Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks

by Owen R. O'Neill

  As she made her way carefully to her bunk—Tanner’s bunk, actually, since hers was an upper rack—Baz looked down at the tablet he was browsing. “By the way, your xel’s been beeping like crazy.”

  “Fuck it,” Kris muttered as she sat carefully on the bunk and dragged a pillow across her knees.

  “I think it’s important.”

  “Fuck it anyway,” as she lowered her face into the welcoming softness.

  “It’s from Commander Huron.”

  Kris raised her head faster than was prudent. “What the fuck?”

  “Yeah, he got promoted. Months ago, I guess. Anyway, it’s his sig. Thought you’d wanna know.”

  “Yeah.” She’d left her xel a good two meters way. That meant moving. Shit.

  Baz got up and reached over for it. “Here.”

  “Thanks.” She hadn’t meant it to sound so gruff. Baz smiled anyway. He opened his mouth but then his xel warbled, an insistent priority tone. He thumbed it off and checked the alert.

  “Now they’re here. Just cleared into orbit.” He looked over at Kris, who was staring at her xel in bewilderment. “You doing okay? I can stay a little longer, if you’d like. It won’t kill them to wait some.”

  “No—no,” Kris said distractedly. “Go on. Have a good break. Tell your sister I say Hi.”

  “Sure you don’t need anything?”

  Yeah, being alone. “Naw, I don’t. All good.”

  “Okay.” He made no move to stir. “We’ll be downside a few days—maybe the rest of the week. Then we’ll be at my sister’s place in Kyoto. You got my card?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well . . . y’know—you can call if there’s anything. Door’s always open—all that.”

  “I know.”

  Finally, he shouldered his tightly packed duffle bag and picked up a smaller travel case. “Well, see ya next term, Kris.”

  “Take it easy, Baz.”

  The door slid open and then shut behind him before she looked up.

  The message was from Lieutenant Commander Huron and what was more, it came with an endorsement from Commandant Hoste, or at least his office. The endorsement informed her that while the attached request concerned an official matter, her compliance was wholly voluntary and refusal would in no way impact her Academy career—would not in fact be noted in her record—but if she chose to comply, she was to understand there would be certain obligations thereby assumed, both under civil law and the 17 Articles of the Code of Military Justice, and she was to understand what rights she had in such a case and which others might be limited or curtailed by her acceptance of the request and so on for almost three pages.

  The message itself was not even three lines. It simply said he and some other unnamed ‘gentlemen’ had some questions they would like to ask her, and would she agree to meet with them downside at the main campus today at 1500, or some other time tomorrow if that was more convenient? The second line informed her that transport was already standing by.

  Of the topic there was no clue, but there were few things Commander Huron and some ‘gentlemen’ could possible wish to ask her about—in fact, she could think of only one: Nestor Mankho.

  She sighed and rubbed her aching ribs, trying to ease the pain in the wrenched muscles along her sides and around her abdomen. She had no doubt she could refuse, and besides, she felt like shit. That was not an excuse exactly—no excuses were called for here—but on the other hand, it would get her off this fucking rock for a day. And she’d get to see Huron again. That thought gave her queer contradictory feelings which did not sit well with her stomach.

  Goddammit. She rapped her knuckles absently on her thigh. It was still early. What did she have to look forward to here? Choking down another liter of that fucking jellied lizard piss this evening?

  Oh, to hell with it. She opened the message again, typed her two-word acceptance. Hit SEND.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  CEF Academy Main Campus

  Cape York, Mars, Sol

  Fresh from a two-hour nap that had her feeling almost human again, Kris jogged up the broad white dolomite steps of the portico that framed the towering main entrance of the Academy’s Cape York campus. At the security desk, she presented her ID and surrendered her private xel and her calling cards—she’d decided to stay downside at least a few days and so had recovered them and packed her meager belongings—and received her badge and a pathfinder from the young, round-headed guard whose chipper demeanor clashed oddly with the two grim, unsmiling, censorious marine sentries who flanked the inner entrance.

