“You sure, Brett?” asked a man who hadn’t spoken yet. “His scores are a little soft.”
“I am.” Commander Rappaport checked two boxes and extinguished the four profiles. “It can’t be all about numbers, Pete. Not anymore.”
* * *
Kris entered their dorm just as Minx was stuffing two last articles in her duffle and zipping the flap. The rest of her luggage was already by the door. The realized prospect of war had rubbed some of the brass out of Minx’s personality, but Kris hadn’t seen her look like this before—almost stricken. Suddenly, she wished she’d arrived a minute later.
Minx clearly had been hoping the same thing. Straightening stiffly, she watched Kris cross to the bunk she shared with Shyli Casanova.
Kris felt the stare on the back of her neck as she dropped her bag on the footlocker. “Look”—turning after another awkward span of seconds—“that was a tough break.”
“Uh huh. Yeah.” Minx slung the duffle over her shoulder and reached for the bags by the door. Her eyes skipped once about the room before returning to Kris and then sliding away. “Umm . . . Congratulations. Tell ‘em bye, okay?”
“Thanks. I will.”
But Minx was already out the door, jogging down the hallway as fast as her luggage would allow.
Chapter Four
Mare Nemeton
Nedaema, Pleiades Sector
Pouring herself a second cup of tea, Trin Wesselby logged on to her desk console in her downtown Nemeton apartment. Outside the window, Telos, the largest of Nedaema’s moons, was a silver-blue crescent low on the horizon. Slightly above and to the right was Eidothea, who seemed to be enjoying the monthly flirtation with her companion, to judge from her sweetly blushing peach complexion. But it would fade to a pale buttery yellow soon enough, as the smaller moon approached its zenith. Tomorrow night the inevitable separation would begin, the two moons rising seven minutes apart each day.
Such absurd romantic notions would not have occurred to Commander Wesselby at any time, and especially not now, when she was reviewing her accounts. Aside from the welcome news that Q3MM and Prometheus Development were bucking the current bearish trend—the former had just declared a small but welcome supplemental dividend—and her pre-war decision to divest herself of her holdings in Caelius Protogenos was proving providential, there was a note that Nick had just paid back a dinner tab from last month to the tune of §49.99.
Among its other interesting characteristics, 4999 was the prime number closest to 5000. Picking up her xel and opening a message Nick had sent her around noon that day, she extracted an exponent and a random seed. The exponent, when applied to the amount of his tab, gave her the address of a single-use lockbox. Running the seed through her key-gen supplied a password and she downloaded the contents via a ghosted connection. The lockbox obediently evaporated.
The file presented her with what she’d expected: Nick’s current appreciation of their working list of people who might have been involved with the Alecto Initiative. Many had been included in the ultimatum as ‘persons of interest’. Some were left off as being diplomatically untouchable. Others had not yet garnered official attention.
For most, Nick had nothing new to add. The late Sandrine Onstanyan had been removed, of course, and shortly to join her in digital, as well as physical, oblivion was Clancy Rollins. Trin had suspected the Bannerman’s Ambassador’s statement regarding the former security director’s demise of being a typical diplomatic falsehood, but Nick concurred that he was dead. Orbital traffic analysis had identified his flyer shortly after the fact and Nedaeman OTC had recovered it, thoroughly sanitized. No rendezvous with another craft had been found, although that was not conclusive, since an undetected transfer could still be made, if you didn’t mind drifting for a while. Still, some object whose ephemeris would link the flyer’s trajectory with that of an outbound craft should have been detected, even if it appeared to be no more than a piece of debris.
Nick’s people had run the entire Nedaeman orbital debris catalog and found no such object, but they did find a small item that had been ejected from his flyer. Based on its radar cross-section, was about the size of the head of an explosive bolt. It had been tagged as catalog entry 57.5947.39-5795.452, and duly removed from orbit during the last OTC debris sweep. However, looking like a bolt head did not mean being a bolt head, so NBPS’s orbital analysis team obtained the raw sensor data and reprocessed it. Cyclostationary techniques revealed that the actual mass of 57.5947.39-5795.452 was between seventy-five and a hundred kilos, at ninety-five percent confidence.
