Loralynn Kennakris 4: Apollyon's Gambit

by Owen R. O'Neill

  Keeping her steady mental count, she felt her heart rate elevate as he crossed the halfway point. Closing to within ten meters, she was unconsciously clenching one hand and at five meters she was sure he’d make it. But with barely two meters to go, Rafe Huron broke the surface and kicked to the wall, hanging there, red-faced with effort, drawing in slow, enormous breaths.

  Quirking an eyebrow, Trin climbed to her feet and walked over to him with a smile. “I’m impressed. I had no idea you could that. Was it four minutes?”

  “I’m a man of many talents,” Huron said when he could talk again. He glanced at the gauge on his wrist. “And no. Sorry to disappoint, but it was nine seconds short.”

  “Well, I won’t hold nine seconds against you.”

  With Trin stationed at Nedaema and him posted to Lunar 1, they hadn’t seen each other for almost a year. Maybe it was absence doing its quiet work, or maybe it was just the early hour, but Trin didn’t seem as interested in exercising her rapier wit as usual. Instead, her tone was almost warm.

  It occurred to him to wonder if she was lonely. He’d heard that she had come out here on long leave and PrenTalien had attached her to his staff as a supernumerary advisor. She’d been on Nedaema for the better part of a decade, most of the admiral’s staff were people she didn’t know, and Nick was on Terra, having the time of his life apparently. It must have required some adjustment, even for Trin.

  “Very kind”—returning a like smile. He found he didn’t object to keeping the needles sheathed this AM. “I’m shooting to get to four minutes. Might be a while before I make it though.”

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  “A little over a year.” Until he taught Kris to swim, it had only been a casual exercise for him. That was another thing teaching her to swim had changed.

  “I’ve never been able to get past three, myself. How do manage to keep in shape aboard ship?”

  “You do have to get a little creative. It’s not nearly as good as the real thing.” He glanced around at the real thing. “I’m guessing you’re here at oh-dark-thirty because you like to swim alone. Am I in your way?”

  “Not this AM.” She flipped the towel away, and launched herself from the rounded edge, hitting the water in a knife-clean dive. Surfacing, she struck out for the other end with swift, sure stroke and was back at his side in just over a minute, her face showing a healthy glow.

  “Very nice.”

  “Thanks.” She flicked the water from under her eyes. “Are you here for the duration?”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  Trin could guess how happy he was to be yanked from being group leader on Thermopylae. But whenever life got interesting, the Admiralty would pull the CEF’s most famous officer back to a staff billet. Halith had lost their most famous officer at Third Miranda, although they’d concocted an elaborate story to claim he’d met a more suitable end at Wogan’s Reef, a month and half later. It hadn’t held up well: at this point, the entire CEF knew that Captain Jantony Banner had been defeated in an epic dogfight with Kris (then just an ensign); a feat given additional credence by her performance with Huron at Wogan’s Reef, and the Admiralty had gotten even goosier about Huron putting his life on the line. This time, she was aware they’d gone so far as to change his billet at the next-to-last moment from Lo Gai’s staff to PrenTalien’s, evidently to keep him even father out of harm’s way.

  That might account for much of the tension Trin sensed he was hiding, but not all of it. There was something else under that smile, and Trin had been an interrogator too long not to feel it. But she didn’t want to venture blithely onto tender ground, so her voice was deliberately guarded as she asked, “I heard about Kris. How is she doing?”

  “They shipped her off with Loews’ Mission.” He looked away, covering the motion by smoothing his dark wet hair back, and there was a small catch in his voice that breathing hard didn’t account for.

  Yes, very tender ground. “To Iona?”

  “Yep. They sent Vasquez with her, too.”

  Huron’s tone unmistakably conveyed his thoughts on that, which were in the same vein as Trin’s. Trin also knew from the fleet rosters that the Anandale Rangers, under Major Minerva Lewis, had been deployed to Iona with the blockading force. Major Lewis also had an extensive background in black ops. This was too much talent in one place not to be suspicious—especially to Trin, for whom being suspicious was a defining characteristic.

