Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks Read online

  THE MORNING WHICH BREAKS

  Loralynn Kennakris #2

  Owen R. O’Neill

  &

  Jordan Leah Hunter

  Also by

  Jordan Leah Hunter and Owen R. O’Neill

  The Alecto Initiative (Loralynn Kennakris #1)

  Also by

  Jordan Leah Hunter

  The Erl King’s Children

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and organizations either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for you, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.

  Copyright © 2014 Owen R. O’Neill and Jordan Leah Hunter

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Cover design by Pleiades Web Press.

  Published by Pleiades Web Press

  1141 Catalina Dr. #257

  Livermore, CA 94550

  IN DEDICATION

  To Owen, for his perseverance, imagination and wit, and for his dedication to the integrity of the story. And to those who have helped me gain the understanding to write the hearts of these characters. My life is so much richer because of all you have taught me.

  Jordan Leah Hunter, April 2014

  To my dad (Captain, US Army Corps of Engineers, WWII), and my mom (Staff Sergeant, US Marine Corps, WWII), for setting me on the straight & narrow path—and then showing me how to stray from it. Tackle Anything. Semper Fi.

  Owen R. O’Neill, April 2014

  Acknowledgements

  A great many people have helped us in getting this book from a fuzzy idea into published volume. Our thanks go out to all of them for giving us feedback, providing encouragement, and generally supporting our work. Most of these wonderful folks we cannot put a name to, but we trust you know who you are, and that you are appreciated.

  However, some deserve particular mention for their efforts on our behalf. So we extend heartfelt gratitude to Alex, Brett, Cynthia, Edward, Joe, Johanna and Ramona, Kira, Nick, Mark, and Valentin for their keen insight and invaluable comments that saved us from many errors and enriched our universe. We allow them no responsibility for any errors and shortcomings that remain, despite our best efforts.

  Table Of Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Part I: New Beginnings

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Part II: Retribution

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Part III: Awake the Sleeping Sword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  Authors’ Notes

  Index of Terms

  Glossary of Terms

  Index of Personalities

  Personalities

  About the Authors

  Prologue

  Lakskya Compound

  Lacaille, Praesepe Cluster

  “Bravo, this is Alpha Six. Where are those goddamned grenades?” 1st Lieutenant Sebastian Gomez, commander Alpha team, Nedaeman SOFOR 1, hunched in the darkness under an overhang of striated rock as he waited for 2nd Lieutenant Mike Ananian, Bravo section leader, to respond.

  “No joy here, Six,” Ananian came back. “The fuckers are late.” Lieutenant Gomez was well aware they were late—over thirty minutes late—and the unnecessary comment was a sign of the strain the delay was putting on Bravo leader’s temper. Gomez’s temper wasn’t any better: his op window was closing. It would be half-light in another thirty-six minutes, when Lacaille’s secondary rose, and while it was just a very bright star compared to the primary, it would increase the ambient light by almost twenty percent, and Gomez begrudged every extra photon.

  But much more important—critically important, in fact—were his team’s extraction windows. The stealth corvette in orbit overhead could not just magically appear and drop its shuttles at any time. It was a slave to the laws of orbital mechanics, and unless that goddamned convoy with the grenades showed up in the next ten minutes, he had little chance of making the first window. He could theoretically afford to miss it, but that increased the risk enormously, and he certainly could not miss the next. It would be full dawn by the time there would be a third window, and if his team wasn’t gone before that, they weren’t going at all.

  Everything had gone flawlessly up to now, to the point of making Gomez a trifle nervous, so he was not surprised when they finally ran into a hitch, but the convoy being delayed this much was not the hitch he’d foreseen. The plan had allowed a half-hour’s slack for the convoy to reach the point where Bravo could track them. That was a generous window, given that the trucks only had to travel five-hundred twenty klicks from the rendezvous where the cases of grenades had been transshipped. At the truck’s nominal airspeed, the trip should have only taken two and a half hours. The corvette had ver
ified that things were on schedule as of its last pass—there was just no good reason that convoy should be this late on a one-hundred-and-fifty-minute trip.