Thus did it appear that the unfortunate Mr. Rollins had bailed out to catch a ride that did not come and, trying to activate his suit’s emergency beacon, discovered it had been disabled (the suit having no doubt been supplied by the same people who were supposed to pick him up). Or so Nick surmised.
Trin agreed, with the elaboration that Rollins had certainly made contact in some way with his compatriots, so as to be lured into taking that fatal step. But that was neither here nor there at this point, and the former security director-cum amateur terrorist was long gone, having added his own personal sparkle to the annual light show produced by OTC’s manmade ‘meteor shower’ last winter.
About Korliss Hellman, now in snug with his Halith hosts (his accreditation had been more or less a crock, not that it mattered); Captain Arutyun, promoted to Admiral Heydrich’s Aide de Camp, and the former Shardine Karmin (enjoying her exotic sexual tastes more privately as Carissa Pagorskav these days); or Orlando Kagan-Lazar, whom the war had placed beyond even Trin’s creative methods, Nick had nothing to add—unsurprisingly, as they were far off his range.
But he had attached a new name: Cole Pritt, Supervisory Agent of the Hestian Central Bureau of Investigation, and former deputy director of their human-trafficking task force. Ever since the full dimensions of Mariwen Rathor’s kidnapping on Hestia became apparent, the government there had been conducting a most meticulous investigation—or witch hunt, depending on which side you were on—as to how the crime could have been committed. The bulk of Hestia’s economy depended on tourism and having about the biggest celebrity there was snatched cleanly off their planet was crushing the tourism trade and just about everything else. Land values had tanked as the rich no longer wished buy the vast bucolic estates there, as it had been fashionable to do, or they were trying to dump the ones they owned. Hestia’s stock market had slowed to crawl—even first-class paper sometimes not negotiable.
Heads were rolling right and left throughout the CBI, many surely scapegoats and some perhaps not. Supervisory Agent Pritt had taken over the initial investigation of Mariwen’s kidnapping from one of the former, a department head named Karol van Dyk who, on being dismissed, protested his innocence by blowing his brains out in his office. Pritt had also seemed well on his way to following van Dyk into the herd of scapegoats. He’d been placed on administrative leave without pay for three months, then brought back and demoted.
But in Pritt’s case, appearances might have been deceiving: around two months before the Alecto Initiative went down, he’d visited Rollins at Eelusis Cosmodrome. Ostensibly, the visit was related to security for the Grand Senate hearings Mankho’s plot had targeted, but the combination of the meeting and van Dyk’s suicide, together with the somewhat banal results of the investigation Pritt took over, piqued Nick’s interest.
As well it should, Trin thought. This was Nick’s bailiwick, however, and she’d leave that ball in it. What interested her most was the pièce de résistance of the whole download: a biographical summary of Taylor Lessing. The first section told her little she did not expect; it could have applied to any ambitious and gifted political operative, given allowances for the times and planet of origin.
To begin with, his birth name was one of those long, awkward, non-euphonious and peculiarly Hesperian monikers: Edward Taylor George Earle Calpurnius-Lessing. It was a very distinguished name in the eyes of Hesperian society, and his was an ancie
nt and honorable family. Although perhaps the honor had been somewhat tarnished in recent generations. His father had once been Baron Lessing, as had all his fathers before him, but collapse of the family fortune had caused them to fall below the property threshold for titled nobility, and he’d been forced to sell the barony, becoming, like his son, plain Mr. Lessing.
What effect this degradation in status had on that son was not clear, but once in college he had jettisoned the excess baggage from his name, officially shortening it to Taylor Lessing. On graduating, he gravitated to politics, first as staff gopher and then moving into security, as Nick had mentioned. He’d landed a job on Grimbles’ staff before he was thirty, while the future grand senator was still a parliamentary backbencher. The father died not long after, and while Lessing subsequently recovered much of the family fortune, there were no indications that he had petitioned for restoration of the title.
