Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks

by Owen R. O'Neill

  No one was standing today, it being just the admiral’s regular weekly staff meeting, and the omnisynth was off since Ardennes was in port, docked with the massive bulk of Cassandra Station, which dwarfed even the five-hundred-meter ship; thus, its flat projection surface hosted a box of donuts.

  The admiral, his bulk overwhelming the inadequate seat, declined a last donut in a nod to moderation and set his briefing notes aside. “That concludes the important business. Geoff, did we get our weekly missive from the Honorable Jackson Holder?”—this to his flag lieutenant, Geoffrey Reynolds.

  “We did, sir,” Reynolds replied. “Two, in fact.” Ever since Vice Admiral Burton had started enforcing the rules of the road on the transit lanes under PLESEC authority, Jackson Holder, CEO of Caelius-Protogenos, accustomed to the immunity usually enjoyed by one of the League’s largest corporations, had been bombarding PrenTalien with increasingly strident letters from his legal department. Two in one week was a new level of escalation, however.

  “Two?” PrenTalien cocked a bushy eyebrow.

  “Yes, sir.” Reynolds pulled a hardcopy from his folder and slid it across to his boss. “I believe he wrote this one himself.”

  The admiral picked it up and scanned it with an amused look. “By god, I think you’re right. His bot would certainly know the difference between their and they’re.”

  “Indeed,” Reynolds said with an answering smile that was echoed around the space. “It seems we are beginning to take a bite out of his bottom line.”

  “Bully for our side.” PrenTalien set the printout on a stack of other reports. “If he put half the effort into getting his skippers to keep their assigned vectors and observe right-of-way as he did into writing that letter, we wouldn’t need to haul down on them all the time. But where’s the fun in that?”

  “Quite so, sir,” his flag lieutenant acknowledged. “Do you choose to respond?”

  “I suppose I ought to. Return the compliment, as it were. You’ll make sure it’s grammatical, of course.”

  Reynolds smiled. “That won’t be an issue, I’m sure, sir.”

  “Very well. Any others?”

  “Just three, sir. Things were a little slow this week. Shall I respond as per usual?”

  “Do. Use that letter you composed for the last batch—I liked that one especially. Copy CNO and send the detailed log files this time, not just the overview. If they want to break a lance with Carlos over this, they have my blessing.” It was not usual for flag officers, even of PrenTalien’s seniority, to be on a first-name basis with the Chief of Naval Operations, but this wasn’t the only way the CinC of Pleiades Sector was exceptional; most of his staff had served with him for a long time—Reynolds, at a mere six months was the newest—and they were used to the familiarity.

  “Thank you, sir.” Reynolds jotted some notes and closed his folder. “I’ll do that.”

  “Then that wraps things up for today.” PrenTalien closed his folder as well. “Let’s go keep a weather-eye on the mischief out there, shall we?”

  His staff rose with a chorus of nods and covert smiles, that being one of the admiral’s favorite expressions, and as they filed through the hatch, he caught Trin Wesselby’s eye. “Indulge me for a minute, would you, Commander?”

  “Of course, sir.” Trin squeezed herself against the charting table and waited for the throng to pass by. The hatch closed and she resumed her seat across from PrenTalien, who had not gotten up.

  “You didn’t have much to say this AM,” he commented.

  “I wasn’t asked anything, sir.”

  “C’mon, Trin,” the admiral said with an indulgent look. “We’ve known each other too long for that. What’s eating at you? This Hydra business?”

  ‘This Hydra business’ had been the main subject of the morning’s meeting—specifically, a request from the Plenary Council, responsive to a motion in the Grand Senate, that Third Fleet make a show of force in that region to counter the ongoing Bannerman exercises there. CNO had been able to finesse the previous request, but with Admiral Sabr’s Task Force 34 already there at New Madras, ostensibly for just such a purpose, this one could not be avoided.

