Loralynn Kennakris 4: Apollyon's Gambit

by Owen R. O'Neill

  Anson cleared his throat and motioned with the report again. “According to this, sir.” Then he added, a little weakly, “As you recall, they justified PrenTalien’s actions as a legitimate response to discovering Halith was in violation of the armistice.”

  Roquelaurie certainly did recall. The real ugliness with the League had started just afterwards and personally he blamed the treaty for it. “What did they say Kennakris did?”

  “Officially, Kennakris and Huron were commended for conducting the reconnaissance that discovered that the Asylum Fleet had been repositioned, which allowed PrenTalien’s G2 section to uncover the planned assault on Miranda in time disrupt it. But the prize money awarded to Kennakris might be interpreted as being consistent with the . . . reported events.”

  Roquelaurie rubbed his chin. “So we believe all this?”

  “They could hardly make it up, sir.”

  Roquelaurie sat moving his lips silently for a while. Then out loud: “So let me see it I have this straight. Since she was taken off that boat, she has”—he lifted a hand and began ticking off points on his fingers—“foiled a major terrorist plot; attacked an enemy formation at odds of thirty to one and defeated it; engaged two stealth destroyers unsupported, killing one and crippling the other; taken over a pocket dreadnought by herself and blown up a major orbital installation. And now, she’s threatening to blow up our planet. Did I leave anything out, Lev?”

  “No, sir. I think that’s what they call escalation.”

  Roquelaurie shook his head, muttered more bad words, and tossed the xel on to his desk. “So we’re supposed to be worried.”

  “Yessir. And I suppose I should mention there’s a note here that she’s the only cadet in League history to defeat a no-win scenario.”

  “Dandy.” Roquelaurie picked up his stylus, began chewing the end. “You say you’ve met this woman. You think there’s any chance she’d wouldn’t light up those ships and send them into the planet?”

  “Her record says it all, sir. In each one of these instances, she was a backed into a corner. And we just—”

  “Backed her into a corner.” Roquelaurie tapped the end of the stylus on his desk. Began gnawing it again. Went back to tapping. A minute went by, silent but for the tap, tap, tap.

  “What are the chances there’s a senior officer left who can rein her in? Assuming that’s even possible.”

  “Up there or down here?”

  “Either.”

  “Well, we’ve got a full captain and a several commanders, even some lieutenant commanders who are senior to her. But as POWs they can’t give orders and none of them seem to be her friends. I’m—ah—not sure she has many friends.”

  Imagine that. “How about up there?”

  Anson shook his head. “Not so good. I went over the prisoner’s debriefs and checked our fleet roster. Most of the senior officers are accounted for. Five aren’t habeas corpus; two of which are the captain and executive officer of the cruiser that got away, but it’s almost certain they’re KIA. That ship took some twelve-inchers right through the bridge and COMINT says that it was under the command of a lieutenant when it left—he was all over the emergency net. We didn’t take any marines and no marine casualties were recovered. Seems they were left behind to secure the ships they captured. So by a process of elimination”—Anson seemed unaware of the grisly pun—“that leaves the Marine Commandant as the only other senior CEF officer on station.”

  “Who’s that?”

  Anson hesitated before he said the name. “Major Minerva Lewis.”

  “Oh Jesus fuck—” Roquelaurie snarled before he caught himself. The exclamation had to go somewhere and his desk took the shock. Cold coffee slopped over and spattered a stack of printouts.

  “Yeah,” said Anson in an undertone. “It seems they’re taking this more seriously than we thought.”

  Roquelaurie just stared at the wall, no longer listening. “With our luck, when the relief arrives, it’ll be Shariati and that little sadist she tramps around with, whatisname—”

  “Admiral Sabr. And—um—they’re married, sir.”

  “Right. They’d let Kennakris blow the planet just for the fireworks—hell, they’d sell tickets.” He began sweeping up piles of hardcopy and dumping it his desk drawers. His secretary was going to love sorting that out, Anson thought in an oddly detached portion of his mind.

