As if summoned, the hyperwave lit up with Noelle’s code and a message scrolled across the screen: LOCKING NOW. WILL HAVE VOICE IN 2. STAND BY PLEASE. Her mental slip very much on her mind, Hazen Gautier typed her acknowledgement with care. The hyperwave beeped and displayed a ream a headers, then the Circuit Active indicator lit.
“Hello, Madam Speaker,” came Noelle’s voice, stripped of all tone and most inflection by the link.
“Good morning, Noelle,” she replied, enunciating precisely. “How are you?”
“Quite fine. What can I do for you, ma’am?”
Hyperwaves were not well suited to idle pleasantries and chitchat, so the Speaker relayed the essentials of her conversation with the Halith ambassador, without any elaboration, then asked, “Are we doing anything, Noelle?”
“Not that I’m aware, ma’am, besides perhaps that Rephidim business.”
“That’s only exploratory. We haven’t approved anything yet. It has scarcely been discussed.”
“Reconnaissance was approved, ma’am.”
“Approved, yes. But not begun. The assets are still being assembled. They won’t be ready for at least another week.”
“Quite true, ma’am.”
“And Halith has no interests in the Outworlds Border Zone. Surely they could not object to our conducting reconnaissance there. We are well within our rights to patrol that region as we choose.”
“Yes, ma’am. Though they might have an interest in the subject himself.”
“Do you think it’s possible they would have learned of the subject?”
“I’d be very concerned if they did, ma’am. Such a situation would need to be—dealt with.”
“I agree.” A pause while Speaker Gautier considered that most unwelcome prospect. She found it did not bear thinking on and retreated to her first suspicion. “Then you don’t think the admiral might be engaged in something?”
“Admiral Westover, ma’am? Do you mean an off-the-books operation?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“I shouldn’t think so. Admiral Westover isn’t much a risk taker.”
“No?”
“He’s very astute, ma’am, and administratively quite excellent. But he owes his position to his relationship with Jasmine Kasena. He’s not really what they call a fighting admiral. The former Speaker retained him because he runs a taut ship, as they say, and he’s not a loose cannon. The former Speaker did not tolerate loose cannons.”
Because he was one, the Speaker thought to herself.
“I’d be more concerned about Admiral PrenTalien, but he doesn’t have the authority and if he tried to start something big enough to be of concern, I’m sure we’d hear about it.”
“Is it your feeling that the ambassador is just bluffing then?”
“Perhaps, although the ultimatum is of great concern to them. There are people listed in it that I’m sure they would very much like to see removed.”
“Such as?”
“I believe Korliss Hellman would be one such.”
She recalled the name, but not the specific connection. There was no need to ask, however—she would look this person up later.
“So a fishing expedition then. To see who we might give up?”
“More of a probe, ma’am, I believe. To gauge our reaction.”
“Indeed.” That did make a lot of sense. “Then we need to encourage him to lay his cards out.”
“Just so, ma’am.”
“Thank you, Noelle. This has been most helpful.”
“My pleasure, Madam Speaker. Will there be anything else?”
“No. I think not presently.”
“Then good evening, ma’am.”
“Take care, Noelle.”
She waited until Noelle signed off, ended the session, cleared the channel, and shut down the hyperwave.
Yes, it all made a good deal of sense. Send out a probe—gauge a response. She had been too open and conciliatory in her initial approaches, that was clear. Her efforts had not encouraged a like openness. But it had conveyed a certain impression; that could be useful. Time to send some probes of her own. Of course, in sending a probe, the platform was nine-tenths of the issue. Without a proper platform, nothing could be accomplished—things might even backfire.
The Bannerman ambassador would make a quite good platform, she thought. He and the Halith ambassador certainly corresponded, and not just about what was in their official ambit. Indeed not. She could certainly feed the Bannerman ambassador something that would pique his Halith friend’s interest. Something that would get him to show at least part of his hand.
And she would play hers very close.
Yes, she felt much better now. Yes, she could handle this.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Miss Goodnight, in orbit
Rephidim, Outworld’s Border Zone
Events, entangled with causal chains, whose links were made of many human foibles and most human vices, continued to unfold across distances that had reached cosmic proportions.
At Rephidim, in orbit about its yellow dwarf primary that had not the dignity of a name, only a mere catalog descriptor (Gamma Hydras LXIX-EZ1), Nestor Mankho’s factor was arguing with the master of the slaver packet, Miss Goodnight. He began by informing the master he was late.
Sixteen hours, the master retorted. BFD. Did the factor think he was the fuck’n post? Besides one of the cargo managed to choke herself to death on the way out—swallowed her fuck’n tongue!
The factor upbraided him for careless handling and received a rude response.
Any gate, the master went on, they picked up a replacement at Outremeria. Sweet deal. That’s why they were late—lost a day. Got some back. Did the factor wanna see the body?
Which body, the factor wanted to know.
“The dead one, asshole,” the master snapped.
He did. The master conducted him to the bilges and unsealed a body bag. Inside was a young woman, gray and rigid with a specially mixed dose of tetraodontoxins. The factor checked her with his outdated med scanner. Yep, dead. About a week. He wrinkled his heavily studded nose. Lucky they had a body bag.
