Loralynn Kennakris 4: Apollyon's Gambit

by Owen R. O'Neill

  “Best of fortune . . . Kris.”

  “To you also, Vasquez.” She turned to leave.

  “Kris?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If you do make it back this way in time, there is a special event in seventeen day. Maybe you’d like to come with us?”

  “Event?” Kris turned back to the short corporal.

  “A concert. The Major and I are going, and we’re inviting some others—Captain Wesselby, Commander Yanazuka, Captain Gomez. It would be wonderful if you could come.”

  Kris stood quite still for a moment. “Yeah,” she said finally. “Maybe I would.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Day 249

  Undisclosed Location

  Iona, Cygnus Mariner

  The small apartment was so spartan, so much more fitting as a cell of a penitent than a domicile, that Quinn rolled her eyes when Alexis Corhaine beckoned her in.

  “My, my. Isn’t this plush?” she chuckled as she looked around.

  “You know how ship life is, Allie,” Corhaine replied, amused and looking decidedly out of place in civilian attire. “It ruins you for the finer things.”

  “I’ll say”—as Corhaine closed and secured the entry behind her.

  “Take a chair,” the general offered. “You’ll note there are two.” Shaking her head, Quinn took one while Corhaine settled into the other. “What can I get you? Tea? Coffee? Something a little stronger?”

  “Thanks, I’m all good.”

  “At least have some of these.” Corhaine took a flat box off the adjacent shelf, set it between them and opened it.

  “Oh!” Quinn’s eyes widened at the dark, glossy, decadent chocolate truffles within. “You found ’em!”

  “Imported.” She pointed to one with an elaborate scroll on top. “That’s pear and champagne. I highly recommend it.”

  “Thanks.” Quinn plucked out the indicated truffle, bit it and closed her eyes in bliss. “Why—why—can’t they make decent chocolate anywhere but Terra?”

  “It’s a mystery, I’ll admit.” Corhaine selected one of her own. “How’s the concert coming along?”

  “Great!” Licking the last smears of chocolate off her lips, Quinn examined the truffles intently.

  Corhaine pointed. “Raspberry.”

  “Can I?”

  “Of course”—with an uncharacteristic smile.

  Removing it and nibbling delicately this time, Quinn went on. “Dates all set. We’ve narrowed it down to two venues.”

  “Choose the larger one,” the general said.

  “The larger one’s really big”—narrowing her eyes as she licked the exposed pink core.

  “Go big. I’m covering the gate for you.” When they first discussed it, Corhaine had prevailed on her to make this concert free, with her covering all the expenses.

  “Then we gotta cut the rate—”

  “No.” The general’s tone brooked no argument. “Full fare—fifty a head.”

  “Alright”—knowing argument was futile. But she attempted a small one as the last of the truffle disappeared. “Are you sure you can’t be there?”

  “Not this time. Duty calls.”

  It did, of course. The Rangers needed to be rebuilt—new ships, new people; refitting, reorganizing, training and retraining. It would be a long time before they were back up to strength. But that wasn’t the whole reason, or half of it.

  Feeling the weight of Quinn’s gaze, Corhaine asked, “What about you?”

  “Going straight?”

  “There’s a lot to be said for going out on top.”

  “Yeah.” Quinn leaned her forearms on the table. “There is . . .” Corhaine waited out the unvoiced but. “It . . . I dunno. I might get bored.”

  “Whatever you want, I’m there. But do think about it.”

  “I will.”

  “And let me know about the venue.”

  “I will. I’ve got something for you, too.” Quinn fished in a pocket for the true object of her visit.

  Corhaine quirked a brow at the unexpected announcement. “Professional?”

  Extracting a small foil sleeve with a chip in it, Quinn slid it onto the table. “Personal.”

  The older woman seemed suddenly reluctant to reach out. Then she raised her eyes to Quinn’s, questioning.

  Quinn nodded at the chip. “I think she’s alive.”

