ate in silence for a while, Trin more cautiously after the first bite nearly blistered the roof of her mouth.

  “Like a beer?” Taliaferro asked, procuring one for himself. Trin shook her head; she preferred milk with this particular delicacy and Nick Taliaferro was emphatically not a milk drinker, although she assumed he knew what it was.

  They demolished three-quarters of the pizza in religious silence. Trin declined a final piece and brushed crumbs from her lap. Watching them scatter—they were more profuse than she’d thought—she asked suddenly, “Nick, do you know how they were planning to handle Mankho’s interrogation if the op succeeded? They didn’t exactly cover themselves with glory with Larson and his cohorts.”

  “Screwed the pooch is more what I’d call it.”

  Larson was the name—obviously a codename—of the one good-sized fish Nick’s people had netted, along with a shoal of minor ones, in the aftermath of Mankho’s plot. Then, once the heavy lifting was done, the Nedaeman Foreign Office moved in and claimed jurisdiction. They demanded that the captured terrorists be turned over to the counterterrorism task force, which the Foreign Office led. The claim was perfectly valid, given the interstellar nature of the plot, but a sensible approach would have taken into account that the task force, being an interagency organization, lacked its own assets and was ill-equipped to handle prisoners or undertake their interrogations.

  The obvious solution—to include the Bureau of Public Safety in the task force and let Nick’s well-trained people conduct the interrogations—was rejected in favor of bringing in the Nedaeman Directorate of Intelligence and Analysis. NDIA was not, strictly speaking, a field organization, so they in turn brought in teams of contractors, who were not sufficiently diligent in testing the terrorists for tripwires, as anti-interrogation implants were commonly known. So the NDIA and Foreign Office reps watched as the brains of several subjects, including the man called Larson who’d led the cell that carried out the operation, literally melted before their horrified eyes.

  Trin had managed to get her hands on the forensic analysis—the actual raw data, not the sanitized version that made it into the official report—and it was painfully obvious to her professional eye just when and where and how the operators hired by NDIA had gone wrong. Interrogation was a delicate business, requiring at least a day or two by a skilled operator, and tripwires were, by their very nature, touchy things to deal with. To disable them took at least twice as long, maybe even a week.

  The implants Larson and the others had been fitted with were good but not the best she’d seen. Any halfway decent CEF interrogator would have found them and known how to handle them. Which meant that either the contractors selected by NDIA were not halfway decent or that something else was going on. And the more she looked at the situation as a whole, from the botched interrogations to the failed raid, the more the possible dimensions of that something else grew to disturbing proportions.

  “Weren’t going to bring in any of your people, were they?” She offered to the silence.

  “Never go
t that far. The grumbles said SOCOM was gonna try to keep it in-house this go.” Nick wagged the forefinger of his beer-holding hand at the last slice. “Sure you don’t want to split that?”

  “Thanks, but you go ahead.”

  Nick did and Trin watched as the last of the pizza fulfilled its destiny. “Who was read in on this op?” She asked as the last bite of crust disappeared. “Anyone new?”

  He looked at her over his glass. “What’s on your mind, Trin?”

  She wiped her mouth again on a napkin, scrubbing at more than just pizza grease, and dropped the crumpled cellucine wad into a trash receptacle. “It’s just that . . . Nick, have you ever known an op to go so wrong?”

  “Not above a couple dozen.”

  “No, I mean so precisely wrong. The plan was timed to the minute, from insertion to extraction. Look at this.” She brought a small envelope out of the breast pocket of her uniform.

  Taliaferro’s eyebrows climbed high up the dark-tanned forehead. “You printed it?”

  She nodded. “My paranoia is rising to a new pitch. Look.” She unsealed the envelope, extracted two folded flimsies and spread one out on top of the pizza box. “This is the timeline, as far as we’ve been able to reconstruct it. The more I look at it, the worse it seems—like they had a precise list of targets and were just waiting for them to show themselves so they could take them out.” She ran her fingers down the list of events, showing the planned and actual timing. “See the tolerances? Now here’s what we think happened.” She overlaid the second sheet on the first. “Note this delay? Another couple of minutes and they almost certainly would have aborted. But they were pushed right to the edge, where they’d have the least amount of time to adapt if anything went wrong. Then they walked straight into what must have been a trap.”

  She sat back as Nick stared hard at the flimsies, lips moving in silent vexation.

  “Now wouldn’t it take some pretty fancy hardware in overwatch to detect the corvette, track the team and cue the sensors? That corvette and the shuttles had some of the best signature suppression we’ve got. If even Halith has hardware that good, we’ve missed it badly.”

  “But if they were being surveilled from the moment they got in-system, why let it go as far as a firefight? Propaganda value? Doesn’t make much sense—just detaining the corvette would’ve still given them a dandy incident, if that’s what they were looking for.”

  That took a few unpleasant moments to digest. “You have a point.”

  “And all the indications are that surprise was complete. If they were waiting for them, that means our team couldn’t detect ‘em.”

  “Or they weren’t waiting for them. Which implies they had their forces staged in the vicinity but not close enough for our team to find them, and a good enough idea of the timing so they could warn against the corvette even if they couldn’t track it. But once the shooting started and the shrike went up . . .” Trin folded up the flimsies and stuffed them back in her pocket. “Nick, how conspiratorial are we feeling?”

  “Well, I don’t know about you, but I could fit myself for a tinfoil hat about now.”

  Wesselby tried to suppress a bitter smile. “Do you want to go on record with that?”

  “Let’s just keep it between you and me for now. But it’s looking rotten as hell and this ain’t Denmark.”