  “Get the Cabinet out of bed. I want to meet within the hour. And order some breakfast, will you, Lev? It’s gonna be a long day.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Day 206 (AM)

  Whitehall, Caernarvon

  Iona, Cygnus Mariner

  Breakfast did much to restore Bill Roquelaurie’s sense of equilibrium, but so did the fact that as he worked his way through the plate of shirred eggs while putting together his presentation for the Cabinet, his conversation with Commander Kennakris began to assume a tinge of unreality, like a nightmare fading from present memory. Certainly her threat was the literal stuff of nightmares: it had been alleged, though never proved, that during the Formation Wars several star civilizations had succeeded in attaching massive hyperdrives to asteroids kilometers in diameter and using them as weapons. These asteroids, emerging from hyperspace at around two percent of the speed of light, would literally pulverize any planet they encountered, but there was no evidence they had ever been used, even if they had been developed—which current expert opinion doubted, holding that the engineering problems were insurmountable. But these planetary killers maintained a firm hold on the popular imagination and regularly figured in popular culture as the ultimate evil.

  Whether Kennakris was deliberately playing on these deep-seated fears to run a colossal bluff, Roquelaurie could not say. Try as he might to rationalize it, her record did not suggest that—he had detected nothing of the Machiavel in her demeanor—and moreover his sensor nets had verified that those ship’s drives were definitely hot and they could be sent into Iona at a minute’s notice. On the other hand, she had succeeded in destroying his composure—as galling as that was to admit—and it would not do to let that unduly influence his judgment. Being startled into making that idiotic comment about “full-scale” war was bad enough and must not be compounded.

  He was reaching for a glass of citrione, dearly wishing he could adulterate it with something alcoholic, when Lev Anson entered with a folder and worried look. Seeing the look, he pushed the eggs away. He had not really been tasting them, but merely eating mechanically as he wrote and hardly tasting the spicy orange-gold liquid.

  “Just how unpleasant is it this time?”

  Anson eyed the partly eaten plate of eggs and put the folder on the desk. “It’s not good, sir.”

  “Lev,” Roquelaurie said, glancing at the folder. “How could this possibly get any worse?”

  “Well, sir, it’s part of her personal file—Commander Kennakris’s. It’s older. I found it buried in a data dump from that special channel, separately encrypted. I had to go over some heads to get the key.” Roquelaurie cleared his throat. Anson moved on. “It appears to relate to those medical reports filed on Nedaema I mentioned—or it’s probably better to say it might be the basis for them.” Roquelaurie took a swallow his citrione and motioned for him to continue. “The report was filed from the LSS Arizona—the cruiser that liberated her. The ship she was held on was the contract slaver Harlot’s Ruse; captain, one Anton Trench—he was involved with Nestor Mankho’s people.”

  Roquelaurie nodded and fanned his hand at these preliminaries. “The terrorist. Okay?”

  “Anton Trench was killed when Harlot’s Ruse was boarded but not by any of Arizona’s crew. According to that report, based on the account of the officers who recovered her, Kennakris killed him personally.” That was hardly surprising given what else he’d heard and Roquelaurie said so. Anson’s look of discomfort increased by a factor of several. “Yes, sir. But there’s a pic.”

  Roquelaurie glanced at the folder and set down his glass. Forewarned by A
nson’s look, he reached over, opened the folder, accessed the document and—forewarned though he was—instantly regretted his breakfast. Closing the report, he looked away and took a deep breath. “That . . . um . . . that looks . . . looks like . . .” He took another deep breath.

  “Yes,” Anson said, “that was done by teeth.”

  Roquelaurie massaged his forehead, breathing slowly to calm his stomach. “Thank you, Lev. Please tell the cabinet I will be with them shortly. I have a few revisions to make.”

  * * *

  President Seth Marquardt stared hard at the Secretary of Defense as he closed the last window of his briefing and sat down. “What the hell are you suggesting, Bill? Surrender? Surrender to the demands of a jumped-up lieutenant with a fag-ends of a squadron? You can’t truly mean that.”

  “I didn’t say surrender, Seth,” Roquelaurie retorted, looking tight-lipped at the president. “I said enter into a discussion as to terms. We need to do that in any event.”

