The black mare rounded the clubhouse turn and stretched out, every muscle of her strong, compact body straining. She was a good two lengths in the lead, four ahead of the pack, and all her focus was on the finish line one hundred twenty yards ahead. The huge bay, now a length and a half back, drifted in toward the rail and seemed to find another gear deep in his massive body. His longer stride began to tell; he closed. The mare was flying though, her jockey low on her neck, and there seemed to be no way he could catch her. But with a mere twenty-five yards to go, the bay suddenly veered to the outside and shot forward, propelled by an immensely powerful drive from behind. The mare’s jockey turned his head, a split-second too late, and both horses hit the wire together.
“I told him,” Marcus Huron said, shaking his head in the VIP box five minutes later, after video revealed the mare had lost by a nose—less than a nose, really: a whisker. “I told him: watch out for Blue’s late charge. I told him: ride through the finish. What do I have to tell him?”
Rafael Huron IV, the retired speaker, clapped his youngest son affectionately on the shoulder. “Well, if the worst she does is lose the Victorian Cup by a hair her first time running it, she’ll have a grand career.”
“But she had it, Dad! You saw that she had it.”
“Oh yes, I saw. Truly.” And truly, their accounts were now lighter by about a million. But Eclipse, the black Arabian mare who was his youngest son’s pride and joy, and the most beautiful horse he’d ever beheld, had actually run better than he expected her first time out in the southern hemisphere’s biggest race. The victor, Blue at the Mizzen, was a canny brute, and his jockey, Geri Wolfe, was one of the best in the business. Willie Brunt, who’d been up on Eclipse, was generally solid and reliable, but he’d blundered today, thinking he had it in the bag in the most important race of his career. It was clear that they’d have to find someone better for Eclipse to come fully into her own.
Marc refused to be mollified. He was fairly new to the racing business—his latest enthusiasm. Having taken up horse breeding some years ago, he’d concluded there ought to be some purpose he was breeding them for, so he launched into a line of racehorses, and he still felt these setbacks (as he persisted in seeing them) keenly. He was on the short side, with an air of permanent youth stamped on him; lightly built, almost wispy compared to his tall, commanding eldest brother—half-brother, to those inclined to be pedantic, for he, like the middle brother Charles, was the son of their father’s second wife. He also had his mother’s light blond hair, blue eyes and refined features, which conveyed a misleading impression of delicacy. Charles, on the other hand, was dark-haired, dark-eyed, and corpulent. There was a heaviness about his manner that tended to make him seem sullen, even when he wasn’t, which (truth be told) was not that often. Three more disparate siblings could not well be imagined.
They all had their particular geniuses, however. Marc, when not indulging his eccentricities (before horse breeding, he’d made a brief foray into racing camels), was a senior staff physicist, although he was not yet thirty, specializing in gravitics at Forbes-Dyson, which supplied about half of the grav-plants in League starships. Charles excelled as a manager, for all he and Rafe often didn’t see eye-to-eye; and Rafe’s exploits (military and otherwise) were top-line news—that is, whenever they were made public.
Rafe was the son most closely identified with his exalted father, and the most like him, casting a deep shadow over his siblings. The seeming injustice nagged at him, but Rafael Huron IV had lived too long and seen too much to believe all injustices, or even most of them, could be righted. This one, to the extent it existed, did not seem to loom large on the cosmic scale, and in any event, the best one could do was try to fight the good fight, trust in Fate, and enjoy what meager triumphs she afforded.
A club steward entered and made himself known. Both faces, old and young, turned to him as one. He bowed and announced, “There is a Bethany May Wolcott wishing to see you, sir.”
The young face registered incomprehension, while the older barely changed, so the steward explained, “Blue at the Mizzen’s owner, sir.”
Marc squinted sidelong at his father, who smiled and said, “We’d be delighted. Please show her in.”
“I thought Blue was owned by Parke Godwinson,” Marc muttered as the short, trim, elegantly dressed woman was ushered through the entryway.
“Please don’t think I’m here to gloat,” she said before any word of greeting could be made. “Eclipse is a magnificent animal—magnificent. She had the race; had it, but for—well, you know. But I just wanted to come and congratulate you. Such an outing in her virgin Cup! I hope you are both quite proud.” The door shut and the woman took off her aqua-tinted glasses.
