Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks (22 page)

“Take your time. The Navy Department is going to balk at rating a midshipman, and who knows what other objections they might gin up. They like things orthodox and this is anything but. And these assignments can be tedious as all hell—right up until they become a shit storm in an airlock. That’s what the recruiting propaganda calls an
adventure
. On the other hand”—he spread both of his—“maybe we get lucky.”

She echoed the gesture. “So what do you want me to do?”

He stood. “First, I think we should probably cease inflaming overactive imaginations any more than we already have.”

“What d’ya mean?”

“Any chance you know a female cadet, about this tall”—he held his hand at shoulder level—“slim, long black hair, long legs, bit of an attitude?”

“Sounds like Minx.”

“Yeah, that would fit.”

“She fuck’n lurking?”

“Might call it a reconnaissance in force.”

“Bitch.”

“Don’t take it so hard. The envy of the masses, y’know. We’ve got a day—go think about it.”

Port Sutherland
Mars, Sol

She thought about it—for almost as long as it took to exit the building. In truth, there was never any real question in her mind. Whatever Huron had said about cakewalks and deep ends and airlocks, the overriding fact was that the prospect of so much time on her hands alone filled her with consternation, and that was spiked with the additional worry of where to spend it. As a cadet, she wasn’t allowed to travel out-system without clearance, and the options she faced all struck her as less than congenial.

Mars, the oldest settled extraterrestrial planet by a century, had in the view of many (especially the descendants of the original colonists) become a bureaucratic hellhole, a charge with substantial truth to it since the League capital of Nereus sprawled across a huge chunk of the narrow equatorial zone, and eight of ten inhabitants worked for the government. Otherwise, human settlement had taken a light hand on Mars, aside from importing enough air to make the atmosphere breathable (close to a billion cubic kilometers of refined gases brought from Venus by the Mars Air Line; perhaps the greatest engineering feat mankind had ever pulled off), and the planet retained its stark beauty, but what mattered to Kris was that it reminded her all too much of Parson’s Acre.

Venus, on the other hand, was just creepy. When it was originally colonized, Venus still had its dense, highly corrosive atmosphere in which breathable air was a lifting gas, so the first settlements were encapsulated stations floating at high altitudes where the temperature, pressure, and available sunlight were suitable. Although the Venusian atmosphere was now benign and the surface temperature no longer hot enough to melt lead, the Venusians themselves had never lost their taste for floating cities, and if there was one thing Kris disliked more than being in a gravity well, it was being in a gravity well where you could fall thirty kilometers before you hit something.

The Belt sounded kind of fun, but visas weren’t easy to come by and living space there was at a premium—waiting lists for everything—and her cadet status did not get her preferred treatment like it did on Mars. Earth, which from what little news she followed appeared to be a planet-sized insane asylum, was right out.

In view of the options, she’d waited what she hoped was a decent interval before telling Huron she was
in
, and had spent the hours since trying not to get her hopes up. Huron was a hard person to read, but you could always tell when he was serious about something—at least she could. It was certainly true the Admiralty could balk—that any number of things could get in the way—but Huron had looked like he wasn’t about to take
no
for an answer, and Kris had a strong if rather indistinct faith in that look.

She hadn’t seen Huron since she’d left Nedaema a little over eight standard months ago. Her acceptance to the Academy had been pretty much a
fait accompli
, but since she still had to pass the preliminaries, she’d shipped out two months early and taken up residence here in Port Sutherland, the settlement adjacent to the Academy’s main campus at Cape York.

So when he’d appeared so unexpectedly, promoted to lieutenant commander and now in a staff billet, it was almost as if she hadn’t seen him in years, except that her memories of those weeks on Nedaema were still so sharp. They’d spent quite a bit of time together—because of Mariwen, because she didn’t know another soul on the planet. It was a companionable time for the most part, but there was also a subtle friction that never quite abated; a matching of tempers, mutual respect and intrigue that (or at least, that she thought) was paired with a fair degree of innate understanding of each other.

She knew he was cautious towards her, and while he was careful not to crowd (occasionally too careful, she sometimes felt), there was also a degree of protectiveness that often irritated her, but it all was mixed up with a strange, inchoate feeling that they were never really going to get out of each other’s company—almost as if, were they both wandering around in a crowded room blindfolded, they’d always end up next to each other.

