Orion's Price Read online

  Orion’s Price

  Loralynn Kennakris #6

  Jordan Leah Hunter & Owen R. O’Neill

  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.

  Copyright © 2017 Owen R. O’Neill and Jordan Leah Hunter

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by the authors.

  Image credits:

  Photography by the authors

  For Cynthia

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Part 1: The Undiscovered Country

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part 2: Orion’s Price

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Epilogue

  Authors’ Notes

  Acknowledgements

  About The Authors

  More Work by Us

  Connect with Us

  Prologue

  Simla, State of Himachal Pradesh

  Pahari Republic, Terra, Sol

  Simla under a sullen sky that could not show the Queen of the Hills, as the city had been known since time immemorial, to full advantage. Even the ancient buildings along the Mall between the Shrine of Hanuman and Prospect Hill, housing their exclusive shops and restaurants, with the stately Viceregal Lodge on nearby Observatory Hill—the most famous building in the city and one of the most famous on the subcontinent, now housing the renowned Pahari Institute—seemed dull in the flat gray light, and the forests of pine and oak, deodar and rhododendron in and around the city huddled in the thin mists, looking drab.

  Mariwen stepped from the cab at the limit of vehicular traffic—the concourse that separated the old Upper Town from the modernized lower demi-metropolis—and walked up a cobbled street so steep there were steps cut into the paving to a cheerfully painted two-story house with a pitched red roof and terraced gardens. The small woman pulling weeds among the snow crocuses, irises and tall stalks of delphiniums looked up when Mariwen was still fifty meters down the slope and stood beaming as her daughter labored up those last yards.

  Dr. Amari Rathor was doll-like woman, late middle-aged but looking younger, except perhaps for her hair, which was woven into a thick iron-colored braid shot through with a wide streak of silver. She was dressed in the long, flowing fashion of her ancestors, a shawl of silk and Kashmiri wool which drew all its rich and subtle colors from the landscape, and a green silk head scarf against the penetrating damp. Her face was round and preternaturally cheerful, its lines shaped by a lifelong habit of smiling, but few who had known her in recent years would have been accustomed to seeing it glow as it now did.

  “Chris must have told you I was coming,” Mariwen said as she entered by the little wrought-iron gate and they embraced. “He was supposed to keep it a secret.”

  “Oh pish, dear,” her mother said, laughing and looking up, for she barely reached her daughter’s shoulder. “Urging your brother to keep secrets from your mother—what next? You are arrived just as I expected, and I have made fresh chai. Now it will still be hot. Letting good chai go cold is very close to sin.”

  She urged Mariwen through the front door into a comfortable little solarium off the kitchen and insisted she take a seat while the chai and biscuits and fruit were fetched, the latter from her own greenhouse. Setting them out on the inlaid teak table, a fine profusion, Amari took a seat next to Mariwen. “You look well,” she said, pouring steaming chai expertly into delicate antique cups set on small saucers with gilded rims.

  Mariwen lifted the tiny cup, the fragrance a memory from her earliest childhood, and letting the steam tickle her nose, answered, “I’m much better.”

  Indeed much better, strikingly so, with a light in her eye and animation in her look not seen since before her kidnapping. During her New Year’s Celebration visit, there had been hopeful signs: the painstakingly protective shell seemed thinner, more transparent to the life it sheltered, but it would still close over her daughter’s personality at times, leaving only that cool almost featureless imperturbability. The crisis her doctors had warned them about—a sudden efflorescence or a terrible shattering dropping her back into the catatonia of those first dreadful months—had evidently occurred, and while Amari did not know the catalyst, she did know her daughter and she could guess.

  Guess, but silently, for in two things Mariwen was constant and had been even through the long rehabilitation: she hated being smothered, vexed, harassed with coddling and she disliked impertinent questions. For all her lively outward graciousness and openness, Mariwen had always been an intensely private person. It was a trait she had inherited from her father, along with several others: her brazen flirtatiousness, her ambition, her drive to succeed on her own. By her late teens, Mariwen had learned the power of her exceptional intelligence, agile imagination and incandescent sexuality—what she could do, if she chose, with the sheer force her smile—but she hadn’t seemed to quite grasp the full effect she had on people. Indeed, Amari Rathor, watching her daughter grow up, sometimes felt that Mariwen had almost the essence of a devi or something elemental like the wind: to those who felt it, it might seem mild or strong, cool or parching, but to the wind, it was all the same—it was just blowing, just being what it was.

  That essence had fueled her meteoric rise in the modeling world, but it also set her apart and in a sense iconized her. The image of Mariwen people revered—distilled, perfected, idealized by their own imagination—did and did not reflect the person she really was. When Mariwen played a role, however brashly or subtly, there remained something essential and true that drew people to her and captivated them. Perhaps it couldn’t be touched, or really known, but it was there all the same. There was no teasing in it, not even conceit. It was just an essential condition that had to be accepted.