“Hello, Trin,” the elder Huron said.
“Are you really Blue’s owner?” Marc asked.
“When I need to be,” Commander Wesselby said with a smile. “Sorry you had an expensive PM.”
The father waved that off. “It’s Brunt that had the expensive PM. He is a fine lad for down-circuit tracks, but he was in over his head today.”
“I’m sure you’ll find a comer very soon who can take Eclipse the full distance. She really is a magnificent animal.”
“Thanks,” Marc said, a little uncertainly. Trin Wesselby appearing under an assumed name could only betoken certain things, the consequences of which were usually unpleasant for someone. He directed a searching glance between her and his father. “I think I’ll go talk to the trainers. I imagine you two have things you wish to discuss.”
“Not at all,” Trin said with an even smile. “Is Rafe still up at the ranch?” The ‘ranch’ was four hundred thousand acres Marc owned just north of the Grampians.
“No, he left out of Adelaide night before last.”
“He did mention that issue you’re having, however,” his father added.
She nodded, appearing satisfied, while the elder Huron fished silently in his wallet. After a few moments he extracted a business card and handed it to Trin. “These are the people Vai recommends. I hope it helps.”
Trin slipped the card into a pocket inside her fawn jacket. “Thank you so much.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“Absolutely not.” She took out her xel, flipped open the display, and frowned mildly. “I need to run. It’s nice seeing you again, Marc. Sorry I can’t stay longer.”
“Yeah. Absolutely. Anytime.”
With a wave and a breezy goodbye, she palmed open the entryway and left.
Marc stood still for a moment, looking at the space she’d formerly occupied. “Has she ever been married?”
“Trin?” his father answered with a peculiar smile. “Perish the thought.”
Five decades ago, Rafael Leonidas Huron IV had been at the pinnacle of his career as the League’s leading business magnate, managing the huge commercial empire built up by his grandfather, Rafael Leonidas Huron II. The original Rafael Leonidas Huron had emigrated to Terra from Karelia, changing his surname and bringing with him the two companies that had been in the family for generations: Ilmatar Neoforming, which specialized in fabricating habitats on moons and other small forms, and its sister concern, Tuonela Shipbuilders. It was his association with the Dr. Ivan Osorio, who developed the first immunocyte implants, that allowed Ilmatar Neoforming to leverage the new terraforming technology that used nanocyte ‘seeds’ on a biologically active planet to transform the atmosphere and neutralize toxins in a fraction of the time required by previous methods. Immunocytes allowed settlers to occupy these newly terraformed planets years before they otherwise could, and they were almost equally beneficial on established planets, even some of the Homeworlds.
By licensing the basis for immunocyte technology, Ilmatar Neoforming became the tenth largest terraforming corporation within a generation, and Tuonela Shipbuilders, renamed TeraCon Heavy Industries, the largest private company. It was Rafael Huron II—the unusually active and (oft said) rapacious grandfather—who had then assembled the KKHR Cont
rol Group over the notional bodies of his corporate foes.
Then it seemed the cutthroat strain skipped a generation (the third Rafael Huron was an amiable, well-liked man and an able consolidator), and had perhaps died out altogether in that man’s son, the dashing, charismatic Rafael Huron IV. Others were not so sure, imagining they detected a glim of the old man’s ferocity behind the effortless charm. Still others had him down as a playboy, a lightweight, a ‘flash cove with no bottom.’ The courses of his youth had suggested as much, for he led an unusually active social life, often appearing at the banquets, toney riots, and charitable events he frequented with a new and radiant companion on his arm—sometimes two.
By his forty-fifth year, any doubts about his managerial skills had been dispersed, and in that year, the social world was stunned by his sudden marriage to Alana Marcella Zavala-Marquez, the daughter of a prominent Ionian family, who possessed all the beauty and fire of her Antiguan heritage (Rafe got his looks from her), along with a full measure of the savagely independent Ionian spirit. The gossips salivated.
Events, or Fate (who always does her work uncompromisingly), intervened. In the year ‘89, Halith invaded Karelia, staging the operation out of Miranda, which they’d annexed twenty-one years before. The old and respected Terran Grand Senator Sophonisba Emrys announced her retirement and, incensed by what he viewed as a dilatory response to the invasion, the newly married Rafael Huron IV stood for the seat. In the campaign that followed, those who suspected the latent ferocious strain, and those who doubted it, had their opinions respectively confirmed and obliterated. The opposition was quietly slaughtered, with such efficiency that rumors of a hidden hand behind Grand Senator Emrys’ retirement began to spread.
