Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks (16 page)

“Okay, people—three minutes. Get hot.”
And, Minx, you little twit, don’t you dare be late
. . .

Kris watched the range rings run off the display one by one. She still didn’t have the range down as well as she would have liked, but there was no time to worry about that now. The back of her neck itched and she flexed her hands around the stick.

“Baz, as we go in, light up that
Kurgan
with all the plasma you’ve got.”

“Plasma guns won’t do anything to a destroyer, Kris.”

“It might keep ‘em from seeing Tanner’s torps until it’s too late. We need two hits on that
Kurgan
to take it out. If their point defense gets both, we’re shit outta luck.”

“Okay, Kris.” The 14-meg ring was coming up. Coming up—creeping towards the edge, crossing now. . . “Tanner? You got tone?” Five seconds—ten. . .

“I got tone!”

“Baz, you ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

“Keep it close. Here we go. . .” The throttle jammed forward; the gentle push back in the seat;. her HUD coming alive with data as she brought all her sensors online—no point in stealth now—arcs, ranges, envelopes flashing out in red, orange, bright yellow. Her fire control engaging, the pip locking on; range rings flying now; Basmartin a comforting blue triangle just off her port wing spar. Fifty seconds to launch range, forty, thirty—activity in the destroyer up ahead; its sensors were up, going active, sweeping; her ESM clamoring that they’d been detected—
Yes, I know that
—fifteen seconds to launch.

“Baz, dump chaff and weave!” Chaff blooming around them as she dumped two packets, Baz dumping a third. No lock warning—no missiles out yet. The frigate slow in responding to the danger, its fire control just now online. Priming spikes as the frigate and destroyer woke their drives—

Too late, you sonsabitches, too fuckin’ late
!

“Tanner?”

“Launch! Two torps away!”

“Baz, paint ‘em hard!” She squeezed the trigger of her plasma cannon, a line of bright violet coruscations that burst into white incandescence when their mag-jars timed out, playing across the frigate’s engine cluster at extreme range; Baz taking the destroyer under fire; their guns heating up; the indicators running towards the red; Tanner’s torpedoes burning in. The 5-meg ring approaching. . . “Baz. . .”

“I got tone!”
Wait, wait
. . . “Torp away!” His torpedo arcing through her display.

Lock warnings chimed in her ears. “Suck it in, Baz! Here they come—”

A volley of missiles from the destroyer, orange fans arcing out and curving towards them. She purled off two decoys, activated her ECM, and kept her eyes fixed on the three torpedoes. They were running true. Had they seen them yet?

“No shields yet”—Baz’s voice was loud and startling—“I think we caught ‘em with their knickers low!”

“Break now, Baz!” He broke high and right, ECM screaming and spraying chaff with abandon as the destroyer’s missiles came on. The salvo hunted, some losing lock, some detonating on the decoys, their anti-missile chain guns engaged some more. The rest bore in. There was a flash and a short, sharp shock as one detonated against her forward shield; the shield took it, the indicator dipped into the yellow and she pulled hard left and down as another burned in. It flashed past, encountered a chaff cloud and detonated behind her. She rolled up just in time to watch the destroyer’s point defense take down one torpedo.

The second one ran in. She saw the destroyer trying to turn keel up with thrusters only. The torpedo struck forward, a glancing blow against the belt armor—Kris saw a plume of debris and gas from a hull breach, serious but not disabling. She boosted in hard, juked a missile, came down on the destroyer’s port-aft quarter and opened up on a drive node, hammering it savagely with her neutron guns until she saw molten slag explode as the node ruptured. She broke off, dancing under the ship, shaving the keel, and boosted away for L3 past the frigate tumbling in a cloud of wreckage, a great gash open amidships. She must have turned into the torpedo trying to bring her weapons to bear and been struck square on. Her fusion bottle was in emergency shutdown and her people were frantically running stringers along the ruptured hull.

Kris resisted the urge to make a pass—a few bursts of neutron fire into that breach or even a couple of the six missiles she was hoarding would have been devastating—but the frigate was out of the fight and it would bring her under the guns of the destroyer, closing up now with its battered consort. Nor, she reflected through the adrenaline singing loud in her veins, would the referees think highly of her firing deliberately into a crew busy trying to save their disabled ship. Willing her heart to calm, she headed for L3.