  The problem was that the Hydra was a backwater, and while it was not entirely devoid of importance, there was nothing there worth starting an interstellar war over. That included Nestor Mankho who, she was sure, had long since decamped to parts unknown. Indeed, it was evident to Trin that the original rationale for the ultimatum—coercing the Bannermans into helping apprehend him—had been lost in the rush to garner political capital from looking muscular, and to avenge the perceived insult to Nedaema’s honor. But there were also hints that the ultimatum was being pushed by some shadowy actors, probably allied with one or more of the powerful merchant house factions. Those hints pointed in the opposite direction, across the Crucis Sector, towards Antares and the Sultanate of Andaman and Nicobar.

  There was trouble brewing in that region. Iona, which bordered on Andaman and Nicobar, had emerged in recent years as a major competitor to both the Sultanate and certain of the League merchant houses, based partly on the development of some groundbreaking new technologies and partly on their cutthroat way of doing business. To access new markets for their burgeoning commerce, Iona relied on the strategically crucial transit junction at Winnecke IV, which was controlled by Ivoria, a Nicobarese colony. The Sublime Porte, as the Sultanate’s government preferred to be called, had started restricting Ionian traffic through Winnecke IV just over a year ago, and the Ionians had retaliated by stopping and searching merchantmen flagged by the Porte both in their space and in the disputed zone between them and the Sultanate.

  The Ionians, who were vehemently antislavery, claimed they were stopping suspected slavers returning from the Outworlds. The Porte denied these claims with equal vigor, accusing the Ionians of mounting false-flag operations and outright piracy. The League’s official position was that the Sultanate no longer dealt in slaves and rumors to the contrary were based on counterfeit registrations or otherwise unfounded. Trin knew better, as did Office on Naval Intelligence, but the Central Intelligence Directorate leaned in the opposite direction, and neither Ionian’s methods nor motives were above reproach. There was evidence, tenuous at best but not dismissible, that Iona had designs on the Winnecke IV junction itself.

  Things had gotten so ugly that the Porte had made common cause with several of the League’s largest concerns—Caelius-Protogenos was prominent among them—in urging the Plenary Council to order a blockade of Iona. When Grand Senator Huron was Speaker, these pleas (and the protests that accompanied them) had fallen on the deafest of deaf official ears. The former speaker had strong personal as well as political ties to Iona—his first wife had been Ionian—and those most feeling the bite were his commercial competitors and political rivals.

  Hazen Gauthier was likely to be much more receptive, however, but what role the politicking over the ultimatum played in all this was unclear. Trin was sure there was a role, but the ultimatum also cast the League in the light of an aggressor, and the Porte would not be happy getting dragged into a war on those terms.

  Indeed, the Porte did not want war at all. Being militarily weak, the Sultanate prospered by exploiting its strategic position, playing the League off against Halith. If either power became firmly ascendant, Andaman and Nicobar would rapidly be reduced to the status of client states. So while the Porte might very much want the League to rein in its brash former colony and offset the small but highly trained and technologically advanced Ionian navy, it did not wish this done at the cost of another major war with Halith, and no one with any sense believed the ultimatum would lead to anything else.

  So it was possible that the ultimatum was being used by someone to wring concessions out of the Porte, and there were also those reports that suggested the Emir of Ivoria may have his own plans, and if he got Ionian backing—

  Here Trin hit the brakes on her careening train of thought. Letting it ramble on could lead off
into any one of a dozen unprofitable directions at this point. But there was one thing. She cleared her throat.

  “Permission to speak frankly, sir.”

  PrenTalien, who’d been using the brief interval to survey the remaining donuts and decide if he regretted his earlier decision to forego another, shut the box lid. “You know you make me nervous when you get formal like that.” He made a coaxing gesture with one large hand. “Why don’t you just tell me what’s on your mind?”

  “Sir, they’ve put themselves between the devil and the deep-blue sea on this ultimatum vote. What are the chances this op is a set-up to create a diplomatic incident?” If the Bannermans initiated hostilities, that would cut through the Gordian Knot of complications at the risk of the whole thing blowing up in their faces, and she’d be damned if she’d roll over quietly for that. (When Trin mixed her metaphors, she believed in going whole hog.) Further, it was inconceivable this hadn’t occurred to her boss.

