Huron chuckled. “Maybe that’s why they abolished the rank.”
After lunch, they were joined by Mick Quennell, another man from his shop named Keith Rosen and a third named Ezzard Klein, whose affiliation was not stated. Quennell and Rosen, with their thinning long hair, day-old stubble and rumpled attire, adhered to the stereotype of a cloistered tech almost to absurdity, as if they dressed each AM according to a manual. Klein was of a wholly different animal, laid-back and very sure of himself, and he smiled to excess.
Commander Wesselby introduced the newcomers and gave them a preamble setting limits on the topics and questions. Kris was not mentioned this time. She hunched in the back willing herself to invisibility, as the commander finished: “Our goal here is to assess whether we can realistically place an operator within Nestor Mankho’s personal compound and if she could sufficiently control events to allow our team to extract him.” She paused. “This is perhaps the most challenging environment we have ever encountered, and you are all aware of the previous failure on Lacaille. So the risks here are extreme—especially to any operator we assign. Now I’m going to summarize what we have so far, but keep the level of risk in mind when you consider your input.”
The summary was admirably concise, condensing the essence of all Kris had told them into a few short minutes. The possibility of using Vasquez was introduced last.
“Just one point,” Lieutenant Elkins spoke up when she was done. It was obvious from his tone that he was trying to redeem himself. “Corporal Vasquez is a three-time All-Forces Unarmed Combat Champion. That’s earned her some notoriety. How confident are we that Mankho’s organization hasn’t cracked our profiles and could recognize who she really is?”
Trin Wesselby took a breath before answering. She hadn’t shared her suspicions with anyone in the room except Huron, and the point was an unsettling one. Huron hadn’t reacted to the question, except that his gaze was now rather chillier.
“That would imply a serious and far-reaching breach of our overall security,” she said carefully. “If we consider it a realistic possibility, we need to make our case directly to GS2.3 and CNO. If not, we go forward and plan accordingly.”
Elkins subsided, but not all the way. “What about the possibility of doing a visosculpt or something? Do we have time for that?”
From the back, Kris abandoned her attempt at being undetectable. “Excuse me, ma’am?”
Commander Wesselby turned toward her. “Yes, Midshipman? Have you something to add?”
“Yes, ma’am. That would be a really bad idea.” All eyes around the table fixed on her and she cleared her throat. “They—ah . . . check real carefully for re-gen marks—big buyers hate ‘em. You’ll never get a girl through like that—they’ll spot her as a knockoff right away.”
Huron, Wesselby, Lieutenant Crismon, and Yu shared a collective exhalation; Quennell, Klein and Rosen regarded her with new interest. Elkins stared straight ahead, doing his best not to look picked on again.
It took a moment for the mood in the room to recover, and the brainstorming that followed made Kris blanch almost as much as poor Elkins had during that AM’s briefing, as the three civilians brought up and sifted a compendium of dirty tricks, nasty surprises, and ethically dubious remedies.
It made her stomach turn, though, when Rosen suggested, “What if we give her a shot of androhalynene? With thirty-six hours for it to build up in her mucosa, it’d give him all the symptoms of a scary-ass heart attack about twenty minutes after he initiates sex with her, whether he’s using a barrier or not—unless it’s a damn special one—and provided he has a Y-chromosome, of course.”
And when someone else—Kris thought it was Klein—muttered that Vasquez would hardly need androhalynene to induce a heart attack in any man she had sex with, she excused herself and left the room.
Huron found her in the head, splashing cold water on her face. She looked sideways at him: disgust bordering on loathing. Reaching for a towel, she just held it for a moment, and then dropped her gaze back to the metal sink.
“That’s some fucked-up shit you guys think of.”
“Klein was out of line. In about an hour, it’ll occur to him that Vasquez might become aware of his remark.”
“And if she did?” Kris straightened and began scrubbing her face with the rough towel.
“She’d probably just laugh. But Klein doesn’t know that—he only knows her by her reputation. And she knows where he works. He may not be sleeping too well for a while.”
