Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks

by Owen R. O'Neill

  She backed up and tried again. “But the thing is, say you net some guy. Unless you drop on a Bannerman boat, how you gonna know if he’s top-rail or not? They pretty much all smell the same.”

  Something like a collective sigh went through the room and Matheson looked appealingly at Huron. Tilletson continued to do an excellent impression of a nonentity. Kris couldn’t figure out why he was here—or Matheson, for that matter. Only Huron seemed to not have his head up his ass. She hungered to know what this was really all about; her guess about Mankho seemed to be wide of the mark.

  Huron made no response to the appeal and Matheson scratched his ear. “Yes. Most enlightening, Ms. Kennakris. You clearly know a great deal about the subject.” He folded his hands again, looking studious. “Tell me: what would be your assessment—or rather let me say, were we to interview other, ah, detainees, would they be able to provide a similar level of insight into, shall we say, issues of interest?”

  The question took Kris squarely aback. “Oh hel—um, sorry. No, sir.”

  “No?” Matheson ridged his narrow forehead.

  “No, sir. Transportees don’t know anything. They’re on the holding deck all the time or in pens or they get stashed in a haven if there’s problems with the delivery or a deal gets 86’d. And they’re only around for a couple of months—three, maybe four at the outside. Slavers don’t hold stock. Costs too much.”

  “But you yourself—”

  “I mean, if you wanted to get anything useful,” Kris interrupted out of exasperation, “you’d have to talk to the goldfish. But goldfish don’t talk.”

  It was profoundly true that goldfish, in the sense of Asian carp, Carassius auratus, were absolutely speechless, as the three men in the room readily acknowledged. What Kris was alluding to, however, they found particularly obscure. Matheson again appealed mutely to Huron, who accepted the invitation this time.

  “We don’t quite grasp what is meant by goldfish, I’m afraid.”

  Huron’s comment brought home to Kris just how liberal she’d been with slaver jargon and her cheeks flamed. “I’m—I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to—”

  “No worries. Just, if you could—”

  “Yes, sir.” Kris took another calming breath. “Goldfish is what they call long-term slaves. Ones that have been held for two, three years or more. It’s cuz, well . . . once you’ve been in a goldfish bowl long enough, you’re not really good for much else.”

  Huron tensed his jaw and even Commander Tilletson was startled out of his vacant expression.

  “And that’s why they won’t talk,” Huron said.

  “That’s right, sir. That is, not normally.”

  The three men shared a significant look. “Thank you, Ms. Kennakris,” Huron said after a pause Kris found profoundly uncomfortable. “That concludes our questions, for the time being. Would you be willing to wait outside for a few minutes?”

  “Yes, sir. Of course.”

  She stood up. Huron stood up as well and conducted her to the door, which he opened for her. “This shouldn’t take long, but if you’d rather, feel free to wait in the canteen. It’s just around that corner and down the hall to the right.”

  “Thank you, sir.” And saluted—in spite of herself.

  He smiled, an oddly tight expression, and acknowledged her salute, and the door closed behind her with a decided click.

  “The Andamans have slaver guilds?” Matheson said as the door latched. “Seems scarcely believable. We have evidence of their involvement, of course—nothing actionable—but guilds?”

  “Goldfish?” muttered Commander Tilletson. “Good lord.”

  “If half of what she says is credible—” Matheson continued.

  “I don’t think there’s any question about that,” Huron cut him off.

  “But where does that leave us?” Tilletson demanded. “We’ve never interrogated slavers, and from what she just told us, that’s a fine thing—their value as exploitable assets is damn near nil.”

  “I don’t think that was quite the point she was making, sir,” Huron demurred, more willing to be polite to a senior naval officer than to a middle manager from CID.

  “We still lack a reliable means of triage,” Tilletson complained. “And we can’t haul every one of them we sweep up back here for interrogation—that would take months.”

  “I don’t suppose the cadet could provide a matrix of indicators, or something,” Matheson suggested.

  Both Huron and Tilletson glared at him.