  Two: Eve of All Hallows

  Tanner’s Ridge, Traumerei Mountains

  Iona, Cygnus Mariner

  In the heat of Iona’s blue-white sunshine, Kris trudged up the slope towards the large house on top of the rise. The jet park was on some cleared land a good klick down below, probably for safety, and the path was no more than a narrow space in the waist-high brush. At the rate things grew here, Kris wondered at the amount of labor required to keep it that way.

  She came out of the brush onto the native lawn the covered the ferrocrete foundation; garish purple grass that glowed in the slanting afternoon light. It clashed with the soft rose and gray stone the builders used to cover the house’s internal structure. Numerous windows were cut in the thick walls, some with diamond-faceted panes, and four tall chimneys like turrets stood at the corners. There weren’t any doors. Doorways, yes—several. But they had no doors in them.

  Kris walked up to what she took to be the main entrance. Inside was a wide atrium with a vaulted ceiling; more stone and polished native wood lining an interior that was furnished in the more elegant variant of the massive style Ionians seemed to favor. The room radiated comfort and solidity.

  Kris hailed, heard Vasquez’s unmistakable accent answer from one of the wings. A moment later she popped out, dressed in a gray sweat suit and a garment Kris could not immediately identify. It looked a lot like an apron.

  Vasquez came down the hall, grinning widely, on two legs. She’d had two legs when Kris last saw at the concert six weeks ago, but now the pronounced limp was mostly gone and the old grace was rapidly coming back.

  “Kris!” she cried, holding her arms out. They were covered up to the elbows with a white power and there was more white power in a smudge over her left eyebrow. “Welcome! Lev said you’d be coming.”

  “Did he?” Kris looked the little corporal up and down. She was tan again and her skin had regained its hyper-healthy gleam. “I’d hoped he’d kept a lock on that. I wanted it to be a surprise.”

  “It is. We weren’t expecting you until day after tomorrow. Don’t be hard on Lev, he just can’t keep good news to himself. And speaking to good news, ma’am,” Vasquez’s tone became smoothly professional, “Congratulations on your promotion.”

  “Thank you, Vasquez.” Kris touched the little case with the lieutenant commander’s tabs in her left thigh pocket. As prophesied, the court martial had been a mere formality—more an occasion for expressing their congratulations than anything else—and she’d been reinstated and promoted without delay. It wouldn’t take effect until she went back on duty, but she liked to feel the tabs there.

  “It’s richly deserved ma’am.”

  “Thanks,” Kris said again, beginning to feel embarrassed. “This place you’ve got here is . . . big. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

  “Isn’t it wonderful? Almost like home. Not as much color though.”

  Kris, glancing out the doorway at the gaudy native vegetation, decided that if she should ever visit Antigua, sunglasses were a must. “Yeah,” she said. “What’s the deal with the doors? I would have knocked, but there wasn’t anything to knock on.”

  “Tomorrow is All Hallows Eve back home. Come with me. We’re in the kitchen.”

  “How did you figure that out? That it was All—that it was that holiday, I mean. It is a holiday, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” answered Vasquez, leading the way down the wide well-lit corridor. “I have it programmed into my calendar. I have all the saint’s days in my calendar.”

  “It’s a saint’s day?”

  “It’s All Saint’s Day—or the day
after is. That’s why it’s All Hallows Eve.”

  “Glad we cleared that up,” Kris muttered. Then louder: “So what about the doors?”

  “We take them off so the house will be open.”

  “Yeah, I figured out that part,” Kris said. “But what does it have to do with this All Hallows Eve?”

  Vasquez laughed, a thoroughly delightful sound. “You don’t have autumn festivals where you come from?”

  “We don’t have autumn. There’s kinda only two seasons on Parson’s Acre—light and dark.”

  “How boring.”

  “Vasquez!”

  Vasquez laughed again—infectious, even a bit intoxicating, and it caused a pang in Kris’s chest. “We take the doors off so the spirits can visit us. We want them to know they are welcome to come celebrate with us. At home, we take the windows off too, but the way Lev built this place you can’t open these with anything less than a satchel charge, so I had to make do with the doors. The kitchen’s through here.”

