Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks (7 page)

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I could fit myself for a tinfoil hat about now.”

Wesselby tried to suppress a bitter smile. “Do you want to go on record with that?”

“Let’s just keep it between you and me for now. But it’s looking rotten as hell and this ain’t Denmark.”

CEF Academy Orbital Campus
Deimos, Mars, Sol

Sergeant Major Yu, barefoot and dressed in a black exercise rig, bestrode a stage erected in Shuttle Hanger #6. Class 1861, all dressed alike and already diminished to forty-two of its original fifty-six members, sat on rows of equipment lockers placed before the stage, some trying to keep their naked soles off the icy metal deck and reflecting that Yu was pacing back and forth on nice, warm wrestling mats. It was their first day back after the mid-term break, and some of the cadets were clearly still feeling the effects of a week of liberty—their reward for completing the first half of their initial six-month term—and with that sadistic genius that so characterized the bureaucratic military mind, it was their first day of unarmed combat training.

Sergeant Major Yu was the Academy’s senior unarmed combat instructor. Moreover, he was a three-time All-Forces Unarmed Combat Champion, a distinction he shared with no living person, and with the next tournament coming up at the end of this term, it was being confidently predicted by most that he would win a fourth title, something never before achieved. This opinion was not universal because Yu would be competing for the first time against the reigning champion, a corporal named Vasquez who had won the title once previously, and interest in the match was sure to mount to feverish heights. Early betting favored Yu by odds of three to two.

Kris, sitting in the second row, was mostly unaware of the growing excitement surrounding the upcoming tournament, but she was not unaware of the cold deck and was sitting cross-legged to avoid it, dignity be dammed. She was not among those suffering from an excess of liberty because she’d spent her liberty right here on Deimos, luxuriating in the quiet of an empty dorm, Tanner and Minx having gone downside to Mars and Basmartin having been treated to a trip to Earth. Basmartin had invited her along but she had declined, claiming the expense as the reason; a false reason as Kris could easily have afforded it—she was, in fact, quite well off, with her credit account still flush with the repatriation payout the government had given her in consequence of her enslavement.

The true reason she declined was that Mariwen Rathor was from Earth and while Kris had no notion of Mariwen’s current whereabouts—the last time she’d seen her was in a hospital on Nedaema—the pain of that visit and the association with Earth were still too sharp. So she’d ordered a few imported luxuries and enjoyed having a whole glorious thirty-four square meters to herself until her studymates returned last night, Tanner arriving with just ten minutes to spare, his eyes still red-rimmed and bloodshot, and wincing when anyone spoke in the normal tone of voice.

Tanner was sitting just four places from her now, pasty gray this AM and still wincing as Yu delivered his unamplified address in a gundeck voice calculated to fill a larger space than this roomy hanger. “Now I know some of you think that modern warfare is just sitting around fiddling with icons, and all this is only a betting sport.” He looked out over the group, making most everyone his gaze touched feel like one of the culprits. “So let me assure you, children, that out there, that shit breaks and you never know when and where you are going to meet your enemy. When all the fancy gadgets don’t play—in a cutting-out expedition, a boarding action and yes, those still happen—or when your shuttle is taken down in hostile space, the only thing between you and getting strapped to a table and having your brain turned into mayonnaise is what you learn right here.”

Yu stopped in his pacing and pointed. “A volunteer, please.” He looked straight at her. “You, Kennakris. Come on up here. On the quick now.”

Kris stood, sidled down the aisle to murmured exhortations of her classmates—
Go get him;
Kick his ass; Some people have all the fun
—and mounted the steps to stand at parade rest before Sergeant Major Yu. He greeted her with a knowing leer. “So Kennakris, how’s your AM been going?”

“We’ll see in a minute, sir.”

The leer widened. “Worked up any good resentments lately?”

“Not against anyone present, sir.”