In his mid-forties, he married (late for a Hesperian peer, but not that late) a lovely nineteen-year-old heiress (young, but not that young) from a parvenu family. It was mildly scandalous. And, it seemed, unhappy. No children, separate vacations after the first year; eventually separate residences. The wife took a good many lovers of both sexes, becoming ever bolder about it. Yet it was probably her increasingly erratic public behavior that led to the final break-up: wild shopping sprees, multiple brushes with the law, drug-induced frenzies and some altercations, a near-fatal flyer accident.
The divorce proceedings began acrimoniously but were settled rather suddenly. The young wife pocketed a sizeable settlement and disappeared from public life. All that was left was a patchy trail of medical records from a number of rehab facilities. Her current whereabouts were cloaked.
Contemplatively, Trin sipped her fragrant tea and stroked her upper lip.
Prior to the divorce, Lessing had made a bid for a seat in parliament, but the imbroglio with his wife sunk it. He returned to Grimbles’ staff after that and never left. Unusual loyalty. Grimbles had been elected to the Grand Senate on his second try. Lessing managed the campaign and thereafter became his chief of staff.
Except for the drama with the spouse, all very typical, and that was noteworthy only in degree. What followed was less typical, and may have offered a clue to the unhappy marriage. It was a filtered log of Lessing’s cloud activity for the past three years, including a number of ‘sterile’ profiles and some short-lived proxy accounts, through which considerable sums had flowed. It was all anonymized and carefully ghosted, and Trin suspected that an audit of his accounts would show that those sums had never touched them. There was a still a thriving, and largely illegal, sub-economy that ran on cash and barter, and few were entirely innocent of it.
Lessing’s participation was significant, but by no means exceptional. What was of interest was where he spent it. Lessing had relied on an anonymizer/VPN bundle known as Tap-Out, one of the most popular of those illegal applications. It was powerful, easy to use, and a CID product. Indeed, Trin had no trouble giving CID due credit for creating it. Along with the black-market firewall CID had released, it was an invaluable tool.
Nick had prudently restricted his pull to just the meta data, but that was sufficient to show that Lessing was a frequenter of the dark clouds and that his interests were primarily sexual. The illicit sexual services offered there spanned a wide spectrum, and Lessing’s tastes lay toward the more expensive end. That alone would make him a prime target for blackmail, as the expensive end was also the most exotic and perverse. Yet there was no hint of blackmail in his actions or in his accounts.
Draining the last of her tea, Trin resolved to look more deeply into the mystery of the ex-wife’s whereabouts. And not only that.
Outside her window, the ardor of the moons was cooling as they mounted higher in the sky. Eidothea’s peach tint had faded and Telos was now a soft dovish gray. So like life, infinitely repeated.
Trin smiled as she looked away, closed the file and deleted it.
Chapter Five
CEF Academy Main Campus
Cape York, Mars, Sol
“Comments, Naomi?” Commandant Hoste slid the file across the table to Commander Buthelezi. It listed the new instructors proposed for the additional classes needed to handle the increased load and fill the vacancies created by officers who’d taken active-duty assignments. The selectors had narrowed it down to twenty-six final candidates, of which only two caught Buthelezi’s eye.
“This Commander Mertone.” She tapped his name with a fingernail to highlight it. “I don’t know him.”
“Cal?” Hoste leaned back and laced his fingers in front of him. “He served under me on Tarawa. Technically excellent—rather a stickler for detail, though that’s not a bad thing. Question?”
“He’s a Messian aristocrat, Ambrose. And we have an unusually high number of colonials among the new cadets.”
“A good many officers are Messian aristocrats, Naomi. I don’t think we can afford to be particular on that account.”
“It looks like he’s gunning for the fighter-boss slot on Trafalgar,” she added with pursed lips. Mertone’s file included an annotation that he’d turned down the same post on LSS Camperdown, after serving as DSRO (the more official designation for fighter boss) on the light carrier LSS Fidelia. Trafalgar was the CEF’s newest and fastest fleet carrier, due to be commissioned just after the end of the current term. She was a plum posting for any officer and competition for billets was fierce. Naomi herself had been encouraged to apply for TAO but she’d demurred, preferring to stay at the Academy for the time being.