Bringing her fighter into formation three minutes, ten seconds later, Kris hailed her wingmates.

“Tanner?”

“All good here, Kris.”

“Baz?”

“Got some sunburn here; forward shield is toast.” He’d taken two hits on the way out that had taken off part of a wing spar, and one near-miss that had scorched a patch down his starboard side, but he still had a torpedo and all his missiles. “Not bad considering. You?”

Kris had timed her escape a shade too nicely: the destroyer had gotten off another missile launch—smaller than the first—but it had still cost her her aft shield. The burn-through had taken out her long-range radar and her port drive node was down to eighty-five percent. “I’m okay. Got a little singed back there. Nothing real serious. Where’s Minx?”

“Doing what she’s supposed to, looks like,” Baz told her. “Have you seen this?”

“LRR is hash—show me.” He linked over some data. “I think they think we’re something we’re not,” he said as the data came up on her display. The squadron covering the packet was breaking from Lacaille orbit and headed their way—all of them. Sixteen fighters, twelve minutes out—maybe thirteen. “What are they leaving down there?”

“Just a corvette and one LMAC.” Without the fighters, Minx could easily deal with a single corvette and one sluggish attack craft, but not if that
Kurgan
came down—and as soon as Minx and the corvettes got in range she
would
come down, no matter how the frigate or the fighters were doing. Already she was edging away on thrusters, and while the attack had disrupted her getting underway, she was now only five minutes or so from boost.

“We gotta go back in.”

“You wanna take on that destroyer
again
?” Tanner obviously thought once was all honor demanded. “She has shields up now,” he added.

“You want to wait until she has drives up and comes after us with that fighter squadron?”

“No. But we can blitz out now, hail Minx, get the hell outta here. Call it a tie.” From the scoring point of view, he had a point. Playing a
game
, it made perfect sense. Kris ground her teeth together. “I’m
not
going home with missiles under my wing.” A pause while she watched the destroyer’s progress and the fighter squadron coming up. “And I’m not wasting that goddamned torp.”

“Kris,” Baz now, using his voice of sweet reason. “One torp
will
be wasted on her shields.”

“They’re probably not a hundred percent. I bet if we hit her with all our missiles at once and then the torp, we get burn-through.” Silence. “Come on, guys—let’s go home winners or not at all.”

“Alright,” Baz replied first. “Just to see the look on their faces.”

“Okay,” Tanner agreed. “This is fucking nuts but let’s do it.” And then
sotto voce
: “Before she thinks up something else . . .”

*    *    *

If Kris had ever been more exhausted, she couldn’t recall it. She pulled herself out of the simulator and hung by the hatch, grateful for the zero gravity, not at all sure she could have stood had it been gee-normal. Basmartin and Tanner were there to greet her, Baz looking more ebullient and energetic than he had any right to be.

“We did it! I don’t believe it!”

They had done it—and he would have been well within his rights not to believe it. Coming down spar-tip to spar-tip, Tanner on point, Kris on flank, and Baz in the slot where their shields could cover him, they’d survived the destroyer’s last baggage of missiles—thanks in part to the clutter of the previous attack—and launched their own at point-blank range; watched the destroyer’s point defense take down five as they broke away; seen the rest strike the aft shield almost as one; and seen the shield shiver and collapse and Baz’s torpedo go home into its engine cluster. The destroyer’s fusion bottle went critical and exploded forty seconds later—ten seconds sooner and they might not have survived it—and the explosion having the most decided effect on the Red Squadron that was flying to intercept them.

Seeing their destroyer disappear in a blaze of light and their frigate a tumbling hulk, they broke raggedly and burned hard for the safety of their orbital base. Within a minute, the LMAC and the corvette guarding the packet followed them. Minx’s flight came in unopposed and affected the rescue without further incident.

The three of them glided down the passageway together. There was a debriefing to go to before she could collapse completely, but Baz was busy with his xel; messages were already flying far and wide. He scrolled through several and grinned at her. “Oh my god! It
was
a boggart! Y’know you just made history, Kris? No one’s ever beaten a boggart before. Not ever!”

“Knock it off, Baz,” Kris said, vaguely embarrassed by his effusions. “You guys made the torp runs—I didn’t really do anything.”

