Loralynn Kennakris 1: The Alecto Initiative (2 page)

Eight years later (GAT)
. . .
Contract Slaver Harlot’s Ruse

Kris tried to brush a pesky strand of hair out of her
eyes using the cleanest place on the back of her arm. It didn’t work; her arms
were covered in bilge muck to the elbows. She thought about asking the woman
next to her, but decided against it. No talking among the cleaning crew.

She gave up and returned to washing the big conical
recycling filter. After all these years, she still couldn’t believe how much
they stank. The greasy gray-green muck had a clingy feel as if it had been
polymerized. Maybe it had. She’d never figured out what the recyclers did
exactly—why, when they were supposed to squeeze every useful organic compound
out of the ship’s waste, there was so much of
this
left over. She wasn’t
supposed to know. Slaves weren’t supposed to know anything—anything, that is,
except how to do what they were told.

That’s how she’d ended up down here, in the ship’s bowels,
working in scum on the slime line—not doing what she was told.

Well, not
exactly
not doing what she was told.

God Damn!
this stuff stank. She wondered why her nose
hadn’t gone dead. Maybe it had—a little. For the first hour she’d gagged
almost constantly. Strich, the line boss, had spiked her a couple of times over
it—not bad, just reminding. But she’d thought she would be used to it by now.
After all, the whole ship stunk like this—well, not quite like
this
,
not near this bad—and this wasn’t the first time Trench had sent her down here
either, although he hadn’t done it often. Only when he was really pissed.

Well, she
had
been trying to kill him.

Maybe it was a stupid thing to do, she considered. Trench
wasn’t that bad to her; she had slave life easy and she knew it—occasional
trips to slime line notwithstanding. She was well-fed, given light work, even
allowed to read some or check out the vids. It’d always been that way. For a
year, she hadn’t understood why. Trench had kept her by him ever since that
first morning; the morning he’d looked at her and said
Take
. When she
was thirteen, she found out why.

She had kicked and screamed and clawed and tore that first
time. Thrown things, broken things. Tried with all the strength of her young
body to kill him.

Trench just laughed. He’d pinned her wrists in one coarse,
long-fingered hand and wrenched her quivering legs apart with his knees. She
bit him and he loved it.

When she figured that out, she quit. It hurt too much, and
his pleasure made the very notion of a heroic resistance seem silly, even
obscene. She’d tried laying still, a limp masturbatory doll, but Trench hadn’t
liked that at all. He let her know it in the most brutal fashion possible. That
hurt too much, too. So she concentrated on trying to please him and that
worked.

Things got better. He sometimes got her things she asked
for, if she wasn’t too greedy about it. He kept the others off her. She didn’t
get shared much unless he needed to grease a deal. He even let her alone once
in a while. This was special and she used that time to learn everything the ship’s
systems could teach her. She was looking for a way to kill him—kill all of
them. This was not the first time she’d tried.

She didn’t think Trench knew that though. She’d messed with
the ventilators, trying to give him mild hypoxia, but that was just cover. If
he’d found out she was trying to tweak the jump convolvers, he’d have thought
of something worse than this. Her hand paused in scrubbing. Maybe he
was
thinking of something worse than this. Maybe this was just the softening-up
routine . . .

Strich moved into her peripheral vision, slapping the spiker
against his leg. She scrubbed harder. Strich wasn’t bad with the spiker, but he
wasn’t reticent either. Nor was he stupid. He’d been watching her. If he
thought she was acting weird, if he told Trench, if Trench had asked him to
watch her . . . Sweat began to form on her sides, clammy and itching.

Think of something else
. . .

She returned her attention to the recyclers. The stench was
almost a welcome distraction now. Maybe they were mistuned, or just not very
efficient. They were old. Everything on slaver ships was old: the comms, the
hydroponics, the synthesizers, the assault birds, the planetary tilt-rotors—all
old. Some of the designs—like the tilt-rotors—she knew went back hundreds and
hundreds of years. Stuff out of her school’s history texts.

