“Is that a Homeworlder thing?” Kris hadn’t heard the phrase since she was very young, and Loews employing it had come as a shock to her.
“Homeworlders come in all makes and molds,” Min answered with an abstracted air. Then she smiled. “But I guess Good Old Dynamics speed doesn’t have much of a ring to it.”
Kris thought a moment. “You’re kidding, right?”
Nothing but that smile answered.
~ ~ ~
Day 196
LMR Penthesileia, orbiting Thetis
Iona, Cygnus Mariner
“General, someone’s hailing us on theta band.” Lieutenant Jurrica Reed turned to her commander with a stricken look. That was one of the universally recognized civilian frequencies, not something their employers should ever be using.
Corhaine nodded. Certainly, they had been detected but it was still possible, perhaps likely, that they hadn’t been localized. She looked at Colonel Hollis. “Hank, set Condition 1 Blackout throughout the fleet. Get ready to go to general quarters at my command—not an instant sooner.”
“Ma’am? Shall I warm up the weapons?” asked Lieutenant Commander Lim Gordon, her TAO.
“No,” Corhaine snapped. That was exactly the sort of thing whoever was hailing might be trying to panic them into doing: the weapons coming online could bleed enough energy to pinpoint their position. “Keep all dark—maintain good quiet. Jeri, route that call to me.”
That the call came up with a visual was surprising enough—the broadcast source must be closer than she’d thought—but not nearly surprising as the face that appeared on her screen.
“Hello, General,” Major Minerva Lewis said. “Would you mind opening a private line?”
“Not at all, Major.” Corhaine snapped her fingers at her comms officer and pointed a forefinger and clenched a fist for trace. “Just one second, please.” Her executive officer signed general quarters? She gave him an emphatic thumbs down. Lieutenant Reed looked up from her console and spread her hands, face screwed into a look of disbelief. The private line connected.
“Thanks, Alex,” Min said with a tight smile. “And I’d really appreciate if you didn’t go to GQ or take your engines out of standby—as a personal favor, you understand.”
“Personal favor, Min?”
“You know, for old time’s sake.”
“Min, as much as I treasure old times, you can’t seriously be asking me—”
“Well that’s just it, Alex. I wanted a private chat because, frankly, this is kinda embarrassing. I hoped we could work things out just between you and me—without a lot of messy formalities, you understand.”
“Work what out?”
“Well, y’see . . . I have ask you to stand down.”
“As a personal favor?” Corhaine gestured at her comms officer. Reed showed her the trace, shaking her head—there was no trace.
“Whatever reason you’d like actually. But I’d really appreciate if you don’t light anything up right now—that would ruin my whole day.”
“How’s that?”
Lieutenant Reed zoomed in on the trace—zoomed in again. There was a trace, but incredibly it stopped at the hull.
“Because we got a couple of half-kiloton demolition charges attached to your engine cowling. The other ships, too. I’d hate like hell if they went off.”
“You what?”
Reed was pointing insistently at her screen. The trace stopped at the hull. General Corhaine felt the blood drain from her cheeks.
“Min, where exactly are you?”
“You got a pickup in your aft-port engine maintenance hatch, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Bleed about a third atmosphere into the lock, will ya?”
Corhaine gave the order. A moment later, there was a thin ringing sound as a slug spanged off the outside of the hatch.
“Sorry about the paintwork, Alex. I didn’t bring a hammer.”
Shit. General Corhaine clicked her command circuit. “All ships, this is the General. Secure all systems, stand down. Repeat: Secure all systems, we are standing down.”
“Thanks, Alex,” Min said softly over the private line. “I really do appreciate it.”
* * *
“Damn, I’m stiff.” Major Lewis groaned as she stretched her back in General Corhaine’s stateroom. “Here.” She handed across the slim silver flask she’d pulled from inside her uniform jacket. “This might help.”
“Don’t count on it.”
“Don’t take it personally, Alex. We had an unfair advantage. It’s just bad luck. You’re still the best fleet commander I’ve ever hot-bunked with.”
