Loralynn Kennakris 3: Asylum (3 page)

“Tim, how are you? And how is Captain Shannon?”

“Pretty fair, Admiral, but I’m afraid they had to tank Alex.”

“Sorry to hear.” Putting someone in cryostasis was the method of last resort, and even if they could be revived and treated, the chances of postmortal cryonic dementia were lamentably great. “I don’t doubt he’ll pull through, Tim.”

“Me neither,” replied the younger man with a slightly strained smile. Alex Shannon was said to be so stubborn that he expressed the trait down to the cellular level. “Though if we’re wrong, the afterlife is gonna be a bitch of a place to reside in.”

“True words. Under the circumstances, I suggest you jump ahead to Epona as soon as
Ramillies
makes potential. We’ll watch the gate here for you, just in case the Doms decide to get ambitious.”

“I appreciate that, but we’d rather not leave you holding the bag.”

“You’ve got most of the wounded, Tim. Better you go ahead. We’ll follow as soon as they’ve jumped. Should they change their minds, you know it’ll be the last thing the sonsabitches ever do.”

“Can I at least give you some people to help with
Blenheim
? I hate to see the old girl like that.”

“Thanks, but Kyle and Dalton are doing all they can. Keep your people in case something shakes loose on the way home. But as you appear to be in a giving mood, I’ll ask for a prize crew for
Korolev
.”

“Happy to.” Murphy couldn’t entirely disguise the twinge of relief he felt. “I’ll send one right over. Have you thought of a provisional name for her?”

“I believe that should be your privilege.”

“Your people captured her.”

“Your people destroyed
Revanche
.”

“Okay. Since you insist, what do you think of
Carlow
?”

“Appropriate.”

“Thank you, Lo Gai. See you back on the beach.”

“Happy return, Tim.”

The line dropped and Rear Admiral Murphy’s image faded. With a glance to confirm that Sir Phillip was still keeping within the bounds of propriety—he was, if those bounds were considered a trifle elastic—Sabr spoke to Captain Donovan. “Raise
Blenheim
, please.”

A moment later the harassed and sweating face of Lieutenant Jeremy Dalton,
Blenheim’s
senior surviving engineering officer, appeared.

“What’s her status, Lieutenant?”

Dalton blotted his forehead with a sleeve. “I’m afraid it’s no-go, sir. We could get the plant back to maybe forty percent in two, three hours, but she’ll never take the strain. The keel’s near sheared at the root and there’s nothing but good will keeping things together aft of frame one-oh-four ‘til you hit E-Ring. All the stringers god made, if we had ‘em, wouldn’t help.”

“Understood, Lieutenant.” Sabr had been prepared for that. Throughout the AM, he’d cherished a private hope that
Blenheim
might have enough left in her to get home, even if they had to bundle her with
Trafalgar
. But hope was like water in the desert, and it disappeared into the sand just as quickly. “Secure things there and prepare to disembark your people.”

“Aye aye, sir. Should I page Commander Kyle? He’s down the hole.”

“That’s not necessary, Lieutenant. You’ve done all you can. Report when all’s secure.”

“Aye, sir.”

As the line dropped, Sabr returned his attention to the omnisynth. “When Lieutenant Dalton gives the all clear, tow
Jellicoe
and remaining captures alongside
Blenheim
, secure with ley lines, and set the fusion bottles to blow together.”

“That’ll take some time, Admiral,” his chief of staff remarked cautiously.

“Then make the time”—fixing the captain with his dark-shadowed gimlet eye. “She’s a proud old ship and she handed out better than she received. She doesn’t deserve to go alone.” His turbulent black gaze returned to the main screen. “No one should go alone.”

Kris came to in sickbay, her body suffused with a deep burning ache, and tried to lift her head. Nothing happened. The false sensation of muscles contracting utterly betrayed her. A spasm of panic coursed through her, to which her body was unable to respond with so much as a twitch. A medical corpsman, hovering over her and intent on a scanner, did not notice she was conscious until she made an effort to clear her clogged throat.

“Hey,” he said with what he obviously thought was a reassuring smile.

“Wha . . . why . . .” She tried to force the words out but they would not come.

“Oh, nothing to worry about,” the corpsman said, as he put a mask over her nose and mouth. Something sharp and bitterly cold shocked her throat and lungs. “We gave you a paralytic. Can’t have you moving until the assessment’s done. That’ll be a little bit.”

The vapor left a sour, caustic aftertaste on her tongue but the congestion in her throat was gone. The shock of being unable to move subsided, and she tried again. “Why . . . why’d—I pass out?”

