Loralynn Kennakris 1: The Alecto Initiative (22 page)

Mariwen nodded again and consumed more fruit. As Lora busied
herself with the built-in wardrobe, so much larger and more versatile than an
autovalet, Mariwen paused for a moment, her fingers over the plate. “Has Kris
called?”

Lora turned and noted the new brightness in Mariwen’s eyes.
“Who?”

“Loralynn—the girl I went out with that night. You
remember.”

“Oh!” Lora bobbed her head, an exaggerated movement. “The
pretty one. No, she hasn’t.” She took a suit from the wardrobe; inspected it
critically. “I heard she left with Rafael Huron—you know they’ve been seeing
a lot of each other—a day or two ago.” She laid the suit out carefully by the bed.

“Oh.” Brightness gone, Mariwen looked down at the little
plate where the juice of the remaining slices was running in narrow rivulets to
collect in a carmine puddle against the rim.

Right on schedule, Lora Comargo tugged the lapels of
Mariwen’s suit jacket even and twitched the wide collar straight. “I
so
wish we were going with you.”

“It’s fine,” Mariwen said.

“I
hate
all this—the rumors, everything that’s been
happening.” She smoothed the jacket’s fabric with her palm.

“Don’t worry.”

“Oh, you know me.” Lora stepped back to see if anything else
needed fussing with. Satisfied, she picked up Mariwen’s bag, a large black
satchel, and handed it over. Mariwen took it, gave Lora a quick hug and they
kissed. “Taxi’s already outside,” Lora said. “Wait a second, Sweetie. I want
you to take this.” She held out a heavy compact pistol with a short thick
barrel. “For protection.” Mariwen’s hand hesitated over it. “It’ll be fine.
Just give it to security when you check in,” Lora said reassuringly. “I just
can’t stand the thought of you going out there alone. Things can happen so
fast
.”
Mariwen’s hand closed over the black shape and she slipped it into the satchel.
Lora squeezed her arm. “Thanks, sweetie. We’ll see you this evening—just as
soon as it’s all over.”

Mariwen nodded absently, the front doors opened and she
stepped out into the soft morning light.

*     *     *

Kris finished her morning bath early, dressed, and
came out into the big atrium to find Huron already gone and a note on the
console saying he would be at the Chief Inspector’s office. There was a map
reference and a card on the mantle below. The card had a hand-written note next
to it that read:
If you need to see me, this will get you in
.

She ordered breakfast, took it to her rooms and settled by
the console. Today was the first day of the hearings and the media were already
out in force. There were vids of participants arriving, taken at a safe
distance because of the security; vids of the welcoming ceremony that media was
not allowed near at all—government reporting only—with commentary based on
leaked copies of the opening speeches, and speculation about the testimony to
be given and its probable effects.

Mariwen was to be the first actual witness to testify once
the preliminaries were finished. They showed file video of her and replayed
bits of the first sensational stories about her kidnapping. One showed a
distraught Lora Comargo turning the media away, played in slow motion while a
female announcer cooed about the terrible crime. Then the clip cut to a tight
shot of a younger Mariwen walking away from the camera and looking back over
her shoulder with that dazzling smile as the wind caught her hair and blew it
suddenly across her face.

Fuckers
. Kris snapped the obscene vid off. She
checked the time. Mariwen was due to arrive in less than half an hour. Kris
stared at the dull blank display, but the images remained etched on her
retinas: Mariwen’s face—young, sweet, happy, achingly beautiful and alive—the
wind rising, her hair stirring, blowing, the gust—

Gone.

Heart thumping high in her throat, Kris brought out her xel,
requested
Transport
, tagged it
Urgent
. The destination was
requested. She entered
Grand Exhibit Hall
.

The request came back:
DENIED—Restricted Zone
.

Shit
.

She got up, looked around, breathing fast, angry, helpless.
Picked up Huron’s calling card. Stared at it. Huron’s
card
. The mantle.

She sprinted from her rooms, snatched the card off mantle.
She repeated her transport request. When she asked for her destination, she
entered it again and swiped his card over the xel.

The request came back:
ACCEPTED ETA 00:23:17
.

