Loralynn Kennakris 1: The Alecto Initiative (12 page)

“Okay.” Kris observed it critically. It was a stumpy little
vessel with short rounded wings and couple a canted fins at the tail, rising
from an over-sized looking reaction engine.

“Four-man pinnace. Not armed, of course, but it’ll go like a
bat outta hell.” He smiled. “Don’t get any ideas.”

Kris wasn’t sure just what ideas she wasn’t supposed to get,
but she did not have much time to consider the matter as they walked up to the
rates who were finishing their prep and running the last checks. Most of them
saluted but one just waved. Huron’s response was similarly off-hand.

“Got her ready?”

“Yessir, Lieutenant,” the crew chief declared. “She’ll leave
a patch, that one will.”

“Not necessary,” Huron replied smiling, as he made a circuit
of the little craft. “Just a little pleasure cruise today.” One of the rates
laughed and Kris noticed them looking at her in a way she did not entirely
appreciate. “Want to check her out?” Huron was talking to her.

“What?”

“Check her out. It’s good rule never to get in a craft you
haven’t walked around.” Kris nodded. “Okay.” Huron took her around, pointing
out this and that, indicating common things to look for, having her pull and
tug and, in some cases, just peer. Satisfied, he popped the hatches just
forward of the stubby wings and they climbed in.

“What was that all about?” she asked after they were
strapped in their seats and the hatches had sealed.

“Safety protocol.”

“Every passenger get that?”

“Every passenger should,” he answered as he ran through the
preflight checks. “Whether they do or not depends.”

“On what?”

“On what they’re worth.”

He signaled the rates with a salute and a thumbs-up, they
cleared away and he released the docking clamps. A tractor beam pushed them
into the airlock—it wasn’t quite as smooth as it had looked from the outside—and
inner lock sealed. Seconds later, the lock indicators showed green, Huron got
launch clearance, the outer doors opened, he engaged the thrusters and they
were in space.

As they dropped clear of the huge station, Kris got her
first look of the incredible mass, stretching away left and right and far up,
the base a massive convex oval with the bulges of the fusion plants just
visible beneath it. All was pearlescent white or sparkling mauve where the
harsh light of Nedaema’s primary touched and impenetrable black where it did
not.

Kris had been in space for almost half her life but she had
rarely
seen
space. Whenever they had visited downside, she’d been
bundled into a shuttle’s cargo bay and strapped down, not seeing what was
outside until they landed and usually not even being told where she was. A few
times she’d been let onto the observation deck, but that was rare; the less
slaves saw or knew, the better slavers liked it. Trench wouldn’t have taken her
downside at all if it hadn’t been for her entertainment value.

Now she stared in astonishment at the vastness of it all:
the station receding, becoming delicate, even fragile; the slim ivory fusion
towers gleaming amid the sparkling lattice of the outer works; the tiny disk of
the innermost planet, extraordinarily close in astronomical terms but barely discernible
to her eye; the other planets mere points of light. And beyond, the incredible
wealth of stars showing every color but pure white; those of the Pleiades
cluster, only light-months distant, as bright as moons, while along the
ecliptic flowed a gaudy torrent that thinned to a rich spatter of diamond
brilliance when she looked away from it—all burning in great glory against the
perfect darkness of the cosmos, fourteen-billion light-years deep.

Huron nosed the craft around and the living blue-green limb
of Nedaema rose into view on the forward screen, cloud-streaked and
jewel-toned, shading rapidly into darker hues below (they being on the night
side), and Kris realized she was holding her breath. Letting it go slowly, she
blinked, and not taking her rapt gaze off the view, asked, almost in a whisper
as if one dare not speak a thought out loud here, “Huron, do we have to go
straight down?”

“No. We don’t.” His voice was quiet but not a whisper: a
voice you would use to wake a lover in the morning. “You’d like to stay up here
awhile?” Kris nodded. Huron leaned forward, tapped new commands into a console
and they rushed toward the blazing sun rising over the world below.

Time and again, the little craft fell to the east, Nedaema
rotating serenely beneath it. They were in a 63-degree, 98-minute orbit, clear
of most traffic and Huron had rolled the pinnace so that to one side the
forests and tundra and mountains and the vast island-speckled oceans unrolled
below them, now sunlit, now in deep shadow; while above, the stars traced their
immortal curves, serene and almost hypnotic.