“Oh, that.” He put down his scanner and peeled back one eyelid to shine a flashing blue light in her pupil. “That was a bit of an infarction you had a there. No big deal—suit defibrillator took care of it. Kinda expected, y’know.”

Kris did not know.

“Well, other than that shoulder and five busted ribs,” he explained, “you got a righteous case of R&R. Nothing we can’t handle, but yeah—there’s some smooth muscle damage. Not too much, but we’re gonna keep you wired here for a bit.”

So that’s what it feels like
.

R&R in this instance stood for “
rattle & roll
,” which was the short form of “
shake, rattle & roll
,” the informal name for the muscular damage pilots suffered from sustained ultra-high gee maneuvering. Doctors called it
Submesodermal Microrupture Syndrome
, and Kris would have given a lot to have lived her whole life in ignorance of how it felt.

“How . . . long?”

“Can’t rightly say. Doc’s gonna be back soon. He’ll fill you in.” He picked up his scanner again, scribbled more notes. “Sorry we can’t do more for the pain just yet. It’s a . . . well, I guess you’d say it’s diagnostic.” More scribbling. “I know it sucks.”

You
think it sucks
, Kris thought acidly.

“And you got a visitor. Wanna see him?”

“Commander Huron?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He gestured with the scanner. “Gotta send this to the Doc. You want I should get him?”

“Sure.”

Moments later Rafe Huron stepped into her field of vision, wearing a carefully unconcerned and false smile on his disconcertingly handsome features. “Hi, Kris.”

Kris tried a fake smile of her own. “We gotta stop meeting like this.”

“Yeah.” Huron rubbed the bridge of his nose, slightly crooked from an old break he refused to have corrected. “I’m not going to ask how you feel.”

“That bad?”

His mouth twitched sideways. “Well, I know it’s not good. Been there myself.”

“Really?”

“Twice.” He dropped his hand, looked off toward a bulkhead. “Let’s see, the first time was . . . ah . . . damn! I forget his name.” He shook his head. “He was a stubborn bastard—wouldn’t take no for an answer. That was in the last war. The second was Mananzas Cay. I got ship duty after that.”

“That was about a year before we met, wasn’t it?”

“I guess so.” He grinned and it was genuine this time. “Lucky, huh?”

Kris gave him an answering smile. “Lucky.” Then the smile faded. “Did Tole make it back?” In the murderous melee that had taken place over
Prince Valens
, Kris and her element leader had gotten tangled up with six Halith fighters in a swirling dogfight that pulled them far from the main action. Tole’s fighter had taken heavy damage early on and the last she’d seen of him, he was arcing away, out of control, trailing molten slag and gas.

“Most of him.”

“Most?”

“His bird was pretty much toast and he had to swim home. Rough ejection. We got him back all right, but if he wants to have kids, he’s gonna have to clone ‘em.” Huron did not look like he was kidding. She decided not to ask. His gaze wandered the room for a moment before meeting her eyes again. “You know, there’s no shame in taking a pass under circumstances like that.”

“I hate to come home empty handed.”

He smoothed the hair over his left temple. “You could leave some for the rest of us.”

“I think I did.” A pause. “Who the hell
was
that guy?” She had dealt with the remaining bandits after Tole was knocked out of the fight—that went okay and she was no more than singed. It was the
other
fighter who’d shown up a couple of minutes later—out of nowhere, flying solo. No sane pilot
ever
flew solo. It was almost like he’d been waiting . . .

“Won’t know for sure until all your data gets collated, but I have a hunch.”

“What’s that?”

“Think of the best Halith pilot we know.”

“No way! He’s a captain now—teaches goslings back at Haslar. No way they let him go up.”

“Maybe. There was a rumor on the Boards he wangled a staff posting—director of flight ops planning for the Haslar Fleet.”

“That wasn’t the Haslar Fleet out there.”

“No, but it’s possible he talked his way into a transfer. After all, what’s the point of being flight ops planner for a fleet that never leaves port except to parade around the core systems to impress the plebs?”

“You really think it was Banner?”

“That’s my guess, but we’ll see.”

Kris closed her eyes and exhaled slowly. Captain Jantony Banner had scored over two hundred victories in the last war. Between the wars, he’d formed up a training squadron with three friends, all top pilots: Lord Garvin, Pavel Heinck and the Vicomte Sallinger, and gone touring with their protégés. They called it
Banner’s Flying Circus
. Garvin had been killed in an accident on Vehren years ago. Huron had shot down Pavel Heinck during a skirmish here in Cygnus. Sallinger was reportedly attached to the Prince Vorland fleet and still flying.