“Too bad. Let’s see what we can do about that.” He executed a fluid motion, impossibly swift, and Kris hit the mat hard. “Unacceptable, Kennakris,” he barked. “Totally unacceptable. How’re you gonna kill
bad guys
flat on your ass like that? Come on, get off your butt and try it again.”

Kris hauled herself off the mat slowly, coming up into a crouch, rubbing her sore tailbone, and with her knees flexed, exploded forward. She’d fought hundreds of savage, desperate battles against Trench—nasty, brutal, vicious combats that always made him laugh—and lost every one but the last.

Now, her right hand shot up, feinting with two stiff fingers for Yu’s eyes while she punched hard with the left for his solar plexus. The blow had all the power of her driving legs behind it, but Yu slipped the feint and turned so her fist slammed into his ribs—it was like hitting granite—and his arm came around hers. She writhed, brought her knee up hard for his groin, missed as he blocked with a thigh like a tree trunk—wrenched free, ducked a blow to the side of her head, pivoted hard and tried to sweep his leg. The blow connected. She heard a small grunt as it went home, felt the slight change in balance and lashed out with a kick to the neck that found nothing but air. She spun with the momentum, blocked a heel aimed at her middle, dropped into a roll as a blow hammered down on her shoulder; bounded up, felt herself lifted; twisted in midair, slamming an elbow into rock-solid meat, came down on her feet with her knees bent and kicked high.

The kick went wide as Yu moved like smoke, and suddenly she found herself flat on the mat, the breath leaving her lungs in a rush, and there was a tremendous weight on her chest, pinning her firmly yet almost gently. The sergeant major smiled down at her—no kind of leer now—and the redness around the edge of her vision started to clear.

“Much better, Kris.
Much
better. Put more science behind that and you’ll scare the piss outta people.” His voice was quiet, almost private, and Kris, gasping for air, merely blinked. Yu watched as the yellow-eyed look of savagery faded. “Ready to get up?”

Kris nodded, accepted Yu’s hand to get to her feet and straightened painfully. “That’s the way to go about it, cadets. There are no match rules out there—nobody taps out at the end. You fight smart, you fight dirty, you fight to
kill
.” He turned to Kris, just starting to breathe easy. “Well done, Kennakris. Take a seat.” And to the others: “Now that we understand each other, let’s get on with the class.”

*    *    *

At the traditional Monday dinner of protein laboring to imitate beef, reconstituted vegetables, and mashed potatoes—the only genuine thing on the plate—slathered in butter-not-born-of-cow, Basmartin, as study leader for the week, led them in the pre-meal ritual: sitting at command, adjusting their chairs just so, uttering the thanksgiving, “Oh Lord, for what we are about to receive, bugger off,” and then ordering the attack. They ate in silence for a minute and Baz, seeing that Kris was just toying with her food, said, “I gotta hand it to you, Kris. I think you actually made him breathe hard. The rest of us could hardly make him lift a finger.” Kris shrugged. “Where’d you learn to fight like that?”

Kris answered with nothing more than a level stare, but Minx, sitting cattycorner, interjected: “Don’t you know? She grew up in a crappy neighborhood.”

Kris looked across to her, resisting the powerful urge to slam her pretty Homeworlder face into her mashed potatoes. Minx’s smug look faltered and then went blank, and Kris dropped her eyes to her plate. “Well, it’s true. I did.”

CEF Academy Orbital Campus
Deimos, Mars, Sol

Rubbing her eyes, Kris picked up her tablet again. The Academy’s history courses were dedicated to the concept of ‘know thy enemy’, which Kris embraced—up to a point. This week, the enemy they were supposed to get to know was Halith. The tablet considerately reminded her where she’d left off.