She knew Huron had a reputation in the Service as a brilliant though occasionally difficult officer. Although his results were unquestionably good, his methods were often unorthodox, he took more liberties than some felt were quite right and he was devilishly difficult to pin down. Huron had a certain lank elegance and he used it to great effect, both to disarm or, if he felt so inclined, to subtly needle. It showed in his look, his manner, and his voice too: a vague drawl, playing with the syllables as they crossed his tongue. He could be meltingly smooth, he could be sickeningly syrupy, he could be cuttingly sharp—sometimes all at once. No one knew which was the real Huron, although a lot of ladies spent uncounted nights in diligent research trying to find out. Despite all the rumors, and an underlying and not-quite-acknowledged sexual tension between them, Kris was not one of those ladies.

It was complicated. He was complicated, her feelings were complicated and that would have been true even without the complicating factor of Mariwen, whose life she’d supposedly saved and whose current existence—for which she felt wholly responsible—was the cruelest thing she’d ever seen. None of it obeyed any calculus she was familiar with.

The one thing that stood out from her tangled emotions were the flight lessons Rafe had given her during her last few weeks on Nedaema. She had never felt so wholly alive, so completely free and unburdened as when she was putting a flyer through its evolutions. And what made the whole thing truly astounding was that during their last week of lessons, he’d let her solo. That was not strictly legal, but here again Huron was something of a law unto himself. There were those who avowed he routinely abused his position; he had at least as many enemies as admirers (some even being one and the same), and while he was not nearly as black, or as glowing, as common report painted him, it was true that he let little—essentially nothing—get in his way once he determined he was right.

And with Kris, he thought he was right. Time would test that assertion, but that was of little consequence then or now, and none at all to Kris. What mattered to her more than anything was that he’d
believed
in her. It was a gift beyond words, a gift she still could not expand her being enough to fully comprehend. From the first time she saw him in
Arizona’s
sickbay, he’d treated her as a person—not a commodity or a medical issue or a dangerous curiosity. The chaos of the next few weeks had masked that realization, and it had not really hit her until he’d helped her strap in to his flyer—
his flyer!
—handed over her helmet and said, “Okay, take her up and turn her loose. I’ve got your wing. Don’t fuck up.”

That day—the whole week, but that day especially—was the most incredible she’d ever lived. The deep azure sky, the sweetly responsive flyer under her hand, the song of the engines, the tremendous raw power to be gentled or unleashed by the pressure of her fingertips . . . and then, overwhelming even these feelings, the time she’d asked, summoning all her nerve, to go sub-orbital. His voice had come back through her headset, calm, cool and assured: “Roger, Kris. That’s affirmative. Take her over the top.”

She’d eased back the stick, opened the throttle and the sapphire roof of the sky had disappeared. A perfect darkness opened like a dream, infinitely deep and beckoning. She held her breath as she cut back the engines to switch to thrusters, and all sound died. Silence, the purity of the stars in that eternal night . . . freedom. It only lasted an hour—Nedaeman ATC was on the edge of apoplexy as it was—and she had to shake the tears out of her eyes so she could line up the vector for reentry.

Finally, sitting there in the cockpit with wet cheeks after they landed, watching Huron walk across the apron with that easy gait, helmet swinging in his hand, whistling off-key and grinning. She could have kissed him. She
would
have kissed him, except that she never could have made it mean enough.

*    *    *

A little more than ninety-six hours later, Kris had her afternoon bath interrupted by the sound of a calling card. She’d taken rooms at one of Port Sutherland’s better hotels and paid extra for the luxury of a tub and an extended water ration. That still effectively limited her to just two baths a day, but she was entirely good with that.

Even better, her system had finally made peace with the immunocytes and she was enjoying real food again, mostly mounds of mashed potatoes—the genuine article imported from Terra, not the Martian ones, which were orange and had a strangely sweet character she didn’t especially care for. Between the baths, the manifold joys of eating, and reveling in not being sick, she was feeling positively sybaritic, so much so she hadn’t even started to get bored yet.

Wrapping her hair in the warm towel so it wouldn’t drip all over the plush carpet—the carpet would just have to deal with the droplets running off the rest of her—she padded into the bedroom and picked up the lit card.

“Hi, Rafe.”

“Hello, Kris.” Huron was used to her somewhat eccentric habits when it came to bathing and didn’t bat an eye. “SECNAV’s given us the go-ahead. So how about it? You ready to go catch bad guys?”

King Henry V:
The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,
And the flesh'd soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand shall range,
With conscience wide as hell
. . .