Kris watched them both in silence for all of one orbit and
part of another until thoughts began to intrude, called up perhaps by the
quiet; the intense feeling of being alive yet apart—of boundless freedom yet
being fixed in an unfathomable solitude. Memories of the
Arizona
,
particularly of their last day: the celebratory dinner and what was said and by
whom and how they all looked and acted came back with an aching clarity,
relived almost, but as it were from a great distance—a play seen through a
telescope happening in a time at once immediate and everlasting.

She squirmed under the weight of the recollections, trying
to sort meaning out of glances and gestures, tone and inflection: the way a
finger curved with a thought, or a breath was held for a moment, or the way an
eye narrowed and lips parted in the instant before speech. Yet the meanings
were confused, unintelligible, and at last she ran her hands down her face,
yawning and shaking her head as though to shake loose of a spell.

Huron glanced over as she scrubbed her eyes with one hand.
“How are you doing?”

“Fine.” She stretched in the straps, looking forward as
Nedaema’s primary again jerked free of the limb to trace its brilliant arc
overhead, and asked a question that had been in her mind at the dinner but was
now back and curiously insistent. “Huron, you knew Mariwen before, didn’t you?”

“Oh, so we’re asking personal questions now, are we?”

“Sorry,” she muttered, suddenly defensive. It was hard to
make out his expression in the dim glow of the cockpit lights but then he
chuckled. “No—I’m sorry. I was teasing you. Yes, I did know her. It was years
ago. We were at college together.”

“Really?”

“Yep. Only for a year. University of California.”

“She said you were from Michigan,”

“I am.” He turned toward her and she could his smile. “But
the Naval Advanced Warfare College is in California. It shares the UC campus so
when I was there in the InfoOps program, I also took year at UC to finish up
another degree.”

“What degree?”

“Ancient history. With a minor in oenology.”

“
Eeni
what?”

“Wine. And wine making.”

“Oh.”

“Part of the family business. My great grandfather bought
the all vineyards in the Napa Valley, Sonoma and the Willamette Valley; most of
those in Bordeaux, some in Burgundy and Spain and a few in Australia.” He
glanced over, noted her total lack of comprehension. “He liked wine a lot.”

“Oh.”

“So what were you asking about Mariwen?”

Kris twisted her hands in her lap, flustered. “I just
wondered how she knew you. She didn’t mention your being in school together.”

Huron gave a little half-snort. “Maybe it wasn’t that
memorable.”

Kris did not know precisely what he meant by that but her
instinct said not to pursue it. “You took classes together?”

“A few—I was at the grad school and she was still an
undergrad.” She heard him pause, considering. “She majored in biology . . . or—no,
I think it was biophysics. Got her graduate degree after I left. Did her thesis
on modes of avian communication. Ravens mostly.”

“Ravens? You mean, like—birds?” Kris had grown up with a
few chickens and for awhile they’d had a flock of big gray flightless geese.
She was pretty sure she’d seen vids of ravens.

“Yeah. Birds. She speaks raven—pretty fluently too.” Huron
looked over at her with an ambiguous smile but Kris, frowning at her lap, did
not see it. “Didn’t she tell you that?”

“No, she didn’t mention it.” That unsettled her. “Was she
different then?”

“Well, until this trip, I hadn’t seen her in years. But no,
I wouldn’t say she was different, really. She’s amped it up, of course. She had
just gotten into modeling then. Did a lot of nude work, as I recall.” Kris
remembered the old flat-photo she signed for the crewman.

“Oh . . .” Then: “Did you like her?”

The question seemed to particularly amuse him. “Do you mean
did I like her or did I
like
her?”

Kris felt her cheeks warm with a blush. When she said
nothing further, Huron went on: “We
are
talking about
the
Mariwen
Rathor here, Kris. She’s not the most imaged woman from here to the Horsehead
for no reason.” He was silent a moment and she got the impression he was
privately chuckling. “Yeah, I
liked
her and I like her too. Whatever you
may hear, she’s a good person.”