Section 6.4. Poli-Social Theory Module: Technological Determinism

{a} FTL Technology and the Evolution of the Halith Imperium: Bi-Polar Gravity Lens—Antimatter Jump Drive—Astrographic Factors. [ Open Abstract ]

You Have Not Read This Article

She expanded the unit and pulled up the assignment window. It read:

This section discusses the evolution of the Dominion of Halith into an autocratic, imperialist, expansionist state from the perspective of Technological Determinism. Your report will compare and contrast this approach with competing schools of thought, such as Cultural Determinism, the Socio-Economic school, and Holistic Archetype Theory. Explicitly discuss the strengths and weaknesses of Technological Determinism vis-à-vis the competing theories. Consider particularly the ability of the theory to explain significant cultural markers, such as the notably higher incidence of sadistic tendencies among Halith warrior-aristocrats. Form positive conclusions and be prepared to defend them in the oral session.

Crap
. She hated this type of assignment. Did anyone really give a shit
why
the Halith empire—Dominion, they insisted on calling it, even though the Halith referred to everything about themselves, including their armed forces, as
imperial
: the Imperial Navy, the Imperial Marines, the Imperial Ground Forces—had turned out like it did? Did it matter if one theory said it could explain better than another why their aristocrats had a statistically greater incidence of being sadistic fucks than other societies? All she cared about was that they still dealt in slaves, they exported terrorism, they’d damn near killed her, and they’d—
no, don’t go there
. . .

Setting the tablet aside, she closed her eyes and rubbed her solar plexus. It had been over seven months now and the memories still made her stomach churn. Opening her eyes and leaning out of her bunk, she clicked her footlocker open—there should still be some of her last prescription left. She fished out the vial and opened it.
Goddammit
. Only two doses; no refills until the end of next week. She clicked the vial shut, slammed the footlocker closed and retreated back into her bunk. Picking up her tablet, she opened the main article and tried to focus on what it had to say.

The argument began simply enough. First, it reviewed the pros and cons of bi-polar gravity-lens technology, the basis of the original hyperlight drives. The pros were that these drives, which passively collected and focused natural gravity waves, required orders of magnitude less power to operate than modern jump drives and could be run by standard fusion plants, making them relatively safe, cheap and efficient. The text here popped up an info bubble reminding Kris—as if she cared—that gravity-lens technology was still widely used in unmanned hyperdrones, hyperlight relays, and other low-mass applications that required such technology.

The main drawback was that the required translation energy depended strongly on rest mass (and more weakly on relativistic momentum), and because gravity-lens drives needed useable gravity waves, potential translation points became harder and harder to find as mass increased. For vessels large enough to carry people, gravity-lens drives pretty much had to exploit natural lensing phenomena, which are sparse and subject to fluctuations. That these fluctuations were small-order effects was immaterial: the movement of a translation point by a light-day or two—an insignificant distance at cosmic scales—could add weeks or even a month or more to a trip. So the bottom line was that gravity-lens drives were great if you were low on mass or long on patience, because most trips involved short hyperlight transits linked by lengthy journeys between translation points.

This was especially true in the region around Sol. Transit times among the nine systems outside Sol that would eventually become League Homeworlds—four of the League Homeworlds, including Terra (
Earth
, the article insisted), orbited Sol itself—were on the order of one to several years and even messages required months to exchange. The first colonies founded by these societies were even farther afield: decades away in most cases, at the very limit of what could be achieved with gravity-lens drives.

The first viable transit route outside the Sol Local Group linked the Hyades with the Pleiades Cluster via the Merope Junction, three hundred eighty-six light-years away, leading to the settlement of Nedaema and Galatea, and later Hestia. But the second route discovered was much more ground-breaking: it linked the Regulus junction, via Alpha Persei, to the Orion Spur, a full sixteen hundred light-years distant. The Orion Spur, densely populated with fairly young, metal-rich stars, was well-supplied with habitable worlds, and the gravitational topography there provided a wealth of transit routes between them that were accessible with gravity-lens technology. Instead of years, transits between the systems in the Orion Spur were often only a few weeks—in some cases, even days.

