“—horses!” Kym ended the sentence Kris had missed with a giggle.
“Horses?”
“He raises them! On this big place he has back home!”
She hadn’t caught where that was. Maybe Kym hadn’t said. “Sounds really nice.”
“I’m so happy!” Indeed, there were tears of it glinting in her eyes. “An’ it’s all cuz of you!” She threw her arms around Kris’s neck and hugged so tight Kris winced. “Can’t never thank you ‘nuff, Kris! Not ever!”
Kris moved to ease the stranglehold a bit. “S’Okay, Kym,” hugging her back. “Don’t give me too much credit. You got lost on your own.”
Kym laughed, a peal of pure delight, right in her ear. Then a kiss, high on her cheek. “Never gonna forget you, Kris.”
“Never gonna forget you either, Kym.”
Unaccountably, that seemed to make her shy, and her arms loosened. “Oh, you’re gonna—I mean . . . What time is it?”
Kris showed her.
“Oh! I gotta go! My connection’s leaving outta Phobos tonight. I’m meeting him at Ceres and then we leave.”
“He didn’t come along with you?”
“Uh-uh. He needed another day to finish up some arrangements. Said he’s been to Mars already—din’t need to see it again.”
Oh . . .
“Don’t look like that,” Kym scolded her with a cockeyed grin. “He’s really nice.”
“I know.” Kris stood up. “You better get going.”
“Yeah.” Kym stood up as well. “This is it! Wish me luck!”
“Best of fortune, Kym.”
“G’bye, Kris.”
Releasing Kris’s hand with a final squeeze, she ran back across the courtyard, almost as fast as she’d come. Pausing once at the edge of the taxi way, she turned and waved. Kris waved back. The tiny figure climbed into a waiting taxi; it pulled out into the traffic pattern and was rapidly lost.
After another heartbeat, Kris turned and made her way quickly up the Academy steps. The wind had suddenly picked up, blowing in fitful gusts, and it was cold.
Chapter Eight
CEF Academy Main Campus
Cape York, Mars, Sol
Commandant Hoste once again addressed the Academy’s assembled student body. What had begun as an expedient had become an end-of-week ritual. Part of that ritual was the sheet of paper with the handwritten notes inscribed on it that he smoothed onto the rostrum’s surface before beginning.
“I am pleased to say that the news this week is of a better nature than last.” This was setting a pretty low bar, in all conscience: last week the loss of Crucis Sector (the word abandonment was studiously avoided) had been officially announced. “An assault on the Merope Junction was repulsed with heavy loss to the enemy. Losses among the Bannerman auxiliaries were especially severe, with one detachment being captured entire. The Winnecke IV junction remains secure. Reports that a Halith fleet managed to run the Rip and turn our position there, though widely reported, are without foundation. Elsewhere, the Larate of Alesia has signed a capitulation. That leaves the Aventine Grand Duchy as the only state in Deneb still resisting the Halith incursions. At the request of the Mirandan government, additional marine forces have been dispatched to deal with the rise in insurgency there. You are all aware, I am sure, that holding Miranda is vital to maintaining our connection with the Karelian Republic. The situation in regards to the Terebellum Empire and the New UK is unchanged.”
Here Hoste paused and removed his hands from the rostrum. Looking across the sea of faces, which seemed to him absurdly young, his voice took on a new and deeper tone.
“Cadets, in a few short weeks, you will be officers. You will be facing in combat the very forces that now are moving to occupy the homes of many of you. I shall therefore refrain from, as the saying goes, attempting to blow sunshine up your ass.”
A ripple of polite laughter answered the sally.
“Victory is never assured. It is not a gift—it does not descend from some higher power upon those who think themselves righteous. Victory is won—by your skill and yes, your pride, but most of all by your professionalism. It is your professionalism that these events will most sorely test. I do not doubt that you all can successfully meet that test. Remain vigilant. Anger, hate and despair are your deadliest opponents. Conquer them and your battles are half won.
“One more thing. Final exams have been suspended. That is all.”
