Orion's Price (Loralynn Kennakris Book 6)

by Owen R. O’Neill

  “Okay . . . we’ll keep going. Until you say otherwise.”

  Mariwen nodded, a heavy drunken bob of her head. “Help . . .”

  Trin put Mariwen’s arm around her shoulders and eased her to her feet as gently as she could. Lindstrom came over and together they lay her back down on the narrow white bed with its racks of equipment. Trin hooked up the drip again and he reattached the monitor leads. Then he left the room to return to the master console, still shaking his head, and she started the procedure again.

  The hug—so brief—a tantalizing hint of delicate scent like heather in the sun—the quick pressure of her lips on Kris’s cheek—Kris returning the squeeze of her hand, looking down, face coloring. Her hesitant voice: “You, um . . . don’t want to come up for a minute, do ya?”

  Yes, Dear God, please yes . . . Her involuntary verbal answer: “I can’t. I really do have to get back. It’s late . . .” Kris’s nod. She understood. It was almost certainly for the best. But Kris didn’t quite hide her disappointment.

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  Cy Lindstrom tapped Trin Wesselby on the shoulder. It startled her badly—she hadn’t heard him approach. His face was waxy, the hair was damp at his temples and there were beads of sweat on his brow and upper lip. And he’d been in her office, just listening. Trin looked up with a face almost as drawn and tense as his own.

  “You gotta get her to back off, Captain,” he whispered. “Nobody can take this. We’re gonna end up with pieces of her all over the fucking walls.” He pointed to Mariwen, who was coiled into a tight, shivering ball. The cruel sobs had died to a fractured whimpering almost an hour ago, but the data still streamed and any attempt to stop the procedure had been met with furious denial.

  Trin’s pale gray eyes were glacial and her voice colder still. “You will oblige me by following orders, Specialist. When she says stop, we stop. Not before. Is that clear?”

  “Yes ma’am. Beg your pardon, ma’am.” He went back to the other room. Trin heard him muttering—Good fucking Christ . . . Jesus goddamn fucking Christ—but returned to stroking Mariwen’s shuddering back and let it go.

  The gun bucked hard in her hand, jarring her arm. She felt the recoil in her elbow, her shoulder. But the report was muffled: a far-away sound, meaningless, and before it had really registered, the man grasping Kris jerked, a stunned expression on his suddenly bloodless face, and slid off her, the blue clots of his brain sprayed out in a fan on the ground behind him. And that was meaningless too . . .

  Kris stepped towards her, arms outstretched. Mariwen could see her as clearly as if she held her in her arms: the rise and fall of her breast, the pulse fluttering in her neck, the sweat beading on her forehead; her eyes, so great and green and tear stained—

  SHOOT! The cry echoing in her brain came as a shock. Not an internal voice, but another’s from nowhere. A rasping, hammering noise in the forefront of her mind. SHOOT! GOD DAMN IT! Her index finger tightened on the trigger. The capillaries in her fingertip swelled. GOD DAMN YOU! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR!

  “Would you like to stop for now?”

  No—I can’t—stop . . . can’t stop . . .

  Kris’s face was the universe, she could see nothing else. She imagined the gun firing, the painful kick, the bullet spinning away. She felt it strike, knew the precise spot and time of entry, imagined Kris’s eyes widening and changing as the bullet passed through her body—the body she would have held and stroked and kissed and loved, in whole and in its myriad parts—hands and throat and fingers and lips and thighs; all stiffening, all writhing in outrage at the insult of invasion by a 10-mm slug. She felt it and knew it and saw it in her eyes—the only thing she could see—all in an instant, a single particle of time, immeasurable . . .

  “I think we should stop now. Will you do that for me, Mariwen? Please?”

  Can’t . . .

  Kris’s face slackened, the muscles relaxed. Her eyes filled up with pain even as Mariwen saw the life drain away. Pain . . . and something else—fear, wonderment, a glimpse of things not clearly seen—of love. Her lips parted, as if reacting to a lover's touch, murmuring words for her that Mariwen could not hear . . .

  “Please Mariwen—”

  A terrible sharp shocking crack, ringing in her ears—pure and clear and agonizing—and a vast hot blackness opened before her. She faltered—fell. Her eyes closed and the universe closed with them.

