Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks

by Owen R. O'Neill

  “Almost no chance of seeing them in this water,” Yu commented, noticing Kris looking at him.

  “But how will we get across?” she whispered. She didn’t welcome the thought of stripping down and getting into that frigid-looking water—even if she could swim, which she couldn’t, Parson’s Acre being emphatically unsuited to the practice. This probably wasn’t quite the right time to bring that up. Maybe she could hold onto something . . .

  “We walk the bottom on a line,” Yu said with a grin. “I just hope this goddamn armor don’t leak too bad.”

  * * *

  It didn’t—as long as the definition of too bad did not include water filling the armor up to the knees. They slogged along, with Fireteam Charlie flanked out and Cates on point, heading for a patch of rocky ground eight kilometers south of the compound. The going was slower now as they followed a more circuitous path, keeping to areas where their armor’s camouflage would be most effective. Reaching their destination two hours before midnight, they established a perimeter and Fireteam Charlie took the first watch. They all laid out their full-spectrum camo-shelters and Burdette set up an array of passive sensors. Then she took out her xel and waited for the first update from Vasquez. It came in, right on schedule. Burdette ran a series of checks against the data and nodded, satisfied.

  “Report?” Yu asked, as Huron and Gunnery Sergeant Lopez joined them.

  “We got a good set of vertices for what she’s seen so far, but that’s only the garaging area and some of a subfloor. Looks like they’ve got her with the others in a holding area.”

  “Any sign of the proprietor?”

  “Not yet. She’s signaling all quiet.”

  Kris, lying a few meters away and listening to interchange, felt anything but quiet.

  Kris was awakened all too shortly afterwards by the sound of Huron’s boots crunching through the thin crust of the cold dry soil. As she opened her eyes, he lifted the edge of her camouflage canopy and said in a low voice, “They’re reporting activity downtown. Might be the proprietor—need you to take a look.”

  “Yeah. A’right.” Her eyes weren’t fully focused and she blinked rapidly to clear them. Through the canopy’s fabric, transparent from the inside, the star-pocked sky at last came into being, with both moons overhead, showing a rusty amber. Drawing her helmet close, she checked the chrono; barely past midnight—another seven hours until first light.

  She’d fallen asleep in her armor (they were all sleeping in their armor this close to Mankho’s compound), so all that was needed was to roll out and strike the shelter. Taking a quick drink from a canteen, she cleared the stickiness out of her mouth as Gunnery Sergeant Lopez came over and settled next to Huron.

  “Toni will take you there,” he said. “Benn and Rachel are out on the line. Good hunting.”

  “Ready, ma’am?” the sergeant asked quietly in her sweetly accented Antiguan voice.

  “Yes.” Picking up her rifle, Kris rolled into a crouch.

  Tapping her shoulder, Lopez pointed. “Around this way then. Keep your head down.”

  Together they moved off, staying low to the ground for the first hundred meters, and then turning north and setting off at an easy jog for Mankho’s compound, just eight klicks away.

  * * *

  Squirming up to the top of a ridge thick with half-meter tufts of dark gray-green native vegetation, dull black in the dim ruddy moonlight, Kris carefully parted the stalks with the barrel of her assault rifle and zoomed the scope to max. The residence was three kilometers away across the barren ground in front of her, and she zeroed in on the big lit second-story window. Early AM was a popular time with Mankho: sometimes for a little ‘light fun’ or maybe just to pace when he got nervy, which seemed to be often. She knew that big space on the second floor—he called it his ‘rec-room’ and held his less private entertainments there. It had stairwells in each of the back corners and a spiral staircase up to a mezzanine level that wrapped around three sides; when last she saw it, he’d installed couches for spectators, and less comfortable, but more inventive, arrangements for participants. None of which were visible from this vantage point.

  She could make out that the furnishings had changed in the last two years, and big new consoles had replaced the pornographic wall decorations. There was a bar at the back that she’d didn’t recall, with a large screen over it. At least, she thought it was a screen. Other possibilities occurred to her, one involving ‘goldfish’, which she didn’t want to think about. Whatever it was, it was blank now and the room was empty. In fact, she didn’t see any signs of life in the compound at all. But the lights were on, so somebody must’ve been in there very recently. She scrunched deeper into the foliage.

