Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks

by Owen R. O'Neill

  She was profoundly unsettled anyway, unable to join in and unwilling to be the first to leave, and so was profoundly grateful when Huron shook hands with CAT 5 and then waved for Kris to fall in with him as he left.

  When they were alone in the passage and Kris felt she could breathe a little easier, she murmured, “I didn’t know it had words.”

  “Hmm?” Huron looked across at her. He didn’t seem to be angry with her anymore, and that made her uncomfortable. She was still angry at her . . . “The song—I didn’t know it had words,” Kris repeated, feeling strangely embarrassed.

  “You know that song?”

  The feeling of unease and embarrassment became more acute. Could he be making fun of her? Now? “Sure. We played it on Parson’s Acre all the time. At school—church . . . holidays. But we played it on bagpipes. No one ever sang.”

  That brought a hint of a smile to Huron’s features, the first she’d seen since they’d made the drop from the corvette together. “You like bagpipes?”

  “Yeah.” She ran a hand over her warm forehead. “What’s wrong with bagpipes?”

  “Not a thing. So they tell me.”

  Yeah, that was definitely a smile she was seeing. Goddamn him anyway.

  A party of rates coming the other way saluted and squeezed aside to let them pass. Kris watched them as they continued down the passage towards the forward bays.

  “Was I supposed to do somethin’?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Say somethin’—back there.”

  “No, Kris. They understand.”

  “They do? How d’ya know?”

  “They left you his pialla.”

  “The dinged cup?”

  “That’s right. It’s lucky.”

  “It is?”

  “Yep. Marko was a lucky guy.”

  “Uh—okay.”

  “Life goes on, Kris.”

  “Does it?”

  “For the time being.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  LSS Kestrel

  approaching the Cilician Gates, Outworld’s Border Zone

  At the chime sounding the beginning of the first dog watch, Kris entered Kestrel’s gunroom, prompt to the minute and still attired in her dress blues. Kestrel was a bit lax about mess dress, as were many frigates, and fatigues were not an uncommon sight there, something that would rarely be countenanced on a destroyer, and never on a cruiser or any other major capital ship. But today was special; the mess steward had pulled out all the stops in honor of Marko, and she knew her presence was particularly expected.

  Had it not been, she would have been tempted to dine in her berth, but CAT 5 had made it clear she was not excluded from their company, and repaying them by sulking alone when the invitation had been extended was inconceivable. She hadn’t needed Huron’s subtle hint to understand that, though under the circumstances, she didn’t blame him for making it either. So she took her place at the table and did her best to be convivial, succeeding to a competent degree.

  All the same, the excellent dinner did not sit well on her stomach, and she didn’t object when, having made it through dessert and endured the three obligatory toasts, Huron stood, offered his sincere thanks, and asked if she’d join him in CIC.

  On the way there he said next to nothing, but she detected something quietly churning below the placid surface, and as they approached the hatch to CIC, she concluded it was an uncommon degree of excitement, perhaps mixed with a touch of unease. Just what there was to be excited about she could not imagine, and as it happened, did not learn for some time. Instead, Huron made small talk with the watch officer, Lieutenant Ramses, and brought her acquainted with the events of the last twenty-four hours.

  First, he told her that Mankho’s compound, for all intents and purposes, was no more. Commander Yanazuka had interpreted her broadly worded orders to mean that if Mankho could not be captured, at least his facility should not be left behind as a viable base. She therefore destroyed the outer works, the IADS, and all of the main compound itself but the residence building, with surgically delivered strikes. To make doubly sure, she had preceded this with a bombardment of EMP charges sufficient to reduce to smoking slag anything electronic within a fifty-kilometer radius.

  By an unhappy chance—unhappy for those roaming about outside the compound after their firefight with CAT 5—the first EMP salvo was not in fact all EMP charges. As the log subsequently reported, a number of 8-inch close-ground-support anti-personnel rounds had been “accidentally expended,” and several hundred of Mankho’s supporters reported to their Maker. This was blamed on a miscommunication. Warrant Officer Wojakowski said he was sorry. He would “read more careful” in the future. Kestrel’s captain sternly admonished him that he should indeed do so.