  Chapter 8

  Denver Heights, Colorado

  Western Federal District, Terra, Sol

  Trin Wesselby handed the cup of steaming hot tea to Mariwen.

  “What’s this?” Her voice was thin and rough with strain, but its music was beginning to come back, if only as an echo.

  “Just tea,” Trin answered as Mariwen raised it to her still almost bloodless lips. “Amber Yinshao Jasmine to be precise. With osmanthus leaves.”

  “Did I tell you about that?”

  “No,” Trin answered truthfully. “It’s one of my favorites. I thought you might like it.”

  “I love it,” Mariwen said, sipping gingerly. “Thank you, Captain.”

  Trin considered this woman who, for much of the past two days, had been having her soul turned inside-out and digitized, while Trin had held her and listened to it all. If she had been a theist, the metaphysical implications would have appalled her. Who could withstand such nakedness—being stripped so utterly bare—and yet remain so admirable? Not herself, Trin was sure. And to have to sit through it, like some little tin-pot deity eavesdropping on the Day of Judgment . . .

  “You know . . . I think you’ve earned the right to call me Trin.”

  “Trin.” Another dainty sip. “Okay. But only if you call me Mariwen.”

  “I believe I can handle that.”

  “Did you get everything?”

  “We did.” She looked at Mariwen in the big bed, propped by a mound of pillows. Her bed. Which was fine. She’d spent many nights sleeping on things much less comfortable than her couch. “Things might be a little hazy for a day or two. That’s normal—memories don’t come back all at once or in an orderly fashion . . . but I keep forgetting you know that.”

  Mariwen gave her a half-smile and a small nod.

  “So. How do you feel?”

  “Lighter.” Mariwen put the cup carefully on a nightstand. “Thank you.”

  “I’m glad.”

  Mariwen continued to look at the cup of tea. “You know, the first night Kris and I were together she gave me tea.”

  “Yes.” Trin had learned about that—and all the rest too. “She’s very lucky to have you.”

  Mariwen smiled, a pensive expression that touched Trin all the more for knowing what was behind it. “I’m very lucky to have her.”

  Trin Wesselby knew a good deal more about Loralynn Kennakris’s past than Mariwen did, but much, much less about her heart. Quaint and curious it was to know so much and see so little . . .

  “You should get some sleep.” She rose to go.

  “Trin?”

  “Yes?”

  “I hate to be more trouble, but”—Mariwen lifted the tea—“if it’s not too much to ask, would you mind staying a little while?” Her free hand was smoothing a spot on the mattress, a delicately offered invitation.

  The breath caught momentarily in Trin’s throat. “No—no bother. It’s no trouble at all.” She walked around to that side of the bed and lifted herself onto it, tucking one leg under. Mariwen squirmed over a little, curling into the space created by the pillows and Trin’s flank. With only the slightest hesitation, Trin slipped an arm around her and felt Mariwen begin to relax.

  Mariwen continued to nurse at the tea and when she finally finished it, she set down the cup and reached out to catch Trin’s free hand with her own.

  “You know,” she murmured as her eyes closed, “someone’ll be very lucky to have you, too.”

  Only a lifetime’s habit of control kept Trin from stiffening. But why in God’s name Mariwen would say such a thing,
she had absolutely no idea.

  Chapter 9

  Denver Heights, Colorado

  Western Federal District, Terra, Sol

  Trin looked up from the tea she’d just poured as Mariwen came in the kitchen. “How are you doing?” Mariwen had been sleeping for sixteen hours straight, and Trin was still a trifle surprised to see her.

  Mariwen answered with a wan smile. “I’m all right. Why?”

  “You don’t look terribly all right.” In fact, she looked . . . distorted.

  “I’ll admit I’ve had better nights.” Glancing out the window at the sun a hand’s breadth above the western horizon, she lowered herself into a chair. “Night and day, I guess. Is that tea?”

  “Yes. Would you like some?”

  “Please.”

  Trin pushed the large mug across. “Have this. I haven’t touched it.”