“Min, how many fleet commanders have you hot-bunked with?” Corhaine accepted the flask and took a healthy gulp of unadulterated Maxor vodka. “Christ. I think I’m appalled that you still drink this stuff.”
“For medicinal purposes only these days. Unlike when I was young and foolish.”
“I don’t recall you ever being particularly foolish, Min.” She handed the flask back.
The major winked as she sampled the liquor. “Maybe that’s because of the roseate glow of advancing years—or time?—knitting up the raveled sleeve of care. Or something.”
“It’s sleep.”
“What?”
“Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care. Macbeth.”
“A good man. Willy Macbeth. Gunnery sergeant, wasn’t he? What ever happened to him?”
“You haven’t changed much, have you?”
“Time will tell.” Min took another sip. “Did I get that right?”
Corhaine chuckled and stretched out her hand. Min surrendered the flask. The general’s eyes made a circuit of the cabin’s tactical displays out of habit as she drank and then, reminded of her condition, she looked at the deck.
“Time will tell.” She exhaled. “Do you ever regret going back?”
“Those were good years, Alex.”
“But?” The vodka was making Corhaine’s eyes water and she blinked.
“Well, y’know . . . What the Service lacks in excitement, it makes up for in retirement benefits.”
Corhaine, who knew what Min had accomplished at the Battle of Wogan’s Reef allowed a smile. But she could feel the ground shifting under them and decided to change the subject.
“So if it was just bad luck, would you mind telling me what the hell went wrong?”
Min explained about the foam-covered body bags and rendering her people comatose so they’d could live on the limited oxygen during the 35-hour drift.
“I really needed to catch up on my sleep,” she finished.
“So it was Wogan’s Reef all over again. I should have thought of that. But what I really meant was, what tipped you off in the first place? It had to have been that party but . . . Is Maralena on station?”
Min was surprised to hear the General use Vasquez’s given name—almost no one ever did and she wondered how they knew each other—but she just nodded.
“Yes, she is. Attached to the Mission as an orderly.”
“Not with you?”
“Nope. Just temp duty. She’s still with Zeke Perry. Assigned to the Mission’s senior MILREP—got a burnt-out arm, walking-wounded list—so they sent Vasquez along to look after it.”
The general refrained from remarking how improbable that sounded. “Did somebody make Lieutenant Ellison?”
“No—she’s doing okay, by the way—they’re working on getting her memory back. It was a man named Hazard. He and Vasquez were acquainted back in the old days. They recognized each other. She recalled some rumors about his career after he ran, and with some digging, we got a probable hit.”
Corhaine shook her head, wiped her eyes, and returned the flask. “What was she doing down there—if she’s an orderly attached to this MILREP?”
“Damndest thing. Loews’ MD wanted to go look for this fancy lizard-y critter—not a real lizard, as I understand it, but something special—and the doctor and Vasquez had got to chatting on the way
out about things xenobiological—that’s a hobby of hers, you know—so he invited her along. The Envoy approved and—”
Six people died. Alexis Corhaine sagged back in her chair. They’d chosen the one of the remotest parts of the high southern mountains as a shore-leave site. ISS had vetted it, there being no installations or settlements anywhere near and ISS controlled all the orbital sensors that might pick up the small encampment. Evidently, no one considered that it was the habitat of the rare Veriform Gloriosa—she’d heard of the beast—and, equally, it never occurred to IPS to inform ISS that they’d cleared a League doctor and a CEF corporal—especially that corporal—to go play amateur naturalist on that very spot. That the party they’d blundered into just happened to include a deserter that Vasquez had once known was just icing on the whole steaming pile of . . . bad luck.
Min, watching her eyes, reached out and put the flask on the desk between them, within easy reach. “For what it’s worth, Vasquez expressed some doubts as to how things went down. She’d caught one of those critters earlier that day, got a scratch—turns out the thing’s venomous as hell, came damn near to punching her ticket for her—so she wasn’t in top form. Thinks maybe she overreacted.”
“You know better than that, Min.”
Lewis shrugged. “I suppose so.”
“So what happens now?”
“We have to arrange to transfer your people, obviously, until they come to some kind of agreement.”
