Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks

by Owen R. O'Neill

  The trouble came when her dad had decided to try to grow peaches, a rare delicacy on Lacaille. Peaches called for a lot of water, especially to get them established, and a couple of years into the venture, some dispute (Kym didn’t know what it was about) caused the local boss to give their extended water license to a competing farm. The trees all died—sixteen hectares of them—leaving her family heavily in debt. And then the boss had sent his men . . .

  Kris shook her head as she swallowed a bite of braised garlic seitan and answered Kym’s question about her impending departure. “Yeah. Pretty soon. Not real soon, though.”

  “Comin’ back?”

  “Um, not here. I go back the Academy after I’m done here.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Mars.”

  “Is that a long way?”

  “No—not really. This system.”

  “Is it better’n here? Mars?”

  “I—I dunno. It’s different.”

  “What’s it like?”

  Kris took out her xel and brought up a series of images. Kym wrinkled her nose.

  “Is it all like that?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Why’d anybody wanna live there? No animals. Can’t grow nothin’.”

  “Well, the capital’s there.”

  “Why don’t they put the capital somewhere nice? Don’t make sense.”

  Kris moved her shoulders helplessly and closed the pictures.

  “I don’t have to go somewhere like that, do I?”

  “No. You can go wherever you like. They’ll send stuff on places—jobs. You get to pick.”

  “Okay.” Kym sounded far from satisfied. Then: “You goin’ back?”

  “Back where?”

  “Y’know. Out there.”

  “I dunno yet. We’re—lookin’ for somebody.”

  “That’s why you wanted to know ‘bout all those people you showed me? Why I had to go see that lady.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Who? Who ya lookin’ for?”

  “I . . . can’t say.”

  “Somebody Corc’n knew?”

  “I dunno.”

  “You knew Corc’n—din’t ya?”

  “I—ah . . . Trench knew him.”

  “I know. They were tight. When Trench got killed he—” Kym looked down with her fists buried in her lap. “Corc’n talked ‘bout ya lots. Said Trench use’ta—did he—? I mean Corc’n, he din’t never—”

  “Kym—”

  The strain in her voice snapped Kym’s head up and her hands slapped over her mouth. “Gawd! Sorry! Din’t mean to—sorry!”

  “S’Okay, Kym. No worries, huh? No worries.” It was an effort to sound calm but somehow she managed.

  Kym wasn’t fooled. “Din’t know! Thought he jus’—jus’ talkin’.” Her face crumpled in a stunned look of naked, unguarded distress.

  Kris reached out and squeezed the shaking shoulder, then brushed tears off one round cheek. “S’Okay, Kym. Really.”

  Kym sniffed. “Really sorry.”

  “C’mon. Stop it.”

  The catch and sigh of uneasy breathing between them, calming after a long minute to silence. Then: “Wish I could help.”

  “You did, Kym.”

  “Real help. Maybe I could. If I knew.”

  “Sorry, Kym. I can’t—”

  “Don’t trust me, do they? Those people.” She jerked her chin at the whole outside.

  “It’s not that. We just have to do things a certain way.”

  Kym shook her head with a disgusted look. “Everybody says that. They said that.”

  “Sorry, Kym. This is different. Gotta be.”

  Kym bit a knuckle, wanting to believe. Finally: “Real tall then, huh?”

  “Who?”

  “The guy. The guy you’re lookin’ for. Way—way up there? Right? Or ya wouldn’t be doin’ all this. Right?”

  “Yeah. That’s true.”

  “Like him?”

  “Who?”

  “Y’know. Him.”

  Kris shook her head, bewildered. Kym stood up, came over and whispered the name in her ear.

  “Did you know him?”—in a shocked undertone.

  “Uh-uh. Corc’n knew him. Talked ‘bout him all the time. Talked real big, y’know?”

  “You never met him?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “Umm . . .”

  “Kym—”

  Kym’s flawless teeth indented her lower lip. “More pictures, huh?”

  “If you wanna help.”

  “Just you this time?”

  “Just me.”