  The commander turned back to Huron. “I don’t know what to make of this. Seemed like an innovative approach, but we just don’t have the proper assets.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly say that, sir,” Huron countered. “We appear to have one.”

  “You mean Cadet Kennakris?” Matheson broke in. “She’s a cadet. She can’t serve on active duty.”

  “She could be rated midshipman.”

  “We haven’t rated a midshipman in over twenty years,” Commander Tilletson added, frankly dubious. “She’s not even an upperclassman.”

  Huron failed to see the relevance for either of those observations. “She does have extensive, detailed and personal knowledge, sir. She’s capable of performing triage and she may have additional insights we’re not yet aware of.”

  “Would she even consent?” Matheson asked with a peevish frown; that doubled-barreled glare was still stinging. “It’s highly irregular. She’s not under orders. And she’s . . . quite young.”

  Huron ruthlessly suppressed a scathing retort. “If we want the answer to that,” he said more calmly than he felt, “I suppose we’d have to ask her.”

  Commander Tilletson made a discontented huffing sound. “Well, if you can convince the Admiral to rate her midshipman, you’ve got my blessing. But what to make of all this, I’m sure I don’t know.”

  “It’s highly irregular,” Matheson reiterated. “I can’t see a role for CID in this.”

  Thank god, Huron thought with a great inward sigh of relief.

  “Of course, if anything actionable should turn up—”

  You’ll be happy to share the credit.

  “Keep my office advised,” Matheson finished.

  “Then are we concluded here, gentlemen?” Commander Tilletson looked from one to the other.

  Huron nodded.

  “I have nothing to add,” Matheson said, sealing a folio and standing.

  Now that’s an understatement. But Huron just smiled as he got to his feet.

  Huron found Kris not in the canteen but outside it, a few meters farther up the hall. She was leaning against the wall, looking grim and tapping the heel of her boot against the beige plasticrete surface. On entering the canteen, she’d been hit with a vinegary smell, slightly sweet, and while it was not strong, her stomach gave a dangerous lurch and she beat a hasty retreat upwind. The pangs of nausea had soured her mood as well as her stomach, and her glance was less than friendly as Huron approached.

  “Immunocytes?” He recognized the look and the general demeanor.

  Kris dropped her eyes back to the floor with a slow, careful nod.

  “Landed me flat on my ass for a week when I got my first implants,” he commented offhandedly. Pausing as he passed the canteen’s entrance, he caught a whiff of three-bean salad—probably the last aroma someone in Kris’s state would want to encounter. “How are you doing?”

  Kris covered a watery belch with her hand. “M’Okay.”

  “Right.” He glanced up and down the corridor. “Let’s find another venue, shall we?”

  “Sure.”

  The other venue presented itself around two corners and down an anonymous stretch of hallway, next to what appeared to be a utility access panel. It was a blank metal door glazed to match the walls and innocent of knobs, locks, handles or any markings but an ‘L34’ deeply embossed in the middle. Huron regarded it with satisfaction.

  “This’ll do.”

  He took out a set of card keys and applied t
hem to the right-hand side of the door where a lock would be expected to be until, with a hydraulic-sounding hiss, the door popped out about a centimeter.

  “Handy things to have,” Huron remarked as he levered the door open and the interior lights came on. “After you.”

  “You’re kidding.” Alane Hotchkiss pulled her head back behind the corner. “That’s just not right.”

  “You believe me now?” Minx asked, sweetly triumphant.

  “Not if I hadn’t seen it.” Hotchkiss took out her wallet. “Twenty-five?”

  “And dinner.”

  “Nyoutaisushi again?” Stroking the money into Minx’s account with a mild scowl.

  “I’ll let you pick.” Minx gave her girlfriend a strategic squeeze. “We can save sushi for later.”

  “So,” Huron said, settling comfortably on a pallet of cleaning supplies, “I expect you’re experiencing nine kinds of what the hell? just about now.”