All DSROs were former pilots, and Mertone was a starling—a flight-rated naval officer, one of a dying breed since the services had been separated. He hadn’t seen the inside of a cockpit in years, but he was very well connected and looked to have the inside track on the position. That meant he’d probably only be at the Academy for the next four months, and Naomi would have preferred someone committed to at least a year, not just serving out the current term.
“I’m not sure we can hold that against him,” Hoste offered. He was well aware of the history behind the choice. “We need someone to replace Janaina, and Cal, in addition to being excellent on theory, has a wealth of real-world experience. It might be throwing them into the deep end to some extent, but it’s not too soon for that.”
Naomi allowed the justice of that remark. Lieutenant Commander Janaina Carniero, the former Advanced Astronautics instructor, whose position Mertone was being considered for, had also been an excellent theoretician, but she hadn’t served in the fleet since she was a jig (that being why she’d accepted a posting to Tamerlane, one of the newest battlecruisers), so in that regard Mertone was definitely an improvement. And these were uncommon times; Ambrose was not wrong about the cadets getting an unvarnished view of the navy in which they were about to serve.
Accepting her nod, Hoste pointed to a name further down the list—the second name to catch Naomi’s eye. “What I was most curious about, however, was your reaction to Commander Huron.”
Naomi raised an eyebrow slightly. “Ambrose, you can’t be suggesting there’s someone better to teach ACM.” Advanced combat maneuvering (dogfighting to pilots) was the most important course in the Advanced Fighter Program; the cadet’s instruction in it was literally a matter of life and death. She knew Huron had requested assignment to any open wing commander billet, of which there were several—the fleet carriers Normandy, Ramillies and Blenheim and the light carriers Bellerophon and Daedalus all had wings available—and the Admiralty had shot him down, promptly and without comment. Not that any comment was needed: with the war going badly, it was scarcely conceivable that the CEF would allow its most famous officer to be exposed to the dangers of front-line combat, extending to the enemy the possibility of a major propaganda coup should he be killed or captured.
Privately, Naomi did not expect that to last. Huron had applied to take over as lead instructor for the Academy’s ACM course as his second choice, not i
ncidentally allowing the current incumbent to pursue the combat posting he coveted, and giving Huron time to marshal his forces, as it were. She was sure that the end of term would see him back at the controls of a fighter, even if he had to change the government to do it (she allowed herself a private smile at the exaggeration, if indeed it was that), and what was more, Trafalgar’s wings were still being formed. Personally, she suspected he had his heart set on the new carrier’s recon wing, and she wouldn’t put it past him to have urged the Admiralty for an immediate appointment, knowing it would be denied, to strengthen his case for getting it.
But private politicking aside, she was entirely certain he would give himself completely to his role as teacher, and both the Academy and the cadets would be much the better for it. Looking across at the Commandant, however, she could tell he was occupied with other thoughts.
“Are you concerned about him and Kennakris?” she ventured.
Hoste compressed his lips—a clear affirmation. “It’s not that I give credence to the scuttlebutt, but she will obviously be in the alpha track, and appearances, even if they are only that, can still be distracting.”
That was true, as far as it went. The ACM class lead served as principle flight instructor for the alpha-track cadets, and that would put Kennakris in close contact with Huron for the last half of the term. There would be no shortage of gossip and innuendo, and yes, it might prove a bit distracting. But that went along with the unvarnished side of the service as well, in her opinion.
“That’s true, Ambrose. But I’m afraid it just may be in Kennakris’s nature to cause distractions. Under the circumstances, I think we will just have to accept that and overcome it.”
“Well, I suppose there is something to that,” the Commandant allowed, having just employed the same argument. “I shall endorse the list and, as you say, we’ll deal with the fallout as best we can.” He leaned forward to pull the document closer and affix his signature. “And who knows? Perhaps Commander Huron will know what to make of Kennakris. I do not think it is my fate to find out.”
Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks Page 52