  Her patience was rewarded a few minutes later when two men entered from the left side of her view. One was dressed in loose trousers and the other in nothing at all, and both of them were dead ringers for Mankho. Neither was, of course: the trousered one slouched and the naked one held his right hand to his face when he spoke, stroking line from his nose to the left corner of his mouth. With no need to perform, they weren’t making any effort to ape the boss. But they did seem to be conversing animatedly as they crossed the space to the bar. The naked man kept talking while the other rummaged behind it. From the way the talker was now waving one hand, Kris didn’t think they were merely exercising their prerogatives as Mankho’s doubles (assuming they had any), to grab a late-night drink.

  As she watched, both men stiffened suddenly and the rummager glared to his right, hand frozen deep in a niche as a third Mankho walked in. This one was fully dressed and his back was three-quarters to her. Was it him? She crawled forward half a meter but the other two relaxed perceptibly. Not the genuine article either, then—no one relaxed like that at the sight of Mankho. The newcomer went up to the other two, and appeared to deliver a message. As he turned sideways in her field of view, Kris was able to confirm her hasty judgment: three fakes and no proprietor.

  Goddammit.

  “Ma’am?” The quiet voice of Sergeant Lopez and a tap on her boot made Kris’s heart jump. She twisted around to the sergeant, just below her on the downslope. “Not wise to expose yourself that much.”

  Kris slid backwards off the ridge. “I was just tryin’ to get a better read,” she whispered.

  “Roger that. But be careful. Understand?”

  Face hot, Kris nodded.

  “Post on up then.”

  Shifting back into position, Kris saw the three men finish their discussion and go their separate ways. The lights died. She gave Lopez a thumbs down. Lopez checked in with Gergen and Cates: nothing from their vantage either. They decided they’d wait the watch out.

  The two moons were twelve degrees lower in the sky when Kris heard Lopez pinging Cates and Gergen for an update. They reported no activity in the residence, no extra power drains, no comms. Lopez tapped Kris’s boot again and motioned her off the ridge.

  “No joy, ma’am. I think we’re done here for tonight.”

  The waiting had been bearing down on Kris to the point where she’d had to make a conscious effort to breathe. Now the crushing feeling eased with a deep shuddering breath. Afraid of coughing, she signed Okay.

  “Then head on back, but not the way we came. Take a loop around that big rock pile to the east and follow the gully from there. Roger?”

  “Yes, ma’am”—finding her voice and adding the contra-protocol ma’am unconsciously.

  Lopez took no notice. “Alright. Get going. I’ll cover you.”

  Herd might have been more accurate, at least as Kris saw it, but they got back in good time, and when they arrived, she felt a pang at finding the team awake and in cover positions. At first, she thought it was an alert they weren’t telling her about, but on seeing Gergen and Cates appear wraithlike from the darkness and noting Perez and Argento were missing, she realized it was just Charlie coming in as Alpha took the dawn watch.

  Lopez saw her back to her shelter where Kris safed the
rifle. Then she left, with a nod to Huron who came over and knelt beside Kris as she removed her helmet. There was just enough light to allow her dark-adapted eyes to discern his hooded expression, but not what lay behind it.

  “Anything to report?” His murmur was a touch gravelly and she didn’t think it was because he’d been sleeping. Everyone was tense—she could feel it.

  “Three doubles”—keeping her voice to a whisper. “Proprietor himself was a no-show.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Nosir.” The meeting of the three doubles could mean anything—or nothing—and she couldn’t think how to explain it anyway. In fact, she couldn’t think.

  Huron gazed off to the west, where the primary would be rising in a few hours and shifted as if to leave.

  “Uh—sir?”

  “What is it?”

  “We hear anything? This end, I mean?”