Baz laughed out loud. “God! Listen to yourself! You didn’t do
anything
! Yeah, right.” Still laughing, he shook his head and held up his xel. “You know why they bolted?”

Kris shook her head.

“They thought
they
were being boggarted! They thought giving them light capital ships was a sucker play and we got something even better!” He laughed again, louder. “Lord, I can’t wait to see their faces when they find out . . .”

CEF Academy Orbital Campus
Deimos, Mars, Sol

The victory was a nine-days’ wonder throughout the Academy, but by the evening of the second day it had become a singularly uncomfortable one as well. The faces Basmartin couldn’t wait to see were every bit as astonished as might be wished or even more so, but the gratification that had been expected was not forthcoming. Official scoring was delayed, pending the outcome of a formal hearing, to be held on Deimos the day after tomorrow, into the precise circumstances of the victory. By firing on two ships in ambush position first, Kris had interpreted the rules of engagement rather liberally, and that, combined with a lack of any reliable info about how she’d accomplished it, had the rumor mill churning at full speed, producing a flood of speculation in which Kris had already been reprimanded, expelled, crucified, or exonerated and given a formal cheer.

The hearing was the outcome—the reluctant outcome, for formal hearings were not comfortable for either students or staff and the Commandant especially felt they did not tend toward the smooth running of the institution—of an AM meeting, downside at the main Cape York campus, involving the Commandant, Kris’s instructors, and other concerned staff (which was most of them). It produced a consensus that while Kris had certainly acted aggressively, she had not transgressed the bounds allowed to an active, zealous officer when confronted with an ambush. Beyond that, only three things were clear: that a hearing was unavoidable, that there was no firm evidence of wrongdoing, and that Kris’s explanation to Commander Buthelezi, while offered with every appearance of frankness and sincerity, could not be attempted to be believed. The meeting broke up in an atmosphere of singular dissatisfaction, all the more burdensome for having no specific focus for its discontent, and the staff left with little more than a feeling that they were being handled in some obscure way, and that they resented it.

Naomi Buthelezi lingered at the request of Commandant Hoste. Ambrose Hoste had a reputation as a fine mathematician and a good administrator, and he’d been known as a solid fighting captain in his younger days but no kind of fire eater. A spare man of medium height with the flesh lying close over the angular bones of his long, deeply-lined, amiable face, he often projected a grandfatherly air but he certainly was not doing so now. He was just a year from retirement, his tenure had been unremarkable and he very much wanted to keep it so—the prospect of scandal was wonderfully disagreeable—and the dissatisfaction of the meeting affected him most severely.

After the room finally emptied, he let that dissatisfaction settle more deeply on his narrow, aged features. Hoste and Naomi were old shipmates—she had served as his flag lieutenant during his last active command—and this, in addition to her being Superintendent of Student Affairs, allowed a rare degree of openness between them, an openness which he now called upon.

“Naomi, in all candor, do you think she’s lying?”

“I would not like to believe it, Ambrose,” answered Naomi, who had taken a liking to her gifted, withdrawn, oddly magnetic student. “She’s performed exceptionally well in most things prior to this, and while she’s not particularly popular, the others still look to her as a leader. You’ve seen the results of War Week. She tends to dominate whatever team she’s on even though I think she’d rather not, and even when some of the other team members resent it. But they still fall in with her—it’s still her plan that ends up being adopted, even when someone else is nominally the exercise leader.”

“Yes.” Hoste pulled at his jaw. Kris had won every engagement she’d been involved in, often in overwhelming fashion, although in several cases the cost had been rather higher than usually considered acceptable. “I fear it may be distorting—that the cadets may not feel the need to exert themselves around her.”

“I’m not sure that’s exactly true,” Naomi demurred. “In some cases, she seems to inspire them to some remarkable efforts—the torpedo attacks by Cadets Basmartin and Tanner in this last exercise is a particular example—but when it comes to exerting independent leadership, I fear you’re right.”

“Yes,” he began, “it would be unfortunate if the preferred solution to tactical problems devolved to asking the opinion of one cadet. But . . .” They were in danger of getting rather far afield here and Hoste waved distractedly at the digression. “But about this claim she’s making. Is it at all credible?”