Chapter Nine
CEF HQ, Mare Nemeton
Nedaema, Pleiades Sector
TOP-LINE BREAKING: HESPERIAN GRAND SENATOR MISSING—FEARED DEAD.
{For Immediate Release. This story is developing–ed.}
A convoy carrying Grand Senator Archibald Grimbles of Hesperia and members of his staff has disappeared en route to Miranda. The Senator was making a secret trip to visit Hesperian troops stationed there for Michaelmas {Hesperia’s main thanksgiving holiday–ed.} The Senator arrived at Epona Outstation on schedule, and left as planned twenty-six hours later. As the convoy was observing strict communications silence to maintain security, no signals were received and the convoy was not declared missing until twelve hours after it failed to reach Mirandan space. CEF units have been dispatched to search for any survivors.
Missing along with Grand Senator Grimbles are his chief of staff, Taylor Lessing, his personal secretary Manuel Weston, his security chief, Jacob Christy, and—
Trin Wesselby clicked off the feed.
“Well, that’s bloody convenient,” Nick Taliaferro commented from his chair.
“You don’t believe it either?”
Nick snorted—the question was not a serious one. “Oh, I believe Grimbles is dead alright. As for Lessing, either Halith decided he was a liability and foreclosed on him, or he set this up as his ticket home. So the question is, did Lessing put him up to it?”
“That is the question.”
“Your folks got anything?”
“Just wreckage. No survivors.”
“So this story is just the Speaker’s idea of buttering up the masses for the bad news?”
“That’s about the size of it. But if he arranged this as his ticket in from the cold, why bother? He can’t hope to go so deep underground that we won’t find him eventually. Besides, Halith might want the credit—they’re vain that way. And there’s nothing like a little mole paranoia to fubar the source code.”
“Nice way to silence all the people who might have had something on him. We know Lessing didn’t get along with Christy. Weston was also in a position to learn things that might have been damaging. Like what really happened to his wife.” They’d recently learned that the ex-wife was dead: euthanized by court order after spending five years in a persistent vegetative state as a result of a drug overdose, which had been ruled an attempted suicide. As yet, they’d uncovered no contrary evidence, but Trin had heard that one before. “And maybe he’s protecting someone else.”
“Another mole.” Trin sighed. “Any chance you can get at the rest of his personal files? Profiles? Xel logs? Backups? He can’t have erased everything. He wouldn’t have erased everything. He’d keep some sort of insurance. Otherwise he becomes a nonentity. Admiral Heydrich isn’t going to welcome a nonentity just for a job well done.”
“Awfully sure of ourselves here, aren’t we?”
“If I’m wrong, I’ll cheerfully admit I owe him an apology.”
That’d be worth the price of admission, thought Nick with an inward smile. But his face gave nothing away as he answered. “Anything he left behind will be sealed pending an inquest.”
“Is that a problem?”
That allowed the smile out. “You promise to visit me on Helpless?”
“If they give us adjoining cells.” Which might be a best-case scenario, Trin thought.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Chapter Ten
Olympus Mons Airspace
CEF Academy Flight Training Zone, Mars, Sol
Her target ju
mped on her screen like a hooked trout, zigging and jagging, jinking and spinning, waiting until she guessed wrong to break away and get around behind her. She couldn’t guess wrong—she’d been riding his ass for what seemed like forever and if he got behind her in his more maneuverable ship, it was game-over.
She squeezed a couple of bursts from her plasma cannon; too far out for a good hit and she knew it, but mostly she was just trying to piss him off. She was glad to see one flare on his belly, even if the shields took it. Her target broke high and right, trying a snapback on her to make her overshoot.
No you don’t, asshole. That’s in the book.
She braked hard into a lazy-S and dropped below him. As her nose came up, she fired a hard burst of plasma at him. Two went left, two right, two caught his left weapons spar. The shields stopped one, the other took the spar end off.
Yes! That was more like it! Her prey went to full military power, burning into a pure vertical, going for an up-n-over. The book said go with him: her superior acceleration would put her on top first, placed for a good shot if he muffed the rollover, or a good escape if he didn’t.