  “Does a bear shit in the woods?” PrenTalien averred with a wink.

  “To the best of my knowledge, sir, these days, most of them shit in zoos.”

  “Oh. Right.” The admiral made a mental note to abandon that particular expression. “Well then. Anything else bothering you?”

  “That’s the main thing . . . at the moment. Sir.” As artful a dodge as she could manage under the circumstances.

  PrenTalien read what he wanted from her response and went to the charting table, nodding for her to join him. Bringing up a chart of the Hydra as she stepped beside him, he returned to the previous point. “That’s why I’m making this an anti-slaving op. It answers the mail but offers fewer opportunities for any untoward provocation. We’re overdue to run some anti-slaving exercises in the Hydra, in any case. With all the focus on the Outworlds lately, they’ve pulled in their horns there and are likely making up the difference here.” He waggled his index finger over the triangle formed by Lacaille, Cathcar and Mantua. “There’s some rich pickings in there, as you know. My belief is that’s a good place to start.”

  “Yessir.”

  “By building the task group around Retribution, we deploy a force that’s well suited to running down slavers, but also one that has the legs to get out of a tight spot if they have to—Retribution is the fastest battlecruiser on the list, though I wouldn’t go odds between her and Nike, and she has very long claws if it comes to that. Captain Lawrence has a way with these things”—slavers, he meant—“and if we produce an airtight argument for half again more than we think we need, we’ll stand a good chance of getting something reasonable. I plan to add one light cruiser to the list as a sacrificial goat—that always makes the Admiralty feel better.”

  Most of this had been covered in the meeting, and Trin waited for the punch line.

  With a knowing smile, he delivered it. “And then there’s Mankho. If we could get a line on his whereabouts, we could queer their pitch on this ultimatum nonsense, couldn’t we?”

  “Yessir”—with a nascent smile as the picture began to come into focus.

  “I have a notion that slavers have a damn sight better idea where he is than the Bannermans do. We’ve never considered slavers much of a resource in that regard, but I’m thinking it may be time to expand our horizons. What do you think?”

  Trin was already thinking, and had been since he uttered Mankho’s name. “It has a lot of merit, sir. I don’t imagine you’ll be including this in the standard op-plan?”

  “After what happened on Lacaille? No.”

  That answered Trin’s unspoken question.

  “So someone would need to be assigned to carry out this part of the operation. Someone not directly under Captain Lawrence, but assigned in an advisory capacity?” PrenTalien replied to that with a nod. “Commander Huron would be a logical choice, I believe.”

  “I agree there,” the admiral said. Huron had been promoted to lieutenant commander five months ago and assigned to Task Force 34 as Lo Gai’s staff operations officer. It was perfectly reasonable that on a delicate mission of this type the admiral’s ops officer would go along, although of course he could not be, in effect, demoted to serve on the senior captain’s staff, even if the captain was allowed a commodore’s billet. “So you think it’s doable?”

  “Well, sir, there are a lot of questions that would have to be answered. We would need a much better understanding than we currently have of slavers just to determine who is worth interrogating. We don’t have the time or the resources to just round up slavers and send them back for interrogation. We need a reliable means of triage to have any chance of recovering useful data.”

  “What’s it take to do that? Develop a decent triage method?”

  “Our data on slavers is all top-level. Slavers tend to deal on a personal basis, face-to-face, not through organized institutional networks. So we’d need someone who knows who’s who in the slaver community.” Trin paused. “I can only think of one person who might have any insight there.”

  “That girl, if I take your meaning.” PrenTalien had clearly been following the same logic to the same conclusion. “The one who supplied all that data. The medicos had their knickers in a twist over her. What was her name?”

  “Loralynn Kennakris, sir.”

  “That’s right. Knew Huron pretty well too, as I heard.”

  Trin allowed herself a look of guarded pique. “Yes, sir. But not in the way commonly assumed. And she’s a cadet now. A flight-officer candidate.”

  “So I recall. Made a bit of rumble at the time.” The admiral blanked the charts and squeezed past her and back to his seat, where he appeared to be considering the slim stack of reports he’d retained. “You really think she could help?”