  “But not like this! Not in response to these . . . these threats! I’ll be damned if I negotiate with a . . . with a terrorist!”

  “For Christ’s sake, Seth—look at her record. Are you willing to—”

  “We have looked at her record,” the president interrupted. “You’ve been most eloquent on the subject of her record. But that doesn’t justify surrender—negotiating—whatever you want to call it—on these terms.” The president scanned the table for signs of support, received a few lukewarm nods in reply and turned to the military’s Chief of Staff before Roquelaurie could say anything more. “What about it, Rick? Do you take this seriously?”

  Lieutenant General Richard Avery looked determinedly noncommittal. “I take the capability quite seriously. I’m not yet prepared to comment on her intent. What about you, Ed?”

  Edgar Fellows, the Director of ISS habitually assumed a look of professional detachment, but the tick under his right eye was going. Roquelaurie didn’t expect him to commit himself and was not disappointed.

  “The information is credible—we have of course verified that, within the limits of possibility,” the director said. “Certainly, this could be a bluff—especially given their situation. On the other hand, there is a pattern of behavior here that might suggest that. . . well, she’s serious.”

  As the cabinet members exchanged glances, Roquelaurie gauged the feeling in the room: it was tolerably fluid. Everyone was having trouble digesting all this; he didn’t blame them but dithering was not a luxury they had. On that, he and president seemed to agree because Marquardt directed a scowl around the room and said, “This doesn’t seem to be getting us anywhere. We need to make a decision here. Are we really going to give in to this junior officer, however colorful her record?”

  That led to a good deal of muttering and Roquelaurie began to regret his decision not to bring the actual video of his conversation with Commander Kennakris. He’d circulated only the transcript because he worried that the visceral reactions she was likely to provoke would just confuse the issue even more. But now he felt that mere words and the bare details of her record had an almost fanciful quality, making them all too easy to dismiss. He sat back, hands folded, as the discussion became more general and it seemed to him that the essence the problem was becoming lost, diluted by the very enormity of its nature.

  Silently, he marshaled his points in rebuttal, waiting for his colleagues to flog their arguments thin enough for his to tell, but then the Interior Secretary burst out with: “Oh, this is just ridiculous! Seth’s right—we just need to make her understand we aren’t going to give in to silly threats. We simply need to force her to see reason!”

  Conversation stopped as the Interior Secretary leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms in a most decided manner. Slowly, Roquelaurie sat up and pulled out an unopened file. He’d done his best to restrain himself but the idiotic outburst was just too much.

  “What the hell do you mean see reason, Agnes?” His voice was deceptively soft. “Do you have any idea who we’re dealing with? Let me show you who we’re dealing with.”

  He opened the file to display the image Lev Anson had given him that morning, pushing it the center of the table. The noises around the table—some strangled, some guttural—told of their dawning comprehension. Roquelaurie stared into the Interior Secretary’s ashen face and tapped the image. “How exactly do you propose to force the woman who did that to see reason?”

  In the deafening silence, President Marquardt finally shifted forward and put his interlaced hands on the table. “All right, Bill. I think you’ve made your point. Let’s find out what sort of terms this . . . person . . . is proposing. Do you have any idea how to go about that?”

  Roquelaurie pulled the file back and mercifully closed it. “I do. She’s already acquainted with my aide, Lieutenant Anson. I think it might be best if they meet first to see what she has in mind.”

  “Okay, I’ll agree to that. Anson is not to commit us to anything, obviously. That must be firmly understood. You think she will agree?”

  “I believe it’s quite likely. And at very least it will buy us some time.”

  Marquardt nodded. “Well then, I think we are done for the time being. And God help us.”

  The murmur went around the table and Roquelaurie thought it made more sense than anything else he’d heard that morning.

  ~ ~ ~

  Day 208

  LSS Polidor, in free space

  Iona, Cygnus Mariner

  Face planted into the firm, yielding surface of an exercise mat, Kris struggled to catch her breath and think of reasons not to hate Corporal Vasquez. In truth, she’d grown quite fond of the corporal, outside the rec spaces. Right now, with the corporal standing over her—Kris could imagine that pretty face with its beatific smile regarding her prostrate form with maddening patience—fondness took a backseat to frustration, pique and that abiding feeling of uselessness.

