Loralynn Kennakris 1: The Alecto Initiative (17 page)

Kris took a couple of deep slow breaths and smiled more
genuinely. “Ready.”

CEF HQ, Mare Nemeton
Nedaema, Pleiades Sector

“Hi, Trin. Got anything new on this?”

Commander Trin Wesselby, acting director, Pleiades Sector
Intelligence Group, looked up at Huron and scowled. “Dammit, Huron. Don’t you
ever knock?”

Huron reached over and rapped three times on the corner of
her desk. “That better?”

The expression in her pale grey eyes told him it was not.
Trin Wesselby was a short woman; slim, tidy and precise in speech and manner,
but today she was also tired, harassed and fighting cramps, and her patience—not
long in the best of times—was correspondingly thin.

“No,” she snapped, reinforcing that look’s message. “But why
do I expect you to have suddenly become housetrained?”

“Because of your unfailing optimism. Now do you have
anything for your very nearly dear departed? With a little help, I can dodge
stealth drones when I have to but I’m wondering what else they may have cooked
up.”

She sighed and indicated the chair by her desk. “Well, since
you put it like that,
do
sit down.” Huron did. Wesselby steepled her
arms and looked him over interlaced fingers. Unlike most female officers, she
kept her dark hair long and the fact that a few disorderly stands had managed
to break free of the severe regulation hairstyle spoke volumes. “The short
answer is no.”

“What’s the long answer?”

She jerked her head at the console to her right. “Mostly
no.” Huron raised an eyebrow and waited. Wesselby dropped her hands, opened a
locked drawer and brought out a hardcopy file with a red striped cover. She
unsealed it with a finger and sour look. “This is all we have so far. What it
means depends on how far back you want to go and which conspiracy theories
you’re willing to entertain.” Her mouth quirked left. “And maybe how much
you’ve had to drink.”

She started sifting reports out of the file and pushing them
across the desk at Huron. “There’s been some message traffic, probably
originating from Halith—Zalamankar looks like a good bet—to destinations that
are suspicious: Bannerman, the Andamans, and Miranda mostly. We understand
Miranda and the Andamans—they’re still trying to make mischief with the local
governments.”

Huron’s jaw tightened. The League had already fought one
bloody war with the Dominion of Halith—the Halith Empire to most people—and
many confidently predicted a second.

 “But the Bannermans and, in at least a few cases, the
Andamans, have also been in contact with Solon in the Outworlds. It could be
innocent but Bannerman is big in the slave trade and we know the Andamans still
deal, even though they swear they no longer do, and Solon is a major node. We
also think they’ve started moving more shipments through Lacaille, but we can’t
prove that yet. We do know money is moving around, in some cases lots of it,
through some new handlers, likely from Mantua. And there have been some
potentially interesting ship movements, too.”

“Any of this correlated with that message traffic?”

“Of course not.” Wesselby dropped her chin and peered up at
him, disappointed. “No one’s that stupid. Unless you’re in a hell of rush,
there are plenty of ways to send info around that can’t be traced without a
tail.”

“So?”

“So not much. If you’re paranoid, you can make it look like
something and a few people have. Most of them being Chapman.” She rolled her
eyes. Huron knew exactly what she meant. Dr. Marc Chapman was head of one of
her analysis groups. With a wild idea, a whiteboard and a stylus, he could
clear a room in a heartbeat. “But there’s this.” She shoved a contact report
under his eyes.

He scanned it briefly. “This?”

She nodded, turned the report sideways and cocked her head
to look at it. “We got this late last year—our year—from the Ionians. You
know they’ve been having difficulties with Andaman and Nicobar over Winnecke
IV?” Huron nodded. “They swear there was a meeting on Cor Leonis seven months
ago between Korliss Hellman, Nikolai Arutyun, and Nestor Mankho.”

That got Huron’s full attention. “Mankho? The anarchist?”
Decades ago, Nestor Mankho had formed a terrorist group called the Black Army
that originally had no known state affiliations and no fixed address. It had
committed a string of assassinations and some fairly minor bombings until it
settled on Rephidim, a cold and inhospitable planet in the Outlands border zone
with a particularly grim settlement history. Once there, Mankho declared his
own sovereign territory and began launching large-scale attacks, almost
certainly with state support. The last one had almost wiped out the Nedaeman
colony of Knydos. After that, the League dedicated a lot of effort to
suppressing the Black Army and Mankho hadn’t been heard from in years. There
were persistent rumors of his death but most believed he was holed up somewhere
in the Methuselah Cluster or the Outer Trifid.