Jantony Banner
. . . Her lips moved without her knowing it and Huron broke in on her thoughts.

“I did confirm one thing, though.”

She didn’t bother to open her eyes. “What’s that?”

“You just made ace-in-a-day. Got five and a half out there.”

That got her eyes open. “I did?”

“Yep. Congratulations. Tole’s gonna owe you a triple fuck-ton of beer.”

Had things been working better, Kris might have gone to the effort to make a face. She’d learned to like coffee, but she couldn’t grasp the Service’s deep attachment to beer.

“I thought it was only four—that the rest got away.”

“Well, no doubt you were distracted at the time.”

Fuckin’ no kidding
.

“Get some rest, Kris. I know it feels bad now, but it won’t last. They do a bang-up job on SMS these days.” She detected a ghost of a smirk and a slight twinkle in his eye. “No pun intended.”

Kris rolled her eyes as he turned away.

None taken
.

Forty-eight hours later, supported by a cocktail of carefully blended painkillers and duly admonished by the ship’s doctor about her immoderate behavior, Kris walked into the wardroom with one arm in a sling but under her own power. The nanocytes had done their ticklish work—a not exactly painful process but one that produced a singularly annoying crawling sensation—and were now breaking down and being flushed out of her system as fast as her overworked kidneys could manage. They had given her some pills to help with that, along with strict instructions to scrupulously avoid rich food and strong drink—clearly someone’s idea of a bad joke.

In truth, it wasn’t as much of a joke as Kris had first thought. The atmosphere of rejoicing that flooded the carrier after the battle had been tempered by the loss of many friends, but it was rejoicing nonetheless. There was no shame in feeling elation at still being alive, and if there were friends to be mourned, that mourning could go forward just as well, or even better, in good fellowship and strong drink as in sorrow and tears.

This certainly was the opinion of
Trafalgar’s
medical director, Dr. Stanton, who entered the wardroom the evening after the battle, triumphantly bearing aloft four gallons of genuine Kentucky bourbon. Having seen that the wounded were as comfortable as his keen ingenuity could make them under the present crowded conditions, he did not scruple to prescribe for his other shipmates. Bolstered by this Hippocratic sanction, affairs proceeded at full tilt, to the point where a young lieutenant-JG treated them to a rousing rendition of—of all things—
John Peel
. This was followed by the unofficial version of
Farewell Hyperion
, the Navy anthem, with earthier lyrics that seemed more to the point, and somehow culminated in
Lights Out, Miranda
.

Now, as she entered the wardroom, Kris saw her flight mates gathered at their usual places, joined, as they often were, by Senior Lieutenant Geoff N’Komo, the recon wing’s Foxtrot squadron leader and Huron’s best friend. A full day of celebration and its aftereffects had rendered them a relaxed group, except for Tole, who’d made it out of sickbay a day-cycle ahead of Kris and was looking glum. From this, Kris deduced someone must have brought up his relatively minor but embarrassing wound.

She was right. N’Komo was laughing as Lieutenant-JG Krieger expounded on the details of the incident while consuming enormous forkfuls of food. He was just completing his recitation of Tole’s ejection and recovery when Kris limped up to the table. They all greeted her with genuine warmth, and as she sat, slowly and with extra care, a mess steward slid a bowl of translucent, tepid, colorless glop in front of her and handed her a spoon.

Kris regarded it skeptically. “What’s this crap supposed to be?”

“Doctor’s orders,” N’Komo said with a leer.

“My ass,” Kris muttered.

The leer deepened. “Nah, it’s actually just amino acids spiked with a few complex carbs.”

And everyone laughed. Even Kris.

Then Huron, wearing his usual look of smiling, affable reserve, leaned back, enfolding a steaming cup of coffee in his two hands. “Have you seen the report yet?”

Kris, consuming a spoonful of glop, shook her head. Tole, welcoming the interruption, skated a xel across to her. “Ya made the highlight reel, that’s fer damn sure. Check it out.”

Kris did. She swallowed hastily. “It
was
Banner.”

“You want to know what else?” Huron asked, sipping slowly. Kris, scanning through the report as she obediently took another spoonful (the stuff wasn’t as bad as it looked), shrugged.

“You don’t see it?”

A slow deliberate headshake.

“Here, let me enhance it for you.” Huron took the xel and fiddled with the display for a moment. “There. Look at that.”

The spoon stopped halfway to her lips—hung there faintly trembling. “Air?”

“Yep. That’s an air-trail he’s leaving. Has some node damage too and I wouldn’t give a lot for that section of fuselage ahead of his canopy.”

