Loralynn Kennakris 3: Asylum (49 page)

By which Antoine understood him to mean old friends from his days in the Royal Hesperian Marine Corps—some of them no doubt ‘willful-missings’—who had decided to eschew the quiet life after their separation from the Service. Outremeria was a favored haunt of such persons: an interstellar crossroads where mercenaries, smugglers and those who employed them gathered, along with less savory types. It was one of the more civilized planets in the Outworlds Border Zone, but that wasn’t saying a great deal.

“I do have a question though,” Nick remarked.

“Of course?”

He took out the worn chit the shoe keeper had given him. “What’re the chances I’m actually gonna get my boots back when we leave this place?”

Antoine answered with a knowing smile and an open-handed gesture toward the statue. “I fear that is in the hands of Hanuman.”

“Thought as much.”

The Capricorn Belt;
Outremeria, Outworlds Border Zone

Outremeria, the Capricorn Belt: a band of steamy tropics where things still moved by muscle. Nick Taliaferro sat on the bank of the Trang River, watching the primary rise over the wide ribbon of purple water, the air full of morning mist and the smell of rotting vegetation and dead water buffalo. The horizon was banked with pink-bellied clouds—a storm that was going to arrive in the heat later that morning and make things miserable—but right now it was pleasant, and with any luck he’d be on his way before then.

The drink in his hand, a local beverage that passed for coffee (more or less, but mostly less), had been purchased from the ramshackle
basha
to his back. It was little more than a bit of depraved canvas stretched on poles over some wooden chairs set about little round metal tables, deep in rust, with an annular bar at the center, inside of which the wizened proprietor glowered and spat on the spongy dirt. He was not happy to have been rousted at dawn by a stranger demanding
minachai
, and the off-world bastard had turned down his daughter, a sweet girl, just now budding, and an excellent value. Buy a quarter hour, and he’d have thrown in a full five minutes free. Off-worlders were all the same. Arrogant pricks. But it would not do to insult this one to his face, so the proprietor satisfied himself with hurling streams of silent abuse at the broad back and making obscene gestures below the bar.

For his part, Nick sat, sipping the bitter lukewarm liquid and observing banyan trees, heaps of cloud adrift in the buttery light, swarms of benign but annoying gnat-like critters, and the dead buffalo, about as far away from its ancestral home in the swamps of Southeast Asia as it was possible to be, while keeping one eye on the pilot boat beyond a big mat of reeds, a stooped figure at the stern, lank as a crane and naked but for a broad-rimmed floppy hat, guiding it along with an articulated pole.

Threading his way between the carcass, the mat, and a sodden tree trunk just below the surface Nick had not noticed until now, the boatman made for the
basha
with all the somnolent energy of his kind. As the boat nuzzled the bank, a scruffy little man in light khakis rose from beneath the rounded wickerwork canopy, ran trippingly up the wide upturned prow and sprang goat-like over a yard of grayish mud onto drier ground. Coming up the mild slope with a rolling bowlegged gait, he waved a dark-tanned hand in greeting.

“Nick? Nick Taliaferro? That really you?” The nearly impenetrable accent in which this was delivered would not have been out of place in Dublin or Cork on Terra, centuries ago, but now you had to go to Reunion or Lodestone Station to find it.

“Hiya, Eddie. Who else’d wear this mug? How ya been keepin’?”

“Ah, y’know—‘bout average.”

“Yeah. Worse’n last year, better’n next year. Average.” Both men said the last word together and laughed.

“How’d you find this mingy bit o’ bog?” Eddie snagged a chair over and sat his small frame, seemingly all composed of derisive angles, on it. “I couldn’t even get a navsat reference.”

“Skills, Eddie”—with a deep chuckle. On learning that Eddie was engaged in business at the starport up north—like many natives of Lodestone, he was in the import-export business—Nick had sent him a lat-long and an invite to drop by for a chat. Haunts like this could be found all along the Trang, on which heavily laden barges and flatboats moved with the current downstream, and by wind and oars upstream. This one was near the eastern extremity, beyond most traffic—and well away from any sources of monitoring.

“Ya don’t say,” Eddie remarked as the chuckle died. “By the by, I heard you got into the enforcement end of this miserable fuckin’ business.”

“Well, some people’ll do anything for money.”

“But you’re back among the livin’ now? Wha’appened?”

“I went straight.”

Eddie laughed. “So what brings ya way the fuck out here?”

“Bit of a fishin’ expedition, y’might say.”

“I might. As in . . .?”

“As in I gotta contract I’m staffing up. Wondered if you knew what any of the boys were up to these days.”

“There somethin’ in it for ‘em?”