She didn’t want to escape and he wasn’t going to muff the rollover. Not this guy. No, she wanted him—bad. She’d lost a lot of velocity braking into the lazy-S, and now she jammed the decel as hard as it would go. The fighter shuddered, but she’d done it. She’d stood her bird on its tail. She saw him above her, just about topping his arc as her nose came up, and popped off two seekers.
They weren’t locked: no time and he was out of the envelope anyway. But he couldn’t be sure of that. His best bet was turning into them in his dancy little ship—that meant breaking his rollover into an Immelman.
He did. She whooped and hit emergency boost. The water molecules fed directly into the reaction chamber instantly increased thrust twenty percent, and again acceleration slammed her—this time back into the seat, and the screen got dim and fuzzy. Blinking as the inertial compensators eased off, she prayed that he’d watched those missiles for just a second instead of her. She saw them flash by him, one close enough to make him juke. Then he flattened out, right in front of her.
It’d worked! He had expected her to still be down there, playing dink-n-dodge until her missiles locked—not climbing his ass on E-boost in a charge that she’d no way be able to save if she missed.
She wasn’t going to miss. She had that sucker dead-on. Now if only she could close the range. She flipped to neutron guns—half the range but four times the hit. She was climbing fast. Dodging those missiles had bled off velocity—he was having trouble getting it back. He drifted into her sights—
Gotcha!
She squeezed the trigger. Twin lines, metallic purple in the tracking laser light, stabbed out. They caught him amidships. His shield flared green and out, then his ship disappeared from her display in a cloud of glowing orange plasma.
“OOOEEEEE!” she whooped, loving the bright orange flower convulsing before her. Then her HUD went nuts and the track alarm began to shriek.
What the fuck? She broke hard right, looking to her T-Synth. Something hammered savagely on her port-aft quarter. Pendragon! Shit! Shit! Shit! Alarms lit up all over the place and there was a loud, ugly crunch. The KILL warning flashed up on her HUD, and the trainer’s weapon systems and sensors went into lockdown as the autopilot engaged and set a course back to base.
“That’s enough for today, people,” Lieutenant Commander Huron said over the command net. “Let’s take it home. Huron has the lead.”
She was still sitting in the fighting straps, with her hand on the stick and the canopy cracked open, when she heard footsteps approaching; Huron and Pendragon, maybe Merlion. She’d trusted Merlion to handle Pendragon. Dumbshit! You know better! She hunched, hating what they were about to say.
“Cadet Kennakris”—Huron’s voice—“gloating over a victory is considered a bit . . . unseemly. Especially when it gets you killed.”
“Yessir.”
“It is likewise unseemly to refer to your flight instructor as an asshole.”
Oh fuck! Was I talking out loud? God DAMN it!
“Now come out of there. It’s been a long day.”
“Yessir.” She yanked at the fighting straps, caught a finger painfully in the buckle and swallowed the invective this time. Gracelessly, she clambered out of the cockpit and onto the ferrocrete of the landing apron.
Mercifully, he was the only one left to meet her. When they finished staring at one another—Huron appraisingly, Kris violently—he leaned one hand against the trainer’s fuselage and spoke.
“You know, Kris, you take this shit all too seriously.”
“Flying is a serious business, sir.”
“I’m not talking about flying.” His voice had gotten sharp. “I’m talking about killing. You live for killing.” He shook his head. “I know what it’s like to score and come away clean. It’s a rush. That’s natural, that’s part of winning. But you”—his dark eyes pinned her—“when you score, just here in playtime, I watch your bi-outs and I swear to god you cum.”
Hard and cold, she snapped, “I got you.”
“See, Kris?” His narrow smile was too fucking close to a smirk, and her short fingernails punched angry crescents in her palms. “Yeah, you got me. And Pendragon iced you. You die, we win. There are five of us for every one of you. You lost. And you just lost again. I can wind you up and let you go. I can dance you anywhere I want. Can’t I?”