Shakespeare, Henry V: Act 3, Scene 3

LSS Retribution
New Madras Outstation, Hydra Border Zone

The last time Kris had boarded a CEF naval combatant she’d been carried on by an officer in combat armor and covered in Trench’s blood. Now she stood next to Huron, looking quite tall and handsome in the black dress uniform of an SRF flight officer, in the docking hatch of the cutter that had brought them from the dispatch boat
Tyche
to the side of the battlecruiser LSS
Retribution
.
Tyche
was a true flyer that had lived up to its name: the skipper delivered them in near-record time but at the cost of a rough passage; so rough that Kris, who’d known her share of rough passages, was still feeling a touch green as they waited for the boarding lamprey to latch on and seal to
Retribution’s
portside main hatch.

The lock indicators cycled and the pressure blister in the hatch itself confirmed the presence of atmosphere on the other side. Kris pulled her shoulders back and tugged her own dress blues straighter, smoothing the imperceptible wrinkles. Naval Logistics Command had faced something of a conundrum when it came to outfitting a single midshipman. In the last war, the traditional uniform had been revived—an archaic-looking rig topped by, of all things, a shako—but it had been decommissioned immediately afterwards, and to go through the bother of getting approval to use it again and then produce just one, especially on short notice, was patently ridiculous. The compromise reached—an ensign’s blue uniform with an epaulet on the left shoulder only and no braid—suited Kris much better. The only peculiar note was that they had replaced the single star on the epaulet that indicated a line officer with a domed pin of the League emblem, an ellipsoidal design representing the League capitol and the thirteen Homeworlds, colloquially known as ‘Mars and Stars’. Kris thought it a trifle gaudy and unmilitary-looking, but she of course had not been consulted.

Once the conundrum had been resolved, they’d loaded her down with a full kit. Being presented with a full set of ‘Ups & Downs’—Ups were the dark blue uniforms worn aboard ship, while Downs were the ‘reversed’ white uniforms worn when stationed planetside—along with her own suit of combat armor, left Kris somewhat puzzled as to what to do with it all. Cadets were only supplied with a single dress uniform and two working uniforms for everyday use, plus fatigues and an exercise rig. Aside from the dress uniform, those items and the entirety of her personal possessions comfortably filled one large duffle bag. Her new kit took up more than twice that, and then there was the armor to contend with. She didn’t think she could get it all in one trip, which meant making the cutter’s crew wait—an unpleasant prospect. Huron, being a lieutenant commander, had a batman who would look after his baggage, but whatever arrangements the Navy Department had seen fit to make for the only midshipman in the service, they undoubtedly did not include dealing with her gear too. And it would certainly be improper to ask him. But hopefully this boarding business wouldn’t take long and she’d make it back before they got testy.

The hatches opened to the trill of an alarm, and Kris and Huron launched themselves into a smooth glide through the ten-meter lamprey. They negotiated the gravity gradient at
Retribution’s
big pressure lock deftly and landed together just inside the main hatch. Each branch of the Service had its own particular flag, with its own name, that was always prominently displayed and commanded the first respects of all visitors, flag officers not excepted. The SRF flew the Black Jack, a swallow-tailed guidon with silver wings above the unit insignia on a black field. The marines had the Red Ensign, a burgundy-and-gold design that retained the archaic sea-anchor-and-chain motif, while CEF warships all wore the Blue Peter, or ‘Old Pete’: a narrow isosceles triangle that had the ‘Mars and Stars’ emblazoned on a royal-blue field which was scattered with small white diamonds representing the colonies.

Huron and Kris performed their duty to Old Pete, hanging from the jack staff on the near bulkhead. That obligation satisfied, they turned to the small party waiting to greet them. That party consisted of a tall man, a short woman, and a nondescript young lieutenant. The tall man was also unusually thin; he had that slightly elongated build of one who’d grown up in low gravity, and there was a brief moment of surprise as Kris realized he was
Retribution’s
captain. Star captains did not usually meet mere lieutenant commanders when they reported; that was typically left to the executive officer—Kris took the short woman in the commander’s uniform to be her—but Huron’s social position clearly made him an exception in this, as in so much else.

The young lieutenant stepped forward and saluted, then made introductions. The captain was Sir Phillip Lawrence, the title indicating he was from the Meridies Cluster. The woman was, as Kris had surmised, the exec, Commander Trislan Ravenswood. The lieutenant, per protocol, did not give his name. Huron made his acknowledgments and then indicated Kris. “Allow me to present Midshipman Loralynn Kennakris.” This was merely the identification required of anyone entering the ship.

