Loralynn Kennakris 1: The Alecto Initiative (11 page)

“Let’s get strapped in. They’ll be taking the gravity down
in a moment.”

“Oh God!” Mariwen squeezed her eyes shut. The tremors were
getting worse. “I can feel it . . . I can already feel it—”

“Mariwen,” Kris coaxed. “Come on. Come here.” She couldn’t
feel much yet beyond the familiar sense of anticipation, but they couldn’t be
more than a minute away and whatever was happening to Mariwen was clearly worse
than just nerves. She slid her arms around Mariwen’s waist and pulled her into
the bunk as the gravity started to fall. Holding her tight with one arm, she
secured both of them with the other hand.

“I got you,” she breathed into Mariwen’s ear. “I’m here.
I’ve got you.” Most people had some reaction to translation, usually just a
moment of disorientation or vertigo. For a few, it was a lot worse, but Kris
had never seen anything this bad. She hugged Mariwen’s vibrating body as hard
as she dared, took a deep breath as she felt the first tingle flash across her
skin, and the ship dropped.

Mariwen might have screamed—she couldn’t be sure. She was
lost to the hot pulsing thrill that sang along her nerves, wave after wave that
made her gasp and her body shake as she took the strain of the exquisite
pressure that kept building and building and . . . Light flared behind her
eyes, a searing incandesce that burned right through her. Kris felt Mariwen’s
body rigid against hers as her arms tightened and she thought
god don’t hurt
her—don’t hurt her
and then the tension broke; a vast measureless release
that wrenched a deep moan out of Kris and left her trembling. Mariwen turned in
her arms and Kris’s face was awash in the dark sea of her hair and she couldn’t
tell which of them was shaking more.

“Sorry,” she husked out. “Did I hurt you?”

“No,” Mariwen answered in an unsteady voice. “No. I’m . . .
okay.” Kris eased her grip and lifted her head to see Mariwen’s eyes, wide and
dark and tear-stained, looking at her: astonishment mingled with apprehension.
“Did you . . .? It almost felt like you—”

“No,” Kris cut her off, glad the red glow hid the color in
her face. Her reaction was rare, but she'd never felt self-conscious about it
before. “They’ll bring up the gravity in a moment. Sure you’re alright?”

Mariwen nodded, voiceless, and they felt the tug of the
gravity coming on. The captain was bringing it up gently and they sank slowly
into the bunk. Kris released the straps and rolled onto her back, still
breathing heavily. Mariwen brought a hand toward Kris’s face but stopped,
pulling her quivering fingers back to her own dry lips. “Thank you.”

Kris sighed and closed her eyes. “Don’t mention it.”

Cassandra Station
Nedaema, Pleiades Sector

Two weeks in rehab on Cassandra Station, orbiting the
cloud-streaked green and blue orb of Nedaema, was not nearly as bad as it could
have been, but by this point Kris was thoroughly done with it. For the first
few days, she’d had Mariwen for company but then a compact, short haired,
pixie-faced women arrived, Lora Comargo, Kris assumed—they had not been
introduced—and Mariwen left within the hour with only a rushed goodbye. Kris
was more than a little miffed at the special treatment but Mariwen was a
citizen and a celebrity so it was hardly surprising, even if it still felt
monstrously unfair.

After that Kris had plenty of time to enjoy the food, resent
the shrinks—who showed an unusual and, she thought, overly persistent interest
in her—and get bored. She was given access to a system but not a xel so she
could only get on-line in her quarters, and she couldn’t access everything, but
her share of the clouds still contained much more than she’d ever seen before.

What she saw first was a shock. The clouds were alive with
news of Mariwen’s rescue; it trumped the coverage of the Grand Senate
deliberations on which colonies would be granted voting rights this session, of
a shuttle accident that killed six and injured a dozen more, and of the verdict
in long-running court case about adulterated foodstuffs. Even news of some
global sporting event didn’t make the headlines. The stories were hasty,
sensationalized and badly distorted, and made the bile rise in Kris’s throat.
She blocked the news feeds and took to viewing almost anything else, up to and
including encyclopedia entries about her new host planet. Nedaema was the first
foreign society she’d been exposed to, and after reading up on it she came to
the conclusion that it was indeed, as she muttered to herself while lying in
bed one night,
really fucking foreign
.