“Want salvage?” the master asked.
“How much?”
“Twenty percent of purchase.”
“That’s fuck’n outrageous!”
“You gotta thing for dead chicks, you can pay a fuck’n premium.”
The factor told the master what he could do with his premium.
The master told the factor to go fuck an engine port. Then, adopting a more conciliatory mien, he led the factor back up the ladder.
“Wait till ya see what we got in her place. Prime. Worth two—three times asking. Ya lucked out.” On reaching the holding deck, he whistled. His men brought out a short shivering cowering naked girl, terror writ large in her beautiful dark eyes. “See?”
The factor saw, and more than his cupidity spiked. The girl wasn’t just prime, she was a treasure. The very thing his boss adored. The master was under with his three-over assessment. So taken was he, the factor hardly examined at the chip the master handed him with the girl’s bill of sale, grading certificate, ownership history and health records.
“I’ll give her to ya for just . . . one up.”
“Double? That weren’t the deal.”
“Then take the salvage and hit air.”
The factor gnawed the end of his braided beard. The girl was easily worth three times what they agreed for the dead one. He took another look at the replacement’s records. Copasetic—chipped too. The boss would like that.
“Okay. We’ll take.”
“All good then?” asked the master.
“Good,” the factor agreed, eyeing the new acquisition and weighing whether he could get away with a test drive on the trip down.
The master was shaking a lading chip at him. “Sign.”
The factor signed.
“Load ‘em up!” the master yelled. His men started herding the other two doz
en slaves—some wondering what fate-worse-than-death one of their number had met with—into the boats that would transport them to the cargo lighter loitering in a 96-minute parking orbit just below.
“Hey?” he addressed the factor as the latter turned to accompany his shipment. “You want the salvage or what?”
The factor shook his head.
“Fine. Gonna dump her when we break orbit. Make a pretty show. If you’re lucky, you might catch it.”
The factor laughed, took Vasquez by the hand, and led her into the second boat.
* * *
At the same moment, five hundred light-years away, nine former slaver crew regained consciousness, dazed and confused, in the hold of a tender bearing ‘guest labor’ to a prison moon in the Halith colony system of Qokand. The security forces on Qokand V-b (the moon had not a name either) had been without fresh recreation for quite some time. The nine slavers—dazed and confused not just because of their surroundings, but because they were now mute and their bodies were undergoing a startling transformation—had been placed in that part of the shipment set aside to provide this recreation.
The transformation might not be quite complete by the time the tender delivered its cargo in a little over three weeks. Not that the men of the security forces would notice. Or care, if they did.
* * *
Still farther away—almost four times farther, in fact—the Speaker fiddled while the opposition burned. The previous day, when the randomly selected girl who would soon wake up in LSS Kestrel’s sickbay, confused but free, was being rendered a temporary corpse, the Bannerman Ambassador informed Speaker Gauthier of his government’s initial response. It was terse. The Ambassador was not.
The burden of the message was that while his government was most cognizant of the serious nature of the demands, there were difficulties that may be insuperable within the allotted time. Was some flexibility still possible? As a gesture of good faith, his government would have no objection to a fact-finding expedition to Lacaille to recover whatever might be helpful (an almost meaningless concession at this stage). More to the point, he had a list of names. Here, he produced the list.
A short list. Prominent on it was the name Clancy Rollins, formerly Security Director at Eelusis Cosmodrome, outside Nemeton on Nedaema, and wanted for questioning in the matter of the Alecto Initiative. The notation to the right of the name read Deceased.
“Almost certainly,” the Ambassador emended.
A much more interesting name was Korliss Hellman, a prominent Bannerman financier known to do ‘unofficial diplomacy’ on behalf of Halith, who had set up a bank to help slavers handle their business. Nestor Mankho had been a client. (His partner in this endeavor was a semi-retired official from the Andaman finance ministry, Orlando Kagan-Lazar, who’d arranged for the bank to be formed under the seal of the Sultan’s government. His name, regrettably, could not be part of the ultimatum.)
Next to Hellman’s name was the word Accredited. This raised even the speaker’s distinctly arched eyebrows. The ambassador spread his hands with a pained smile.
“The gentleman has been accredited by the Halith government.” He then produced a credential, showing that the Dominion of Halith had indeed seen fit to enroll the Honorable Korliss Hellman as a special envoy, and grant him full diplomatic immunity. The instruments allowing for this were attached. “Obviously, we are powerless.” He extended the documents.
The Speaker did not bother to even glance at them. “Obviously.”
Speaker Gauthier leaned back in her leather upholstered chair, regarded her magnificent hand-carved desk, and thought of probes and fig leaves. The Bannerman ambassador took his leave ten minutes later.
The next day, the Halith Ambassador announced that he was returning to Halith Evandor by order of his government for urgent consultations. He regretted that the subject matter could not be revealed. The Speaker regretted his hasty departure. Neither he nor Speaker Gautier mentioned the ultimatum by name. The remainder of the interview did not last five minutes.