  What had remained intact, however, was that private inner space. Mariwen possessed an infinite store of compassion, she gave openly and genuinely and there was nothing forced or artificial in how deeply she cared about people or her often impish sense of fun. But her heart had always been her own.

  Now looking at her daughter, sipping chai, that astonishing allure banked, lowered in tone, more human, Amari was sure someone had broken through that reserve and reached a virgin core and touched it. This had not happened before. Her late wife, Lora Comargo, a marriage Amari had never fully approved of—a glitter union the gossips unkindly called it, though Amari thought that was not entirely inaccurate—had not done so, nor any of her daug
hter’s other lovers, although one (unaccountably, a man) she was sure had come close. Yet here Mariwen was, heart virgin no more, and the change had made her somehow less perfect, but more beautiful.

  But questions; questions would never do, so they digested the months of separation in small talk: topics as various as the weather and her brother’s children and their delight in Brandee, that entirely sweet-tempered, even noble, equine. Amari produced the thick sheaf of hardcopy that was the new translation of the Odyssey she was finishing, now in its fourth revision, with commentary on the iniquities of publishers who could not be brought to understand that classical Greek hexameter could not be readily rendered into English or, for that matter, any other tongue. The music of it—indeed the essence, the soul of it—was debased by rhyming couplets or the alien cadences of modern poetry feebly employed—something more was called for, and that something took time.

  “I wish you would read it for me,” Amari said, riffling through the pages. “I’m stale with all these revisions.”

  “Oh, Mom,” Mariwen replied with a smile behind her cup, aware of the tactic. “You know that, even in school, my Greek was bad. I barely made it through Xenophon, and Thucydides drove me to tears.”

  “Thucydides drives everyone to tears. Impossible man—so inconsiderate as to die before he could even finish, much less revise. If there was ever a man in need of an editor . . .” The inconsiderate behavior of ancient authors in regard to their obligations to future generations occupied her for some time, segueing into a denunciation of the Pahari Institute’s laudable but ill-managed project to preserve the disappearing Indic languages including Gorkhali, Garhwali and Parbatiya, the last of which Mariwen had been sung lullabies in as a small child. She’d been taught a smattering of it in her primary school years, much as American children were usually taught some Spanish or European children learned a little of German or Polish, and forgotten it just as quickly. However much Terrans liked to flaunt their linguistic diversity, it was almost all posturing and any degree of real fluency in these ancient languages was strictly the province of academics, as it was for Latin or Greek. That Mariwen’s mother was just such an academic—a professor of Classics in the States before returning to India shortly after her husband was killed—gave Mariwen a better-than-average appreciation of them though no greater fluency.

  They nibbled their way through this comfortable No Man's Land while Mariwen’s mother waited for her daughter to divulge why she’d flown suborbital across a hundred and thirty-three degrees of longitude to make this visit, and when she finally did so, just as the sun was at last threatening to burn off the overcast and restore some hope to the vistas, it was with a question at once characteristically blunt and elliptical. Toying with a slice of tropical fruit certainly native to another clime, Mariwen asked, “Mom, why did you never remarry after Dad died?”

  Her father, Captain John Christopher, Terran Navy, killed at Novaya Zemlya at the end of the first war just before Mariwen turned eleven, was a man she owed much to but, as he was often away for months at time, even a year or more on occasion, hardly knew. What she mostly recalled was his immense height and booming laugh, and when she was little, being lifted to a god-like eminence on his broad and solid shoulder. From later years she remembered his vivid tales told over supper, helped out by expansive gestures and an impressive repertoire of voices, and—if they merited it—astounding videos.

  Her mother retained a small old-style flat photo of him on the corner of her writing desk: a vigorous-looking man with a dazzling smile, all the more striking for the rich contrast of his skin against the dress whites of his brand new captain’s uniform—an Adonis in ebony—the picture having been taken at his promotion ceremony, the pinnacle of his career. For many years, it had not occurred to Mariwen to wonder why her mother kept this particular image, rather than one more personal or even one from their wedding; an image with little connection to herself or the life they had shared, or so it seemed. But she had never asked and now her mother regarded her with a pensive smile, turning over thought after thought that Mariwen could only guess at, before she answered.

  “Your father and I made a life together. That life did not end when he died.” She inspected the last of the chai—not much and now grown tepid—and dismissed it. “Perhaps it is foolish in me, but I have not met anyone else who fit so I keep the path that was chosen, though I did not choose it.” She tapped the nearly empty pot. “More?” Mariwen shook her head. “It is well, sometimes, to go rambling off the path—though often dangerous—and other times better to keep the way laid before us. Though even the best of us cannot often know which, I fear. And I sometimes wonder that we may worry too much about the choice.”