“They can kiss my ass—I think I can promise that much. As for filthy lucre, let’s just say I’m looking for men of strong moral fiber.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“Tich Lytle. Dan Grady. Horse Egan—”

“He’s married.”

“Horse got married? You’re shittin’ me!”

“Last year sometime, I guess. Sweet little piece.
Sweet
.”

“You
met
her?”

“Oh, fuck no. Sven told me. He heard it from Louie, who met ‘em in transit. Says they went back to the far-beyond.”

“I didn’t think Horse’d ever go back there.”

“Well, y’know what the marriage state does to a fella. Horse always were a lucky fuck.”

“Ok. How about Austin?”

“Dead. Copped it out in east bum-fuck. Misjudged a catch.”

“You don’t say. Wattie and Duke?”

“They’re still around. Last I heard.”

“Shorty?”

That name bought a snicker. “Who knew of Shorty when times was
un
complicated?”

“Floyd?

“Down on his luck.”

“How far down?”

“Cell block R-13. On Paradise.”

“Nixon? Gale?”

“Have to look into that. Nixon got onto your side of the river. That’s not to say he won’t moonlight for a good cause.”

“Oh, it’s a stellar cause.”

“Never crossed my mind otherwise.”

“I’m sure it didn’t. Put a wiggle out, would’ja?”

“For how many?”

“A baker’s half dozen, say?”

“Heavy lifting?”

“Fair to moderate.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Good man, Eddie.”

“Now, I didn’t give ya no call to get nasty.”

The North Burins;
Rimmon, Outworlds Border Zone

Rimmon, the North Burins. Above, a mother-of-pearl sky, frosted with shimmering mares’ tails, enclosing air so cold no moisture could abide in it. Beneath, a permafrost landscape, so flat and unvaried as to be a paradise for connoisseurs of the horizontal, spreading its utter nakedness.

Coming out of this sky and touching down twenty klicks away from a cluster of self-assembling geodesic domes—the only disruption in this singular topography—was a shuttle from the twin-keel starclipper orbiting overhead. Designed as racing yachts for the hyper-rich, starclippers were the fastest hypercapable craft in existence. Notoriously finicky because their grav plants had to be tuned by hand, there were fewer than a thousand in operation, and only about a hundred of these were the twin-keel variant, the swiftest of the breed. Twin-keel starclippers also had greater range than their single-keel sisters, and this one had just made the trip from the Merope Junction in the Pleiades to the backwater planet of Rimmon in the Outworlds Border Zone in what would have been record time, had any such records been kept.

They were not kept because this particular starclipper had no official existence, nor did her crew, and as far as anyone knew, her passenger, Commander Trin Wesselby, was back in a secure ward of Bastogne Military Hospital at Cassandra Station, undergoing treatment for a massive stroke. The set of ‘anyone’ was itself tolerably small, consisting of the staff of her boss, Admiral PrenTalien, and a few of the medical personnel on the hospital ship, LSS
Cimarron
, where Trin had been initially stabilized following her ‘stroke’ and placed in a medical coma. (Bastogne, which of course knew nothing of any of this, did not, as a matter of security, log the admittance of patients like Trin and thus would deny she was ever there.)

Transferred from
Cimarron
to the admiral’s personal launch and revived the team of med-techs (who also had no official existence), she’d been flown to Merope and there gratefully consigned—for Trin was a horrid patient, and the special batch of nanocytes they’d used to produce stroke symptoms convincing enough to deceive
Cimarron’s
doctors had unpleasant side effects which took several days to wear off—to the crew of the starclipper.

Even now, looking out one of the shuttle’s ports at the trio of hover-cats skimming across the ice to meet them, she was stiff and sore—not just from the nanocytes, but also from four neat, newly healed punctures in her chest from an A-V stim unit that had been used to keep her heart going after the nanocytes briefly interrupted it. A-V stim units inserted four long needles into the heart chambers to do this; a matter of no concern to an insensible patient on the verge of death, but Trin, owing to a slight mistiming of certain drugs, had not been quite insensible at the time, although she was under the influence of a general paralytic.

Combined with the wrenched muscles in her back from the multiple applications of a defibrillator before the stim unit was resorted to, even the most saintly personality would have been hard-pressed to remain civil, and Trin was no saint. Indeed, the pilot’s record-setting performance might have been partly a consequence of her mood and the impossibility of avoiding it on so small a vessel.

But unleashing a jet of searing glacial fury on a presumptuous subordinate (the poor fellow who’d suggested she might like another pillow was still somewhat pale) was one thing. For the meeting she was about to have, a high degree of diplomacy and professional cordiality was called for. Given the stakes, it would not do to put a foot wrong now, for these people were under no sort of obligation to her, or indeed, to her cause, and while they had a Plan B should this meeting fall through, she was loath to have to resort to it.