“You think he made it back?”

Glances crossed all around the table. Huron refilled his cup. “Can’t say. You did.”

“Yeah. I did.” She put the spoon carefully back in the bowl. “So, who’s gonna tell me what this was all about? Or is it still a big secret?”

Two weeks ago, without any explanation, they’d suddenly been ordered to Karelia—a high-speed transit under maximum security. Arriving at Kalervo Station, orbiting the frigid paradise of Pohjola, they’d exchanged their full complement of fighters for the strangest warbirds any of them had ever seen. There were eighteen of these great ungainly beasts, and along with them came two hundred seventy nameless strangers, who promptly vanished into locked quarters, emerging only to see to the care of their charges, whom the deck crews were not allowed to approach, and whose requirements in the way of fuel, stores and handling (to the extent they were communicated) were wholly outside the crew’s experience.

It was disruptive, and at times more than a little provoking. Kris and Tole, along with Ensign Charles Dance, who was the other occupant of their berth (there should have been four of them, but Lieutenant-JG Molly Szentpetery had been killed two months ago, and they hadn’t been assigned a replacement yet), found themselves hot-bunking it in a warrant officer’s berth, while the junior officer’s wardroom was summarily taken over without so much as a by-your-leave. The deck crews were forbidden their own holy deck, and left to grumble in the mess and stalk sullenly about the passageways.

Trafalgar
then proceeded, again at top speed and under complete blackout conditions, to Tuonela, the true back of beyond, where ninety men and women boarded the strange craft and launched into the unknown. The crew of
Trafalgar
watched them go, most shaking their heads in bafflement, but a few beginning to suspect something momentous has just happened. Kris was one of those few.

“Which part?” asked N’Komo, with a cat-that-ate-the-canary smile.

“Those birds. What were they?”—wondering if she’d guessed right.

“Starclippers,” Tole answered. He’d had a day to catch up on the scuttlebutt that was just now beginning to spread. “Racing yachts,” he added, being helpful.

“Yeah, I know what a starclipper is.”

Starclippers were the fastest hypercapable craft ever built. She had heard of them but never seen a real one, as indeed few people ever had, there being fewer than a thousand in existence. These had not looked quite like the published images, due to their modifications, but they weren’t heavily disguised. Kris hadn’t needed the benefit of the scuttlebutt to draw the right conclusions.

Looking around, she stirred her glop. “So what did we do? Take a poke at Halith with those things?”

Kris knew that Tuonela, at the very edge of Karelian space, was connected to Syrdar, the outermost of the Halith core systems, by a thin transit route that was uncommonly dangerous. Having a lot of experience running dangerous transits when she’d been held as a slave on
Harlot’s Ruse
, she had a much greater appreciation of what that meant than most. If that was really what they’d attempted—and why else would you launch armed starclippers from such a gawd-forsaken bit of ether?—those ninety men and women must have been exceptional: exceptionally brave, exceptionally crazy, exceptionally bored with life—any or all three. She figured less than half would make it.

“You gonna tell her?” N’Komo looked to Huron.

He leaned forward with his elbows on the table. “Yep. We took a poke at Halith.”

“Okay.” Kris dutifully ate another spoonful. “Are you gonna give me a hint? Or . . .”

Huron shrugged, smiled, swirled his coffee, and began. “We’ve been trying to engineer this for about a year now . . .” Ever since the disastrous Battle of Kepler at the beginning of the war, in fact. The Speaker of the Grand Senate, Hazen Gautier, had first expressed the desire to strike Halith a direct blow at a secret meeting of the Plenary Council within a month of Kepler. As defeat followed humiliating defeat, with the subsequent loss of Crucis, where one system after another succumbed to the onslaught, it became ever more important to bolster public morale by demonstrating, somehow, that Halith was also vulnerable to attack. But ten months elapsed before an opportunity presented itself and when it did,
Trafalgar
was the chosen instrument. That was why she’d been inexplicably saddled with eighteen specialized starclippers.

Using starclippers to conduct a raid on the Halith core systems was the brainchild of a marine, Colonel Christina Yeager. It might have been unexpected that such a notion would originate in the CEF Marine Corps, but the colonel was the daughter of Ed Yeager, the famous yacht racer, and in the days of her youth, little ‘Chrissy’ had learned a thing or two about handling those fast, finicky beasts from her old man. Furthermore, her family was Karelian, and she had a good idea of what Halith’s reaction would be to a strike, however small, against their ‘sacred space’.

“You knew the Colonel, didn’t you?” asked N’Komo, rising from his seat.