  Passing through into the massively vaulted atrium, she followed the pathfinder’s line to a bank of lifts at the far end and was surprised to see Minx coming from the other direction, accompanied by a young woman with buzz-cut silver-white hair, a Venusian tan and a wrestler’s build. She was quite a bit shorter than Minx and wore a Marine cadet’s uniform, and Kris thought her attractive in a robust, square-jawed sort of way. She and Minx made a rather odd couple, and as they exchanged nods in passing, Kris noted that the name on the marine cadet’s badge was Alane Hotchkiss.

  The next available lift queried Kris’s pathfinder, and on verifying her biometrics, displayed her destination—the ninth floor—and produced a riser for her. She stepped on it and as it ascended, she just missed Hotchkiss looking back over her shoulder.

  “Who was that?”

  Minx twitched one eyebrow. “Oh, that was Kris.”

  “That’s Kris?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Nothing. I just didn’t know she was, ah—”

  Minx frowned.

  “—so tall.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Y’know,” Hotchkiss went on, noting the tightness of her girlfriend’s lips, “I saw Commander Huron up on the Ninth about an hour ago.”

  “Really?” That brought some color back to Minx’s smile. “No wonder she’s in a hurry. I bet they don’t even wait ‘til they’re out of the building.”

  Hotchkiss laughed. “What? You think they’re just gonna find an empty desk and go for it?”

  “She hasn’t seen him in like eight months.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “How much you wanna bet?”

  The ninth floor was reserved for senior staff offices and conference rooms, so Kris was not surprised at being directed there, but she hadn’t expected the pathfinder to guide her to the Commandant’s suite. The door opened to her hesitant knock, and after crossing the well-appointed foyer, Kris was met by his secretary, who conducted her to the inner office.

  Commandant Hoste was waiting there, along with Commander Buthelezi, two men she had never seen before and Rafe Huron. The two unknown men were such a contrast as to appear almost comical, irresistibly reminding Kris of stock actors in the vids she watched as a child. One was tall, thick-bodied and stolid, his heavy-jowled face not giving anything away but a sense of bureaucratic officiousness. The other was a narrow-chested, thin-faced man with a longish nose and a fringe of pale hair, who sat very erect and projected an air Kris could only think of as rabbity. The impression was not helped at all by his rather long and wispy sideburns. He was probably a native of Mars, she guessed, and the sideburns had undoubtedly been in fashion at some point, but why he clung to them was anybody’s guess.

  Huron was sitting just to one side, looking almost totally impassive in his crisp lieutenant commander’s uniform. Huron had more ways of being impassive than anyone decently should, and Kris was not sure what this one might mean. She guessed he was just waiting; there certainly did not seem to be any real connection between him and the other two men. Commander Buthelezi projected her usual air of competent unflappability, and Commandant Hoste looked like he’d had a rough few days of it, which was certainly the case.

  Hoste cleared his throat. “Ms. Kennakris. Good of you to come. I trust the conditions stipulated in the attachment to Commander Huron’s message were clear to you?”

  Oh, fuck no. “Ah—
yes, sir.”

  “Very good.” Hoste extracted a printout of those conditions from a folder and pushed the flimsies across his desk to her. “If you will sign and authenticate these, please, we can begin.” Kris dutifully signed where the Commandant indicated and pressed her thumb over the signature. Hoste secured the pages and replaced them in his desk. “This meeting is informal in nature and we have no intention of making you stand all the while. Do be seated.”

  Kris looked behind her to see that the Commandant’s secretary had managed to surreptitiously provide her with a chair. “Thank you, sir,” she said with an acknowledging smile, and sat.

  Then he indicated his visitors. “These gentlemen are Commander Tilletson and Mr. Matheson. You will have deduced from the endorsement that Mr. Matheson represents CID, hence the caveats.”

  Kris had deduced no such thing, though if she’d taken the time to read it fully, she might have. Keeping as straight a face as possible, she said nothing but bowed her head politely to each of them, hoping that would suffice; it didn’t seem appropriate to salute under the circumstances.