  Next, a review of the data Kestrel had been able to glean regarding these supporters who had so unexpected arrived shed some light on their purpose there. Kestrel’s signals section had been able to decrypt their comms, both with Mankho and with as yet unidentified parties in Tirana, and these revealed that they’d been there for both a planning meeting and to start on a major upgrade of the compound’s defenses, including an improved IADS with better sensors. Other details were vague, but it was clear Mankho had been expecting something to happen and, based on a vicious argument over impending schedule delays, expecting it in about three to four weeks.

  To Huron, who alone knew the proposed versus actual schedule for the operation, this sounded like too much of a coincidence. He was now dead certain that Admiral Westover had called it, and that Trin, as usual, was right on the money.

  The final item had to wait until Kestrel’s TAO could join them. The wardroom dined later than the gunroom, and a dinner to honor a fallen comrade could not be rushed. They’d been reduced to small talk by the time Lieutenant Commander Caprelli appeared and greeted them, cordially but without undue warmth.

  “Can you bring up the plot from yesterday?” Huron inquired politely. “I’d like the midshipman to take a look at it.”

  “Of course,” Caprelli answered, sounding a touch chippy. “Over here, please”—directing them to the omnisynth. He tapped the controls and the holographic display volume flooded with data.

  Kris peered at the chaotic jumble. “Ah . . . what am I looking at, sir?”

  “A mess,” Huron answered succinctly. “This is what happened yesterday in response to our little visit. As you can see, Tirana went ape shit”—Kris caught Caprelli’s sour look at the profanity—“and Kiruna and Svaardo lit up too.” Those were Rephidim’s three starports. Kiruna, the smallest, was on the northern continent with Tirana. Svaardo, which was big enough to handle light trans-atmospheric freighters, was in the southern hemisphere. “Let me filter it for you.” He approached the omnisynth’s console. “May I, Commander?”

  “Of course.” Caprelli gave his head a jerky nod.

  Huron typed and the mess reduced to a spray of tendrils radiating from Mankho’s compound and spanning the globe. “There are vehicle tracks out of the compound. You can see from the ticks he didn’t waste any time getting the hell out of there.”

  “Mankho?” There were almost ten times as many tracks as Mankho had vehicles, Kris noted. What help was that? “Are you sure one of those is him?”

  “Well, there’s two schools of thought there.” Huron flashed out that half-smile of his. Caprelli was not amused. Huron tapped a key. “Here.” All but four of the traces vanished. “See? They launched a whole flock of decoys.”

  “Those were all decoys?” It seemed like an awful lot of drones to put in the air at once.

  “Yep. Made by AVI Conlandia. They’re more Bannerman junk—about the size of your fist. Nice and cheap, too. They make some rather extravagant claims for them. Anyway, you said you saw three doubles, right?”

  “Yeah—yes. Sir.”

  “And from what you told us, Mankho puts a pretty high price on his own skin?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But he di
dn’t get time to plan his trip. If you look at all those decoy tracks, you’ll see that they went off later than these four. My guess is that he hit the door as fast as he could, sending his doubles off at the same time. Then one of his flunkies thought to cover the boss’s ass while he was already in the air—leaving his people behind to deal with the mess, by the way. Not very leader-like of him.”

  Kris didn’t comment on Mankho’s tendency to leave messes behind. Caprelli cleared his throat. Huron continued.

  “You see where the first four went: Tirana, Kiruna and two down to Svaardo. Now here”—he tapped another key—“are the launches from those ports, within the window he could’ve made.”

  “Okay.”

  “You said he’s claustrophobic. How does he deal with flying?”

  “I—dunno.”

  “I’m guessing not very well, especially when he’s not prepared for it.”

  That sounded reasonable. Kris shrugged.

  “So let’s X out Svaardo. That’s a long flight and, if we wanted, we could have smoked both those vehicles in the air. Too big a risk.”

  “Um, yessir.”

