Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks

by Owen R. O'Neill

  “Very experienced officers.” Hoste looked slowly from side to side, but whatever he sought was not in reach. “There were reservations, you know, about admitting her—strong, I believe, in some quarters—but they were overruled. Her records are sealed.” This he had learned from his request prior to the AM’s meeting for the standard background check on Kennakris (Loralynn), of Parson’s Acre Colony. The terse memo he’d received in response was open now on his desk. He drummed his thumb on his chair arm.

  “How are the cadets taking it?”

  “As far as I can tell, about half seem to think that since the scenario was no-win, cheating to get around it was fine, even laudable. Most of the rest resent it, but I suspect that’s because they can’t figure out how she did it. And some probably also resent that she had the guts to go through with it.”

  “Well, a damned awkward business, at all events.” The drumming stopped; he consulted the memo. It told him nothing new. “You say she has not many friends?”

  “That’s my impression. She’s not easy to approach and frankly she tends to make people feel ill at ease.”

  Hoste was certainly beginning to appreciate that. “Thank you, Naomi. I suppose it’s time to talk to Sergeant Major Yu.”

  When it came to making people feel ill-at-ease, few succeeded better than Sergeant Major Yu. In part, it was his semi-legendary status as the senior member of the 101st Strike Rangers; in part, it was his record of accomplishment, which had been amassed over more than half a century and would take an afternoon to read out; and partly it was Yu himself—he was the iconic sergeant major to the teeth, imposing resistless military perfection on all around him.

  Commandant Hoste was immune to most of these sources of unease: officers of his seniority were not easily imposed upon, and while two men could not well be more different in temperament, Hoste being from the mathematical navy that liked its probabilities neatly defined and bounded, whereas Yu was from the part that throve in the maelstrom, Hoste had genuine respect and liking for Yu. Yet he did have some cause for unease, because he knew that Yu had sources of information—some official, most not—that were not available to him, and under the present circumstances, and on top of the revelation of the sealed records, he found that profoundly irritating.

  The sergeant major was called into the Commandant’s office and on being told, “At ease, Sergeant Major—no ceremony,” assumed a comfortable parade rest.

  Hoste cleared his throat. “You will not object, if Commander Buthelezi is present for this meeting?”

  “Certainly not, sir.”

  The Commandant folded his hands and considered Yu over them. “You are aware of the, ah, controversy surrounding Cadet Kennakris and the latest exercise—particularly her explanation as to how the victory was accomplished.” It was not a question and, requiring no answer, it received none beyond a very slight inclination of Yu’s head. “So in the interest of expediency, allow me to simply ask: do you find her explanation credible?”

  “I’m afraid I cannot express an opinion of Cadet Kennakris’s abilities in that regard, sir.”

  The answer was delivered with all the precise and civil absence of inflection Hoste expected, and he sighed inwardly. “Have you an opinion you feel you can express?”

  “I would be most surprised if she cheated, sir.”

  “You don’t think she’d cheat even when she’s confronted with a no-win scenario?”

  “I’m not sure she is acquainted with the concept of a no-win scenario, sir.”

  That fascinating comment hung in the space between them for several beats. Hoste glanced at Naomi, who wore a pinched expression. “Sergeant Major . . .” Hoste paused, one pale, narrow finger tapping his chin. “What is your personal assessment of Cadet Kennakris?”

  “Permission to speak candidly, sir?”

  “Certainly, Sergeant Major.”

  “She’s a killer, sir.”

  The Commandant’s eyebrows climbed to a surprising degree, and the commander lost her pinched expression to startlement. “Anything else?” Hoste asked.

  “Yes, sir.” Hoste seemed to detect a change in Yu’s professionally bland visage, a gleam in the small dark eyes that he could not readily identify. Pride? “If something matters enough to her, she’ll go through Hell for it—and Hell will never be the same.”