“Well, if it isn’t, we have to accept that she beat the system in some other way. She was not in contact with anyone outside Blue Team before the exercise began. There were no data transmissions to her xel, and when she began the exercise, all she did was link the nav data from one of the corvettes to her simulator—perfectly allowable.”

“And the corvettes were not primed to produce those new convolutions? We’re certain of that?”

“The referees insist that data integrity was maintained and there was no way for someone to upload those new convolutions for her. And even if someone
did
manage it and then deleted the data set, they’d have to have recreated all the logs and all the signatures for us to not find some trace of it—that just doesn’t seem possible. So frankly, Ambrose, either she’s telling the truth or we have to face the fact that she and some accomplice managed to defeat all our security and leave no trace behind. I can’t say which I find more incredible.”

Those had been always the only possible options; that, however, did nothing to improve the Commandant’s outlook. “But have you ever heard of such a thing?”

“I asked Commander Olson that. He said that he’d heard similar claims made for a few very experienced officers—there was one long-retired officer, I don’t recall his name, who reportedly did something similar at the beginning of the last war—but Olson said he had never met anyone who could do it, nor did he know anyone who had. So it seems it
may
be possible, but certainly the capability is very rare.”

“Very
experienced
officers.” Hoste looked slowly from side to side, but whatever he sought was not in reach. “There were reservations, you know, about admitting her—strong, I believe, in some quarters—but they were overruled. Her records are sealed.” This he had learned from his request prior to the AM’s meeting for the standard background check on Kennakris (Loralynn), of Parson’s Acre Colony. The terse memo he’d received in response was open now on his desk. He drummed his thumb on his chair arm.

“How are the cadets taking it?”

“As far as I can tell, about half seem to think that since the scenario was no-win, cheating to get around it was fine, even laudable. Most of the rest resent it, but I suspect that’s because they can’t figure out how she did it. And some probably also resent that she had the guts to go through with it.”

“Well, a damned awkward business, at all events.” The drumming stopped; he consulted the memo. It told him nothing new. “You say she has not many friends?”

“That’s my impression. She’s not easy to approach and frankly she tends to make people feel ill at ease.”

Hoste was certainly beginning to appreciate that. “Thank you, Naomi. I suppose it’s time to talk to Sergeant Major Yu.”

When it came to making people feel ill-at-ease, few succeeded better than Sergeant Major Yu. In part, it was his semi-legendary status as the senior member of the 101
^st
Strike Rangers; in part, it was his record of accomplishment, which had been amassed over more than half a century and would take an afternoon to read out; and partly it was Yu himself—he was the iconic sergeant major to the teeth, imposing resistless military perfection on all around him.

Commandant Hoste was immune to most of these sources of unease: officers of his seniority were not easily imposed upon, and while two men could not well be more different in temperament, Hoste being from the mathematical navy that liked its probabilities neatly defined and bounded, whereas Yu was from the part that throve in the maelstrom, Hoste had genuine respect and liking for Yu. Yet he did have some cause for unease, because he knew that Yu had sources of information—some official, most not—that were not available to him, and under the present circumstances, and on top of the revelation of the sealed records, he found that profoundly irritating.

The sergeant major was called into the Commandant’s office and on being told, “At ease, Sergeant Major—no ceremony,” assumed a comfortable parade rest.

Hoste cleared his throat. “You will not object, if Commander Buthelezi is present for this meeting?”

“Certainly not, sir.”

The Commandant folded his hands and considered Yu over them. “You are aware of the, ah, controversy surrounding Cadet Kennakris and the latest exercise—particularly her explanation as to how the victory was accomplished.” It was not a question and, requiring no answer, it received none beyond a very slight inclination of Yu’s head. “So in the interest of expediency, allow me to simply ask: do you find her explanation credible?”

“I’m afraid I cannot express an opinion of Cadet Kennakris’s abilities in that regard, sir.”

The answer was delivered with all the precise and civil absence of inflection Hoste expected, and he sighed inwardly. “Have you an opinion you feel you can express?”

“I would be most surprised if she cheated, sir.”

“You don’t think she’d cheat even when she’s confronted with a no-win scenario?”

“I’m not sure she is acquainted with the concept of a no-win scenario, sir.”