The new Terran grand senator lost no time starting an internal campaign for greater support for beleaguered Karelia, and when the republic fell after a bloody, protracted and unusually vicious conflict, marked by brutal atrocities on both sides, he shifted to exploring other avenues to liberate his ancestral home, which took him deep into the labyrinth of intelligence, and also into military reform.
The League had not fought a major war since its inception; the CEF was a small force, well suited to hunting pirates and fighting minor actions (minor to Homeworlders, that is, not to the participants) on the colonial frontiers. It was hidebound and hampered by the circumstances of its creation, which focused not on military efficiency, but instead on ensuring it did not become a vehicle for any one partner to achieve supremacy over the others. In contrast, the Halith military was large, experienced, and thoroughly professional. Yet in spite of the threat Halith posed, reforming the CEF was still anathema to the more conservative blocks who dominated League politics. Grand Senator Huron nonetheless managed to find allies for his reform proposals, especially after the defeat of his colleague in the semi-decadal elections boosted him to the top slot.
Another fleet was added and deployed to Cygnus to protect the Kepler junction, complementing the three assigned to Eltanin, Regulus and the Pleiades, and the Epona Outstation was established to watch over Miranda. The system whereby colonial officers were considered inferior to officers from the Homeworlds, regardless of seniority, was abandoned (over heated objections from the Meridies). The marines were expanded from being little better than a token force to a genuine fighting arm and made independent of the Navy, as was the SRF. Over two hundred years of mossy tradition were being challenged, and it took all of the grand senator’s famous charm (darkened now by the death of Alana from an unheard-of condition when she was pregnant with Rafe—he missed her still, most earnestly, these forty years and more on) to chip away at the accreted customs and lingering prejudices surrounding the CEF.
Yet chip he did, and progress was made. Still, it was over his vehement warnings that in the year ‘05, the Plenary Council, mismanaging one nasty little war, the Perseid Campaign, which it had started in hopes of weakening the Dominion internally, blundered into a major one in the light of an aggressor.
Over the next twelve years, the League and Halith fought a seesaw conflict, as the reforms proved their worth. Then, in the year ‘17, Grand Senator Huron was elected Speaker. He brought the Plenary Council to heel and set about swiftly revamping the way the League made war. First, he jumped Admiral Jasmine Kasena, an abrasive former President of the Advanced Warfare College, who was known for her strategic brilliance but had never commanded a fleet in combat and was languishing as head of the General Staff’s Planning Department, over a dozen more experienced and higher-ranking admirals to the post of CNO, and then stood by her while she replaced inefficient senior officers, many of them Homeworlders and some quite influential, with talented juniors, often colonials.
He was deaf to cries of favoritism when she gave the coveted position of CO, First Fleet, to her good friend and protégé, Vice Admiral Ashlynn Kiamura, a junior fleet commander with a talent for authoring improbable victories, and who, as a cruiser captain, had earned a reputation as a blue-eyed, cold-hearted killer. He was equally deaf to howls of impropriety when she promoted a hard-drinking, hard-swearing colonial, Joss PrenTalien, to vice admiral, and made him CO of Fifth Fleet at Regulus, the critical League nexus controlling the routes to Cygnus, Karelia, and the Huygens’s gap.
By the time Admiral Kasena reached far down the roster to elevate a hirsute, bandy-legged Nepalese, Lo Gai Sabr, another cruiser captain whose crews loved him as much as his enemies feared him, to rear admiral, the grumblers were either pining in (usually) comfortable exile, or running short of breath.
When she talked the League’s most successful privateer, Yasmin Shariati, an Antiguan rejuvenant who was as beautiful as she was bloodthirsty, into accepting a commission as the only permanently appointed commodore in the Navy, they shook their heads and turned away. And when Admiral Sabr married her, they said that it was fate.