  “And let’s knock off Kiruna too. They’ve only got one pad that can handle trans-atmo hypercapable craft. He might have to wait a day or two to get a ride. After all, the guy’s a bit freaked—not thinking about anything but getting the hell outta town. So he goes to Tirana, which has decent lift capacity, and we know he has friends there—using that term loosely. He takes time to enhance his calm—gulp some meds or whatever he does to cope with traveling—and grabs the first ride out he can get. Am I boring you yet?”

  Kris blinked. “Ah—no. Sir.” Caprelli, though, was drumming his fingers on his trouser seam.

  “Okay, let’s cut to the chase.” Huron swirled the display wildly. There was just one track now, arcing out of the system at max boost. “That’s a corvette that launched from Tirana very late last night. Add up the time to fly there, arrange things and get on board, give yourself some wiggle room, and this is one of two launches within the likely window.”

  “Two?” she asked. So where’s the other one?

  With a nod, Huron zoomed the display into a section of the asteroid belt inside the system’s largest gas giant. There was a speck with a red globe surrounding it. “That,” he said, making it blink, “is a ship. It’s been sitting there cold. Lieutenant Ramses spotted it late this PM.”

  “What happened?” Kris asked because she was obviously expected to.

  “This.” Huron replotted that one track. It passed by what he’d identified as a ship but not close, except in astronomical terms. “Six thousand klicks,” Huron elucidated. “Closest point of approach. Happened right after 1500.”

  “Okay.”

  “So say you eject an escape capsule at CPA and that ship picks it up? How long would the drift take?”

  “Oh.” The picture finally focused. “You think Mankho was on that corvette and they shoved him out in an escape capsule to be picked up by that other ship?”

  “I do. I think that’s Mankho’s bolt hole and why we’ve had so much trouble tracking him all these years. He has a private ship he keeps in a cold parking orbit wherever he is, and he uses it as his getaway, doing a deep-space transfer like this so if anyone is tracking, they follow the wrong vessel out-system.”

  Caprelli cleared his throat again.

  “I should in fairness add that Commander Caprelli thinks this is all circumstantial.”

  “Very,” Caprelli uttered, low but quite distinctly.

  “So here’s the deal,” Huron said with a gesture at the TAO. “I’ve bet the commander a thousand that ship there lights up and heads for the Cilician Gates before the middle of the graveyard watch.” The Cilician Gates were the complimentary transit node to the Tarsus Gates and linked this region to the Outworlds. Bannerman space, and points beyond.

  “That’s right.” Caprelli said it with another of those twitchy nods.

  “And another five that by the time the dogs bark tomorrow, we get signals—COMINT—anything that verifies Mankho is aboard.”

  “Five thousand?” At least Huron was putting his money where his speculation was, Kris thought.

  “Yep. You want any of that?”

  Stunned, Kris rubbed two fingers on a spot between her eyebrows. “You—you asked me here to—to see if I wanted to make a bet? Sir?”

  “I may have an ulterior motive too.”

  “Okay.” Her querulous response owed nothing to the incongruity of his offer and little to his affected manner—a hint too glib and disconcertingly flip—but was almost entirely due to her inner struggle over the fact that he’d just told her—apparently told her—he thought they might be able to nail Mankho after all. Back on Parson’s Acre, when she was very young, they’d harped on redemption constantly: no sermon or talk or prayer meeting was without it—and the incessant drumbeat had made an impression even on Kris, who’d done her best (which was quite good) to ignore these tedious intervals. But redemption, to the church fathers, was a beyond-the-grave thing. It lacked relevance to the here-and-now, which was given over to the suffering that would sort the wicked from the righteous. That silly bullshit Kris had long dismissed, but the notion of redemption as an abstract concept she vaguely retained.

  Or one part of her mind retained. That part brandished it now, and called for hope or some echo of it, for some degree of elation at the thought they might succeed after all, but it called in vain. Those parts of her being were numb, shut tight, unwilling or unable to respond. The absence of feeling baffled her, and absently rubbing her solar plexus, she saw that Huron was looking at her in the strangest way.