  Kris and Vasquez stepped into the large galley kitchen. Copper and brass and an unknown rosy metal abounded. There were counters by the acre. The air was fragrant with the smell of yeast, cinnamon and odder spices, wood smoke and something baking. The food processors were not obvious; Kris supposed they were built into the big ovens in the far wall. Minerva Lewis stood at an island in the center, her arms immersed to the elbows in a vat, wearing gray sweat pants and a tee shirt emblazoned with “I’m the Girl in the Front Row” with the sigil of Quinn’s band below it.

  Quinn had presented that shirt to Min at the conclusion of the concert’s finale: the debut of her new single, “The Girl in the Front Row”, which (Kris understood) was already busting the charts on Iona. The concert had been a new experience for Kris and had shown her any number of things in a new and different light, especially Min and Vasquez. Min attended in a tailored dark suit while Vasquez wore a formfitting off-the-shoulder dress with a skirt like a hibiscus flower. It would never, in all eternity, have occurred to Kris to think of Vasquez in a dress, but seeing her in one was a revelation: she looked every bit as natural in it as she did in uniform.

  Trin Wesselby was there, as promised, and Constance Yanazuka and Robyn Gomez and some other officers Kris hadn’t met before. They all looked splendid, but not as splendid as Quinn, who began the evening in an iridescent black gown with a mermaid skirt and her hair up, and shifting to those tight white maral leather breeches, boots and a short obsidian sharn-silk jacket for the finale.

  Things started off sedate, with Quinn performing the flower duet from Lakmé, in three voices; unaccompanied at first, before the piece morphed in a glorious rage of sweeping, angular melodies and extended chords, heightened by a purely mathematical dissonance. The atmosphere was like a physical entity, a charged field in which no one was able to stand still; free-flowing adrenaline, and Kris had to keep lifting the hair off her neck to feel the sparse breeze tickle over her skin to cool her just a little. She wasn’t sure how many times she wanted to experience being in the front row of a crowd of 30,000 screaming bodies—her memories of screaming crowds were very far from pleasant—but this was different. Quinn made it different, and Kris found herself genuinely enjoying it.

  As strange and wonderful as that whole evening was, it did not come close to preparing her for the sight of Min with white powder in her hair and her hands busy in a vat.

  “Hi,” Min greeted Kris with the gleam of strong white teeth in a broad smile. “Welcome to our humble abode.”

  “Thank you.” The words sounded flat because Kris was trying not to stare. “Nice shirt.”

  Min looked down at it with great fondness. “Yeah. I like it. By the way, congratulations on becoming a target with a much higher pay grade.”

  “Er . . . ah, thank you,” Kris said. “You too, Colonel.”

  “Thanks.” Min raised a gooey hand from the vat, brushed some hair back from her forehead with her wrist. “May we live to see the next one. ‘Cept for Vasquez here, who turned hers down. Again.” To Kris’s utter amazement, the corporal made a face at the colonel. The colonel made a face back.

  “So there,” said Min. “Come take a look at this. My hands are about to fall off.”

  Vasquez peered into the vat. “It’s coming along but you aren’t quite there yet. More wrist.”

  “More wrist,” Min muttered. “Wouldn’t I like to give you more wrist. No, not by half, I wouldn’t.”

  “I was telling Kris about All Hallows Eve. She doesn’t have anything like it where she’s from.”

  “Where’s that, Commander?”

  “Parson’s Acre.”

  “Ah! A fellow exile from the wastes beyond the Trifid. I’m from Lodestone Station myself.”

  “I know.”

  “The accent, yeah.” Min brushed again at the pesky strand of hair.

  “Furbelows, actually,” Kris said. “You remember. Racquetball.”

  “That’s right,” Min chorused. “I’d forgotten I told you about that. Anyway, we call this holiday Halloween where I come from. Mostly an excuse to raise hell. Vasquez here takes it more serious.”

  “That’s because I’m civilized, Min dear.”

  “So that’s what you call it.” Min removed her hands, scraping the goo off on the sides of the vat and reaching for a towel. “I need a break. And a drink. Can I get you something, Commander? Since Maralena hasn’t seen fit to offer.”

  “Thanks.” Kris rubbed her cheek, her equilibrium beginning to recover. “Call me Kris—since its a holiday and all.”