  “Commander Huron would be the best person to assess that, I think, sir.”

  PrenTalien nodded and tapped the page under his hand; Jackson Holder’s letter, she saw.

  “Well enough. Have a sit-down with him and see what he thinks. He’ll be here day after tomorrow for the Quarterlies, in any case.”

  Trin could pretty well guess what Huron would think. “Yes, sir. I’ll do that.”

  “Russ will have to be read in, of course,” PrenTalien added with the air of an afterthought. “And I imagine CID will want their hack, too.”

  “We’ll have to inform them, at least, sir. Given the subject matter.”

  He continued to squint at the letter, scanning a finger down the passages. “Let’s hope they won’t want to clutter things up too much.”

  “I don’t think they’ll interfere. If we play it right.”

  “Very good.” He looked up with a smile. “Keep me in the loop and we’ll see where this leads.” Trin gathered up her materials and prepared to leave. “Say,” he forestalled her. “How’s Nick doing? You see much of him lately?”

  “Off and on, sir.” Trin shifted the bundle to her other arm. Nick and the admiral were old, old friends, but this was no mere casual pleasantry. “Have you heard from him recently?”

  “Emailed me this AM, in fact. Wanted to know what odds I’d accept to take Vasquez over Yu in the upcoming, should they both make it to the finals.”

  Most people seemed to take that as a foregone conclusion, which was about the extent of Trin’s knowledge of the affair. But the real import was that Nick was also being markedly silent about his suspicions. “And how did you respond, sir?”

  “Haven’t yet. A lot of people have gone broke betting against old Fred. But then I recall the thumpings Vasquez would hand out back when.” His recollections here were far from academic, as Joss PrenTalien was the only flag officer in League history to win the All-Forces Unarmed Combat Tournament. He’d met both of them on the mat numerous times and retained a most lively appreciation of their skills. “What do you think?”

  She smiled, for the question was an in-joke between them. “I’m afraid that transcends my professional expertise, sir.”

  “I’ll have to mull it over then.” Still smiling, he stuffed the documents into
a folio. “Carry on, Commander. Now it seems I must go waste precious moments that will never be recovered answering that beastly letter.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  CEF HQ, Mare Nemeton

  Nedaema, Pleiades Sector

  “I know it was my suggestion.” Trin Wesselby poured herself another cup of black coffee. “Just because it’s the only way I can think of to go about this doesn’t mean it’s a good way.”

  “Were you expecting me to talk you out of it?” Rafe Huron, who was still nursing his first cup, looked at her across its rim.

  The commander returned to her desk and sat with a graceless, agitated motion—as graceless as she could be, Huron thought. Which still set a fairly high standard for most people. If Trin noticed his scrutiny, she didn’t show it. Of course, Trin Wesselby excelled at not showing things.

  “Rafe, we’re basing the concept for this whole op on a single source—”

  “—who is known to have reported reliably in the past,” he finished for her, quoting directly from ONI’s analysis guidelines.

  Shaking her head, Trin slouched back in her chair. “You’re not going to be any help at all. Are you?”

  Huron made a broad gesture with the hand not occupied with his coffee cup. “Trin, if you wanted me to come here and play devil’s advocate, you should’ve put that in the memo. You asked me what I thought, and what I think is the idea has a lot of merit. Yes, it’s dicey. Certainly it’s not the way we’d like to do things. But from what you’ve told me already, hasn’t the likeable ship broken orbit already?”

  Trin orbited her coffee under her nose and set it down. “You have a point.”

  “Of course, it would be good to narrow things down as much as possible. Are you picking up any signals yet? It should be about time.”

  “Yes and no. Yes, we are detecting some faint signals off of Lacaille. No, they don’t tell us much of anything. The corvette was probably destroyed by ground fire, but we don’t know how they detected it. The operative theory is that they didn’t vary their orbit enough. It’s just possible the defense net got a ghost beep off it, and when they came around on the next pass they maintained their track—do that enough times and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out who you are.”