  “Sorta.” Kris was sitting on what she took to be a big coil of fiber-optic cable. The rest of the cramped space was untidily stuffed with drums and some bales wrapped in black plastic and shelves with random parts strewn on them, tools she could not identify and a trio of wicked-looking cleaners crammed into a corner. She assumed they were deactivated.

  “The song and dance was necessary, I’m afraid. Ritual is important, as I’m sure you’ve figured out.”

  “Uh huh. Who were those guys, anyway?”

  “You might call them the Gods of the Copybook Headings. They’re useful and even necessary but they can still be a pain in the ass. You have to throw them a bone now and then, and sometimes you have to take them with a grain of salt, too.”

  “Uh huh.” Kris had a feeling that was all the answer she was going to get. “So . . . ah—”

  “Why are we sitting here in the maintenance locker?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because your previous contributions have not been forgotten, and the Admiral—and a select group of others—thinks it might be time for an encore.”

  “You mean the Inner Trifid thing?”

  “In a nutshell, yes.”

  Kris rubbed the spot on her temple that was starting to ache again. “So this op you guys wanna pull off in the Hydra—you’re looking for something like that? I don’t know the Hydra.”

  “You do appear to have insights we lack.”

  “No—” Kris chewed her lip. Where’d they get this idea she was some fucking miracle worker? “Look, the Inner Trifid was Trench’s sandbox. The fix was in, the Feds took their end—it was business. Hydra’s not like that. We went there—a couple of times a cycle maybe—but just to bid when they had a big lot sale or for maintenance stopovers or to crew up or . . . other stuff. It’s mostly all Bannerman anyway, so it’s not like you can just bang in there and hit someplace.” She shifted, antsy and restless. “So—I . . . still don’t know what you guys want.”

  “Well, there’s Thing One and Thing Two.” Which was about the weirdest thing she’d heard him say (out of his decided penchant for saying weird things), because Thing One and Thing Two were characters from a bedtime story her father would act out for her when she was little. Fragments of the ancient rhyme began to flit about in her mind and she shook her head, distracted and annoyed.

  “Thing One,” Huron continued, “is that since we rolled up the Inner Trifid, the slavers have moved more aggressively into the Hydra. Indications are there’s more cooperation going on there than in the past with the Tyrsenians taking an even bigger role. We’re not quite sure who’s in bed with who and to what degree—it’s likely things are shifting about quite a bit. I appreciate that you don’t have the keys like you did for the Inner Trifid, but what you know is still likely to be of help. That routine in there was to present your bona fides and convince them you are an asset we need to employ.”

  “I’m an asset.”

  “In their terminology.”

  “So what’s Thing Two?”

  “The part they don’t know about.”

  “They don’t?” That scarcely seemed possible.

  “This is where things get—eh, ticklish.”

  “Whazzat mean?” Nothing good, she supposed.

  “Thing Two is Mankho.”

  A tingling warmed her cheeks and scampered down her arms to her fingers. So she was right after all. “I dunno anything about Mankho.”

  “Not directly, no,” Huron said, speaking gingerly. “But Trench was associated with him to a degree—that’s how Mariwen ended up on Harlot’s Ruse.”

  She tried not to wince, and he did a good job of not noticing that she tried.

  “After Lacaille, Mankho went to ground—we have no leads. He’s shut down almost anything we could use to track him. But slaves are his main line. We know he’s still active, and now that the nexus has shifted, we think there’s a decent chance almost all his trade is going through the Hydra. But we don’t know where, and we don’t know who. Though it’s likely to be people who dealt with Trench.”

  “So . . .” Kris swallowed. “You want me to see if I can ID any of Trench’s buddies you might sweep up.”

  “Or anything else. We understand what you said about long-term slaves, but there are different possibilities here. We don’t have the time to conduct comprehensive interrogations of whoever we get, and we don’t have a good enough idea where to start looking. We also lack the time to do the kind of workup that could give us these answers, so it all boiled down to asking you. That’s a compliment, by the way.” Noting the look on her face.

  “So how’s all this gonna play?”