  Knowing her friends was another defining characteristic, and Trin was well aware of Huron’s gift for misdirection. Dropping that casual mention about Vasquez was meant to distract her, but it also meant he must have seen Kris and Vasquez as they was leaving: if she has been unaware the corporal had been assigned, here at ELSEC HQ, it was extremely unlikely Huron could have learned of it any other way. And the only reason to distract her would be mask his reaction to her bringing Kris up, this soon after seeing her. And that could only mean one thing.

  Although Trin had known him for more than two decades, she hadn’t been around during Rafe’s brief fling with Mariwen Rathor. But she’d seen the change in him afterwards. Up until Mariwen, he had kept his affairs gentlemanly, businesslike, and shallow. After Mariwen, he’d kept them gentlemanly, businesslike, and even more shallow.

  Kris had changed all that, but Rafe had recesses even Trin could not plumb. She sensed them, as everyone did—they were the foundation of his charm, even more than his looks, his intelligence and his easy manners—but they were something even more: the origin of his lethality. Trin was well acquainted with lethality in its many forms, and Kris and Huron were the rarest pair of killers she’d ever met. But for all that, they were almost exact opposites—or complements. In Kris, this quality blazed, so that at times she seemed lit from within, while in Rafe it never wholly surfaced except, Trin was sure, when he flew. And obviously, when he flew, he was always alone.

  She understood why he kept that side so deeply buried—especially from Kris, with her long history as a sex slave—but she didn’t think Kris would understand. From her observation, the concept of security was not one Kris was au fait with: she couldn’t see it as anything other than a cage. And Rafe couldn’t see revealing that facet of himself as anything but an unacceptable risk.

  Feeling by an old and all-too-familiar ache behind her sternum, Trin had to resist an urge to reach for him. She didn’t want to embarrass him by acknowledging the momentary expression of vulnerability she’d seen. She didn’t want to embarrass herself by letting him see how her defenses had slipped. Instead, she looked at the far end of the pool.

  “That’s interesting”—a near perfect deadpan. “If you aren’t done here yet, I’ll race you two laps.”

  His expression relaxed into a smile she recognized. “What’s on the line?”

  “Loser buys breakfast?”

  “You’re going to buy me breakfast?”

  Taking refuge in the comfortable bantering tone, Trin replied with an arch look. “Feeling that cocky, are we? If you have something else in mind, it’s out of your league, Commander.”

  “Okay, Captain.” He winked. “I’ll settle for a free breakfast.”

  “You think you will.”

  * * *

  For once, Captain Wesselby had guessed wrong. Despite beating her personal best by two seconds, she’d lost to Rafe by the length of an outstretched hand. So when she walked in Admiral PrenTalien’s office at 1000, agreeably sore and owing Rafe any breakfast he wanted when the duty week ended, Trin fancied she might be in for an expensive AM. Tremontaine was an old and cosmopolitan capital, rich with all the trappings of haute culture, and Rafe could be counted on select the best it had to offer. Not that, in the final analyses, she objected all the much. It had been a while since she had an excuse to be extravagant.

  She found her once-and-future boss (her attachment to his staff was as yet strictly unofficial—it gave them more “wiggle room,” as he said) glaring through a wall of open windows, unusua
lly harassed. But he still managed a smile as she entered the space.

  “Hello, Captain. I saw your note. Has the AM been treating you well?”

  “Tolerably, sir.”

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “Has someone revived SSO?” SSO—the Special Services Office—had run deep-cover ops in Halith-occupied territories during the last war. Its existence was never acknowledged, and it had been disbanded shortly after the war’s end.

  PrenTalien swiped a hand through a line of windows, brushing them into oblivion. “Now, Trin, y’know they don’t tell us old admirals that sort of thing. What’s on your mind?”

  “I just learned that Corporal Vasquez is on her way to Iona with Lieutenant Kennakris.”

  “That’s correct.” The admiral leaned back in his chair as the remaining windows merged with his desktop. “She came on-station last duty-week. The Foreign Office requested she be assigned to Loews as additional security—strictly sub rosa. Asked us to make up a billet for her. But they also asked for a military representative and since Kennakris was available, Hatton saw an opportunity for a twofer.”