For example, she learned that there was only one major
continent that covered about half of the northern hemisphere. The capitol
Mare
Nemeton, on its west coast, was one of the few cities on it.
Mare
wasn’t
part of the name but the term for city; the plural was
marii
. Relatively
few people—less than the population of Nemeton—lived in the interior, most of
them on enormous farms. The rest of the population—about 6.9 billion—lived on
the multitude of islands, some large but many quite small, that lay on the
equator and in the southern temperate zone.

The economy of the islands was based on knowledge work,
light industry, and the arts. Arts were heavily subsidized, especially poetry.
Politically, the islands were arranged into
themoi
, each having
representation in a legislative body called the
Proxenoi
Council who
were elected by a popular vote of all citizens of the
theme
, no matter
what class. Members of the body were called
proxenos
, and a
proxenos
was never called
mister
or
ma’am
but
brother
or
ally
when met formally. There was also a senate whose membership was much more
exclusive, but unlike most worlds, this body did not supply Nedaema’s Grand
Senators—those, it turned out, came from the
proxenoi
.

The head of government had the distinctly weird title of the
Archon
; he was chosen by the senate. The head of state had the ever
weirder title of the
Scholiast
; he was addressed as the
Scholai
in public and only used his given name. The current office holder was the
Scholai Michael. The
Scholiast
was chosen by complicated means from
among the membership of something called the
Synalogue
, the origins of
which Kris could not bring herself to care about, even in an advanced state of
boredom. She gathered from the captions of the pics that they were concerned
with the law and favored ‘textual analysis’—whatever that was—or had, once
upon a time.

And Nedaemans didn’t eat meat either, except for certain
religious observances. At this point she had logged off, gone to bed, and
expressed her judgment of Nedaema’s foreignness.

Now she was waiting to be cleared out of the rehab
facility, with her discharge ticket in her lap and a credit chit drawn against
the promised first disbursement of her Repatriation Act money. Like everything
here it was taking ten times longer than any rational procedure should, but
Kris was of the opinion that Nedaemans had far too much time on their hands and
were therefore in the habit of wasting it.

They were, she had noticed, perpetually busy—talking,
messaging, surfing, all while watching three or more entertainments in
different floating windows—but they hardly ever seemed to get anything done on
schedule (unpleasant medical appointments always excepted) or without a great
deal of yakking. But they did create excellent food, lack of real meat notwithstanding.

Tapping her foot and wondering how long she could wait
before she could ask again without getting a rude answer, she did not notice
Huron coming through the doors. “Good morning, Ms. Kennakris,” he called,
startling her. “How’d you like to make this place just a happy memory?”

“Oh hi, ah—Lieutenant.” She had not been addressed so
formally by him before and was unsure how to respond. “Umm . . . yes, please.
I’d like that.”

“Excellent.” He walked up, plucked her discharge ticket out
of her lap, strode over to the reception desk and showed it to the security
staff there. “So we are all in order now? Very good. Thank you.”

He flicked the ticket onto their desk, turned his back,
keyed open the big main doors, stood back a foot, and swept his arm through the
entrance, saying distinctly, “After you, ma’am.” Kris rose and exited with what
she hoped was a properly nonchalant bearing. Huron swung in behind her as the
security people stared after them, still blinking.

As they walked down the main concourse under the naked
arches and girdlers of Cassandra Station’s titanium and crysteel skeleton, all
sparkling in the distinctly even, carefully modulated illumination, Kris could
hear Huron muttering under his breath. Just what he was muttering, she could
not make out but she was confident she heard
Jesus Christ
and
Goddamn
clusterfuck
. Huron noticed her watching him and slowed his stride.

“Breath the free air again, Kris—even if it
is
canned.”

“Thanks.” She smiled, a little timidly. She had seen Huron
in several moods before, but this imposing uncompromising imperiousness was not
one of them. What Kris did not know—could not know—was that Huron had just
spent a rather unpleasant three-quarters of this morning with Dr. Quillan,
three Nedaeman shrinks, the director of the rehab facility and his two
deputies.