The text pointed out that this had three important consequences. First, marginally habitable but resource-rich planets could be colonized because necessities could be supplied from outside. Many of the planets in the Spur systems were in this category—the region was noted for an abundance of the heavy elements, rare earths, and exotic metals that space-faring civilizations need. Second, the lack of self-sufficiency and the ability to exchange information quickly—a matter of days at most—both allowed and argued for centralized control. Third, the harsh environments on many of the newly settled planets led to low fertility and prodigious death rates, encouraging the development of slavery and autocratic social and governmental forms which, again, could be imposed because of the short transit times within the Orion Spur.

Under such conditions, the most habitable (and therefore the first settled) planets quickly came to dominate, and what eventually evolved into the Halith core-systems soon controlled a tight nucleus of linked star systems. Further, navigation outside the Orion Spur was constrained by two large gravitational exclusion zones, and this allowed the Halith rulers to both easily defend their core systems and to bottle up their often unhappy colonists.

The situation was abetted by the growth of the Maxor civilization that took root in Alpha Persei. As the genetically altered Maxors became more deeply xenophobic with each succeeding generation, they effectively put a stop to traffic through their system. Since they controlled the only route between the Sol Local Group and the Orion Spur that gravity-lens drives could use, this effectively isolated the nascent Halith civilization for centuries, until the advent of the antimatter jump drive.

Kris figured it was this period of isolation occurring relatively early in Halith’s development that made Halith society so fascinating to League academics. Under these circumstances, it was no great stretch to explain the evolution of Halith civilization into a highly authoritarian, militaristic, expansionist society based on the interplay of gravity-lens technology and the gravitational topography of the Orion Spur. That much was straightforward, just as it was obvious that the conditions prevailing on the League’s future Homeworlds would encourage independence, individuality, self-reliance, risk-taking, and innovation. The societies that evolved there favored (or already had) deliberative government, divided and constrained by a dislike of constituted authority, often set up on some variant of the old Terran parliamentary or federal models.

To say further that these societies also tended to be noisy, fractious, chaotic, insular, arrogant, distrustful and dismissive of strangers—and greedy—was to state the obvious. By the same token, it was not a reach to conclude that the Halith would value conformity, loyalty, duty, and obedience, and emphasize collective responsibility and direct-line authority over the rowdy give-and-take of Earth and her cousins.

And following this script, it was trivial to see conflict between the two civilizations as inevitable once modern jump drives liberated them from their respective spheres. Halith expanded from its home in the Orion Spur, systematically conquering or making client states of the inhabited star systems along the routes entering and exiting Orion space, while the League’s forerunner, the STO, evolved from a mercantile consortium to an aggressively expanding colonial power, though it did so more by founding new colonies than by subjugating established ones.

This was all great as far as it went, and could get Kris through a solid two pages—even three if she bloated her sentences with redundant modifiers and some meandering independent clauses—but how could you get to the characteristics that made Halith uniquely what it was? The anarchic tendencies that were as often fostered as repressed; the obsession with personal honor; the addiction to sexual sadism and saber dueling; the obsessive love of High Art with all the exquisitely refined sensibilities that required.

Moreover, the closest analogue to Halith’s government, the text said, was the Roman republic of the Classical era—even some of the titles were borrowed—not any of the imperial models. Yet the Halith aristocracy appeared to fetishize something called the Warsaw Pact, a treaty organization comprised of authoritarian states on Old Earth that was a dismal failure, not lasting even fifty years. The Pact’s dominant empire, often referred to only by its initials, had set itself against the Anglosphere, which had formed its own organization, NATO, led by North America, and lost the great Cold War, leading to its collapse before it was a century old. Afterwards, the Anglosphere established a global hegemony that evolved into Terra—
Earth, dammit!
—which it had maintained to the present day.