“What would I hear?”

“Not easy to get a handle on—harder to keep a hold of. A
bit
ephemeral
, some might say. And maybe . . .”

“Maybe what?”

Huron seemed to be reconsidering what he’d been about to
say, and she thought he might not finish, but after a few beats he went on.
“Mariwen’s in a cut-throat profession and she hasn’t just succeeded in it—she
got to the very top, very quickly. And she’s stayed there, which is much
harder. No one succeeds like that and keeps their position as long she has by
letting things—or people—get in her way.”

“Okay.” Kris took out the thin plastic card—she assumed it
was plastic anyway—that Mariwen had pressed in her hand as she left and cupped
it in her palm. Mariwen had given it to her with a confidential smile and said,
“Here’s my card. Call me—promise?” in a low voice and Kris had promised. It
was about seven centimeters by five and featureless except for a small
holographic image of a smiling Mariwen is one corner. She had handled it some
that night but it didn’t do much; icons appeared but they were all gray or red.
It didn’t seem to be activated and that was all Kris knew about it. Then she
noticed Huron glancing down at it. He was smiling—a smile with a good deal of
smirk in it.

“What?”

“You have a calling card.”

“What does that mean?”

“I think it means somebody likes you.”

She scowled at him. “I meant what does it
do
.”

“It’s a dedicated personal line.” He looked back at the
forward screen as Nedaema’s primary went out of view to their left.

“Is
this
like a cel?”

“Sort of, but it works on a different principle. With a cel—or
even a xel—you never know what you’re talking to. It could be a person, a chat
bot—lots of things. With a calling card, you know you are talking to the
person—it won’t work for anyone but the person it’s keyed to and it’s
impossible to program it to accept a bot or connect it with a cloud or a hive.
A calling card will only call another calling card and they all have a secure
mode.”

“How’s it work?”

“No one actually knows. Something about quantum
entanglement. It’s organic, not electronic. You clone them.”

“Weird.” She regarded the card dubiously. “Does that mean I
have to feed it or something?”

Huron laughed—he had a very nice laugh. “Not usually.
They’re good for a long time but if one ever gets feeble, just pop it in the
microwave for about thirty seconds. That’ll perk it right up. Don’t leave it in
there too long, unless you want to make more.”

“
Weird
,” Kris repeated.

“I’ll fix you up with one when we get downside. It’s a good
thing to have.” He reached into the pocket of his uniform jacket and pulled one
out. “By the way, here’s mine.”

“Does this mean you
like
me?” she asked as she took
it, deliberately snide.

Huron laughed again. “Boy, is that a loaded question. Let’s
just say I’ve taken an interest.”

“Thanks.” She slipped the card into her pocket with
Mariwen’s and turned her head to hide the ghost of a smile.

Minutes later, Huron had asked, “You ready for the fun
part?” and when Kris nodded and gave him a thumbs-up, he tapped the console,
took the stick, and fired the retros. The console chimed and they dropped at a
moderate 3.6 gees. Reentry was not as rough as she expected: the noise was the
same—the howling rush of superheated air as they burned their way downwards—but
the pinnace just quivered in a spirited fashion instead of the jarring or even
violent bucking of the shuttles she was used to. At about thirty-thousand
meters, Huron began to shave the vector and they flew in a long curve across a
quarter of the planet toward the capitol city. ATC cleared them for landing and
he brought them down smoothly onto a jetway of the military cosmodrome about
fifty klicks or so outside Nemeton—so smoothly she could not even tell when
the gear touched down.

When they had taxied off the apron onto the jet park, a
groundcar was there to meet them, with a marine driver. They climbed out, Huron
consigned the pinnace to the waiting ground crew and they walked to the car.
The driver opened the doors with a crisp salute that was returned in kind—no
sloppiness here—and handed her into the back seat. Huron got in the back seat
with her and as the door slid shut and sealed, he asked for her chit. She
handed it over with a questioning frown.

“They will have arranged temporary housing for you. Let’s
see what they picked.” He swiped the chit over his xel and Kris, glancing out the
window, missed his look of mild distaste. He tapped a few brief lines into his
xel. There was a moment’s pause. Huron approved the result and handed Kris back
her card.