So as the hover-cats pulled alongside, she stood and sealed her heated environmental suit while calling upon all the equanimity years of rigorous discipline could muster. The shuttle’s main hatch opened to admit a blast of arctic air, and she stepped out at the leader’s hand signal to mount the back of the hover-cat. Settling on and looping an arm around his waist, she gave him a thumbs-up. With a nod, he engaged thrusters and they shot across the frozen plain toward the low domes in the distance.

The trip took a little under four minutes, but even that was enough to greatly improve Trin’s mood. She loved this kind of tearing, ground-hugging speed, and after all that had recently happened, on top of months and months of deskwork, the exhilaration of having a powerful hover-cat between her knees—even one she was just a passenger on—was balm to her harassed and harried soul.

Dismounting at the main portal of the large central dome, her smile owed nothing to diplomacy, and as the leader of the little troop badged her in, she thanked him with perfect civility, even a touch of warmth. Passing through the weather lock, she was met by an adjutant in a crisp gray uniform and a black beret, along with a yeoman who helped her out of the suit. The adjutant, a handsome young man whose dark bronze complexion and coppery hair proclaimed his Phaedran origins greeted her pleasantly and did not bother to subject her to the indignity of a weapons scan. That was no surprise to Trin: landing the shuttle a full twenty kilometers away was merely a gesture of professional courtesy. The individual she was about to meet with had a fleet of warships in-system, and had there been any suspicion, her starclipper would never have been allowed to make orbit, much less launch a shuttle.

Still, the leaders of some mercenary units would go through these motions anyhow, by way of seeing that visitors knew their place. This particular commander had no need for such charades, or Trin would not have been here.

“The General is expecting you, Commander,” the adjutant announced in his softly accented voice. “Follow me, please.”

Following him through narrow corridors wholly devoid of any mark or symbol, he brought her quickly to an entrance and tapped the entry pad. A curt exchange followed, the oval entrance dilated, and Trin stepped through to meet the woman who rose to greet her from behind an old plain desk.

General Alexis Corhaine, commander and CEO of the Tanith Rangers (officially Tanith Private Security Corp L69l; DBA: Tanith Rangers—unofficially Corhaine’s Black Hats, after the black berets they wore—operating under license from the New United Kingdom of Friesia & New Caledonia), extended her hand.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Commander. I’ve heard so much about you.” There was a slight twinkle in the general’s eye.

Trin accepted the strong grip with a calibrated squeeze. “The pleasure’s all mine, General, although I’m afraid I can’t say quite the same.”

“Glad to hear my security people aren’t falling down on the job then.”

“I’ll have to have a chat with mine.”

“Not at all,” Corhaine countered with a smile. “Rafe cannot avoid singing your praises. Please be seated.”

“Yes.” Trin returned the smile as they both sat. “He
can
be indiscreet.”

“You know him better than I, of course.” Corhaine stroked an icon on her desktop to life. “Can I offer you something? Tea? Coffee?”

“Tea would be quite pleasant.”

Tapping the lit icon, the general spoke. “Mirabai, please get the Commander a cup of tea and have them send me up some coffee.”

“Right away, ma’am,” a musical voice answered from the desktop. A minute later, a young man, rather stocky, wearing undress uniform without insignia, entered, bearing two carafes and a pair of plain white cups with matching saucers on a tray. He placed these on the desk, poured Trin her tea and the general her coffee, and retreated with no more than nod.

Trin lifted the cup and inhaled the fragment steam. For a coffee drinker, Alexis Corhaine had good taste in tea. In the interval afforded by her first sips, she took the opportunity to consider this woman about which she had—despite her tactical protestation—heard quite a bit, but never met.

As far as mere physical attributes were concerned, General Corhaine seemed to be constructed with strict adherence to the principle of the mean: she was of average height, average build, and had average features. Her hair was an indeterminate color, neither brunette nor yet blond. Looking closer, Trin detected that ‘constructed’ might apply more literally than usual when it came to Corhaine’s physique. The general had seen much action, and her face bore the faint scars of at least one reconstruction. The unnatural symmetry of her build suggested that not all her limbs were original either. Whatever history her appearance might once have had seemed to have been wiped clean; even her age was indeterminate.

Trin guessed that Corhaine was about her age, but as far as any records went, the general’s existence did not go back even twenty years. She first appeared in the corporate filings of a now defunct mercenary unit as executive officer and comptroller in the year 24. Sixteen months later (GAT), she had assumed command of the Tanith Rangers, and in the year 30, became majority share holder and CEO. The Tanith Rangers had been a run-of-the-mill security firm before she joined. It was Corhaine who built them into a premier black-ops outfit. Her lack of a graspable identity was entirely in keeping with that.