  Mariwen gave her a wry look. “Y’know I still kiss girls, Trin.” There was fleeting change in Trin’s eyes but nothing else. “Sorry. Not at my best this morning. I don’t want to swipe your tea.”

  That earned a relaxed bend of the lips. “Please do. It won’t take a minute to make more.”

  “Okay. Thanks.” Mariwen lifted the cup and detected the osmanthus leaves. “Oh! I thought this was only for special occasions.”

  Trin got up to start the oxygenator and reheat the water. “This isn’t a special occasion?”

  Depends on how you look at it. But Mariwen just murmured, “Thanks” and sipped. Trin came back with another large, steaming mug.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked, resuming her seat.

  “I probably should, shouldn’t I?”

  “It might be helpful.”

  “Okay.” Mariwen buried her nose in the scented steam and inhaled deeply. “I remember things that happened eight, nine—even ten years ago—like they were yesterday. I think that’s because I remembered them yesterday. It’s being a bit of . . . a problem.” Trin nodded. “What I mean is, I think there’s a flaw in our theories.”

  “Yes . . .” Trin nodded again for her to go on.

  Mariwen blinked and shook her head, wincing. “Would you have anything to write on? It’d make this easier.”

  “Oh. Yes. Certainly.” Trin got up and walked to her office. Mariwen heard her rummaging. She returned with an ink fountain pen and a pad of six-by-nine inch paper, put them in front of Mariwen. Sitting down and taking up her tea again, she noticed Mariwen staring at the pad. “Hmmm?”

  “This is Lammergeyer-Mills stationary.”

  “Um hmm,” Trin agreed through a mouthful of tea.

  “It’s six-fifty a sheet.”

  Trin swallowed the tea. “It’s what I have to write on.”

  “I’m going to doodle.”

  “That’s fine. You earned it.”

  Mariwen shrugged with a tolerant smile and uncapped the pen. “Have it your way.” She started sketching an array of lines and nodes across the sheet. “I think there’s two problems, actually. First, I don’t think memory suppression really works—or not like we think it works. There’s things I didn’t remember at all, and things I did, and things I didn’t know whether they were memories or just my imagination.” She drew a cloud structure on the page. “I think it’s maybe an aliasing phenomenon? Your people would know better.”

  Trin nodded. That was certainly what Cy Lindstrom thought. She didn’t want to interrupt, though.

  “It’s—” Mariwen sighed. “Unpleasant . . . not knowing what memories to trust. I think it actually holds things back.” Trin nodded behind her mug. “But there’s the other thing. It’s more significant. It could well be related.” She put circles around a few of the nodes as she talked. “I don’t think the memory suppression really suppresses memories. I think it kind of does the opposite.”

  “The opposite?”

  “Yes. See?” She pointed to a circled node. “We suppress memories by looping out knots, right?” Trin nodded. “Normally, knots unravel and resplice and re-knot themselves all the time. The amygdalae—hippocampi . . . all that, right? We’re constantly reconfiguring parts of the associative matrix. Okay?” Trin nodded again. Mariwen thickened the circle around a knot. “But these are looped out. They don’t participate. So they don’t unravel.”

  Trin put down her tea as the implications became clear.

  “So looping doesn’t suppress the memories—it preserves them. By looping them out, they don’t get reprocessed or respliced. And they don’t get forgotten. It’s the aliasing that lets them bleed into consciousness as flashbacks, but without actually altering the structure.”

  Trin had gone a little pale. “I’m terribly sorry, Mariwen.”

  “It’s not your fault.” Mariwen put down the pen and picked up her tea. “No one knew.”

  “It seems rather . . . obvious. Don’t you think?”

  “Maybe. In hindsight.”

  Trin stood up, rocked by the reality of what years of contentious therapy had just made Mariwen go through—what she’d put Mariwen through. As if what she’d thought until this instant wasn’t bad enough.

  “Would you forgive me for a moment?”

  Mariwen reached out and caught Trin’s wrist. “I’d forgive you forever—if there was anything to forgive.”

  “Thank you.” Trin gently disengaged Mariwen’s hand. “I’ll be back shortly.”