They had repeatedly shown him reams of data, carefully laid
out and annotated, and expressed to him, in terms adapted to the meanest
understanding, their reservations about Kris. Hostile tendencies and a history
of violence headed their objections, but there were also anomalies in a few of
her responses and a disquieting ability to retreat into some inner space their
techniques could not reach nor their theories adequately explain. But the main
issue, as Huron saw it, was just plain dull impenetrable prejudice and a
profound ignorance of the real universe outside their gilded bubble.

As the meeting wore on and they reiterated their concerns,
insisted on their ambiguous and more-or-less meaningless data, and urged their
horrific recommendations, Huron’s expression grew colder, his unfailingly
polite responses shorter and there came into his eye and the tone of his voice
a certain quality that reminded all present that he was heir to one of the most
powerful families in existence, that he was a highly decorated fighter pilot,
and that he too harbored hostile tendencies and had a history of violence.

At last he ended the meeting in a peremptory tone perhaps
more suited to upbraiding a tardy new ensign than addressing a group of
supposedly august academics, demanding that they commit themselves to a formal
review of all their evidence and their recommendations in front of a Grand
Senate subcommittee or obey the law that stated repatriated slaves were not to
be detained—that being the most benign of their recommendations—without
conclusive evidence of their posing a clear and present danger.

At that, the director and his deputies got white, the other
doctors silent, and Quillan, who as a CEF officer was the least exposed to
official wrath, sullen. But Quillan also had the least influence on the
proceedings and when the director nodded and haltingly allowed that their data
were perhaps somewhat indeterminate, Huron treated them all to steely
thank
you
and left the room.

All this was still on his mind when Kris skipped up
alongside him and asked where they were going. Huron stopped, rubbed the bridge
of his nose and regretted the obviousness of his foul humor. “Well, I was
thinking maybe I could take you down to the beach and see that you get settled
properly.” He smiled down at her, only slightly forced. “Unless you’d rather
take the bus.”

“No! No. I’d like to go down with you.”
What does he mean
about the bus?
But she asked, “What do you mean get settled?”

“Well,” Huron said with a hint of a more natural grin, “the
Navy’s generous hospitality is about to come to an end. So you’re going to have
to get some accommodations and find a way to keep yourself out of trouble until
you figure out what to do.”

“Oh.” That part hadn’t sunk it yet.

“Have you had any thoughts on that?”

Kris’s expression clouded a bit. “Um . . . not really.”

“Anything you wanted to—ah . . .” Huron broke the question
off, realizing a bit late that it was probably not a good idea to bring up her
life before she was taken. But his attempt at tardy circumspection was wasted
when she looked at him as if she’d read his mind.

“You mean, was there anything I wanted to do when I was a
kid—before Trench got me?” He’d expected her to be angry, but she just gave
her head a heartbreaking little shake. “I don’t remember.”

There was a silence for a few beats while her eyes focused
on some inward place and Huron collected himself. Then: “Is there anything
you’d like to do now?”

She brightened, her eyes snapping back to the present. “I’d
like to fly.”

Huron smiled, turned and directed her toward the big hanger
bays. “Fly. Flying is good.”

*     *     *

Huron’s ID let them through the main hanger doors and
into a hive of activity. A row of transfer shuttles were embarking passengers
and as Kris watched, one of them sealed its hatches and to the sound of sirens,
a tractor beam lifted it out of the docking clamps and pushed it back into one
of the big airlocks. The lock closed and a moment later Kris felt a slight
tremor in the crysteel deck as the shuttle boosted away.

Elsewhere, crews with lift-loaders pulled pallets from
shuttle cargo holds or stacked them to be taken aboard. The newly arrived
pallets were being processed into bays at the back of the hanger, or loaded
onto float trucks, or in some cases, even handed down ladder hatches open in
the deck. At the far end of the hanger other crews were prepping some smaller
craft for launch and Huron waved at these. “That’s what we’re taking. Number
three docking stand.”