That fascinating comment hung in the space between them for several beats. Hoste glanced at Naomi, who wore a pinched expression. “Sergeant Major . . .” Hoste paused, one pale, narrow finger tapping his chin. “What is your personal assessment of Cadet Kennakris?”

“Permission to speak candidly, sir?”

“Certainly, Sergeant Major.”

“She’s a killer, sir.”

The Commandant’s eyebrows climbed to a surprising degree, and the commander lost her pinched expression to startlement. “Anything else?” Hoste asked.

“Yes, sir.” Hoste seemed to detect a change in Yu’s professionally bland visage, a gleam in the small dark eyes that he could not readily identify. Pride? “If something matters enough to her, she’ll go through Hell for it—and Hell will never be the same.”

Trying hard to detect if Yu was suppressing a smile, the Commandant asked, “Have you any ideas on what such a thing might be?” That question was not strictly within proper bounds; Hoste expected no answer and he got none beyond a mechanical “Afraid not, sir,” and a glimmer of the smile Yu had in fact been suppressing.

“If I may, Sergeant Major, would you go with her?”

“Yes, I would, sir.” The smile broke out fully now—Hoste found it distinctly unnerving. “She wants some seasoning, but indeed I would.”

Hoste nodded. “Thank you, Sergeant Major. It has been most edifying. Carry on.”

The sergeant major saluted smartly, turned precisely on his booted heel and exited. Hoste emitted a breath ending in a disgruntled sound. “Well now. What do you think of that?”

Naomi Buthelezi brought her hands together, slowly rubbing her palms. “I think it’s going to be quite the AM.”

*    *    *

“I
told
you!” Kris slammed the tablet she’d been reading on the mattress of her bunk, and Minx backed up quickly, fetching the backs of her knees up against a chair, which brought her down into the seat with a thump. Tanner put his hand on her shoulder, shieldingly, but Kris subsided.

Naomi Buthelezi had a keen sense of her students, and in this case her assessment of the cadets’ attitudes was accurate even to the level of Kris’s study. Minx was suspicious and resentful, sure Kris had pulled off a spectacular cheat, the details of which she unaccountably refused to divulge. Tanner was uncomfortably neutral and Basmartin supported her, no matter what he believed—he refused to reveal what that was. Minx therefore assumed he had been in on it since the beginning.

From the chair, Minx looked from Baz to Tanner, and not finding the support she sought, hunched down, crossed her arms and threw a leg over her knee, repeating under her breath what she’d said just moments earlier: “What bullshit—it’s a grad course—
nobody
can do that.”

Kris watched her over the edge of the tablet she had picked up again. The article she’d been trying to read—an analysis of the famous victory at Anson’s Deep at the end of the last war—had lost all meaning, and her eyes had taken on that dangerous yellow glint.

Minx measured the chill in the room, mumbled something about needing to go to the library, levered herself out of the chair, grabbed her tablet and left. Kris watched her go, then closed the tablet and swung her legs out of the bunk.

“Not going to the library, are you?” Basmartin asked from the other side of the room.

“No.” Kris stood up. “Target practice.”

Baz put down the tablet he was reading.

Kris shook her head. “I’m just gonna go see if a simulator’s free.”

*    *    *

The fighter was running, running as hard as he could, and although Kris was gaining, she was not gaining nearly fast enough. There was no finesse now, no maneuvering, just a race against time. She was pushing her damaged engines way past red-line to try to close—the alarms had been scolding her for the last ten minutes—and firing carefully spaced bursts from her plasma cannon in hopes of hitting a drive node, making him veer—anything to close the range.

That was her only hope now, unless the chase blew its engines first—a not entirely unrealistic possibility; the chase could not be in much better shape than she was. A couple of minutes would decide it either way: in addition to burning her engines, she was burning her emergency fuel reserve, and it would already take a near-miracle to get her home. Very soon, not even that would help.

An hour ago, Kris had strapped into the simulator and accepted the third single-fighter mission that came up: a convoy op. The objective was to attack and disable two replenishment ships escorted by a corvette and three long-range fighters. It was not the most advanced op, nor was it particularly realistic—no single fighter would ever be tasked to engage such a convoy, and it was pretty unlikely that any such convoy would actually sail—but that was all beside the point.