  If there was no good reason, that left only bad reasons. Bad reasons meant going with the contingency plan and that meant adjusting his deployments, so he checked them again. His people showed as triangles on the topo map projected on his helmet’s faceplate, outlined in light green by his IFF unit. His own section—call sign Angel to avoid confusion—was lying along this ridge overlooking the plain below. Delta section, with the four-man air-sliders they’d use to reach the extraction point, was eight klicks to the north but just a minute away, concealed in some dead ground where the terrain broke up into a series of ravines. Bravo was over the horizon to the southeast, and he couldn’t see them on the plot unless he pushed the power past where he was comfortable.

  A klick behind him on a rise to the east was Sergeant Esteban Howarth, codename Aries, with his 15.4-mm recoil-damped sniper rifle. The big weapon fired terminally guided armor-piercing multimode ammo in three-shot bursts from a hundred-round magazine and had an effective range of five-thousand meters. Aries was his lifeline if—make that when—all hell broke loose.

  He checked the time—seven more minutes—and eased his own rifle across his lap. It was a standard assault model, firing 9-mm light armor-piercing rounds, with a 25-mm grenade launcher under the barrel that could fire antipersonnel, incendiary or high-explosive grenades. It was an old configuration but one that, like the 12-mm sidearm he wore, had served soldiers well for centuries. The same could be said for the 10-cm sheath knife on his belt but not the plasma knife in his right thigh pocket: those had been invented less than fifty years ago.

  The rifle also had the latest tunable ultra-wideband scope with a frequency-hopping maser and automatic target acquisition, which incorporated technology that was still considered developmental. Gomez had turned it off. He trusted his own eyes more than any fancy automated acquisition system and he liked his gun set on manual for the same reason. Besides, all that modern crap bled energy and you could never be too sure exactly how good the other guy’s sensor suite was.

  Another minute ticked by and Gomez activated his command link. “All units, this is Alpha Six. If package not in sight in five minutes, we are Buster. Repeat: if package not in sight in five minutes, we are Buster.” Buster was the codename for the contingency plan and they all knew it was a pretty desperate undertaking.

  He really—really—wanted those grenades.

  The grenades were not for them—they were bait. Bait intended for a terrorist warlord named Nestor Mankho, asleep in the walled compound three klicks down the slope and across the open flat below. Mankho had been behind a terrorist plot he called the Alecto Initiative: an attempt to bomb a series of high-profile Grand Senate hearings in Nemeton last year. It had almost succeeded; Nedaema came literally within a centimeter of having its government virtually wiped out. It was the first operation Mankho had mounted since the Black Army, an anarchist group he’d once led, had been practically annihilated after they attacked the Nedaeman colony of Knydos in the first years after the last war.

  Mankho had survived the destruction of the Black Army and spent the intervening years smuggling weapons, dealing in slaves, investing in a few legit businesses (including the popular social-networking service Zeta that it was believed he used to ID targets for his slaving operations), and eluding capture. Up until just before the attempted bombing, the conventional wisdom had him knocking about in the Outworlds, but then the League’s Office of Naval Intelligence had located him here on Lacaille, a Bannerman client in the Hydra, which lay between Halith and Bannerman space.

  Current intelligence estimates held that Mankho didn’t have the resources to mount such an involved operation on his own—a conclusion supported by forensics—and the consensus among those in the know was that Mankho had been working for someone else. The Dominion of Halith seemed the most likely someone, but this ‘suspicion’ (as the Archon of Nedaema insisted it be referred to) could easily tip the strained relations with Halith into another war, so it could not be entertained in any official sense without absolute proof.

  The absolute proof was Mankho himself, alive if possible, so the information could be more readily extracted. If taking him alive was not an option, it was necessary to acquire his well-preserved brain. Simply killing Mankho no longer served a useful purpose, so this operation had been planned with meticulous care: NDIA had gone to extraordinary lengths to check and recheck their intelligence, the trap had been painstakingly laid using perfectly reliable, perfectly unwitting contacts and set with an irresistible bait: a shipment of second-gen adaptive grenades.

  The shipment was genuine. Gomez knew it had cleared customs at Kapustin Yar, Lacaille’s main starport, right on schedule, concealed in drums of high-density superconductive oil that was used in the Carnot pumps of low-power reactors. He knew it had been loaded into a big air-lorry on schedule, that it had met the convoy arranged by Mankho’s factor at the appointed rendezvous on schedule, and that the cases of grenades had been swiftly extracted from the oil drums and shifted into the convoy’s vehicles.