  Trying hard to detect if Yu was suppressing a smile, the Commandant asked, “Have you any ideas on what such a thing might be?” That question was not strictly within proper bounds; Hoste expected no answer and he got none beyond a mechanical “Afraid not, sir,” and a glimmer of the smile Yu had in fact been suppressing.

  “If I may, Sergeant Major, would you go with her?”

  “Yes, I would, sir.” The smile broke out fully now—Hoste found it distinctly unnerving. “She wants some seasoning, but indeed I would.”

  Hoste nodded. “Thank you, Sergeant Major. It has been most edifying. Carry on.”

  The sergeant major saluted smartly, turned precisely on his booted heel and exited. Hoste emitted a breath ending in a disgruntled sound. “Well now. What do you think of that?”

  Naomi Buthelezi brought her hands together, slowly rubbing her palms. “I think it’s going to be quite the AM.”

  * * *

  “I told you!” Kris slammed the tablet she’d been reading on the mattress of her bunk, and Minx backed up quickly, fetching the backs of her knees up against a chair, which brought her down into the seat with a thump. Tanner put his hand on her shoulder, shieldingly, but Kris subsided.

  Naomi Buthelezi had a keen sense of her students, and in this case her assessment of the cadets’ attitudes was accurate even to the level of Kris’s study. Minx was suspicious and resentful, sure Kris had pulled off a spectacular cheat, the details of which she unaccountably refused to divulge. Tanner was uncomfortably neutral and Basmartin supported her, no matter what he believed—he refused to reveal what that was. Minx therefore assumed he had been in on it since the beginning.

  From the chair, Minx looked from Baz to Tanner, and not finding the support she sought, hunched down, crossed her arms and threw a leg over her knee, repeating under her breath what she’d said just moments earlier: “What bullshit—it’s a grad course—nobody can do that.”

  Kris watched her over the edge of the tablet she had picked up again. The article she’d been trying to read—an analysis of the famous victory at Anson’s Deep at the end of the last war—had lost all meaning, and her eyes had taken on that dangerous yellow glint.

  Minx measured the chill in the room, mumbled something about needing to go to the library, levered herself out of the chair, grabbed her tablet and left. Kris watched her go, then closed the tablet and swung her legs out of the bunk.

  “Not going to the library, are you?” Basmartin asked from the other side of the room.

  “No.” Kris stood up. “Target practice.”

  Baz put down the tablet he was reading.

  Kris shook her head. “I’m just gonna go see if a simulator’s free.”

  * * *

  The fighter was running, running as hard as he could, and although Kris was gaining, she was not gaining nearly fast enough. There was no finesse now, no maneuvering, just a race against time. She was pushing her damaged engines way past red-line to try to close—the alarms had been scolding her for the last ten minutes—and firing carefully spaced bursts from her plasma cannon in hopes of hitting a drive node, making him veer—anything to close the range.

  That was her only hope now, unless the chase blew its engines first—a not entirely unrealistic possibility; the chase could not be in much better shape than she was. A couple of minutes would decide it either way: in addition to burning her engines, she was burning her emergency fuel reserve, and it would already take a near-miracle to get her home. Very soon, not even that would help.

  An hour ago, Kris had strapped into the simulator and accepted the third single-fighter mission that came up: a convoy op. The objective was to at
tack and disable two replenishment ships escorted by a corvette and three long-range fighters. It was not the most advanced op, nor was it particularly realistic—no single fighter would ever be tasked to engage such a convoy, and it was pretty unlikely that any such convoy would actually sail—but that was all beside the point.

  The exercise was intended to teach navigation, proper stealth-approach technique and hit-and-run tactics. It was not expected, or even desired, that the replenishment ships should be destroyed—a mobility kill was what was called for—and the fighters and the corvette were there to make the odds too high to allow a conventional attack. But among cadets, the real objective of this exercise was the fabled sweep: disabling both ships and the corvette and destroying all three fighters. It could be done—it had been done on a tiny handful of occasions—but not by Kris. She’d come close several times, but the last success was decades ago; the cadet who’d done it was Rafael Huron.