  “Sure.” Min smiled, fishing a bottle and glasses out of the cabinet below the island. “You had a good opinion of Maralena’s ‘96 Amontillado—I do recall that.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” agreed Kris, smiling at the memory.

  “So what’s this about All Hallows Eve, Maralena?” Min asked as she poured three glasses.

  “I was explaining Antigua’s way to Kris.” Vasquez took a glass from Min, held it out to Kris. “It’s the night we honor the dead,” she said, her face now solemn. “We open all the doors and windows so the spirits of the dead can come an visit us. Ancestors, old friends, honorable enemies.”

  “Oh.” Kris, accepting the glass, imagined the big house would be crowded tomorrow night. But she said nothing—her own would be just as crowded. Maybe more so.

  “We set out food and drink for them, play music. Some people dance. A lot of people set up alters for the special ones.” She gestured around the kitchen. “I bake.”

  “Bake?” Kris blurted.

  “You don’t bake, I take it.” Vasquez was smiling at her.

  “No.”

  “Or cook.”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t they teach domestics on Parson’s Acre?” It was Min who asked this time.

  Kris shook her head, brushing her hair—longer now—back with one hand and thinking of all the years she could not have answered that question, or any about her home colony. But now those wounds were mostly healed, and her memories of her life before she was sold had taken on a quality rather like a badly recorded vid—some parts garbled and indistinct but others having a surprising clarity—and on the whole detached; a history belonging to someone else.

  “No,” she said finally. “Well I guess they would have if we’d wanted. It didn’t seem . . . important. Nobody really cooked in my family.”

  Min and Vasquez exchanged looks. “What did you eat?”

  “Ration packs, mostly.”

  Min stared in disbelief. “The kind you zip the foil to heat?” Kris nodded. “Jesus. Your folks not like you or something?”

  “Min!” Vasquez hissed.

  “Well, sometimes the hands would cook up something,” Kris said, unperturbed. “That was a kind of treat—unless they got experimental with the native stuff. Then the rat-packs were better.”

  “Hands?” Vasquez asked. “What are hands?”

  “Those things at the end of your arms, d—” Min gasped as Vasq
uez elbowed her shrewdly in the ribs.

  “Hands,” Kris said. “Workers. Hired labor. Like farm hands.”

  “You were raised on a farm?”

  “Only sort of. My dad was a mining engineer. But on Parson’s Acre, most people have at least a hectare or two under glass. We had six, but it still wasn’t much of a farm.”

  “That’s lot of area to cultivate in greenhouses,” Vasquez said. “How long are the seasons?”

  “It varies. Emzara-Furae is a binary system, so the orbit’s elliptical and it precesses pretty fast. But on average the light season is about eight standard months. Dark’s about a year.”

  “Are they really light and dark?”

  “Not exactly. Near aphelion it isn’t actually dark—more like deep dusk on Earth. But you can’t grow much then. We hired hands to work the greenhouses during the light season, to sell and to stock up for the dark season, but if the crops failed . . . well, we ate a lot of rat-packs.”

  Vasquez blinked. “I’d no idea.”

  “That’s because you’re one of the blest.” Min raised her glass and smiled. “May it ever be so.”

  Their glasses clinked.

  “So what are you baking?” Kris asked Vasquez.

  “Empanadas,” Min answered. “Did I say it right, Maralena dear?”

  “Perfectly,” Vasquez replied, smiling sweetly. She knew just how to overdo it. Mariwen had had that trick too . . .

  “Vasquez is learning me to do it the old fashioned way,” Min explained.

  “The right way,” Vasquez emphasized. “Mind your manners or I’ll teach you to grind masa.”

  “Between me and Evil.” Min raised her glass again and took a healthy sip.

  “What are empanadas?” Kris asked.

  Vasquez showed her to the oven. The elements were off; Vasquez had fired the oven with charcoal, strategically stacked in glowing mounds about the interior. Dozens of small plump pastry crescents were baking on ceramic racks.

  “Those are empanadas. A filled pastry. That’s the first batch. I had to improvise a little to account for some ingredients you can’t get here.” She made a small, doubtful face. “I hope they turn out all right.”