Late that evening, a priority call from DCID informed her that unusual activity had been detected on the Halith Supreme Staff’s Morganatic nets—their ultra-secured command channels.
Early the next morning, she was awakened by another call, this one from the Director of ONI, with the news that the Halith Imperial Navy had dispatched the elite Prince Vorland Fleet to Janin Station in Tau Verde, which covered Halith’s end of the Novaya Zemlya transit. The Kerberos Fleet, commonly regarded as the bastard stepchild of the Imperial Navy and formerly homeported at Janin, had been recalled.
Hazen Gauthier thanked the Director in a soft strained voice, hung up the connection, and then sat unmoving in her nightgown until the rising sun began to warm the Carrara marble facing stones on the east side of her residence, and her maid rang to ask if she’d rather have coffee or tea with her breakfast.
Chapter Thirty-Three
LSS Kestrel w/ LHC Flechette in company
exiting the Tarsus Gates, Outworld’s Border Zone
LSS Kestrel dropped into real space-time three light-hours away from Rephidim’s primary with LHC Flechette bundled in tight. As the pent-up translation energy bled off in a violent storm of neutrinos, the statis field binding the two ships dissolved and their keels unlocked as their grav plants went into standby mode. Despite the gravitic baffles that directed much of Kestrel’s translation energy into deep space, the maneuver may not have answered in a heavily patrolled and monitored system, like Tau Verde or Sol, but Rephidim had no sensors even close to that good. All they would see, if anyone bothered to look, was a slightly more vigorous than normal corvette coming in-system.
They also might note that the corvette was a little tubby, as corvettes went, but not enough to excite comment. Slavers frequently modified corvettes with bigger drives and larger holds, sometimes building them up almost to the mass of a trans-atmospheric freighter. Flechette’s increased mass was due to having one of Kestrel’s assault shuttles clamped on, covered by a belly skin in case Rephidim OTC (or anyone else on the planet) had a decent imaging radar. The intel data said no one did, but there was no point in betting your life on that—this op offered plenty of opportunities for betting your life in other ways.
Kestrel parted company to take station in the parking orbit her astrogation section had worked out around one of the nearby gas giants, while Flechette breezed along. It would take about one day cycle to make orbit, and her flight crew for this part of the trip had been lent to her by Kestrel, so Warrant Officer Wojakowski and Sergeant Donnerkill could man the shuttle. That meant a total of sixteen people onboard, checking their gear and doing their best to stay off each other’s toes.
At five hours from orbit, they would make their number and state their intention: take on stores in exchange for some cargo they were carrying, doing an on-orbit swap—all perfectly unremarkable. They had a list with the names of likely vendors and would send out for bids when they settled into a comfortable 105-minute orbit. Adding a few hard-to-get items to the bid list would delay any replies for up to a day and that, along with the usual dickering, would buy them plenty of time—several days at least.
They needed that time for two reasons. First, CAT 5 would drop in about a hundred kilometers from Mankho’s compound, to avoid any surveillance, and it would take two days to cover the distance on foot. Second, they needed Mankho to get warmed up and engaged in one of his ‘productions’, or other event they could take advantage of, and that was expected to take a day or two. By the time they made orbit, Vasquez would be arriving downside at his compound, which would start that clock. The team would deploy from the corvette over the northern pole, where the coverage of the planetary orbital tracking sensors was poor, and Rephidim’s unusually active ionosphere gave some extra cover.
All this was carefully explained to Kris, and made perfect sense. It was the deploying part the whole explanation was kind of light on. You just didn’t step out of a corvette a hundred-fifty k
licks up . . . did you?
She was about to raise this minor issue when Huron told her, with a look of detached unconcern: “Kris, this insertion business can get a little hairy, so you’ll drop tethered to me.”
Oh, that sounds just great, Kris thought. “How the hell does this work anyway?” There were few events more conspicuous than a solid body hitting atmosphere at several kilometers per second; a rock the size of her fist could light up most of a hemisphere.
“Nanobot reentry shield,” he replied with a grin. “It takes the reentry energy and uses it to make more bots, which increases drag and slows you down. Acts as a phase-conjugate mirror against energy weapons—low-grade but better than nothing—and a background-matching transponder or a blackbody against sensor freqs. Damn clever engineering. Works pretty well unless they’ve got prime UWB equipment, in which case things get more interesting.”
But Kris was stuck on the first part. At the amounts of kinetic energy they were talking about that was a lot of nanobots. “But how’s it work? Sure you got lots of energy, but what d’ya use for the structure? You can’t just make stuff outta air.”
“You might be surprised about that. But the seeding material’s in the reentry pack. It’s furled silicon-laced graphene.”
“You make a shield outta graphene and air? How’s that hold together hitting atmo at five klicks a second?”
“Closer to six.”
“Whatever. This stuff is gonna keep us from burning up? What’s the silicone do? Is it silicene? Do the bots spin off nanofibers or something?”
“For god’s sake, Kris,” Huron cut her off, laughing. “Do I look like an engineer to you?”
Kris swallowed her other questions, displeased with the aftertaste. “How big do these things get?”
“It all depends—a klick or two across maybe.”
Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks Page 43