Leaning back comfortably, the general regarded Trin with a level gaze.

“About this proposal,” Corhaine began, stirring her coffee. She’d sweetened it—a habit that did not seem quite in keeping with her character. “I got the sergeant major’s message, of course, and overall, it appears to be within our scope. But it refers to a requirement for
special capabilities
. Can you enlarge on that?”

“Yes.” Trin slid the cup back on its saucer. “I understand you have a Lieutenant Quinn on strength?”

“Did that information come through Rafe by any chance?”

“I’m afraid it did. As I said, he can be indiscreet.”

“I see.” Trin could not tell if Corhaine’s amusement was genuine or calculated. “And this op has a particular need for Lieutenant Quinn?”

Trin met the other woman’s gaze squarely. “She’s a triplet singer. We will need someone working the inside. Trips are, of course, very highly sought after. As a member of your core intelligence unit, she has the requisite training and experience. She would seem to be the ideal candidate to employ for this mission.”

Raising her cup, the general sipped deliberately. “Lieutenant Quinn is exceptional . . . in several respects. This proposed venture entails severe risk. I understand you have the utmost confidence in Mr. Taliaferro”—Trin had to smile inwardly at anyone referring to Nick as
Mr
.—“and Fred Yu vouches for him. I am in sympathy with the objective, but you will understand that my sympathy has limits.”

“Of course.”

Another, even more deliberate sip, her eyes not leaving Trin’s. “You will not take it wrong, Commander, if I suggest you still have a card left to play?”

Trin had been expecting this. She’d already worked out her response, but even so, her habits of secrecy were so deeply ingrained that it took effort to lay that card on the table. In a flat, pragmatic voice she explained her theory about the Halith mole.

General Corhaine listened silently, but something changed in her expression—a hardness she masked by looking over at a wall display and gesturing with her coffee cup. “If you can answer without compromising anything, may I ask how long you think this has been going on?”

“Some years. Beyond that, there is no way to tell at this point. Go back far enough, and the signal-to-noise ratio becomes such that you can detect most anything you chose to look for.”

“Yes, indeed. Of course.” The reply had a distinct inflection. Not merely a matter of academic interest, then. Trin knew nothing about any personal connections Corhaine might have, but she guessed there were some. Did this impinge on someone she knew or had known? That
was
an academic question, but Trin could not help having her curiosity piqued.

“I’m willing to speak to Lieutenant Quinn regarding this,” the general said, resuming her former, thoroughly professional tone. “But she has a right to know why she’s being asked to do it. Is that acceptable to you?”

If it wasn’t, Trin knew they were back to Plan B. “It is. I’ll rely on your judgment there.”

Corhaine’s gaze slid off to the side again. “Very well.” Looking back at her desk, she tapped up a copy of the proposal that Trin had sent via Sergeant Major Yu. “These other aspects present no difficulty. I’ve no objection to attaching the sergeant major to our team, as you and he request. But if the Lieutenant doesn’t agree, will you proceed?”

“We’d discuss an alternate approach.”

With nod, Corhaine closed the document. “The earliest I can have Lieutenant Quinn here is a week, GAT, but it would be better to plan on eight days. I believe that will fit your proposed timeline, but I’m unaware of the nature of your contingencies.”

Finishing the last of her tea, Trin folded her hands as was her habit when calculating. If Nick was on schedule, it would be another ten to twelve days before he had his team assembled. Eight days would give her sufficient time to inform him and Fred Yu if they needed to reset to the backup plan. If the lieutenant agreed, getting her ready and in place within that time would be tight. Not so tight as to make Trin nervous though.

“Eight days is acceptable.”

Corhaine set her coffee aside. Trin noted she’d drunk less than half of it. “In that case, I’ll introduce you to my executive officer, Colonel Hollis. He can answer any questions you may have regarding the nature of the retainer, posting the bond, limits of liability and such. Or would you prefer to take some time for yourself, first? I’m afraid this isn’t exactly a garden spot here, but we do have reasonable facilities.”

“Thank you, General. I’ll be happy to accept your offer—after I meet with Colonel Hollis.”

“Quite so.” Sending a ping to her XO from her desktop, she gave Trin a smile that was more relaxed than any expression she’d worn thus far. “And after you’ve had a chance for a little downtime, perhaps you’d consent to be my guest at dinner? I’d like to have a reason to ask the commissariat for something other than bully beef, egg banjos, and SOS.”