  “So her role is to act as security? That’s all?”

  “To the best of our knowledge and belief.”

  Trin suspected PrenTalien was shading the belief part a bit. “The Anandale Rangers are stationed there as well, sir,” she ventured.

  “Yeah, I got the memo on that.”

  “Between the corporal, Major Lewis and the Rangers, that’s a lot of black-ops firepower to assign to a system.”

  PrenTalien nodded and his smile got more ambiguous. “That decision was made beforehand. They picked Lewis because of the rampant smuggling activities in that system. She has expertise in that area. You might even say it runs in the family, even.”

  You also might say that the admiral’s smile showed what he thought about the official reasons for this. “I see, sir.” Trin considered a moment longer. “So this is all . . . coincidental?”

  “To the best of our knowledge and belief.”

  That answer told Trin all she needed to know. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Was that it?”

  “Perhaps not.” Deliberately, Trin regarded the smiling admiral. “Would it be permissible if I took some time to look into a few things? Should the opportunity arise?”

  “You’re a free agent, Captain. Go where the spirit takes you.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  PrenTalien leaned back over his desk and started tapping open windows again. “Y’know what’s always fascinated me about Iona?”

  “I don’t, sir.”

  “Those floating cites they have there—the damndest things you ever saw.”

  “Have you visited, then?”

  “No, I haven’t yet. I plan to someday.” Trin inclined her head in polite acknowledgement. “If you ever visit one, maybe you could tell me about it?”

  “Absolutely, sir. It would be a pleasure.”

  Three: Arrival Iona

  Day 169

  LHS Leander, on approach

  Iona, Cygnus Mariner

  The League Hired Ship Leander translated into normal space with a burst of noiseless fury as the universe vented her frustration at this violation of her dimensional boundaries. At least that’s how it seemed to Kris, floating on Leander’s observation deck, watching the writhing violet corona outside the ship begin to fade. She knew it was just conservation of energy at work; the ship bleeding off the remnants of its translation potential in a storm of neutrinos dense enough to be seen, but this dry sort of explanation never struck her as sufficiently profound. Something more epiphanal was needed.

  She shook the last of a series of delicious tremors out of her shoulders and suppressed the urge to laugh out loud. It was a matter of long habit, but the exquisite, capillary-bursting moment of translation was always new to her, no matter how many times she’d experienced it. The effect was heightened by the lack of gravity—usual for a ship dropping out of hyperlight—and by the fact that Kris had turned on all the bulkhead viewer screens and suppressed the deck and the overhead—decidedly unusual, even for mariners. By all appearances, they floated in an endless night surrounded by a wild grandeur of stars—they because Kris was not alone.

  Drawing in a deep breath, Kris twitched her uniform straight with her good hand and snuck a glance at Vasquez, floating grim-lipped beside her. People’s reactions to hyperlight translation varied widely and the searing elation Kris felt was quite atypical. Vasquez’s reaction was more common, though still unusual, and on the opposite side of the spectrum. Kris was sorry for that. She’d taken a liking to the short marine, who was peerlessly efficient and unfailingly polite. But it also reminded her of Mariwen, who suffered terribly from translation shock. Mariwen and Vasquez were the only two rejuvenates she’s ever met, and she was beginning to wonder if their bad reactions were somehow related the treatments.

  “How you doing there, Corporal?”

  “Quite fine, ma’am,” Vasquez ground out. Besides reacting badly to the dimensional effects of translation, Vasquez did not like infinity being so noticeably beneath her boots. Nor did she much care for the surreal effect the ghostly outline of the deck hatch and the disembodied stanchions had on the admittedly spectacular starscape.

  And on top of this, the trip had been a rough one. The captain, impressed with the need to lose not a minute, had run the drives as hot as prudence allowed, trying to cut a day off the transit, and so the skeer had been unusually bad. Skeer—caused by abrupt gravity-wave phase shifts—produced a sense of wrenching disorientation and vertigo in some travelers. A few people, Kris had heard, were so badly affected they could only travel hyperlight in cryostasis—a thought that made Kris’s flesh crawl. Looking at Vasquez out of the corner of her eye, she figured that the little corporal didn’t have it that bad, but close.