“You think that likely?” Corhaine’s voice was frankly dubious.
“Can’t say. Rhimer’s not the diplomatic type and if your employers aren’t feeling conciliatory, it could get damnably warm in these parts.”
Corhaine nodded but decided to keep her own council on that question. Her thoughts returned to Vasquez and the unlikely reason for her presence in Iona. “So who’s this MILREP who rated a CAT for an orderly? Rather unusual, isn’t that?”
Major Lewis leaned back in her chair with a grin. “Oh, she’s a piece of work, lemme tell ya!”
“She?”
“Yep,” said Min with a twinkle in her eye that Corhaine knew of old. “Lovely girl—fighter pilot—scares the living shit outta people. Vasquez has taken quite a shine to her.”
Alexis Corhaine noted that Min had not answered the question. “You said she’s the Mission’s senior MILREP? She’s a commander then, I take it?”
“Nope,” Lewis replied with a chuckle. “She’s still pretty much a kid, actually—made senior lieutenant not long ago. They brevetted her to lieutenant commander for this jaunt. Can’t be more than—I dunno—twenty-three, twenty-four.”
“Oh. What’s her name, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Not at all—I expect you’ll be introduced soon enough.” Her grin edged a bit wider. “It’s Kennakris—Loralynn Kennakris.”
A small muscle jumped under the general’s right eye. “Colonial?”
“Yep. Don’t know where from. Seems parts of her background are whatcha might call obscure.”
“I see.” Alexis Corhaine reached deliberately for the flask and ventured nothing more on the subject.
~ ~ ~
Day 196
LHS Leander
Iona, Cygnus Mariner
Kris jolted out of the arms of a recurring nightmare. It always began with Mariwen in the hospital bed, surrounded by devices of unknown purpose, entangled in monitor leads that writhed and coiled like lampreys feeding. Kris would grab them, ripping them from Mariwen’s flesh as she smiled and talked about her life, about her murdered wife—Really, don’t you think Lora could have at least told me first? But she never was good about telling me her plans—even about Anton Trench: he didn’t seem that bad—I’m surprised at you, Kris—but as she ripped at and fought the leads, they turned on her and began to wrap around her limbs and throat and reach for her mouth and eyes as the devices blinked red and recited garbled messages—Special delivery from Sgt. Manes, ma’am. Will you accept the fee? I left it thawing on the counter—and somewhere a console she couldn’t reach warned her that reboot was required and it was sorry for any inconvenience.
But then Mariwen’s hand would reach out of the murderous tangle and the leads would fall away, mere wires again, and Mariwen was nude and Kris was wearing only boots and a flight jacket and Mariwen was pushing her down into something yielding that smelled of tea and cinnamon and roses and Kris was holding Mariwen by the shoulders and saying Huron’ll be so pissed and Mariwen was smiling and saying you little idiot he won’t care, I know him better than you and Mariwen’s hands were in her hair and she was pulling Kris’s lips to hers with impossible strength—you can’t stop me, you never could, why do you keep trying?—and Kris would give in and open her mouth to say something terribly vital but she always forgot what and Mariwen’s eyes would change and Kris was looking at her over the barrel a short heavy black pistol with pits around the crown of the muzzle and there was blinding flash and no sound but her own scream echoing in her ears as she jerked awake in a cold sweat, shaking.
Rubbing her chest where her heart was painfully hammering it way through her ribs, Kris noticed her xel blinking insistently beside her bunk. It was the alert tone that had awakened her and a message with an emergency tag was glaring at her from the display.
She tapped it and it flashed up: Commander: We have a situation. Respond ASAP. Blinking and fighting the tremors, she thumbed off an acknowledgment asking for more details and tried to collect her wits. It was considered to be bad form to use a message-bot to reply to an emergency but she hardly cared.
The reply came back immediately: It’s Loews. Come at once.
Shit. What could Loews possibly want that was worth waking her up with a emergency alert? She rolled out of her bunk and was pulling on her boots when it hit her. Iona—Hardestan—Vasquez—dead mercs. Oh fuck! Has Iona declared war after all?