  What Lieutenant Gomez really cared about, however, were the other grenades that had been handed over at the rendezvous. When the delivery of Mankho’s grenades was being negotiated, the seller’s Lacaille agent had suggested to Mankho’s factor that they do a little side business. This was perfectly usual: agents and factors always had their own business interests and they took advantage of the logistical arrangements of larger transactions to conduct their own. It was not graft in any real sense and the principals rarely objected, provided things were kept within certain well-understood limits.

  In this case, the seller’s Lacaille agent mentioned he had a few extra cases of grenades, a generation older than those in Mankho’s shipment, but still quite sophisticated, and he was having trouble moving them. They’d been dumped on him, he explained, as a result of another deal that went south—he didn’t deal in weapons much—grenades were a difficult cargo—Mankho’s factor had the connections to move them easily—he’d be more than happy to let them go for a very reasonable price—in fact, they made him kinda nervous . . .

  The sales patter was just part of the culture and the deal that was struck—the grenades for a consignment of Tajima-ushi black cattle embryos that the factor knew were unlikely to be viable due to spoilage—was immaterial. All that mattered was getting those grenades on the convoy, because the seller’s Lacaille agent was also a League agent and in each of those cases that were dutifully handed over for the cryocanister of embryos was a special grenade: a class-C EMP device. Getting them into Mankho’s compound was the whole reason for the elaborate set-up.

  Mankho’s compound was not a particularly impressive edifice, only about sixty meters long and forty wide, with a three-story residence in the northeast corner. But it did have a six-meter curtain wall and barracks space for about fifty men, plus three light-armored vehicles and half a dozen plain trucks. It also had a security enclosure, a perimeter sensor suite and of course secure comms. All of these—especially the security enclosure—had to be disabled if they were to have any chance of taking Mankho alive. Security enclosures were proof against EMP, most explosives, and they acted as a high-efficiency phase-conjugate mirror against lasers and most plasma weapons. They weren’t much good against solid projectiles, unless they were military grade—which this one wasn’t—and they didn’t block most varieties of snooping, although they did keep dragonflies and other remote sensors at a respectful distance.

  They were also damned unpleasant to encounter—sometimes even fatal—unless you were wearing full battle harness. Since Mankho would not be, it was critical to take the enclosure out, and they also had to ensure he couldn’t call in help from Kapustin Yar. (Even though the government of Lacaille had always vehemently denied Mankho’s presence, there was no reason to believe they would disavow him to the point of tolerating an
attack on their own soil.)

  Detonating the EMP devices would do all that, but only if they were inside the compound or if the security enclosure was open, and that depended on how good Mankho’s security people were. If they were lax, they’d accept the preliminary checks done at the rendezvous and wave both sets of crates into the compound. But if they were doing their jobs, they’d scan the crates.

  Indeed, the plan bet on them scanning the cases, but doing it with the enclosure open. There were good reasons for this. For one thing, opening, closing and reopening the enclosure took time, was wasteful and a bit of a nuisance. For another, if the grenades came too close to the sealed enclosure, they would explode. How close was too close depended on how sensitive the grenades were, so it was safest to leave the enclosure open until they got them stowed securely inside. Unless Mankho’s people had reason to be suspicious—or were extremely paranoid—it was unlikely they’d stop the convoy far enough away to run their checks with the enclosure sealed. If they were that suspicious, the crates should not have been accepted in the first place.

  As for being extremely paranoid, Gomez would just have to see. He did have the option of blowing the whole load and attacking in the confusion—Buster had envisioned that—with a decent chance they could breach the perimeter so he could take out the compound’s electronics with his own EMP strike. That was not ideal, however: a decent chance was not to be compared with detonating the EMP devices with the enclosure open.

  So it was up to Gomez to pick the moment to detonate the EMP devices that would take the enclosure down and render the compound deaf, blind and dumb. If anything happened to him, Bravo’s section leader would set them off. Combined with the explosion and the attack Bravo would make, that would give Angel section the minutes needed to snatch Mankho, and then Delta section’s air-sliders would whisk them all to the extraction point.

  That was the plan but as always, time was of the essence. To get to Mankho before his people could react, his section had to be positioned no more than a hundred meters from the wall and they couldn’t stay that close for long without being detected—the safe estimate was less than eight minutes. Alpha Team’s light combat armor incorporated the best active camouflage Nedaema could produce, which made it very good indeed, and it covered all bands from DC to daylight (if the definition of daylight was extended to include soft X-rays).