  Both men replied in kind and Hoste gestured to Huron. “Commander Huron, you already know.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “These gentlemen will explain the reasons behind this meeting more fully,” the Commandant continued, “but I shall acquaint you with the broad outlines. If you should feel that you wish to decline further participation thereafter, you are at liberty to do so, but the conditions stipulated will remain in effect. Have you any questions before I begin?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Very well. It has been proposed”—Kris noted the slight emphasis on the word—“that we conduct an operation against the slaver networks in the Hydra. The scope of this operation would be somewhat different than those we’ve done in the past, focusing not merely on suppression but also on identifying potential assets that might support future operations. It was Commander Huron’s suggestion that, in view of your—background, you might be able to provide some useful insights that would help determine how fruitful such an undertaking is likely to be.”

  Here he paused as if inviting her to comment, but Kris sat still, holding to her bland expression.

  After a lapse of some seconds, Hoste finished his introduction. “I shall not be present, but it has been decided that, in view of the exceptional nature of this meeting, Commander Buthelezi may remain in the character of an advocate, should you wish it. Do you wish it?”

  “No, sir,” Kris answered, a shade mechanically. “I’m fine—that is, I don’t think that’s necessary.”

  The Commandant looked as though he’d expected that response and rose from behind his deck. “In that case, Gentlemen, Cadet—the commander and I shall retire. Please take whatever time you need. Good day.”

  A chorus of low-voiced replies wished the Commandant Good day in turn, and as he stepped out, Commander Buthelezi followed, giving Kris a look that might have been simple encouragement or license to ‘Give ‘em hell,’ or something of both. As the door closed, the tenor in the room changed, at once less stiff but somehow more awkward.

  Commander Tilletson, now the senior party present, turned to Matheson and invited him to open the proceedings. Matheson, folding his hands in front of him, shifted forward in his chair and began by saying that they had a few ‘simple and straightforward’ questions for her. Then he talked for the better part of five minutes: a jumbled discourse full of clauses, qualifiers and interlocking parentheses that didn’t always come out. Kris was in no shape to follow it all, and his peculiar delivery, punctuated by occasionally twitching his elbows, was distracting to say the least, but it was clear that he was laboring under the impression that slavers were organized into some sort of hierarchy or could, at a minimum, be assigned to tidy little boxes that were related to each other in equally tidy ways. He seemed to think she could explain all this and tell them which of these boxes (and their supposed occupants) were of potential interest, from an intelligence standpoint, and how to go about identifying them. When he finished, he sat there with his hands still neatly folded and looked at her expectantly with that narrow rabbity smile.

  “I’m afraid I don’t really get what you’re asking, sir,” Kris replied in a halting voice.

  Huron looked across at Matheson, who seemed to be struggling with the notion that his ‘simple and straightforward’ questions had turned out to be neither. Commander Tilletson had withdrawn into a look of studied vacuity, so Huron finally said, “Ms. Kennakris, perhaps you could expand on what it is that we failed to make clear?”

  “Expand, sir?” Kris looked beseechingly at Huron, hoping he was throwing her a rope, not a noose. They’d always been friendly before—almost always, anyway—but that was back on Nedaema. She hadn’t been a cadet then, and while she liked Rafe Huron pretty well (when he wasn’t making her nuts), Lieutenant Commander Huron was someone she’d just met.

  Maybe he had some sense of that too, because he smiled with a hint of his old warmth and said, “Just tell us what you’re thinking.”

  “Okay, sir.” That seemed a tall order, but Kris drew a breath and launched into it. “You see, sir, it all depends. Everyone does things their own way—you gotta know who you’re dealing with. Um . . .”

  Huron nodded encouragement.

  “Well—take the big Bannerman syndicates. They like to keep things in-house. They’ve got their own fleets, their own captains, crews they hire permanently. And of course, they have Feds on their side, so they don’t need havens or bundlers or sutlers—”

  “Excuse me, Ms. Kennakris,” Matheson broke in. “Sutlers?”

  “Ah . . . victualers? Y’know—food? O2? And stuff,” Kris offered with a nervous twist of her lips while Huron scowled at him.