But slavers didn’t use the new tech; they couldn’t afford
to. The new tech was great: efficient, low-maintenance, compact. She heard the
crew bitching about it—about the lack of it—all the time. But when it broke—and
everything broke when you got shot at a lot or had to do things like run the
Devil’s Cat’s Cradle—you couldn’t fix it. Molecular reorganizers, atomic
reflux welders, dionized expert systems—all the stuff that made it work—wasn’t
easy to come by and it broke too. Sure, if you had a secure, full-up, automated
airdock, the latest stuff was wonderful. But slavers had to be able to fix
things in space, on moons, in animal pastures. If hammer and tape could fix it,
good. If you could junk it and steal a replacement, better. If you could do
without, better yet. Slavers put their money where it counted: the engines, the
guns. The things that kept you alive. Kept you running.

Slavers were real good at staying alive and running. Sure
they liked to raise hell, get drunk and stoned and puke on each other. They
used
fuck’n
between every other word and pissed in the beer. They were
raunchy and brutal and stank. But they were some of the best fighters in
Charted Space, drunk or sober. Some found that admirable. Kris just hated them
for it.

Strich loomed on her left side, just behind.

Shit!
She’d been drifting again. She watched the blue
tip of the spiker out of the corner of her eye, waiting for the nerve-jangling
prod. It didn’t come. Then she noticed the look on Strich’s face. Was it
possible to be relieved and anxious all at once? Strich’s look made it clear
that he hadn’t been watching her because he was suspicious or because Trench
had told him to. She turned her back on him, scrubbing furiously.

Would he dare? Trench didn’t like to share his recreation.
Strich knew that. Maybe he figured if Trench sent her down with the animals, he
wanted her reminded of the value of his good graces. Maybe Trench was so pissed
off he’d posted her open-season.

Kris looked left and right. Nobody seemed to be paying the
slightest attention. Of course not. This was expected. She thought the guy two
stations down was smiling a little under his grime. She bit her lip. Good show,
huh? Why was he waiting then? Shit, he was standing right behind her—she could
feel him.
On your knees, bitch
was the traditional salutation. Or maybe
he wasn’t going to bother with the small talk.

She looked down at herself.
Gawd
, she was a mess. She
stank. How could he possibly want to . . .

Of
course
, he wanted to. She was the captain’s bitch
and he might not get another chance. Slavers weren’t fastidious, Strich least
of all. What did he have in mind? She’d always managed to fend off Trench’s
more unpleasant urges after the first couple of times . . .

She felt a push in her center back. Not hard, not gentle—just
unmistakable and insistent. She gritted her teeth and screwed her eyes shut.

No—wrong. She couldn’t resist. If she resisted, she lost
control. She had to turn, to smile. She
had
to . . .

There was a jarring, subacoustic thud and a feeling like
time ripping. Kris thought it was her. Then came a savage jolt and a great
sharp-flat ringing like sledgehammers on hull plate. She and Strich were thrown
to the desk. She was lucky, slamming her shoulder up against the side of the
recycler port. Strich was not. Being taller, he caught his head on a corner. He
slumped to the desk, blood flowing freely. She tried to stand up. Another jolt,
even more violent than last. The deck bucked and she went down again.

What the hell’s happening?

The proximity sirens went off with an ear-splitting wail.
People were babbling and moaning, some stupidly crying for help.
You’re a
slave, dipshit. No one’s gonna help you
. Then she heard the whine of the
fusion drives waking up.

They were in space!
Real
space! Someone had punched
them out of the wormhole. But that couldn’t happen. It just couldn’t . . .

Crawling now—she didn’t dare try to stand—she made for the
hatch. The rest of the cleaning crew was trying for it too, the ones who could
move anyway. A claxon raised its undulating wail, adding to the cacophony of
the proximity sirens. There was a crumping noise and three loud bangs tattooed
the side of the ship.

Someone was firing on them—not warning shots either. She
heard the weird little
kzing
of the ship’s batteries returning fire.
Sudden acceleration squashed her down against the deck. She felt, then heard, a
launch transient shudder the metal beneath her, then two more, then a fourth.

Trench was dumping his missiles—fast. They couldn’t have
possibly gotten a firing solution so quickly. Trench was scared—bad scared. A
hot, delicious joy filled Kris. Something bigger and meaner than him was after
his ass.