  “Ostensibly, we’re after Thing One. That’s in the works and a task group is already fitting out. Deployment is slated to last two months. If you agree, I’ve been authorized by the admiral to submit a recommendation to SECNAV that you be rated midshipman to accompany the mission as an advisor.”

  “With you?”

  “I’m the assigned ops officer, so yes. You and I will be the only ones who know about Thing Two.”

  “So what happens if I say no?”

  “We saddle up and take our best shot. And I’ll have a few more private questions, if that’s okay.”

  “Ah . . . Okay.”

  “This is no cakewalk, Kris. This is throwing you into the deep end.”

  That coaxed out a smile. “Without a paddle?”

  “Something along those lines, yes.”

  Kris shrugged. “Well, shit, then. I didn’t have plans anyway.”

  “Take your time. The Navy Department is going to balk at rating a midshipman, and who knows what other objections they might gin up. They like things orthodox and this is anything but. And these assignments can be tedious as all hell—right up until they become a shit storm in an airlock. That’s what the recruiting propaganda calls an adventure. On the other hand”—he spread both of his—“maybe we get lucky.”

  She echoed the gesture. “So what do you want me to do?”

  He stood. “First, I think we should probably cease inflaming overactive imaginations any more than we already have.”

  “What d’ya mean?”

  “Any chance you know a female cadet, about this tall”—he held his hand at shoulder level—“slim, long black hair, long legs, bit of an attitude?”

  “Sounds like Minx.”

  “Yeah, that would fit.”

  “She fuck’n lurking?”

  “Might call it a reconnaissance in force.”

  “Bitch.”

  “Don’t take it so hard. The envy of the masses, y’know. We’ve got a day—go think about it.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Port Sutherland

  Mars, Sol

  She thought about it—for almost as long as it took to exit the building. In truth, there was never any real question in her mind. Whatever Huron had said about cakewalks and deep ends and airlocks, the overriding fact was that the prospect of so much time on her hands alone filled her with consternation, and that was spiked with the ad
ditional worry of where to spend it. As a cadet, she wasn’t allowed to travel out-system without clearance, and the options she faced all struck her as less than congenial.

  Mars, the oldest settled extraterrestrial planet by a century, had in the view of many (especially the descendants of the original colonists) become a bureaucratic hellhole, a charge with substantial truth to it since the League capital of Nereus sprawled across a huge chunk of the narrow equatorial zone, and eight of ten inhabitants worked for the government. Otherwise, human settlement had taken a light hand on Mars, aside from importing enough air to make the atmosphere breathable (close to a billion cubic kilometers of refined gases brought from Venus by the Mars Air Line; perhaps the greatest engineering feat mankind had ever pulled off), and the planet retained its stark beauty, but what mattered to Kris was that it reminded her all too much of Parson’s Acre.

  Venus, on the other hand, was just creepy. When it was originally colonized, Venus still had its dense, highly corrosive atmosphere in which breathable air was a lifting gas, so the first settlements were encapsulated stations floating at high altitudes where the temperature, pressure, and available sunlight were suitable. Although the Venusian atmosphere was now benign and the surface temperature no longer hot enough to melt lead, the Venusians themselves had never lost their taste for floating cities, and if there was one thing Kris disliked more than being in a gravity well, it was being in a gravity well where you could fall thirty kilometers before you hit something.

  The Belt sounded kind of fun, but visas weren’t easy to come by and living space there was at a premium—waiting lists for everything—and her cadet status did not get her preferred treatment like it did on Mars. Earth, which from what little news she followed appeared to be a planet-sized insane asylum, was right out.

  In view of the options, she’d waited what she hoped was a decent interval before telling Huron she was in, and had spent the hours since trying not to get her hopes up. Huron was a hard person to read, but you could always tell when he was serious about something—at least she could. It was certainly true the Admiralty could balk—that any number of things could get in the way—but Huron had looked like he wasn’t about to take no for an answer, and Kris had a strong if rather indistinct faith in that look.