  Huron’s eyes flicked back to her. “Vasquez checked in. Overheard enough to think there’s something planned for later this AM. Could be a production.”

  “Has she been—um—introduced yet?”

  The corner of Huron’s mouth twitched down. “Not sure. Someone just gave her a bit of a going-over. Pretty light, she thought—didn’t quite fit the proprietor’s MO.”

  “Oh.” Was that what the fake Mankhos had been talking about?

  He rose from his crouch. “It’s four hours till we move out, Kris. Get comfortable and get some rest.”

  Unsealing the torso unit of her armor, she pulled it off. Get comfortable? Not fuckin’ likely. Her guts were twisting like a bucket of eels.

  She swallowed hard. “Yessir.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  near Nestor Mankho’s Compound

  Rephidim, Outworld’s Border Zone

  Chained spread-eagle to a huge ornate bed, hung about with diaphanous silk curtains, she stared at her refection in the mirrored canopy overhead. She was dressed in a catsuit of black Antiguan glove leather and matching calf boots with iridium fittings. The suit had strategically placed zippers, all gaping opening, and the gold chains at wrist and ankle clashed horribly with the outfit’s silver-white buckles. Mankho sat on edge of the bed, dining on imported seafood from heavily incised gilt platters and feeding her bites now and then, while he talked about his art collection. It floating about them, not decently hung as paintings should be, but twisting slowly in midair as the images in the heavy knurled frames slid from one grotesque scene to another.

  “Pay particular attention to this one,” he was saying in an oily murmur, gesturing at the nearest painting with his wineglass as his fingernail traced a neat line on the thin supple leather across her lower belly to the crease between her upper thigh and groin. “We start the incision here and then move in towards the bone—”

  Lurching awake, Kris put a hand out blindly to brush aside the camouflage canopy above her. As she touched it, the boundary between nightmare and reality resolved. It was just after daybreak. Rephidim’s senile primary had barely nicked the horizon and was casting its first thin bloody light across the top of the rise behind them and over the high ground to the south.

  The taste of blood filled in her mouth too; she rolled on her side and spat into the dirt. The hollow was still full of purplish shadows, pooling beneath the boulders, and the dawn air prickled on the back of her neck where beads of cold sweat ran down her spine underneath her tank top.

  Shaking in the grip of the fading vision, she searched the camp for what might have awakened her. It took a moment to discern Huron and the others in the gloom among the rocks. Huron saw her sitting up, and came over stooped low. Everyone already had their gear on.

  “Whazzup?” The word struggled out through the phlegm in her throat. Hawking to clear it, she spat again.

  “Boots and saddles, Kris. Looks like we’ve got an open engagement online.”

  “Okay.” She shrugged on her combat armor’s torso unit, which she’d been using for a pillow, and slid out from under the canopy. “Did Vasquez call in again? Are we on?”

  “No, but they’re prepping for something over there. Tiernan and Cates ID’d a spot three klicks west of the compound to lay up and see what develops. We’ll know more when we get there.”

  For Tiernan and Cates to scout a spot that far away, they must’ve left near an hour ago. He’d been letting her sleep. She broke open a ration bar and nibbled. “Ya lemme sleep. Didn’t need to do that.”

  “You had a busy night. Be ready in five.”

  Before she could do more than move her head in reply, he was gone.

  * * *

  Their new staging area was a sheltered depression, thick with those squat native trees, behind a modest rise, flanked by an escarpment that offered an excellent prospect of the surrounding area. So excellent, in fact, that Yu declined to occupy it, as being the most obvious place for an adversary to keep watch on. Beyond the rise in front of them was a kilometer of broken ground, split by a ravine, and then sloping up to another one of the many ridges that corrugated the local terrain. Beyond that was the two klicks of the barren flat earth that surrounded the compound.