  “Yes, of course,” Matheson mumbled, and Kris groped for her lost thread. “Anyway, they don’t need any of that. They move their trade along all their own vectors, and they have their regular customers and territories and they don’t poach a lot. Y’see?”

  Whether they did or not, the three men nodded.

  “But then you’ve got the Tyrsenians—they don’t deal much. They take for themselves. I mean, if they have overstock they’ll wholesale it, and sometimes the clans will gang up for a spec raid, but that’s pretty rare, I think—these days. Um . . . except the Lemnos clans. They deal, at least . . .”

  Here Kris faltered, afraid she was about to overreach what she actually knew. Like the Bannermans, the Tyrsenian Alliance was a remnant of the slave federations that had grown up in the chaos that followed the Formation Wars. They were much more loosely organized, however, lacking a central government and instead mostly just collaborating to form raiding fleets that operated out of their core systems of Lemnos, Abydos and Tiryns. She knew about the Lemnos clans because Trench dealt with them a lot—he’d enjoyed excellent relations with several of the clan leaders. It cut his margins quite a bit, but it was a lot less risky and it sped up fulfillment too, so it was worth it. But that wasn’t to say other captains didn’t have similar arrangements with some of the Abydos clans—probably not the Tiryns chiefs, though. They didn’t get along with anybody . . .

  “And, um—” Kris blinked, trying to recover gist of the point she’d been about make. “They’re Grade-A muscle too, so they get a lot of play for—um, special . . . ops. Stuff like that.” It was a lame finish to her point and she glanced at her audience anxiously.

  “So . . .” Matheson began in a careful voice. “The Tyrsenians. Who is it they wholesale to? Not the Bannermans, if I understood correctly.”

  “No, sir,” Kris said, embarrassed at the gaping hole she’d left. “The freelancers. The Andaman guilds all deal with freelancers.”

  That caused a visible stir, and Matheson actually held up a hand to interrupt her again. “Ms. Kennakris, you’re saying that the Sultanate actually has slaver guilds?”

  “Sure. I mean, yes. Sir.” As if the CID man had just questioned the law of gravity.

>   “And you are entirely confident—that is, there can be no mistake.”

  Kris blinked. “No, sir. They—ah . . . I mean, the guilds are all based on Nicobar and they don’t deal out of there. Their trade mostly goes through Winnecke IV—the Emir’s people handle it—”

  “The Emir of Ivoria,” Matheson clarified.

  “That’s right, sir. But what I was saying is that they don’t deal local. They’ve got factors in most of the major ports. Y’know—Solon, Pyramus. Mantua and Cathcar in the Hydra, of course. They even had guild reps in Little North Bear for a while. They’re not big lot buyers. They mostly deal in paid picks and special—ah . . . special talents. What freelancers handle. It gives ‘em ploz—um—” Dammit! What was that phrase Trench liked to use?

  “Plausible deniability?” Huron suggested helpfully.

  “Yes, sir. That’s it. Plausible deniability. Since they don’t have official Fed cover or anything.”

  “Quite,” Matheson murmured. He seemed to be wrestling with Kris’s infodump. Admittedly, it was a lot to wrestle with. Then louder: “So, you are saying this is a very large, complex, even organic or one might say ad hoc . . . society?”

  Kris had no firm idea what ad hoc meant but it seemed clear from context. She nodded agreeably. “Yes, sir. But you gotta understand I’m only talking about top-rail captains here—the guys who swing heavy. There are tons of bottom-feeders too—they’ll deal with anybody.”

  “I see.”

  Kris wasn’t at all sure that Matheson did. For one thing, she was acutely aware of ignoring Halith entirely. She knew that a lot of Halith colonial labor—what they called guest labor—was really slave labor, but since Trench never dealt directly with Halith buyers (no freelancer could handle the volumes they needed), she knew next to nothing about them. For another thing, he seemed to be missing the point. Their lack of comprehension of some of the most basic things about slavers confused and puzzled her—Hoste had introduced Matheson as an intel type. Weren’t they supposed to have a read on all sorts of spooky shit?