  “No weird stuff? No blinkin’ lights?”

  “No blinkin’ lights.”

  Her full lips closed over the white teeth and a determined look appeared. “Yeah. S’kay.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  CGHQ Main Annex

  Lunar 1, Tycho Prime

  Luna, Sol

  The last of the images closed after their third time through them and Kym was scrunched back in her chair again, hugging her knees. Kris hated seeing her like that, but she was having too much trouble controlling the shaking in her own knees to worry much about it.

  “Din’t do well again,” Kym muttered from the depths of the chair. They were in a briefing room down in the third basement level of the CGHQ Main Annex, which Huron had secured for them. He was in fact in the adjacent cube, where he’d been selecting the images for Kym to review.

  “Why can’t we just show her the fucker’s picture?” Kris had asked him earlier that AM.

  “Doesn’t work, Kris,” was the even reply. “People try too hard. Show them an image and about half the time, they’ll convince themselves they met the guy. They don’t mean to, they just can’t help it. That’s why we wire ‘em up. Since that’s not an option this time . . .”

  Kris had grumbled—it seemed like putting Kym through that much more, and she’d wanted to avoid that. She hadn’t been at all prepared for what did happen.

  “No, Kym. You did fine.” Kris fought to keep the tremors out of her voice. Fought and lost.

  “You said that last time. You always say that. You’re jus’ bein’ nice. You’re too nice.”

  No one had ever leveled that particular accusation at Kris before, but she was in no mood to appreciate it.

  “Look, I can’t explain. Maybe someday. Not now.”

  Shifting in her perch, Kym slid her pale hands down to her ankles. “My fault you’re so upset?”

  “No. Nothin’ to do with you.”

  Uncoiling from the chair, Kym padded over and knelt so she could look into Kris’s averted face. After a few moments’ study, she reached out to pat Kris’s knee. “S’kay. Sorry though.”

  “S’Alright, Kym.” Kris shifted her eyes away again—they revealed too much. “Listen, I’m gonna have someone take you back, okay? It’s all good—just go with ‘em. Okay?”

  “And you’ll be back?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be back. Later.”

  Kym stood with a shallow nod as Kris took out her xel and sent a request to Huron to have Kym escorted back to her apartment. It couldn’t have been much more than a minute before the entry panel chimed. Kris unlocked the door and it slid aside to reveal a uniformed yeoman waiting there.

  “Miss?” the yeoman said, officially pleasant. Kym shot Kris a look. Kris nodded and bent her lips into something like a smile. Kym nodded back and trotted up to the yeoman, who gestured down the corridor. “This way, miss. Follow me, please.”

  With a final backward glance, Kym jogged off after the long-striding yeoman, and the door shut.

  It opened again a few seconds later and Huron walked in, looking uncomfortable.

  “She didn’t know anyone?”

  Head against her knuckles, Kris gave it a shake.

  Huron lowered himself into the chair Kym had just vacated.

  “But you did.”

  A quick, sharp nod just this side of a
spasm.

  “Which one?”

  “Last set. Third guy from the end.”—harsh voiced, with her hands clenching into fists.

  “How did you know him?”

  She knew him because Trench had loaned her to him for two local weeks. They’d called him Mr. Wexford—a few times Squire Wexford or something like that; the strange title was evidently some sort of joke to them. For two days he hadn’t touched her, but he’d made her watch. He was fond of electrical implements and neural inductors and exotic shows. When he stopped letting her watch . . .

  Kris swallowed hard against the sick churning in her gut.

  “Bad?”

  “Uh huh.” After she’d been there a week, the man left and came back three days later in a savage mood. She’d tried ever since to forget what had happened that night. The next PM he was quite pleasant: had her fixed up, sumptuously fed, even let her sleep alone. Then a friend arrived.

  “What did he look like?” Huron asked when Kris had finished her bald and heavily abridged account.

  “Medium height, kinda thin. A scar here—” she drew her finger from the right corner of her mouth to the angle of her jaw “—missing a finger on his left hand, really pale . . .”