Kris threw the towel at the laundry chute. “Who is this Vasquez person? They talked about her back on Deimos too, especially after she won the last tournament.”
“One of Yu’s people.”
“And he’d send her off to someone like Mankho?”
“She’d volunteer.”
“Fuckin’ stupid,” Kris snapped. “You’re not really gonna do this, are you? You—she . . . you guys got no fuckin’ idea what you’re getting into.”
“She defeated Yu in the finals. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“In a sporting event.”
“I guess you didn’t watch it then.”
Her eyes went to slits as she clamped her lips over whatever retort she was about to make.
“Okay, maybe we don’t know. But Mankho certainly wouldn’t have any idea what he’s getting into. If you ever meet her, you’ll understand.”
Kris leaned back over the sink, silent.
“Look, Kris . . . we’re close to done here. It’s not really necessary for you to—”
She shot him a vicious look. “I’m not copping out on this.”
That brought Trin’s words back like a slap. Maybe he was losing his objectivity.
Chapter Twenty-Six
NAVSUR HQ
Lunar 1, Tycho Prime
Luna, Sol
“Look,” Huron said again, the frustration mounting in his voice, “if we can’t identify a reliable, secure covert comms scheme, this whole plan is pointless.” He leaned back and put one boot up against the briefing table. He didn’t like the idea—none of them did—and he was tired. They were all tired.
Mick Quennell leaned his arms on the table, over which was spread everything they knew about Nestor Mankho and most of what they’d learned about slaver operations in the last few days. “The comms themselves aren’t the problem. We can give her a new freckle, we can tattoo a transponder on her eyelid—we can do any damn thing. But we don’t know what we’re up against.” He swept his hand across the charts. “If they have the right scanning equipment, they can find anything. If we know what they have, we can beat it. But all this—this doesn’t help much. The guy’s paranoid, he’s connected and he’s got Halith tech support.” He slumped back in his chair. “If they’ve got it, don’t we have to assume he has it?”
They’d been going around on this for a while now, partly because cove-ops people and tech analysts didn’t really speak the same language. Huron couldn’t blame him for sounding exasperated.
“So your bottom line is that there’s no point in talking about a solution unless we can give you a more specific target to work against.”
“That’s right,” Quennell said, sounding relieved that someone finally got it. “There’s no generic eight-seven percent solution here. Maybe sixty, but I wouldn’t stick my neck out even on that.”
“Co-opting their surveillance nets might be the most viable option,” Lieutenant Elkins offered. “We can almost certainly get in.”
Quennell gave the young man a quizzical look. “What’s she gonna do? Blink Morse code into the surveillance video?”
Elkins was about to reply but Yu, who’d hardly said anything the whole meeting, spoke first. “We can’t guarantee she will be in range of a surveillance unit when we need it. I’m not sending one of my people in without a lifeline we control. I don’t care what she says.” He spoke with great finality and Elkins subsided. Huron found himself intensely amused that Yu had just implied Corporal Vasq
uez might be human, after all.
“Okay,” he said, letting a glimmer of that amusement show through, “I suggest we—” His xel beeped and he looked down to see Kris hailing him. He tapped ACCEPT. “Yes, Kennakris?”
“I’ve got that report you asked for, sir.”
It took Huron a moment to remember which report she was referring to. “Thanks. Would you mind bringing it down here to Briefing 5?”
“Not at all, sir.”
“Thank you.” He cut the connection. “Anyway, as I was—”
“Does she know anything about this guy’s scanning tech?” Quennell asked abruptly. That got him a pointed frown from Huron. He seemed surprised by the reaction. “Well, I understand she hacked the hell out of that boat’s systems—had the environmentals doing a jig.”
Elkins shook his head, confused. “Who are we talking about?”
“Midshipman Kennakris,” Huron answered.
“The one . . . the one who briefed us on . . .” Elkins stopped, the tips of his ears starting to show pink. “I wasn’t aware . . .”