She jerked on her uniform jacket, jammed her cap over her uncombed hair, and bolted into the passageway just in time to almost run down a lieutenant she did not know who was clearly on his way to rouse her. She caught his arm, partly to steady herself but mostly to avoid knocking him down. “Has Iona declared?’
That brought the lieutenant up sharply. “Dear god, no—ma’am.” He was short, wiry, and older. His name tag said Arles and his accent proclaimed him a Homeworlder from Venus. “It’s Mr. Loews.”
“What about, Loews?” Kris asked, just this side of savage.
“We don’t exactly know yet, ma’am. Dr. Leidecker is with him now. He’s had a stroke or a heart attack or something. We thought you should come, ma’am.”
What the hell for?
As if he’d read her mind—and maybe he had, given her expression—Arles elaborated. “As the Mission’s MILREP, there are docs and materials you should probably take control of, ma’am.”
That probably was inserted merely to avoid the appearance of giving an order, but Kris knew he was right and that she should have thought of it. “Very good, Lieutenant. Let’s go.”
They arrived at Loews’ stateroom where his staff swarmed about and a squad of medics was maneuvering a float pallet and rack of equipment into the stateroom. She and Arles stood aside as the techs crowded the entrance—“Sorry, Commander—pardon, ma’am—excuse us”—and then squeezed in behind them. Arles indicated Loews’ system, against the bulkhead in a niche formed by a corner and the cabin’s working desk, still extended.
“What access do you have?” Kris asked Arles as they edged through the press; he would have to witness and share responsibility for any data transfer she made. “Secondary advisory-permissive,” Arles answered. She nodded—that was standard—and they wedged themselves into the niche. Loews’ system was in autolock; she guessed it was tied to his biometrics. Arles plugged in his xel to the secure port, she added hers, and they typed in their passcodes. While the system took notice and decided what to do, Kris glanced about the room.
Leidecker was bent over his patient—his horribly still, gray patie
nt—reciting and beckoning. A stream of highly condensed technical babble flowed between him and the two medics who were manipulating probes and leads and less identifiable things. With a suppressed shudder at this reminder of her dream, Kris turned away.
Loews’ system had seen its way clear to letting them in and obligingly opening several ghost drives for her. Without bothering to look at them—it would not have been advisable anyway—Kris moved them to her xel, signed and posted a receipt to the logs and verified, as best she could, that Arles got the receipts and nothing else. Then she sealed the system and shut it down.
With no more business here and Leidecker being too busy to fill her in on Loews’ condition, she unplugged her xel and turned to make her way out through the throng. Halfway to the door, Kris heard Leidecker ask the men with the float pallet to transfer Loews onto it and as they moved to assist, she stood aside for them. That was when Kris saw her.
She was squashed into the corner next the bed, sitting with her knees up, one arm wrapped tight about them, the other raised with the little fist tightly clenched and pressed against her over-full lips. Her long hair was purest platinum blond—it lay shimmering over round, creamy shoulders—and the enormous eyes were piercing blue with a hint of violet. Huge tears trembled on long thick lashes and then rolled slowly down the plump cheeks to fall on to breasts that were still forming—someone had thrown a sheet over her at some point, but it had slipped off in the crush and lay puddled about her feet. She looked to be all of twelve years old, maybe thirteen.
Kris’s vision blurred and icy bands vised around her abdomen. She pushed someone rudely out the way and shoved through the door, stumbling to the far bulkhead as she broke free and leaned there, head against her forearm while rubbing her diaphragm and struggling to draw a calm breath.
One of Loews’ staff followed her out and put a solicitous hand on her shoulder. “Excuse me, Commander—” She spun, grabbed him by front of his tunic and slammed him into the bulkhead so hard the breath left him in a rush. His face went white and he wheezed.
“What the fuck was that?” Kris’s voice was a desperate deadly hiss and the big man—he must have been ten centimeters taller and about twice her mass—gaped, his mouth working frantically, as he quailed at the look in her eyes. “Wha—what—”
Loralynn Kennakris 4: Apollyon's Gambit Page 39