She turned her back on him.
“There you go again. Control, Kris. Control.”
She didn’t want to listen anymore. She wanted out—away. How’d she ever let herself get talked into this?
“Hear this, Cadet,” he barked. “Front and center.”
She faced him stiffly; assumed attention.
“Much better.” His voice was now calm and formal. She watched him carefully, wondering where his attack would come from now. Sometimes she thought talking with him was like flying against him. “Now listen, what you do with your own time is your business. But up there, you can’t be flying for Marko or against Trench. You can’t be trying to get back whatever they took from you—you won’t find it up there. You have a job to do—and that’s to see to it you come home and the other guy doesn’t. That’s it. We don’t do victory dances, Kris—save that for racquetball.”
“Understood, sir.”
“I hope so. You’re going to be a hell of a pilot. I know—that’s my job. But if you don’t keep it hardwired, this little jaunt with Pendragon and me won’t be just a game. You’re going to get burned, just like today—only that time, the autopilot won’t bring you home.”
“I know that, sir.”
“Then act like it. You scare the shit out of people. When you were in Rehab, the medics were on you like a gravnet. Uncontrollable hostility, they said. They wanted to turn you into a cabbage—a nice sexy cabbage that could feed itself.”
“What the F–!” Sudden rage foamed up and over. Nobody had told her that before.
“Now goddammit, lock that up!” The command voice arrested her. “See, they were right. But I stopped them.”
“You? Huh? I—I . . . didn’t know that.” Under the shock of those words, the rage drained away. “I—my apologies, sir. No excuses for my behavior, sir. I won’t let it happen again.”
“That’s okay, Kris.” The glimmer of a smile was back. “I’m not going to ask the impossible. But,” his eyes leveled into hers and with the anger gone she saw the earnestness in them, “I can’t keep the assholes at bay forever. No one can. Just you. Stay on top of it, Kris. Make them give you a chance.”
She looked at the ground, nodded—a cold, numb feeling congealing in the pit of her stomach.
“Better?” She nodded again. “I step over the line a lot with you, Kris. I know that. But there’s almost no limit to how good you can be, if only you can stay alive long enough. We need you to be that good, Kris, if we’re gonna take the bastards down. I can’t say I w
ant them as bad as you do, but I do want ‘em.” He pushed off the side of the trainer, sighed like he was tired. Looking at him, she saw he was. “Go get cleaned up, Cadet. If someone calls you late, just send the note to me.”
“Yes, sir.” She turned to leave, but stopped after two paces. “Question, sir?”
Huron looked back and nodded.
“We never do victory dances in the Service?”
The smile that broke out then on Huron’s face touched things down inside she had no name for.
“We never do them up there, Cadet. Down here . . . that’s another matter. Stick with it and maybe we’ll get to share one someday.”
Chapter Eleven
CEF Academy Main Campus
Cape York, Mars, Sol
Goddammit, I am late, Kris fumed as she hurried down the corridor to her next session, stuffing strands of still-damp hair into her undress cap. Neither the topic, Advanced Astronautics, nor the instructor, Commander Calvin Mertone, were congenial, and in this case, the feeling seemed to be reciprocated. But at least this was the next to the last session; after this week they wouldn’t have to worry about getting on each other’s nerves.
Kris stopped at the door, took a deep breath, released it, and twitched her tunic straight. She tapped the entry pad, took two steps through as the door opened and snapped a salute. “I regret and apologize for my unpunctuality, sir. No excuse, sir.”
She felt the eyes of the class on her and steeled herself for one of Mertone’s salvos regretting her inevitable slackness, her lack of dedication or at least ability to tell the time, and compassing her many other sins and perhaps those of her foremothers as well. But Mertone merely smiled at her with his odd cat-gold eyes, the heritage of his pure-blood Messian genome, and motioned for her to take her seat. “Commander Huron has already read you in, Cadet. Do be seated.” The room seemed to let go a collective sigh—in disappointment, or so it felt to Kris.
Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks Page 54