  “Trin, it’s okay,” Mariwen insisted. “You didn’t know. Everything will be dealt with normally now. I’ll deal with it. I am dealing with it. Please don’t look like that.”

  Trin put her hand on Mariwen’s shoulder. “Thanks. I won’t be long. Promise.”

  Mariwen nodded and dropped her arm. Trin squeezed past her. Mariwen wasn’t sure what she heard as the bedroom door opened and then closed. Maybe nothing at all.

  That’s right, I didn’t hear anything at all.

  Chapter 10

  South Wing Imperial Chambers

  St. Gregor’s Palace, Halevirdon

  Halith Evandor, Orion Spur

  The Principal Secretary’s well-honed old voice read out the minutes, opening this meeting just as he had opened every meeting of Halith’s Council of Ministers for two generations. The post of Principal Secretary was extremely prestigious and highly coveted, but it transferred only on the death, incapacity, or voluntary retirement of the incumbent, and in strict order of seniority. The present incumbent—his name was Archibald Schwenck—had already outlived one presumed successor and seemed to be well on his way to outliving the next. The Principal Secretary droned on.

  As he always did, Admiral Joaquin Caneris used the time to assess his fellow council members. That, he had always thought, was the true purpose of the anachronistic ceremony of the Reading of the Minutes—all the council members had access to a transcription—and he had no quarrel with it. Especially not today and especially not for this meeting.

  The Council was a somewhat elastic body, having no fixed size in law and not being made up strictly of ministers. It nominally had seventeen permanent members at present; seventeen, not the canonical eighteen because of Jerome serving as sole Proconsul. What means Jerome had used to persuade his colleague that his condition, reported to be a rare and pernicious autoimmune disorder, required treatment out-system was unknown to Caneris. Lord Milo Froissart was popular, kindly and inept; having engineered his election, Jerome probably didn’t have to lean very hard to get Lord Milo to retire early in this present term. And—who truly knew?—maybe it was his health.

  Jerome had used the excuse of the war to indefinitely postpone the special election to choose Froissart’s successor, an irregular but not unprecedented move that also cleared the way for his planned ascension, and other exigencies had whittled down the present membership. The Ministry of Commerce & Industry, for example, was not represented. The former minister had been indicted for corruption and chosen suicide as preferable to a public trial, and Jerome, who came from Commerce & Industry, had not seen fit to appoint a successor.
The Finance minister had been lightly tarred with the same brush and was absenting himself from meetings for the time being, officially for a period of formal mourning—he’d lost two sons at the Battle of Apollyon Gates. He had vehemently opposed some of the economic policies Jerome had proposed, and it would not surprise Caneris at all if the weight of his grief should prove so great that he would soon step down.

  That left fifteen active council members, but since the Minister of Information (in charge of IT and the state-run media—or propaganda organs, depending on one’s point of view) and the Minister of Justice were entirely Jerome’s creatures, practically speaking there were thirteen. Two of these he counted as allies: the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Secretary of War; especially the former. The militarist faction, led by Tristan Heydrich and including Grand Marshal Van Diemens, the Minister of Heavy Industry (responsible for orbital installations and starships), the Director of IRIS and Lord Gregor Valendingham, was against him—violently so since the duel although Van Diemens seemed less violent on his opposition than the others. The centrist faction, led by Lord Geris and including the Minister of the Internal Affairs and Lord Sikander Balkho, was playing things very close indeed these days. Where Jerome actually stood, no one really knew.

  So Joaquin Caneris was unusually alert to the mood in the room today, the first meeting since his return from Amu Daria and also the first meeting he’d been able to attend since the duel. Heydrich had been at both meetings the Amu Daria operation had forced Caneris to miss, giving him ample time to sow dissention and poison the atmosphere against him. If he could.

  Caneris was by no means sure he couldn’t. The real cause of the duel remained private—Caneris would not air the insult publicly, the consequences of keeping silent be damned—and while the stories Heydrich had spread abroad immediately after the incident had failed to gain much traction, thanks to Danilov, Danilov had been quite correct to remind him that Heydrich, as much as he detested the man, was not stupid or incapable of subtlety. This meeting would tell him a lot. Indeed, the general’s fixed glower from the other end of the table was telling him a good deal already.