Huron shook his head. “I’ve met her. Our families are friendly. Can’t say I know her, though.”

“My mistake,” N’Komo said with a wink that seemed to be aimed at Kris. She had no idea why. Huron had a certain reputation, but— “Anybody else want a beer?” N’Komo asked. No one did.

“So . . . that’s it?” Kris sensed there was much more to the story.

Huron glanced over at N’Komo, although he was used to being ribbed by his old friend. “Yeah. For the most part, that’s it.”

That wasn’t it. In fact, it wasn’t even close to it. The rest of the story he was not at liberty to relate and did not, in fact, know in any official sense—which was true of a great deal of what he knew. To begin with, he knew that Fleet Admiral Westover, Chief of Naval Operations for the CEF, had inclined toward the idea, and Admiral Zahir was positively eager to give it a go. But cooler heads in the General Staff’s Operations Department felt themselves duty-bound to rain on the parade. The problem wasn’t dispatching eighteen extremely expensive boats and their crews on a one-way mission to deliver a pin-prick to Syrdar—the chosen target, it being the most vulnerable of Halith’s core systems—but how to get them within range. The only ship in the right place with enough capacity was
Trafalgar
, and she’d have to completely denude herself of her three fighter wings to cram the starclippers in. G-Staff was understandably reluctant to expose their newest, biggest and fastest fleet carrier to this sort of risk for what was, in effect, an IW mission.

At this juncture, Lady Luck (or the Goddess Fortuna Major, depending on where you hailed from), who had been notably stingy thus far, served up an ace. Sent on an independent cruise to reconnoiter the Halith defenses at the outskirts of Crucis, the redoubtable Captain Lawrence had captured two ships in a single engagement, the heavy cruiser IHS
Polidor
and the light cruiser IHS
Vistula
. Sir Phillip, who prized his dedication to the ‘old ways’, had fought a running gun battle with the two ships, taking them under fire from his battlecruiser’s 14-inch chase mounts.

Retribution
was one of the few ships in the CEF who still owned these long railguns, and they proved their worth. Disabling the Halith cruisers at stand-off range with unhurried, precisely aimed salvos, his marines boarded
Vistula
to find that a 14-inch quark-diamond warhead had gone right through CIC, killing all the senior officers and leaving a panicky lieutenant in command. This luckless lieutenant had neglected to properly dispose of
Vistula’s
IFF system, including her recognition codes and private signals. G-Staff’s ‘dirty tricks’ department (officially GS5.4, the misleadingly named the R&D Department) accepted the gift eagerly, but it did have a limited shelf life, as the Imperial Navy was known to recycle their IFF systems quarterly (by the Halith calendar), and GS5.4 was puzzled as to how best to make use of it.

Coordination was not the rule between the dirty-tricks folks and the more doctrinaire Operations Department, so it fell to an intelligence officer—Huron’s friend, Commander Trin Wesselby, Director of Pleiades Sector Intelligence Group, who was charged with exploiting the captures—to put the pieces together, and she did. Armed with counterfeit IFF systems and legitimately-generated recognition codes, Colonel Yeager’s proposed strike could conceivably be delivered not against Syrdar, but against Haslar, the most vital of the Halith core systems after the prime world of Halith Evandor itself. It would still be no more than a hornet sting, but a hornet sting delivered to an exquisitely sensitive part of Halith's body politic.

A select team led by Commander Wesselby was tasked with planning the operation, and this went forward under the deepest secrecy. The League’s Plenary Council was not informed beyond a carefully worded message from CNO regarding ‘potential new opportunities’ which was as much misdirection as a legally mandated notice. Even the Speaker of the Grand Senate was herself kept in the dark.

The concept Trin Wesselby and her team came up with called for TF 34, which had been on loan to Seventh Fleet to shore up Cygnus Sector’s defenses, to be ‘recalled’ to its rightful home in the Pleiades. While GS5.4 was stage-managing this ‘transit’, TF 34 would travel to Karelia and rendezvous at Kalervo Station with members of the Karelian special forces who would have, in essence, smuggled the starclippers through their own territory.

Leaving her fighters in the care of Karelian Special Operations Command,
Trafalgar
would then proceed to Tuonela and—as Kris had guessed—launch the starclippers on the dangerous thin transit route to Syrdar, through which they would pass on their way to Haslar. Where Colonel Yeager and her flight would go after conducting their strike, only they would know. Trin’s people would provide the colonel with all available intelligence on the various separatist movements in Halith’s territory that might be able to aid or shelter them, but how that info was used was up to the colonel.