  Mariwen understood the reference. She’d always been aware of her mother’s tactful disapproval of her marriage, and if she felt that her mother underestimated the real degree of affection that had grown up between her and Lora, she did acknowledge that their relationship had been based more than anything else on convenience—social, professional, and sexual—and however well it had answered in that regard (pretty well, by any measure), her relationship with Kris was wholly different. Even the term relationship, so pale a word, did not sit well with her.

  As they talked, Mariwen’s hand had gone to her throat and begun fidgeting with the fine gold chain that descended into her cream blouse. Her mother took note of it and said, “That’s a pretty thing. Is it new?”

  “This?” Mariwen held the chain up and Amari saw that it supported a thin gold disk incised with three interlaced horses. “Yes.” She undid the chain and handed the necklace to her mother. “It was a gift.”

  “From someone special?” Amari asked with a quiet smile, admiring the delicate work.

  Mariwen nodded. “I first met her on the ship, before . . . everything. We met again . . . about four months ago.”

  “She must be most remarkable”—looking at the engraving on the reverse of the medallion.

  “She’s a lieutenant commander,” Mariwen answered with a slight hesitation. “A flight officer.”

  Forewarned by that innate intuition that comes with motherhood, Amari had been expecting something of the sort. “Oh, dear. I fear I’ve been a poor example.” The lightheartedness was somewhat forced. “Moping all these years—not a good example at all. Will you tell me about her now?”

  “Her name’s Loralynn,” Mariwen began. “Loralynn Kennakris. She’s a colonial . . .” The account that followed rambled a bit, touching lightly on what little Mariwen knew about Kris’s history as a slave; on their first meeting aboard the LSS Arizona and what she’d learned about Kris’s subsequent career, then telling how Kris contacted her unexpectedly—almost unbelievably—after years because of an impulsive letter she had no memory of actually sending (and had hoped she hadn’t, it being ill-judged), answering what she’d thought was unanswerable; so different from the girl she’d first met, and yet so . . .

  “It’s complicated,” Mariwen finished, her cheeks growing warm.

  That Kris was the ‘special person’ in question had come as no surprise to Amari; she’d in fact guessed it the moment Mariwen said “flight officer”. She knew about Kris from a discussion with the head of Mariwen’s medical team when Mariwen had suffered a serious relapse. Concerns had been raised about Mariwen’s feelings for Kris, about Kris herself, and about the possible ramifications for Mariwen’s recovery. Her doctors had gone so far as to recommend that all knowledge of Kris be expunged from her memory.

  These recommendations had been most gravely expressed, and had been rejected in an equally grave manner. But since then, Amari had taken note of Kris’s career, both from brief mentions in a few news reports and more reliably from the naval connections she’d maintained. This allowed her to fill in some of the gaps in Mariwen’s narrative and also gave her an idea of several possible complications.

  On the one hand, Kris’s advancement in the Colonial Expeditionary Forces had been unusually rapid; on the other,
it had been accompanied by a rare degree of controversy. It was perhaps expected that a young colonial woman rising so fast would create resentments and some of the darker rumors might well be based more on prejudice than anything, and if Kris had made some enemies, she also had powerful friends, chief among them (according Amari’s correspondents) being Rafe Huron. This was, however, not an unmixed blessing and how large a complication it might represent, she could not confidently say. But she knew her daughter did not put great store in monogamy, Rafe Huron’s views on the subject were the fodder of common gossip, and while colonial attitudes were many and various, her intuition suggested this was not an overriding issue.

  No, the overriding issue was most likely that common to all military spouses; all the more so because flight officers had a casualty rate several times higher than any other branch of the Service. But bald statistics aside, Amari was well aware of the adage—as old as flight itself—that there were old pilots and there were bold pilots, but there were no old bold pilots. If half of what Amari had heard about Kris was true, the lieutenant commander was living on borrowed time.

  Amari knew what it was to love someone for whom tomorrow is never promised, but hers was an older faith and she was aware her daughter did not share it. Not only that, but Mariwen had been accustomed to look upon the universe as a sort of equal partner, subject in large degree to her own force of will. She was not sure how Mariwen’s recovery might have changed that. If that faith in her own self-sufficiency had been lessened, could this new love—for Amari was sure it was no less—take its place?

  A fighter pilot renowned for her recklessness among that reckless breed seemed a perilous underpinning for a new-made life. Yet how this woman (about whom Amari had heard nothing particularly flattering beyond her military exploits and that she was said to be uncommonly beautiful—no great asset for a military officer) had managed in so brief a time to unclose Mariwen’s heart was a mystery to which she had, as yet, no key. It was clear however, that in commenting that her daughter’s new lover must be a most remarkable woman, Amari had said more than she knew.