The inertial dampers kicked in, too many seconds in coming.
Something must’ve busted for it to take so long. Lucky they weren’t all smeared
to jelly. She peeled herself off the deck, bolted for the hatch now that it was
safe to run. The batteries were firing constantly.

More banging on the hull, then a loud crump—louder than the
others. The emergency reds came on. Kris dove for a lift ladder; swarmed up
using the rungs—you never could tell when the gravity might give out in a
fight. More noisy crumping—armor plate slagging off, she realized—and a sudden
veer the inertial dampers didn’t quite handle. She swung around to the other
side, knees hooked around the rails, and kept moving. Less noise from the
ship’s guns; just the forward batteries firing now. The shudder of a missile
launch.

Kris boosted herself out of the ladder well on to the
afterdeck. Trench stood in the passageway just outside the cabin they shared.
He held a sidearm in one hand and was trying get into his space armor with the
other. He wasn’t on the bridge! He’d been
sleeping
. He
wasn’t
on
the
bridge
! Kris’s joy turned savage. She hadn’t expected so much.
She sprinted at him.

He hadn’t seen her yet. Another sudden uncompensated veer
staggered them. He turned, reeling—saw her, waved the gun at her. The boarding
alert drowned out part of what he was shouting: “. . . below! Goddammit! Get
the fuck
outta
here!” Her eyes widened. He thought she was
afraid
.
Kris laughed but it came out a scream. He continued to wave at her. “Evac,
goddammit!
Evac!”

There was a huge clang. The ship shuddered and rolled
violently. They’d been docked. Trench went down, clumsy in his half-on armor,
tumbling across the deck and hitting the rim of a sealed hatchway. The breath
went out of him in a grunt. Kris skidded into a bulkhead feet first, kicked
hard and launched herself across two meters of intervening deck plate. He still
didn’t understand when she slammed into him.

LSS Arizona
Inner Trifid Boundary Zone

Captain Jan RyKirt, commanding the heavy cruiser
LSS
Arizona
of the Nereidian League’s Colonial Expeditionary Forces, sat at
the desk console in his quarters, flipping through images and listening to the
after-action report. The stuckee was young Ensign
Whatsisname
, a
Nedaeman on his first patrol, and he wasn’t doing too well. RyKirt was having
to jog every detail out of him.

What the hell was his name, anyway? Currently an assistant
fire-control officer. Car . . . something. Cardinovich. Benct—no Bren. Bren
Cardinovich. RyKirt shook his head slightly.

“I’m sorry, Sir?” Cardinovich interrupted himself.

RyKirt looked up. The boy must have seen him shake his head.
“The crew, son?”

“Nine officers. Five dead, including captain and exec. One
wounded. About a hundred crew, maybe thirty casualties.”

RyKirt regarded the young man narrowly. Cardinovich had
given a good first impression. Hadn’t expected him to go all flappy after his
first fight. “About? Maybe?”

“Well, sir, we don’t know how many were in the aft weapon
spaces and engineering got scrammed some—” The ensign abruptly broke off as he
realized he’d just used ‘tween-decks talk with his CO. Rapidly he amended,
“Took heavy damage. A bunch of equipment got knocked loose. I guess they had
some trouble with the inertial dampers.”

Oh so that’s it
, RyKirt thought. Must have been
messy. Very casually he asked, “Did you inspect the engineering spaces, son?”

“Uh, no sir,” Cardinovich answered. “I was on afterdeck
detail. Chief Olsen told me about the engineering spaces.”

So that
wasn’t
it. Damn, what had gotten to the boy?
Casualties were light on A-deck. Pushing the thought aside, he went on with his
questions. “Hull?”

“Chen-Richelieu converted ore carrier. Manufactured in 09”—he
pronounced it
ott-nine
in typical Nedaeman fashion—“last registered to
Xang-Hua Minerals. Dyson-Forbes powerplant, heavily modified—no serial
numbers. Two C-48 jump drives—”

“What?” RyKirt broke in suddenly. “Where in hell they get
those?” C-48’s were heavy-mass cruiser drives. They’d just been damn lucky—he
never thought he’d been trying to pop a ship with such hot drives.

“I don’t know, sir.”

Of course, the boy didn’t know. “Does Commander t’Laren know
about this?”