  “A long pale face like a dead fish?” Kris wasn’t acquainted with enough dead fish to say, but Huron tapped his xel and put another image on the screen. “Is this him?”

  Kris nodded again, fighting down the nausea. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s him. Who . . . who is he?”

  “That’s Nikolai Arutyun. Captain Nikolai Arutyun. He’s a senior Halith staff officer—works for Admiral Christian Heydrich, Chief of Halith Military Intelligence. We think he’s the one who arranged the explosives for Mankho’s attack on Nemeton.”

  “Great.”

  “Yeah. Word is that he’s a noted sadist. Takes after his boss.”

  “Uh huh.” Kris was not going to fill Huron in on the particulars of that assessment. “That guy—the other guy. Who’s he?”

  Huron put down his xel and lowered his voice. “Kris, that’s Nestor Mankho.”

  Chapter Twenty

  ONI Main Annex

  Lunar 1, Tycho Prime

  Luna, Sol

  “This is for those of you who are new here.” Commander Trin Wesselby, standing at the head of the briefing room’s long table, looked out at her audience and caught the eyes of each of those newcomers in turn: two ensigns and a lieutenant from the CGHQ’s GS2 section, and three civilian specialists from CID’s tech-exploit department. This AM she’d set aside the straitlaced starchiness she usually affected during duty hours, and the severity of her expression seemed to arise from something altogether different. Exactly what was not apparent, although it was clear you wouldn’t want to meet it unexpectedly in a dark alley. Huron and Sergeant Major Yu were both acquainted with Trin in this mode, but hid the knowledge behind their carefully reserved and professional expressions—the others resolved to pay close attention.

  Commander Wesselby was not unaware of the effect she was having—her primness was largely theoretical and never more than skin deep—and she continued with a hint of satisfaction in her voice, if not her expression. “The target, as I’m sure you’re aware, is Nestor Mankho.” Mankho’s image appeared on the briefing screen, and she tapped it between the eyes. The revelation that Kris had met Mankho, the details she’d been able to provide of his compound and what she’d seen of the surroundings had touched off a minor maelstrom of activity. A hasty written request to stand up a team to evaluate the potential for another operation against Mankho—strictly CEF this time—had been approved, and Huron had gotten it appended to his acting order for the Hydra operation so he could lead it. Trin, who’d been back on Mars, fretting at CEF CGHQ Nereus, caught a fast packet back and, at Huron’s request, Yu had been granted leave to come along. The team was built on the fly.

  At the moment, that team consisted of Huron, Yu, Lieutenant Ashley Crismon with Ensigns Jaelin and McCaffrey from GS2, and the three civilians led by Mitchell “Mick” Quennell, who had a reputation as one of the CID’s best tech analysts. Trin was not part of it: for one thing, as DSI-PLESIG she was staff, not a line officer; for another she ranked Huron, which could have caused complications.

  “For the last two decades,” she went on, “Mankho has been pretty much the poster child for evil—and deservedly so. His résumé reads like something written for an archvillain out of central casting. His humble beginnings: kidnapping, assassinations, gun running and dealing in slaves. Then forming the Black Army, moving to Rephidim and declaring his own state there. And finally, the attack on Knydos, expressive of the hubris that causes his downfall”—she said it with a smirk—“as always happens with a good villain. If only he looked the part, the story would have been perfect.”

  Indeed, Evil’s Poster Child was something of a nondescript: roundish face with a wide forehead, sallow complexion, thin mouth, chin slightly weak and dark eyes a bit small with drooping lids. His hair was thinning and his nose was neither beaked nor broad. A face of no particular age that said nothing of its origins and was seldom noticed, exciting no comment if it was, and easily forgotten.

  “The problem is that, even if he looks like a mild-mannered accountant, he’s so iconized that we’ve lost our grip on him—the narrative has come to dominate the reality. Too much, we’ve come to see him as the abstract terrorist mastermind, concocting fiendish plots that are doomed to fail, because in the narrative, that’s what always happens. This last plot—to bomb the Grand Senate hearings—is a perfect case in point. Brilliantly clever and foiled at the last second—literally—by the hand of Fate.” She scanned her audience once more, mouth twisted in a wry expression. “Or something. That is why it’s important to remind ourselves of where Mankho came from, and how he got to be where he is.”