  She had come close this time too—but even if she got this last fighter, she would fall short of the mark. Although her stealth attack on the corvette had been a brilliant success and she’d taken down two of the fighters in short order, they’d gotten in several hits that had reduced her shields to thirty percent and damaged a drive node, and her attack on the replenishment ships had left one limping away while the last fighter fled. She had given chase in the hope of destroying the fighter and then returned to finish off the crippled ship. That hope had disappeared long ago, and now Kris was determined to nail the chase if it was the last thing she ever did, which—as far as the simulation was concerned—it very likely would be.

  She pushed her engines harder; the alarms rose to a shriek and a flashing red warning filled almost her entire forward screen. Ignoring both, she drew a final bead on the chase, squeezed the trigger of the plasma cannon and held it. Plasma bursts lanced towards the fleeing fighter, exploding in searing white flowers, far-distant, as the alarms built to a crescendo and the chase suddenly yawed.

  Instantly, she released the trigger and eased back on the throttle. The alarms paused, recomputed and resumed their former, less urgent tones. The chase had lost a drive node—whether to her fire or overloading she could not tell—and was wallowing. She ghosted into neutron gun range, opened fire, watched the twin purple-silver lines stab him in the spar roots. His armor boiled and in a flash, he was gone. But she did not feel the rush, the burst of exultation she usually did when she scored a victory, and it was almost a relief when, moments later, the claxon sounded, the screen went dark and the simulator cracked open.

  Kris climbed out of the simulator and kicked across the bay to find Basmartin waiting in the simulator ready room, studying the scoring display. She handled the gravity gradient outside the hatch with ease, coming down on her toes and walking into the room without a bounce.

  “Nice,” Baz said as Kris sank down on a bench and unsealed her flight suit. “Awful long way to swim home though.”

  “It wasn’t a scoring run,” she muttered, dissatisfied and provoked.

  He came over and sat next to her. “They’ll log it anyway. Might have been better to finish up with that victualer and let the fighter go—he wasn’t coming back, and you would have made it home with plenty to spare.” He shied from the look Kris gave him. “Just an opinion.”

  Kris looked away as she wrenched one boot off and then the other.

  “Look,” Baz offered against her silence. “I think it’s gonna go okay tomorrow. They can’t throw the book at you just cuz you outsmarted ‘em—I mean not really.”

  “That just another opinion?” She extracted her arms from the bulky suit and jammed it down over her hips. “You don’t believe me either—do you?”

  “Well, it is kinda hard to believe, Kris.” Baz spread his hands apologetically. “I mean, no one’s ever done anything like that.”

  “I didn’t know that!” Kris kicked herself free of the suit, went to her locker and jammed it inside with barely contained violence. Slamming the locker shut, she turned on him. “I didn’t know it was such a big deal!” Her chest heaved and her voice quieted, dropped a tone. “I thought lots of people could do it.”

  Chapter Twenty

  CEF Academy Orbital Campus

  Deimos, Mars, Sol

  Commander Buthelezi was habitually an early riser. She liked to have an hour or so to do a light workout, enjoy her coffee and contemplate breakfast—a meal she hated to rush—before settling into the day’s work. So it was a rather unwelcome surprise when her xel lit up with a priority message from Commandant Hoste just as she had finished her iaido kata and was pouring her first cup of coffee while considering breakfast options. Something hearty (bacon would figure prominently) as it promised to be a long day.

  She picked up the xel and activated the voice-only circuit—she never bothered to dress for her morning’s exercise—and when the connection was established, said, “Yes, sir?” in the most professional tone she could manage.

  “Apologies, Naomi.” Hoste sounded sincere. “I know the hour is quite unorthodox, but I wonder if I might see you before the inquiry this AM. I’ve received a communication that is—how might I put it?—surprising.”

  “Certainly, Ambrose. Shall we say twenty minutes?” That would just give her time for a quick shower. Breakfast could wait.

  “That would be ideal, Naomi. Much appreciated.”