*     *     *

Mariwen breezed up the steps to the Grand Exhibit
Hall, walking with that long, swing-hipped trademark gait; the black satchel
held comfortably under her left arm. Two security men, gaudy in burgundy and
gold uniforms, flanked the broad, arched entrance. Mariwen noticed half a dozen
others, dressed in dull, workman-like gray, placed unobtrusively around the
wide portico and on a mezzanine level just inside. More lurked around the
margins of the courtyard she had just crossed. She flashed her best model’s
smile as one of the gaudy men approached and tipped his cap to her.

“Good morning, Ms. Rathor. Glad to have you with us. I’m
afraid I’ll have to examine your bag, though. Just routine, you understand.”

Mariwen stopped, artfully distressed. “Is that really
necessary? I’m afraid I’m already late.”

The security man spread his hands and smiled a little
guiltily. “I’m afraid so, Ms. Rathor. There have been rumors, you know. We were
told to make no exceptions.”

“Oh, alright,” Mariwen conceded, opened the black bag and
held it out to the guard. As his hands took hold of it, she reached deftly
inside and pulled out a stubby black shape. With a smooth motion, she jammed
the pistol into the guard’s stomach and pulled the trigger.

The flat crack was muffled by flesh that exploded around
them in a fine pink spray. She caught the sagging body even as it clutched
reflexively at its shattered entrails—now uncoiling in tatters about their
feet. Deliberately, she shot the second gaudily-dressed security man, catching
his right arm just above the elbow and carrying it away.

Yelling began to resound through the pistol shots. One of
the men in gray was running at her, firing wildly with his sidearm. A slug
thwacked wetly into the body of the dead man she was holding. She shot him in
the chest, then squeezed off a volley at the men on the mezzanine.

They dove for cover as part of the balcony railing shattered
and a large painted urn exploded into fragments. Shards of poly-marble
ricocheted all over the entry way. Mariwen drew a bead on a man crouched behind
a pillar. Then someone yelled her name.

Kris had reached the broad shallow portico steps just as
Mariwen handed her bag to the security man. She saw the gun drawn, the
explosion as the pistol went off into his belly, the rapid succession of shots
that followed, the other guard crumple around his severed arm, the man in gray
thrown into a neat back flip as the round cratered his chest.

Absurdly, she thought:
10-mm explosive-tipped caseless.
Slaver ammo
.

“Mariwen!” She sprinted up the steps. Another man in gray
ran from the side, moving to intercept her. He had a gun.

“Don’t shoot!” she screamed. “
Don’t
shoot!”

She didn’t know if she was yelling at him or Mariwen or all
of them. The man in gray shouted at her—something stupid like: “Get down!”

Fuck you! You’re trying to kill my friend!

She ran harder. Mariwen aimed deliberately at a man off to
her left.

“Mariwen!
Don’t
!”

He fired—the collar of Mariwen’s jacket twitched as the
bullet clipped the edge.

“NO!”

The man in gray caught her, his arms closing around her
waist. Spinning, she fought him.

“
Mariwen!
”

Mariwen turned and pointed the gun straight at her. There
was a blinding flash and the man holding her jerked as the report boxed her
ears. She looked into his eyes—they stared back at her, utterly surprised. His
mouth opened and shut; he blinked twice. Then his body slithered off hers and
she saw the back of his head blown away, the blue remnants of his intelligence
sprayed out in a fan behind her.

She was untouched. There was hardly any blood.

“Mariwen.” A plea this time; gentle but carrying.

More men in gray ran up, guns out. They waved at her,
yelling idiotically. She couldn’t hear them over the ringing in her ears. Her
arms held out to Mariwen, she walked forward.

Mariwen aimed the pistol between her eyes—she could see the
pitting around the crown of the well-used muzzle. Mariwen’s face was contorted
beyond all bounds of humanness—all beauty raped from it by an insane
bloodlust.

“Mariwen, please.” The silly gray men and their guns no
longer existed. Nothing existed but her and Mariwen and the pitted muzzle of
Mariwen’s gun. Heartbeats reverberated at long and regular intervals, with
deafening silence in between.

Kris kept walking toward her. “It’s me. Kris.”

If the gun went off, she’d never hear it. She knew that now.

“Mariwen, put the gun down.”

Mariwen’s eyes bored into hers: dark, mad, tormented.
Trapped, frantic eyes. Hating eyes. Her finger tightened on the trigger.

“Mariwen, it’s okay. I’m here. Put it down. For me?”