Kris advanced a step from where she’d been waiting at attention, saluted, and was even more surprised when Captain Lawrence addressed her directly. “Ms. Kennakris, welcome aboard. It seems the Admiralty has seen fit to be somewhat vague as to your precise status and seniority. Clearly, you cannot occupy a junior officer’s billet, and placing you with the noncommissioned officers is equally inappropriate, so I have interpreted their directive as considering you a junior warrant officer and have attached you to my staff in that capacity. However, I think it best that you continue to report directly to Commander Huron.” He switched his gaze to the latter. “Does that suit, Commander?”

“Perfectly, sir.”

“Very well.” He looked back to Kris. “The Lieutenant here will show you to your berth. Given the hour, we shall leave off your formal reading-in until the beginning of the forenoon watch.” He nodded to the waiting lieutenant. “Lieutenant, if you please. Midshipman, do carry on.”

The lieutenant swung an arm down the passageway and with a cheery “Follow me, miz,” moved off briskly. Kris, caught off guard—she’d been about to return to the cutter for her neglected baggage—experienced a moment of paralyzing indecision during which Captain Lawrence politely asked Huron if he might “Spare a moment, please?”

I wonder what that’s all about?
The excessively polite tone raised her hackles but, realizing she was about to be left by herself, Kris shook off her paralysis and jogged a few steps to catch up with the retreating lieutenant. He guided her to the main ladder junction, and they ascended two decks before Kris found an opportunity to say anything.

“Sir?” she asked as they approached a hatchway. “About my kit—”

“A crewman will be along with it shortly,” he answered offhandedly as he palmed open the hatch and ushered her into a portside forward berthing compartment. Kris’s naval architecture was still a bit hazy, but from the captain’s comment, this must be where the warrant officers berthed. The noncoms would have the space just to starboard, across the main spline passage, with the rates occupying the forepart of the deck below and the rest of the crew the lower deck, just above the ground tier. Officers’ country would be far aft.

The lieutenant hooked a thumb at the hatch. “You’re not in the system yet, but don’t worry. It’s coded open and so is your berth, and we don’t have any lock-downs scheduled. They’ll put you in with the next update at 0400.” Kris nodded, still befuddled and nervous about showing it. The lieutenant stopped and tapped the entry pad to open the third door on the left. “This is your berth.”

Kris poked her head inside. There was a narrow bunk in a recess at the far end, two lockers and even an autovalet, not just a footlocker, set into the bulkhead, a desk console with its own chair, two folding seats and a mess port. “This is all for me?” She tried to keep the wonder out of her voice, but the lieutenant, whose expression had been verging on a frown since she’d asked about her kit, smiled. How much condescension was in that smile she couldn’t decide, but she tried to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“First time on a warship?” His tone was no less ambiguous than his smile. Academy mockups obviously didn’t count.

“First time on a battlecruiser,” Kris answered carefully.

“Oh, she’s a beaut!” His smile broadened considerably, and now there was no difficulty reading it. “Say, would you like a tour? I’m off after the last dog watch. You won’t be read in until tomorrow AM, so it’d be a perfect opportunity.”

Right. That tour wouldn’t include your bunk, would it?
But she smiled anyway, putting just enough ice in it to see if he’d get the hint. “Thanks, but I should check in with Commander Huron and see what he’s got planned for me.” Huron’s name or her hint—or both—worked their magic, and the lieutenant deflated appropriately. “Where do I mess, though?”

“Warrant officers mess with us juniors in the C-deck wardroom, so I’d guess you’ll eat there. Or you can always punch up something in your quarters. The menu options are on the console. It’s okay if you’re not too picky.”

“Thanks, Lieutenant.” Kris gave him points for being able to take a hint, but her cool smile did not change. He reached into a pocket and took out his card. “Tap me up if you need anything.”

Kris took it. His name was Tomas Wagner and he was an assistant signals officer, which meant he was responsible for helping oversee the ship’s sensors. “I appreciate that, sir.”

Wagner touched his cap brim. “Most welcome. Good evening, Ms. Kennakris.”