“The same.” Wesselby flipped over another page of the
report. “We never could prove who backed him on the Knydos raid—probably the
Bannermans but it could have been the Tyrsenian Alliance, despite the problems
they had with him over Rephidim. Anyway, after we put the Black Army out of
business he got into the slave trade in a big way. Turns out he wasn’t in the
Outworlds at all. He’s been living on Lacaille as an unofficial guest of their
security organs.”

Huron grunted. Lacaille was a Bannerman client in the Hydra.
The rumors had only been off by fifty-six hundred light-years or so. “How long
have we known that?”

“Only a few weeks actually.” She scanned down the page. “I
should have mentioned that the meeting was supposedly arranged by one Orlando
Kagan-Lazar.” The name meant nothing to Huron. Wesselby sat back and rubbed her
palms together slowly. “So what do you think?”

Huron spread his hands. “I think the Ionians are telling us
that last year Nestor Mankho met with a high-ranking Halith officer and some
guy I haven’t heard of on Andaman’s primary moon, all arranged by another guy I
haven’t heard of. And we have message traffic that we think has Halith prints
on it going between the places they all reside or do business. Is that it?”

“You don’t know about Korliss Hellman?”

“Should I?”

“Maybe not.” Wesselby fished around in her desktop. “Got a
file on him here.”

“Maybe just give me a précis.”

“Okay.” She stopped fishing, picked up a stylus and
addressed the open report, making a note. “Korliss Hellman is a prominent
Bannerman and known friend of Halith. In the past he’s conducted what you might
call a little unofficial diplomacy on, shall we say,
sensitive
issues.
And while he’s not directly involved in the slave trade he does profit from it.
He’s a financier and some years ago he got together with the Andamans to set up
a bank to help slavers handle their business. We suspect that his bank offers
its services to other undesirables as well.”

“And let me guess,” Huron broke in. “This Kagan-Lazar fellow
is the Andaman he set up the bank with.”

“Spot on. Kagan-Lazar is a semi-retired official from their
finance ministry.”

“Great. And you think Mankho is a client in good standing.”

“Indeed I do.”

 “So what is the redoubtable Commander Arutyun up to these
days?”

Trin Wesselby smiled thinly. “Well, he’s a captain now and
about a month before this meeting is claimed to have occurred, he was
transferred to the staff of Admiral Heydrich.”

Huron’s eyebrows climbed high. “That would be Christian the
chief-of-Halith-military-intelligence Heydrich or Tristan the
penal-colony-commander Heydrich?”

“The former. Tristan’s a general. ”

“Oh, that’s right.” Huron’s eyebrows resumed their place.
“So why do you keep using words like
swear
and
claimed
?”

“Because CID insists that Arutyun couldn’t have been on Cor
Leonis then. He attended a state function on Halith Evandor within a day of the
meeting. They also doubt Hellman could have been there, but they can’t
absolutely rule it out. They do allow that Kagan-Lazar may well have met with
Mankho though.”

“Just a slave banker having a friendly meeting with a valued
client.”

Wesselby nodded, nibbling the end of her stylus. “And the
Nedaemans agree based on their own sources and, for that matter, so does ONI.
But ONI thinks CID may be wrong about Hellman and that he could have been at
the meeting. Naturally, we been supporting their position.”

“Anything for a good customer.” Huron’s voice was sour. “So
where does all this leave us?”

“What was the meeting about? Just slave biz as usual? Or . .
.”

“Buying stealth drones to commit assassination or a terrorist
attack?”

Wesselby frowned and shook her head, tapping a finger on the
desktop. “Current assessment is that Mankho doesn’t have those kind of
resources anymore. ONI and CID agree on that, at least. They insist he couldn’t
manage an Op like this without state support.”

“Of course they think that. They may even be right.” Huron
shrugged. “So what?”

“Has it occurred to you that a stealth drone is a damned
expensive way to try to assassinate someone? Especially when it doesn’t work?”

“Certainly. Are you suggesting they just try to drop a safe
on my head?”