“Most aren’t,” Huron said, wondering how Quennell found out. Before he could say anything else the door opened and admitted the briefer herself. Stepping into the room, Kris saw the occupants looking at her in a way that made her distinctly uncomfortable. Huron forced a smile.
“Take a seat, Midshipman. We have a couple of questions.”
“Yes, sir,” she replied cautiously, sliding into the chair at the foot of the table. “Oh—here’s the report, sir.” She put the sheaf of hardcopy on the table and pushed it towards him. The charts obediently reshuffled themselves so as not to be obscured.
“Thanks,” Huron said, picking it up and sliding it into a folder without looking at it. “Mr. Quennell, would you briefly explain the problem?”
Brevity was not one of Quennell’s strong points. Kris listened as he began his discourse on cove-com and scanning tech, link equations and probabilities. Finally, swallowing her dismay that they were seriously considering this scheme at all, she interrupted.
“I’m sorry, but why don’t you just tag her?”
Quennell looked blank. “Do what?”
Kris scanned the faces around the table. Elkins seemed to be even more clueless than Quennell, but Yu and Huron were suddenly alert. “She’s pretty enough—tag her. There wouldn’t be anything weird about it. I mean if a chip is supposed to be there, then a scan finding it doesn’t matter . . . does it?”
“I’m not sure we quite follow, Ms. Kennakris,” Huron explained. “Some people get tagged?”
“Yeah,” Kris answered, oddly disconcerted they didn’t know. “You haven’t run into this?”
“Not that I know of.” He was tapping his xel. “These tags—they’re tracking devices?”
“Uh huh.” Kris took a breath. “I’ve heard they do other . . . stuff—too.”
“And who gets them?”
“Top-tier girls . . . you know—the special ones.” She didn’t want to use the term captain’s bitch in this company. Huron understood.
Quennell was looking intently at her. “How big are these tags? They’re O-chips, right?”
“Yeah. They’re about like this.” Kris held her hand up, thumb and forefinger a few millimeters apart.
“That large?”
“Yeah,” she answered, vaguely defensive—what was weird about that? They knew slavers didn’t use new-gen technology.
“Well, that’s huge!” Quennell threw his hands in the air, happy for the first time that day. “We can do anything with that! Even if they scan the chip itself, we can easily disguise our circuits. They’d have to know almost exactly what to look for to detect them.” He smiled at the table in general, then came back to Kris. “So where do they put these things?”
“Umm . . .” Kris tapped her cheek. “This is the most common place.”
“Nice and simple,” Quennell said happily.
Huron, watching Kris, twitched the left side of his mouth.
“But,” she continued slowly, “if the owner is a real bastard—excuse me, sir—he’ll do a labial tag.” That wiped the smile off Quennell’s face. “It means . . . They think it’s funny.”
Kris couldn’t tell what Quennell was thinking, but Elkins just seemed even more embarrassed. Kris wondered if he’d somehow gotten the wrong idea about what covert ops might entail. Only Huron seemed to have followed her thought. Shifting in his chair he said, “So if a girl shows up with a labial tag, they’re unlikely to be suspicious.”
Kris nodded. “They do worry about CFCs—I mean, plants—being run past them.” She dropped her eyes at the slip of the tongue: CFC was slaver shorthand for counterfeit cunt, but she hoped they didn’t know that. “But—yeah . . . a low-chipped girl with a clean bill of sale, there’s almost no chance they’d suspect that.”
Huron settled slowly back, looking satisfied, but Quennell had just discovered the fly in his ointment. “So . . . if we didn’t know about these things, where are we gonna get one to copy?” He eyed Kris. She didn’t think he was leering, but the glare she gave him made sure. Then she looked down the table at Huron, who was watching her impassively.
“Kym has one.”
* * *
“Damn, will you look at this thing?” Quennell had the schematic of the organic nanochip they’d recovered from Kym up on his console and Huron was looking at it. He just had no idea what he was seeing. “Looks like Kennakris was right about these things being more than just tracking devices. We never recovered one before?”