  “So how ‘bout it?” he jogged her, with a smile that was no more than skin-deep.

  “Um. Sure, sir,” she answered through her reverberating confusion, not knowing what else to say. “I’ll take half.”

  Right on time, the ship fired its engines and began to move off, not hurrying, but keeping a nice sober pace. Kestrel, fully cloaked, fell in behind her. Caprelli sighed.

  “Double or nothing on the five thousand?” Huron asked. Caprelli declined. Huron shrugged.

  Two hours later, Lieutenant Ramses raised his head from his ESM console. “Sir, I think we’ve got something.” That could have been addressed to several people in the compartment, but Huron stepped over. Ramses ran a fingertip across the screen.

  “We just got these transmissions decrypted, sir. Can’t read them one hundred percent and there are a few more we’re still working on. But—you see?—this one is thirty-six minutes before he lit off his drives and this one is five minutes later. This last one is just a couple of minutes before he took his drives out of standby.”

  Huron turned his head slowly to Kris. “Kris, didn’t you mention that they had a codename or something they used for Mankho?”

  “That’s right, sir.”—a knot forming in her chest at the question. “They called him Squire Wexford.”

  With a deep smile, Huron turned back to Ramses’ console. “Would you read those last two transmissions, Lieutenant?”

  “Yes, sir.” Ramses coughed to clear his throat. “‘Do you have him?’ That’s the first one. Then: ‘We have him, the Squire is aboard.’”

  Caprelli shook his head philosophically and allowed himself a touch of a smile. It was not like he’d actually wanted to win the bet. “You’ll take a bank draft, I assume?”

  * * *

  A query of TEARs produced the conclusion that the vessel now leaving Rephidim’s system with Nestor Mankho aboard was the Black Autumn, a fast, well-armed Tyrsenian commerce raider, close in mass to a destroyer. Commander Yanazuka agreed with Huron that since the orders for Mankho’s capture specified neither locale nor date, pursuing his ship did not constitute exceeding them.

  She had every confidence Kestrel could tackle Black Autumn alone, even though the Tyrsenian was the larger ship. Catching him was another matter. Kestrel was fast for a frigate, but she couldn’t be both fast
and stealthy. If she had to uncloak, that would make it more of a fair fight than Kestrel’s captain preferred to engage in, although that didn’t affect her view of the outcome—as long as their prey did not have a consort. And that was an open question. It was very unlikely that another ship between here and the Gates could have escaped their notice, so it was a choice between trying to force an engagement before he could jump, since Kestrel lacked the virtual mass-rating needed to pop a ship that size out of the wormhole, or risking that Black Autumn’s skipper had arranged a rendezvous with some friends wherever he was going.

  If they knew where he was going, they could possibly arrange a welcoming party of their own, and therein lay the rub. The Cilician Gates offered a number of options, and they might not discover which he had in mind until it was too late to get word to a task group with a chance to intercept.

  It was not that Kestrel’s captain lacked boldness—if it came down to it, she’d press the fight without hesitation—but that the time was not yet ripe. For one thing, the TEARs record for Black Autumn was neither as recent or comprehensive as could be wished; a longer period of observation was desirable to see how the ship was handled and what its capabilities were. For another, they were giving no signs of being alerted to her presence over there, so for the time being she would continue to stalk in hopes of arranging a more advantageous encounter.

  In regards to working out the details of such an arrangement, she had no qualms in delegating it to Huron and her TAO—Caprelli reveled in taking on this sort of problem—assisted by Lieutenant Ramses and Midshipman Kennakris. She was well aware of what had happened on Rephidim, but she’d also seen firsthand what that unusual young woman had done in the Hydra; they all had. To think Kris might still be able to make a unique contribution, one did not have to embrace the superstitions of the lower deck, whose corporate opinion, expressed with a sidelong look and a finger to the corner of the eye, was that Kris’s luck had “come in too hearty”—a terrible thing, akin to possession by a higher power, which earned her the sobriquet, “Harvester’s Daughter.”