“I’m suggesting that none of this makes any sense. Look”—she
took the stylus and started ticking off points in the various reports—“we’ve
got vague indications of something going on that’s been in the works for at
least a year. We’ve got this Ionian report that is not considered credible but
if it was, would be a smoking gun for a serious plot involving Halith. Then we
have someone taking this shot at you in a way that seems, well, costly and
clumsy.” She favored him with a acerbic smile. “With all due respect, Huron, I
don’t think you’re worth all that effort.”

“For what it’s worth, Taliaferro agrees with you.”

“Nick Taliaferro is worth a good deal. Is that why he’s
making those media statements?”

“Pretty much.”

“Wise of him. These hearings are, of course, a very
high-value target. But if that’s the case, why light up everything
now
by taking a potshot at you? You don’t have anything to do with the hearings.”

“Thank god.” He scratched behind his ear. “So we’re left
with a report we don’t believe, an ambiguous meeting, and a bunch of traffic
that could mean just about anything, or even nothing, and a botched
assassination attempt. And from all this, we conclude that either Halith is
conspiring with Mankho to pull off a major terrorist attack using slaver muscle
and with the connivance of both the Bannermans and Andamans, or Mankho is just
up to his old tricks, or my street value has gone way up.” He looked from
Wesselby to the reports. “Are we milking a dead horse yet?”

“Rather,” Wesselby agreed, gathering the reports into their
file. She sealed it, dropped it back into her desk and shut the drawer
emphatically.

“Well then.” Huron got up to leave with doubtful sigh. “It’s
been lovely.” He paused and looked back at Wesselby quizzically. “Why are the
Ionians so convinced about that meeting?”

 Wesselby shrugged, looking tired and glum. “They claim they
have direct surveillance.”

“Which they won’t share.”

“Nope. Too sensitive. They don’t like us that much anyway.
Especially these days.”

“And there’s nothing of interest in the message traffic you
told me about? Nothing that might possibly point to this meeting or Mankho . .
. or Halith?”

Trin thumbed open a file of hand-written notes and squinted
at them. “No, not really. The only thing CID flagged was some references to the
Alecto
.”

“The
Alecto
?” The LSS
Alecto
was an old Halith
destroyer captured during the last war and refit. “The
Alecto
is laid up
in ordinary. Why would they be talking about her?”

Trin shrugged. “No idea.” She closed the file. “Does that
name mean something to you?”

“Well . . .
Alecto
is one of the
Erinyes
. Or
Dirae
,
if you prefer.”

“Yes Rafe,” Trin remarked with a biting tone and look to
match. “We all know you have a classical education. So
Alecto
is one of
the
Erinyes
. Meaning what?”

“Ancient Greek and Roman mythology—the Furies.
Alecto
was implacable or unrelenting anger, as I recall.”

“So? Other than it makes a nice name for a destroyer.”

“Or a terrorist plot?”

Trin’s brow wrinkled. “What are you trying to get at, Rafe?”

“What sort of education does Mankho have?” Trin rolled her
eyes. Huron’s mood softened. “Okay. Thanks, Trin—this did help. I’m going to
make some calls.”

“Buying tickets for a front-row seat?”

“Hardhat. In case they think of that dropping-the-safe
idea.”

“Good luck with that.”

*     *     *

When Huron was clear of the building, he took out his
xel and tapped up Fred Heink. As soon as the connection locked, Fred exclaimed,
“Christ, Rafe! You could’ve said something!”

“What? Spoil the surprise?”

Fred snorted. “Made me feel like a ass. Some surprise.”

“You’ll recover.” He paused to assess his friend. “Look
Fred, I still owe you a drink. Want to meet at Wanda’s in thirty?”

“Sounds good, Rafe. See you then.”

“Looking forward to it.”

Fifteen minutes later Huron pulled up in front of a café
that was not called Wanda’s. Wanda was the proprietor’s daughter, who had been
the subject of their mutual affections many years ago—a circumstance they’d
been unaware of until the girl got her dates confused one evening. The comedy
of errors that ensued was a pivotal moment in Huron’s young life.

He checked his security detail: a groundcar a discrete
distance behind and some nondescript characters lounging around the corner from
the café and another three sitting just inside the door. Fred was waiting by
the door, looking the other way. Huron leaned out the window and whistled. Fred
saw him and came across the street, not hurrying. When he was about six feet
away, he said, “You don’t owe me a drink.”