“I searched the database,” Huron said. “Looks like a few have been found, years ago. Nothing recent, and the ones we found weren’t elaborate.”
“Maybe this is the super-deluxe model.” He circled part of the schematic with his stylus. “Lookie here—know what this is?” The question was clearly rhetorical and Huron didn’t bother to respond. “Nanocyte reservoir. Seeded with a couple of paralytics—not lethal, as near as I can tell, but one of them . . .” He shook his head. “Major neurotransmitter tweak. Can’t imagine how that would feel.” Huron, trying not to, felt a tightness in his gut. “Programmable—can set it to perimeter, distance, environmental . . . even biometrics.”
“Biometrics?”
“Yeah—in case they get frisky with the staff, I guess.”
Huron muttered something harsh under his breath.
“Over here, we have the logs.” Quennell brought them up and started scrolling. “See? Transponder queries, tracking, arming logs, activation logs . . . looks like she was a good girl.” Huron shot him a look but then saw the sarcasm that twisted Quennell’s expression. “Sales and transfers—only the two owners—health records . . . she had the flu when they picked her up—hmm, must’ve uploaded that later. Oh, they built in a contraceptive implant. How thoughtful.”
Damn, Huron thought. They’d have to check Vasquez for that too. What else hadn’t they thought of yet? He blew out a breath and shook his head.
“ . . . the works. Pretty good security too—especially for the arming system. It’s code-locked and uses biometrics. Guess it would really suck if somebody hacked your girl.”
Huron did not mistake his tone this time. “Is that why it wasn’t triggered when we got her?”
“Probably. Maybe the owner got dead before he could arm it.”
“So there’s no dead-man switch on this thing?”
“Dunno—haven’t been through the menus that far.”
“Yeah.” Huron was glad when Quennell blanked the display. “So you can copy it?”
“Oh hell yes—the technology’s at least three generations back. Have to have the foundry rough it up a bit, just in case they do scan it. And we’ll have plenty of room for our special features too.”
“Have to create all the logs, don’t we?”
“Do these guys keep a central database or something? If not, that shouldn’t be too hard. If so, we’re gonna have to get creative.”
“We’re looking into that
.”
“Beyond that, I don’t see any issues. Take a few days.” Quennell looked over at Huron and leaned back in his chair, fingers laced. “But y’know . . . I thought I’d seen some fucked-up shit in this job. But this . . .” He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t need to.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Lunar 1, Tycho Prime
Luna, Sol
Quennell had sandbagged his estimate. Within forty-eight hours, the new organochip was delivered, tested, approved and fitted. Its reservoirs contained stimulants, painkillers, and lethal nanocytes that guaranteed a painless check-out and a sanitized corpse, if it came to that. The special features were tongue switch, blink switch, and biometrically triggered, and there was a low-power UWB symbol-based neural transponder with a voice circuit for dire emergencies.
Vasquez embarked on a stealth corvette bound for Outremeria, there to intercept a slaver packet on its way to Rephidim with Mankho’s latest purchases. (Trolling the dark clouds had panned out, at least in this regard: Trin’s bots had cracked a bundle of VPNs slavers used to make their logistical arrangements.) Where Trin had obtained the stealth corvette’s crew, those who were aware she’d hired them had the sense not to ask. All that mattered was that they were fully equipped to deal with the slavers on the packet, and by the time they arrived to make delivery, they’d be able to impersonate them down to their accents and favorite foods.
Thirty-six hours later, CAT 5 was loading their gear into another corvette whose stealthy character was of an entirely different nature. She was the League Hired Craft Flechette, and by a sudden twist, her owner was also preparing to board. Kris had made up her mind shortly after arriving at Luna that she did indeed want to purchase the yar little boat, if that was possible. It was, though at the last minute, the Admiralty adjustors balked at selling it to her for scrap value. That would have killed the deal, but for the fact that CAT 5 discovered the need for a fast, unattributable and readily available means of transport.
Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks Page 40