  Skeer also kept the Right-Honorable Envoy and his party in their quarters for much of the journey, more or less heavily sedated, but Kris was not at all displeased about that. Vilnus Loews had turned out to be a large man who wore his unusual girth with an air of ostentation; an air enhanced by his elaborate facial whiskers and long flowing red hair. He dressed in rich clothes, simply cut so as not to distract from the magnitude of his person, and when he spoke it was often bombastic, frequently at length, and always very loud.

  Kris had nevertheless detected that he was unusually intelligent and capable of great charm. Still, she could not like him—he was too much the quintessential Homeworlder—and although the captain’s mad hurry had discommoded him and most of other the passengers, it rarely prevented the usual round of elaborate dinners that Kris, as the CEF representative, could not help but attend, and these dinners gave Kris all the exposure to the Envoy she could stand.

  Dinners of this type were often dismal affairs, even in the best of circumstances, the company being mostly unacquainted with each other and everyone on their best and most formal behavior. Unfortunately, circumstances on the Leander were far from the best, and although the captain’s cook tried to compensate with mammoth quantities of sumptuous food—a tactic that succeeded to a degree, but only to a degree—from the point of view of congeniality, Leander’s dinners could not reach even the common low standard. The captain and her officers were overawed by the diplomats and the diplomats themselves were out of temper and wary of sudden dislocations that might spoil their composure or their clothes. Loews, when he was present, talked a great deal but did not as it were converse. The crew said almost nothing that etiquette did not absolutely require; when put to it they fell back on toasts—a glass with you, sir; to your everlasting good fortune, ma’am—and so drank rather more than they were used to, becoming rosy-faced and even more inclined to silence.

  The burden of conversation thus fell, such as it was, on Loews’ companions, a set of tidy men and uniformly colorless. But they were not drones, far from it: one, Dr. Amos Leidecker—a short, rotund, balding man given to chuckling to himself—being an
amateur xenobiologist of considerable eminence. Dr. Leidecker was also among those least affected by skeer, and on the first occasion he was seated next to Kris (the seating arrangements being rotated each PM according to diplomatic custom) he attempted to engage her on topics ranging from music to the peculiar mutation properties of a shrew-like creature native to Iona. These attempts lasted through the appetizer and into the soup, by which time Dr. Leidecker perceived that his companion’s polite vague noises of assent were neither interest nor awe, but bored discomfort of the acutest kind.

  Unwilling to afflict Kris further, for he was a kindly man, Dr. Leidecker, noticing the medical ratings on Vasquez’s uniform who as Kris’s orderly stood behind her chair, made an unexpected but polite inquiry, which—even more unexpected—revealed a shared passion for ancient composers and an unusual acquaintance on the corporal’s part with some of the finer points of xenobiology. This earned Vasquez a seat at the table, and Leidecker launched into a description of a newly discovered organism that consisted of strains of organic molecules imbedded in a mineral matrix. Discussion around the table picked up. A man named Larson, a delegate from the commerce ministry and an avid collector lepidopteriods, questioned the application of the term ‘organism’ to such a thing, for “Do you not think we are in truth justified in requiring the presence of DNA as a condition of life?”

  Dr. Leidecker in truth did not, arguing that self-organizing and replicating chemical compounds should be considered vital if they exhibited certain vital functions such as energy transport, chemical conversion, and stimulus response, whatever their basis. “And may I say that this new organism—and I don’t use the term lightly—does indeed exhibit these properties. My colleague Dr. VelSilinjes has documented the exchange of impulses among nodes, if you will, as well as conversion of mineral compounds to organic—accomplished in a fashion we don’t yet understand—to create new tendrils and nodes, and further that these architectures reorganize themselves in response to stimuli. I have every confidence that when the data are fully analyzed, we shall have to conclude that we are dealing with an entirely new family of lithomorphs.”