They were an odd, eclectic bunch—unorthodox, undisciplined, often ill-mannered and always brash; Kasena’s deputy, the dapper, smiling Admiral Westover, was the only polished one among them—and their elders muttered and looked on darkly while the media compared them unfavorably to pirates, commented unfavorably on their many eccentricities, and joyfully pimped the views of pundits predicting disaster. This disdain was returned full-bore. Admiral Kasena was known to hate reporters more than Halith (had said of the latter: “At least they can sometimes shoot straight”), and her general order on media relations read: “Don’t tell them a goddamned thing. When it’s over, tell ‘em who won.”
Those characteristics aside, they all had several other things in common: they were ruthless, inventive, and had no idea what it meant to quit. Most of all, they knew how to make the enemy afraid. This attracted other officers of similar disposition, and the tenor of the conflict, as well as the tone of the men and women who fought it, began to change. The League took the offensive more often and more successfully, finally not just trading enormous amounts of vacuum at great cost, until even the media began to take note. (Not that this altered Admiral Kasena’s opinion of them one iota.)
In the meantime, the new Speaker brought all his considerable management expertise to bear on the CEF itself. He reorganized the Byzantine support functions and revamped logistics, eradicating fiefdoms, bypassing middlemen and streamlining supply. The intelligence organs were not spared his scrutiny or his knife either: he pared and slashed, opening up cherished strongholds whose owners had for decades profited by dispensing, or failing to dispense, privileged information. New howls were heard—rampant insecurity, lack of vetting, insufficient oversight—but within a year, the tide of the war turned.
Within another eighteen months, it tipped, when Admiral Kiamura, outnumbered by more than two to one, broke the Imperial Navy’s back at Anson’s Deep. Ten months later, the Plenary Council ordered an invasion of Halith to force an unconditional surrender. Admiral Kiamura spearheaded the operation through Novaya Zemlya, a major transit linking Wogan’s Reef with the Halith nexus at Tau Verde. For reasons that remained unexpl
ained—and seemed inexplicable—her task force became trapped and was effectively annihilated (less than a thousand survivors were taken prisoner by Halith and later exchanged). Fleet Admiral Kasena took responsibility and resigned. Although Halith remained unable to take the offensive, the disaster forced the League to accept a negotiated peace to end the war.
That peace liberated Karelia and restored Miranda to independence (an unhappy occasion for the large number of Halith settlers who had immigrated there), but the Battle of Novaya Zemlya remained one of the bitterest days the Speaker had ever lived, although he’d now lost two wives, the second that very year in a botched assassination attempt. He’d been close to Admiral Kiamura, whose flagship was destroyed early in the battle. She was not among the few survivors recovered, and the circumstances of her death had never been ascertained.
In the aftermath, despite the recriminations that inevitably followed a tainted victory, Grand Senator Huron’s grip on the Speakership remained firm. So did his grip on the intelligence apparatus, expanded during the war and coming to include a number of quasi-official, and unofficial, conduits and sources. These he carefully husbanded, as a potent force against enemies both foreign and domestic (there being no shortage of either), and the cream of which—distilled, collated and organized—he’d just handed to Commander Wesselby, coded into the very atoms of an innocuous-looking business card.
Chapter Fifteen
ONI Main Annex
Lunar 1, Tycho Prime
Luna, Sol
The cream certainly, though of a singularly unwholesome crop, and how to use it? Trin downloaded the mass to her personal xel, in the privacy of her ONI Annex office, then entered the erasure code, licked her thumb and applied it to the card, thereby returning the spin-locked electrons to ordinary matter, and the card itself to a mere piece of cellulosic paper.
They had planned for a considerable mass, but what they got exceeded their generous expectations. There was, for example, no reason to believe the woman they sought was from the League; she could just as easily be someone from Bannerman or Halith, or even the Sultanate, though she had not originated there, according to the description Kym provided. Bannerman also seemed unlikely, based on Kym’s initial response to the voice samples they played for her. Bannerman accents were distinctive; what Kym had identified as “kinda sounds like–sorta” were accents from the Meridies Cluster, from New California, and from the east coast of North America, which was so widely distributed throughout Sol as to be almost useless. But Kym also recognized the predominant accent of Halith Evandor, the Dominion’s prime world. That in itself implied the woman had grown up on more than one planet, which suggested a League origin, as Halith used a strict system of internal passports to discourage mobility; or that she had traveled extensively enough to have acquired the polyglot accent that was sometimes met with among old mariners and other professional voyagers.
Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks Page 32