  The image on the screen faded and was replaced by another. “So let me take you back to another archvillain—and he does look the part.” He did. A fierce dark bearded face with its hawk-like nose and narrow piercing eyes, a shocking light blue and deep-socketed under dominating brows; a cruel mouth and dark wavy hair receding sharply to widow’s peak above the high broad forehead, alive with a brutal vitality.

  “This, of course, is Shamir Azrael Mureyev, the Amur separatist leader. You might recall that back in thirteenth year of the last war, when things were starting to go poorly for Halith, the separatists on Amu Daria made a serious bid for independence—an effort we showed some sympathy for at the time.” She did not need to elaborate: they all knew those expressions of sympathy had taken the form of intelligence support and shipments of weapons—Sergeant Major Yu had been personally involved.

  “That story’s well-known: Halith responded with an invasion, miscalculated for once, and very quickly got into difficulties. The separatists managed to recruit Mureyev, who was Colonel Ivan Mureyev of the Halith Imperial Ground Forces at the time. He reverted to his birth name, broke the siege of Amur-Plesetsk, and allowed Amu Daria to claim de facto, if not de jure, independence.”

  Trin Wesselby paused to take the room’s temperature. “So why the history lesson? We know what happened next: Novaya Zemlya, the end of the war, and two years later the Banestre Square bombing that Halith SPEC-OPs committed so they could pin the blame on Amu Daria’s provisional government as a pretext to invade. By the way, Admiral Heydrich, the current head of Halith military intelligence—he was a lieutenant commander then—was responsible for that bombing. So you can see things haven’t changed much.

  “In any event, Halith did it right this time, the provisional government surrendered and Mureyev, who’d been defense minister, was declared a terrorist and took refuge off-planet, knocking around the Outworlds until he was killed eight years ago.

  “But before that, there was the HSS Haarlan.” The room stilled at the mention of the most horrific terrorist attack in memory. The Halith-registered cruise ship, Haarlan, had been chartered to take six hundred school children from the Halith core system of V
ehren to view the Great Nebula in Orion. Mureyev’s people had managed to hijack the ship during a stopover at Zalamenkar, threatening to kill a child every fifteen minutes until their demands were met. Too far away to send their own teams, the Halith government relied on local forces, who botched the raid, killing only a few of the terrorists while losing half their number and all of the hostages. The murder of six hundred kids, most under the age of ten, created an interstellar sensation and effectively ended any chance of independence for Amu Daria, even though the Amur separatists cut their ties with Mureyev and denounced the attack in the strongest possible terms. It also ended Mureyev’s career as a warlord and terrorist; he became a lone fugitive until he was killed on Meremont's World—not by government agents, but in a dispute over a shipment of illegal aphrodisiacs.

  “And that’s my point,” Trin said. “Why did a successful warlord and planetary hero commit an act so heinous that it completely delegitimized the cause he was fighting for and made him such a pariah that he died years later in what amounts to a whorehouse brawl? Mureyev was never the sort of person you’d take home to mother—his actions on Amu Daria were predictably ruthless, no matter which side he was on—but he never embraced terrorism, and by the local standards, he didn’t allow atrocities either. So what happened?”

  Mureyev’s image faded from the screen and Mankho’s reappeared.

  “That’s right. The mastermind behind the Haarlan hijacking was actually Nestor Mankho.” Trin noted with a small degree of inner satisfaction that she’d surprised all but two people in the room. “So let me thicken the plot some more. We don’t know exactly when Mankho and Mureyev met. There’s some data that indicates it’s likely, though by no means conclusive, that they met on Amu Daria during its brief period of ‘independence.’ Mankho’s an anarchist and Amu Daria was as close as you could get to an anarchist paradise back then.