  “Stop thinking of your arm as a handicap, ma’am. It’s distracting you. Having one less arm than your opponent”—is a fuckin’ joke, Kris growled inwardly—“is no different than being shorter or massing less. It’s a condition. After all . . .” Vasquez paused as Kris rolled on her back, chest heaving. (Yes, she looked exactly like Kris thought she would.) “Suppose you encountered a hostile K’saar?”

  “A what?”

  “Some texts still use the name Kychee, although there’s no evidence they were called that at the time. It seems to be a much later invention.”

  “Uh huh.” According to what Kris had been taught, the Kychee—or K’saar; Vasquez undoubtedly knew what she was talking about—were a human subspecies produced by gene-morphing technology in the era prior to the Formation Wars. Adapted to live in planet-spanning forests that grew in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant somewhere in the Hydra, they had a semi-mythical reputation as super-warriors. That same myth held they were six-limbed, having an extra pair of arms, and their skin changed color.

  “They’re extinct,” Kris added. Succumbing to insanity (the texts said), the subspecies had started a conflict in which they’d been exterminated. Virtually all record of them was lost during the Formation Wars, and authenticity the few fragmentary remains still known to exist was disputed.

  “That’s the consensus view, ma’am.” Vasquez extended a hand to help Kris up. “But it’s a big universe, isn’t it?”

  “If you say so”—grasping the wrist and letting Vasquez pull her to her feet. “Is it too much to hope that this corner of it doesn’t have any of those things? We’ve got enough problems.”

  “I suppose not, ma’am. Now—”

  She stopped as Kris raised a finger at the appearance of the ensign who now served as Polidor’s Signal Lieutenant. The young woman—a first voyager still showing a hint of greenish pallor from her hellish baptism (they had to rely on their small-fry now)—saluted Kris nervously.

  “What is it . . .” Dammit, she couldn’t recall the girl’s name. “Ensign?”

  �
�Lieutenant Salsato’s compliments, ma’am, and he wishes to know if you might come to CIC.” Tom Salsato now wore three hats. He’d turned down Kris’s offer to be acting captain of Polidor in favor Senior Lieutenant Jeremy Dalton, Osiris’ senior surviving officer, to retain his position as Polidor’s TAO while filling in as her executive officer and Kris’s de facto chief of staff

  “Sure.” She’d done enough face-plants for the AM. “Did he say what he’s got?”

  “It’s a distant contact, ma’am. He’d like your opinion on it.”

  Oh, shit-hells. They’d been unable to restore Polidor’s failed systems because only Commander Osier had a copy of ship’s key ring and he was in no shape to help. That reduced them to IDing contacts by experience and guesswork. So far, they hadn’t detected any, which was good news. Since Ninth arriving was out of the question, this contact could only be bad news. The question was: how bad?

  “I’ll be right there.”

  “What d’ya got, Tom?” Kris asked as she stepped into CIC’s dim interior. Lieutenant Salsato greeted her and gestured at the gravitics console.

  “I haven’t seen a signature like this before, ma’am. Probably just a blockaded runner, though? I wanted your permission to go active and see if we can pin him down.” The passive gravitic sensors they were using could only tell them bearing, mass-energy profile and a rough estimate of range.

  Squeezing into the chair next to him, Kris shook her head. It was no surprise Salsato had seen a signature like this; few people had. But to those who had, the traces were unmistakable: she was looking at a twin-keel starclipper. In addition to being the fastest hypercapable craft ever built, starclippers cost a mint of money, were the Mother’s own bitch to maintain and almost as tricky to fly. Fewer than a thousand still operated and of those, less than a hundred were the twin-keel variant. Only one person within 500 light-years could’ve laid his hands on one, and that same person was one of the very few who could have flown it here in a bit less than four days—almost as fast as a hyperdrone.

  Relief all knotted up with apprehension squeezed the breath out her in a sigh. “No, leave the deep-radar down. No sense in calling attention to this. He’ll be in maser range around first watch. Call me when he is.”