  Chapter Six

  CEF Academy Orbital Campus

  Deimos, Mars, Sol

  Sergeant Major Yu, barefoot and dressed in a black exercise rig, bestrode a stage erected in Shuttle Hanger #6. Class 1861, all dressed alike and already diminished to forty-two of its original fifty-six members, sat on rows of equipment lockers placed before the stage, some trying to keep their naked soles off the icy metal deck and reflecting that Yu was pacing back and forth on nice, warm wrestling mats. It was their first day back after the mid-term break, and some of the cadets were clearly still feeling the effects of a week of liberty—their reward for completing the first half of their initial six-month term—and with that sadistic genius that so characterized the bureaucratic military mind, it was their first day of unarmed combat training.

  Sergeant Major Yu was the Academy’s senior unarmed combat instructor. Moreover, he was a three-time All-Forces Unarmed Combat Champion, a distinction he shared with no living person, and with the next tournament coming up at the end of this term, it was being confidently predicted by most that he would win a fourth title, something never before achieved. This opinion was not universal because Yu would be competing for the first time against the reigning champion, a corporal named Vasquez who had won the title once previously, and interest in the match was sure to mount to feverish heights. Early betting favored Yu by odds of three to two.

  Kris, sitting in the second row, was mostly unaware of the growing excitement surrounding the upcoming tournament, but she was not unaware of the cold deck and was sitting cross-legged to avoid it, dignity be dammed. She was not among those suffering from an excess of liberty because she’d spent her liberty right here on Deimos, luxuriating in the quiet of an empty dorm, Tanner and Minx having gone downside to Mars and Basmartin having been treated to a trip to Earth. Basmartin had invited her along but she had declined, claiming the expense as the reason; a false reason as Kris could easily have afforded it—she was, in fact, quite well off, with her credit account still flush with the repatriation payout the government had given her in consequence of her enslavement.

  The true reason she declined was that Mariwen Rathor was from Earth and while Kris had no notion of Mariwen’s current whereabouts—the last time she’d seen her was in a hospital on Nedaema—the pain of that visit and the association with Earth were still too sharp. So she’d ordered a few imported luxuries and enjoyed having a whole glorious thirty-four square meters to herself until her studymates returned last night, Tanner arriving with just ten minutes to spare, his eyes still red-rimmed and bloodshot, and wincing when anyone spoke in the normal tone of voice.

  Tanner was sitting just four places from her now, pasty gray this AM and still wincing as Yu delivered his unamplified address in a gundeck voice calculated to fill a larger space than this roomy hanger. “Now I know some of you think that modern warfare is just sitting around fiddling with icons, and all this is only a betting sport.” He looked out over the group, making most everyone his gaze touched feel like one of the culprits. “So let me assure you, children, that out there, that shit breaks and you never know when and where you are going to meet your enemy. When all the fancy gadgets don’t play—in a cutting-out expedition, a boarding action and yes, those still happen—or when your shuttle is taken down in hostile space, the only thing between you and getting strapped to a table and having your brain turned into mayonnaise is what you learn right here.”

  Yu stopped in his pacing and pointed. “A volunteer, please.” He looked straight at her. “You, Kennakris. Come on up here. On the quick now.”

  Kris stood, sidled down the aisle to murmured exhortations of her classmates—Go get him; Kick his ass; Some people have all the fun—and mounted the steps to stand at parade rest before Sergeant Major Yu. He greeted her with a knowing leer. “So Kennakris, how’s your AM been going?”

  “We’ll see in a minute, sir.”

  The leer widened. “Worked up any good resentments lately?”

  “Not against anyone present, sir.”

  “Too bad. Let’s see what we can do about that.” He executed a fluid motion, impossibly swift, and Kris hit the mat hard. “Unacceptable, Kennakris,” he barked. “Totally unacceptable. How’re you gonna kill bad guys flat on your ass like that? Come on, get off your butt and try it again.”

  Kris hauled herself off the mat slowly, coming up into a crouch, rubbing her sore tailbone, and with her knees flexed, exploded forward. She’d fought hundreds of savage, desperate battles against Trench—nasty, brutal, vicious combats that always made him laugh—and lost every one but the last.

  Now, her right hand shot up, feinting with two s
tiff fingers for Yu’s eyes while she punched hard with the left for his solar plexus. The blow had all the power of her driving legs behind it, but Yu slipped the feint and turned so her fist slammed into his ribs—it was like hitting granite—and his arm came around hers. She writhed, brought her knee up hard for his groin, missed as he blocked with a thigh like a tree trunk—wrenched free, ducked a blow to the side of her head, pivoted hard and tried to sweep his leg. The blow connected. She heard a small grunt as it went home, felt the slight change in balance and lashed out with a kick to the neck that found nothing but air. She spun with the momentum, blocked a heel aimed at her middle, dropped into a roll as a blow hammered down on her shoulder; bounded up, felt herself lifted; twisted in midair, slamming an elbow into rock-solid meat, came down on her feet with her knees bent and kicked high.

  The kick went wide as Yu moved like smoke, and suddenly she found herself flat on the mat, the breath leaving her lungs in a rush, and there was a tremendous weight on her chest, pinning her firmly yet almost gently. The sergeant major smiled down at her—no kind of leer now—and the redness around the edge of her vision started to clear.

  “Much better, Kris. Much better. Put more science behind that and you’ll scare the piss outta people.” His voice was quiet, almost private, and Kris, gasping for air, merely blinked. Yu watched as the yellow-eyed look of savagery faded. “Ready to get up?”

  Kris nodded, accepted Yu’s hand to get to her feet and straightened painfully. “That’s the way to go about it, cadets. There are no match rules out there—nobody taps out at the end. You fight smart, you fight dirty, you fight to kill.” He turned to Kris, just starting to breathe easy. “Well done, Kennakris. Take a seat.” And to the others: “Now that we understand each other, let’s get on with the class.”