  Cates and Tiernan lay concealed along that ridge, keeping the compound under surveillance, with Lopez covering them and Gergen on watch, while back in the trees, Yu, Burdette, Perez and Huron were kneeling around a patch of smoothed dirt, on which they were projecting various diagrams and discussing the final details of their approach. Burdette had located the compound’s Achilles’ heel: a utility bunker on a subfloor of the main garage that was directly beneath the outer wall. Whoever the architect was, he must have thought burying the bunker like that made it safe, not realizing a sapper charge could be shot through a meter and a half of anything softer than granite, and the surrounding earth would provide an excellent tamp. With no more than a dull thump, they could breach the bunker, and once inside they’d control the compound’s power and have access to the main garage. Vasquez had reported seeing three low-orbit capable cargo lighters in there, and there were two stairwells and one elevator leading directly up to the residence.

  Once the mole, sitting there assembled and waiting, got them under the fence, that would get them in, but what happened next depended on whether Vasquez already had the package wrapped or if they had to go get him, exactly where the corvette was, what the opposition was up to and what they needed to do about it. Watkins had been especially happy to learn about the elevator. They were easy to hotwire and could then be used to deliver stun grenades, gas cartridges, or any number of other nasty surprises to one or several floors. But all that mattered to Kris was whether they were going to take her along.

  That was clearly not the preferred option, but there was no guarantee Mankho would be cooperative enough to make an appearance at a convenient window, at least on a schedule Yu was happy with. Burdette had a flock of optical dragonflies out, loitering as close to the compound as was safe, with low-power line-of-sight masers linking the video back to Cates, who relayed it back to Burdette over a UWB burst link. If one of the Mankhos appeared, they’d ask Kris for an ID. It wasn’t as good as putting eyeballs on target, but Kris obviously couldn’t be everywhere at once and she had a feeling they were reluctant to let her out of their sight.

  In the meantime, she had nothing to do but sit by herself and wait. How long was the question. Yu preferred to have the corvette in position to provide support—Wojakowski and Donnerkill were up there with the assault shuttle in 5-minute ready mode—and the ideal time for that was forty-five minutes from now. Cutting the power, hijacking a lorry, and blasting your way out of the garage, leaving behind a nicely timed EMP charge to roast all the compound’s electronics as you boosted clear, was all well and good, but it was not to be compared with the comfort of having a shuttle inbound that could lay down suppressing fire on undesirables.

  On the other hand, their latest info put the number of undesirables at between sixty and eighty, a manageable number, so that comfort was not essential. What was essential, o
f course, was getting a line on Mankho, and Vasquez had sent no more than a hold status update half an hour ago, meaning there was nothing new to report. She was still in a subspace below the main residence, which Kris, when asked, opined was a little unusual. Mankho liked to keep his new girls handy, unless maybe he had other business.

  Other business. Kris knew about the failure of the Lacaille raid and she also knew—better than anyone—that what had beaten Mankho on Nedaema was really just dumb luck. Whatever else she was feeling that AM besides twitchy and nauseated, it sure as hell wasn’t lucky. She glanced over at Gergen, posted maybe fifty meters upslope and still almost impossible to see unless you knew what to look for, and barely caught Burdette saying, “. . . got a situation here.”

  A short conference ensued. Gergen rose to a crouch and took off northeast with his SAW. Perez went off with Fireteam Alpha a moment later.

  Fuck. I knew it.

  Kris dug her boot heel viciously into the dirt. The op had blown on them.

  Fuck’n knew it.

  Yu, Huron, and Burdette had their heads down, intent on some new data that was streaming in. She wondered if she dared get close enough to eavesdrop. A minute crawled by. Another minute. Then Huron looked across at Yu and asked, “What do you advise?”

  Yu was conferring with Burdette but Kris heard his answer clearly as he turned back: “We pull out.”

  Vision darkening with molten churning in her gut, she clamped her jaws shut in an effort not to scream. Going through all that shit—coming all this way—for nothing.

  Fuck that.

  * * *

  “I think we got a situation here,” Sergeant Burdette said, just loud enough for Kris to overhear the last four words, as an alert from one of her dragonflies lit up her xel.

  “What is it?” asked Sergeant Major Yu, in an unruffled voice.

  “I’m picking up signals to the northwest. Vehicles inbound.”