Something clouded the tortured eyes. Something yearning.
Something confused. Mariwen opened her mouth but no sound emerged. Her lips
writhed helplessly.

“Will you do that for me, Mariwen? Please?”

She reached out, arms and hands inviting.

“Please Mariwen?”

The gun barrel wavered.

“I’m here.”

A long scream, terrible and bare, clawed out of Mariwen’s
throat. The pistol dropped from slack fingers. With a long lunge, Kris caught
her as her knees buckled. Together, they collapsed onto the cold blood-washed
marble. Protectively, Kris hugged her while huge wrenching sobs shook her
narrow back and burning tears washed the bitter sweat from Kris’s skin.

Six days later (NST). . .
NBPS HQ, Mare Nemeton
Nedaema, Pleiades Sector

Chief Inspector Taliaferro sat on the edge of his desk
between a coffee cup, two ammo clips lying there in open defiance of
regulations, a scattering of hardcopy and an ashtray. He held a light gray cube
in his fingers, not quite two centimeters on a side, twirling it absently.
“Know what this is?”

Kris, who was sitting in the one of the two extra chairs in
Chief Inspector’s office, gave her head a small negative shake and Huron, who
stood behind the other one, responded only with a tightening of the muscles
around his mouth.

“Metabonded forward-propagating focused-blast explosive,”
Taliaferro said to no one in particular. “Call it
Forpro
. Supposed to be
experimental. About 45 grams here.” He tossed the cube in his hand and Kris
fervently hoped that whatever it was, it had been rendered inert. “If this went
off ”—he held it up and studied the shiniest of the six surfaces—“lessee, I
think that’s the front—it would blow a hole about two-foot across in that wall
there and wipe out the one beyond. Probably get a third. But sitting here,
you’d only a hear a loud pop—except for some blast reflection, that is.”

He stared at the imaginary hole. “Y’see, the way it
detonates, the blast front propagates in only one direction—cancels itself out
in every other direction. Fun, ain’t it?”

Neither Huron nor Kris saw fit to comment.

“Tricky stuff,” Taliaferro went on and before the quiver
this sent up his listeners’ spines could abate he continued, “A real bitch to
set off. Perfectly inert in normal circumstances. Can’t detonate it with
igniters or fuses or even other explosives. Hell, I could set off a demolition mine on this
stuff and it wouldn’t explode.” He dropped the cube on his desk.

“So what sets it off?” It was Huron who asked. Kris was
still just sitting there, looking pale.

“EMP. A pretty healthy dose, too.”

Kris, appalled, found her voice. “That’s what Mariwen was
carrying?”

“Yep. A small class-C device. Effective range for this
stuff, about forty-five meters.”

Kris heard Huron exclaim under his breath. “Where was it?
The explosive.”

“In a bunch of extra tables supposedly for those damn
hearings—had a core in the top of all of them. They just waltzed in with ‘em
and stacked ‘em in the courtyard. Since they’d been scanned, nobody gave it a
second thought—didn’t even ask what they were for.”

“How much?”

“Thirty-two point six kilos total. Stacked right against the
meeting room wall.” Taliaferro shook his head, and Kris looked up at Huron who
was just staring at a blank wall, stone faced.

“That’s the hell of it all.” Taliaferro waved his hand in an
encompassing gesture. “Explosive scans—well, you know how they work—damn
stuff looks inert—won’t see it. Half a class-C EMP device looks like just a
standard high-capacity battery or even a fuel cell. Get a couple or three—whatever
you need—wire ‘em up right, set up a small priming charge . . . there ya go.”
He let his hand fall to slap on his thigh. “Simple.” With a sigh, he pushed off
the desk, walked around behind it and pulled out a drawer, muttered, pulled out
another one.

“You mentioned that explosive was experimental.”

“That’s what we thought.”

“So . . .”

“So they sure as hell didn’t get it from some two-bit bomb
jockey.”

“Halith?”

Taliaferro located and removed an old-style cigarette pack,
teased one out and scratched it to life. “Officially,” he said slowly, “I have
no idea.”

“Unofficially?”

Taliaferro shut the drawer with a bang. “Who the hell else?”
Kris looked away from the expression on his face.

“Please,” she said, not meeting his eyes, “I’d like to know
what happened to Mariwen.”