  True to the minute, Naomi walked into Ambrose Hoste’s Deimos office, and if she felt refreshed by the shower and the coffee, the Commandant, who had made the two hour flight up from Cape York the night before, appeared not to have slept at all. As she sat in response to his nodded invitation, he retrieved a printout and handed it across to her.

  “This arrived some hours ago in follow-up to my request for background on Ms. Kennakris. I stretch a point by sharing it with you—you will have noticed the markings.” Indeed she had. Such a request would normally have been forwarded by the Bureau of Naval Personnel to the Office of Colonial Affairs under the Department of Human Services, who would have supplied the relevant information. This response had come straight from the Office of Naval Intelligence, without even the normal BuNavPers cover.

  Naomi looked across the desk at the Commandant. What was the word he’d used? Surprising? “ONI sent this response?” That a cadet’s personal records would be held by ONI was unheard of. But then, she had to acknowledge, the whole situation was unheard of . . .

  “I was obliged to acquaint them with the background for my request, naturally,” Hoste explained as she flipped through the flimsies, “and you see that they refer to a report—there’s a summary on the second page—submitted by Captain RyKirt when he had the Arizona, with a follow-up endorsed by Admiral PrenTalien.”

  Naomi had noticed that, but she’d already returned to the first paragraph. “No family?”

  “All DHS has is an immigration record from Parson’s Acre that identifies a father, Nathan Kennakris—no prior info on him either—who committed suicide on Tolliman in the year ‘31.”

  “And after that, she was sold as a slave.”

  “Yes. On a contract slaver for eight years, I gather, during which she seems to have developed some, ah . . . curious talents.”

  “She was the source for the d’Harra operation,” Naomi remarked, scanning farther into the document. A CEF detachment had cornered a sizable slaver fleet at d’Harra last year. “And”—reading quickly through the last page—“she was also the one who gave PrenTalien the key to rolling up the slaver network in the Inner Trifid Boundary Zone?” That sparsely settled space between the Inner Trifid and Sagittarius had been a hotbed of the slave trade. Dismantling the slaver network there was a major triumph, but it was generally assumed to have been the result of information obtained from the ships taken at d’Harra.

  “Indeed,” Hoste said with a deep nod. “Specifically—although it is not noted there—what she provided was a map: their routes, nodes, favored efficiencies and supply points for the whole operation. Or almost all
of it. It would seem that, in addition to her other talents, she has a prodigious memory, since it was from memory that she reconstructed it aboard Arizona.”

  “Good lord,” muttered Naomi, putting the report back on the desk. “So she is telling the truth.”

  “So it would appear. A truth SECNAV has deemed highly classified.”

  “And we turned her loose on a boggart.” Boggarting the best cadets was a longstanding but unacknowledged tradition that served not only to test their character but to drive home the point that no one was unbeatable. It also helped defuse some of the tensions and jealousies that War Week inevitably produced. That the tradition could backfire had never been considered, even remotely.

  “Yes. It seems Fred Yu was not speaking in the hyperbole of the Corps this time.”

  “Indeed not. Holding an inquiry under these conditions might be . . . problematic.”

  “Quite,” Hoste agreed. “But I don’t believe we have a choice. You will note—third page, penultimate paragraph—that we are directed to take such action as is consistent with security while maintaining the integrity of our institution. Unquote.”

  Naomi barely cracked a smile in response. Directives of this type were almost reflexive in the Navy Department—enemy force shall be engaged with utmost aggression while strictly maintaining own-force security was a classic—and did not really merit comment. But here, they were much more on the mark. She assumed Hoste had something in mind. He would not have been spending the hours since the message arrived in idle worry, and he certainly wouldn’t have called her merely to commiserate. “Have we an idea of how to handle this?” she prompted.

  “To cancel the inquiry now would smack of a cover-up and only feed the rumor mill—which is already working double tides over this, I gather—and even if we just delay it, it will still seem rather suspicious, especially as most everyone is here. Yet an open inquiry is clearly out of the question.”