In his expansive, well-appointed day cabin, Captain Lawrence urged Huron into a seat with a cheery “No ceremony, Commander” that was a trifle overdone. Huron had never before met Sir Phillip, but he knew him well enough by reputation. He’d been promoted to his present rank in the last year of the late war at the ripe old age of thirty, partly through the work of providence and partly through the good offices of a powerful uncle, making him about ten years younger than most of his colleagues and only six years older than Huron. He had distinguished himself in several small actions, gaining a reputation as a bold, enterprising and skillful commander.

Bold, skillful and enterprising he was, but not especially popular. He was known for being so punctilious as to appear frosty, and when he set himself out to be agreeable—as now—his affected
bonhomie
often did not come across as intended. He was particular about rank and refused to wink at the many little corruptions most naval men saw as their just desserts. His disapproval of alcohol was notably eccentric, nor did he tolerate any degree of licentiousness or vagaries of that kind.

But more than these offenses against the immemorial customs of the lower decks, his crews disliked his habit of frequently destroying prizes. He condemned what he called ‘fortune hunting’ and felt it his duty to set an example of noble disinterest. His officers and crewmen, however, who saw no conflict between duty and profiting from a fine fat prize, were inclined to detect an alloy of hypocrisy in this attitude, for Sir Phillip, in addition to being a New Meridian peer, was from old money and, if his family did not ascend to anything close to Huron’s heights, he was still quite rich.

During the peace, he continued to serve on active duty, unlike many officers—including Huron—who had put their commissions in abeyance to pursue opportunities outside the Service. For several years he had conducted anti-slaving patrols before transferring to the Naval Survey Department, a duty he found most congenial, having grown up in a family of surveyors who spent most of their time on planets that were not gee-standard, which accounted for his somewhat attenuated appearance. Now he was using the long fingers of both fragile-looking hands to arrange the cabin’s situation displays for Huron’s benefit, while he explained their current disposition in the Hydra.

The significance of the Hydra lay in the fact that it was rich in habitable systems and interstellar routes accessible to the old gravity-lens technology. It had been a major combat zone during the Formation Wars. In the aftermath, it was largely abandoned, partly because cosmic symmetries ordained that where conditions were hospitable to gravity-lens drives, they were less favorable for jump drives, but mainly because the region was devoid of the antimatter fields that fueled modern interstellar travel.

But while a lack of convenient routes and available fuel had kept the Hydra from being resettled, that did not mean it was ignored—far from it. The Formation Wars had left enormous amounts of wreckage behind, from derelict starships and other valuable detritus that littered the ancient battle zones, to feral settlements which had never regained space flight in the aftermath of the carnage, some struggling along at pre-industrial levels even now. Wildcat salvage operations flocked there to exploit the first and slavers, the second; Bannermans and Tyrsenians primarily, but also many smaller and more
ad hoc
groups operating out of Mantua and Cathcar.

Bannerman claimed a nominal suzerainty over the Hydra, but it had neither the resources nor the will to enforce it. Halith meddled opportunistically but had eschewed any major operations since it conquered Zalamenkar two centuries ago. The League formally rejected the Bannerman claims and asserted the right to patrol the region to maintain a tenuous contact with a handful of settlements, keep tabs on Bannerman, Tyrsenian and Halith activities and, as now, to discourage slavers.

“The Admiralty made a damn job of it, of course,” Sir Phillip said as he finished uploading the latest data and zoomed in on their present location, the elements of his squadron picked out in a fine glowing green. “They promised us
Gryphon
and she was snatched away in the first week—no surprise there—but what’s truly nettlesome is that they filched
Fury
and
Ethalion
, and replaced them with
Ixion
and
Swiftsure
. Now the only destroyers we have are
Avenger
and
Naiad
, and being saddled with all these frigates”—he meant
Ixion
and
Swiftsure
, together with
Kestrel
, a stealth frigate that was one of the task force’s original members—“I don’t know how they imagine we will be able to cover our assigned sectors with anything like thoroughness.” He highlighted the vast expanse that was their intended hunting grounds. “One might think that the Admiralty would appreciate that slavers are not just foxy bastards but that their ships are legged to the nines, and no frigate yet built stands a chance should it come to a race. In a stern chase, I shall have to leave half my force in my wake and I don’t relish that, I tell you. Not that they have anything that can touch
Retribution
, to be sure,” he added, feeling that perhaps he was giving the wrong impression, “nor
Avenger
—nor
Naiad
, if it comes to it—but I should not like to chance the mauling they might give
Ixion
or
Swiftsure
should they come upon either of them alone.”