Nor were those the only echoes of ancient Terran culture in Halith society. There was an individual named Bonaparte who, just after the beginning of the gunpowder age, briefly ruled much of Europe before being defeated and dying in exile. His rule saw less than two years of peace in twenty and was said to be an economic and demographic disaster, yet he was lionized. There was an ancient Asian admiral—who had the same surname as one of Kris’s math instructors—who was reckoned to be a great leader and strategist, yet her professor of Terran naval history pointed out that his major triumph a sneak attack against an unprepared adversary. Then he led his navy to disaster because he failed to take seriously his adversary’s capabilities, and was soon killed because the enemy had broken his codes.

And wasn’t it weird that General Ilya Turabian, Halith’s greatest hero and putative founder of their current state, had gotten himself killed by foolishly taking his flagship within range of ground fire during the invasion of a minor planet that should not even have required his personal presence? Wasn’t it weird that the Halith should take as their legendary ancestors, and consciously model themselves on, so many short-lived, violent and failed empires? How was one supposed to explain
any
of this by the simple fact that the Orion Spur was uniquely well suited to getting around in with bi-polar gravity-lens technology?

Kris sighed.

“Hey, what did you get?” Tanner asked from the other side of the room.

“Huh?” Kris looked up, startled out of the haze of annoyed thoughts.

“What assignment?”

“Oh. Halith.”

“Ow! Harsh. Explain how gravity-lens tech makes people into sadistic militarists.” His gaze dropped back to his tablet’s display and she caught the edge of a grin. “Good luck with that.”

Kris grunted. “What’d you get?”

“The crazy-as-fuck Maxor.” Tanner’s grin edged out a bit. “Piece o’ cake.”
Crazy as fuck
was almost a Term of Art when it came to describing the Maxor, either individually or their whole civilization. Kris could see his point—not that she was bitter about it or anything. She sighed again, somewhat louder, and dropped her tablet into her lap. Her eyes made a brief circuit of the otherwise empty room as she checked the time.

“Where are Baz and Minx, anyway?”

“Baz wanted to burn off more of those sim-hours he earned. Minx is probably working someone over to get her report written.” He made a not-quite obscene forking gesture with his fingers. Seeing his expression, Kris mentally deleted
not quite
.

“So how’s she gonna defend that orally?”

“Betcha she’s doin’ that now!” Tanner cackled and Kris rolled her eyes. “Damn!” He pointed back at his tablet. “Says here they don’t believe in integers—or something. Crazy shit! Look!” He flicked the article with his forefinger and her tablet beeped as it appeared over the display. She flattened the icon and it automatically opened with the passage highlighted:

. . . the Maxor worship an entity whose nature is not to be revealed to outsiders but which is thought by most scholars to be either the concept of Unity or the real-number 0. (Semantic analysis of Maxor texts strongly suggests that they either
do not believe in integers
or consider them to be blasphemous) . . .

“Wacky, huh? Crazy as fuck—no, not by half!” Then his xel chimed even as hers did. He opened the message first. “Hey? Baz’s got a tag-team going!” The briefest pause. “Don’t want it, do you?”

It was obvious he did, but he knew she and Baz were close—they often partnered each other during sim-runs—and besides, her name was at the top of the addressee list. Tanner’s was second. Minx, Kris noted, wasn’t on the list at all.

Kris shook her head. Somehow, she just wasn’t in the mood tonight.

“Thanks!” Tanner shut down his tablet and exited with the look of a man going to his salvation.

Kris sagged back against the pillow at the head of her bunk, brought up the article that Tanner had flicked to her again, and skimmed it with a twisted smile no one would have thought pleasant. She might not have been fully acquainted with the details of Halith’s founding history but she knew what everyone knew about the Maxor: that they were a genetically modified branch of humanity created using old gene-morphing technology back during the Second Colonization Period, not long before the beginning of the Formation Wars. There had always been movements that wanted to resist or reverse the effects humanity inevitably had on its environment, going back to very early times—who insisted on a moral distinction between
human
and
natural
. Those movements had become quite powerful during the period when space flight was first invented, but they split over the issue of colonizing other planets when that actually became possible, and split again over the use of terraforming technology during the initial ventures on Mars and then Venus.