The Bonds of Orion (Loralynn Kennakris Book 5) Read online

  The Bonds of Orion

  Loralynn Kennakris #5

  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 Pleiades Web Press

  Image Credits:

  Lun-class ekranoplan: Igor Kolokov (licensed under CC BY 2.0)

  Bartini Beriev VVA-14: Emilio Gelardo (Royalty Free Extended License)

  Other images are works of the United States Government and thus excluded from copyright law (considered to be public domain).

  For SJ

  Table Of Contents

  Prologue

  Part 1: The Sweet Influences of the Pleiades

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part 2: No Separate Peace

  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

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Acknowledgements

  About The Authors

  More Work by Us

  Connect with Us

  Prologue

  East Lagoda Territory, Northwest Frontier

  Amu Daria, Epsilon Aquila, Aquila Sector

  The tall, athletically built woman rocked her naked hips hard against the swarthy man beneath her, her breath coming in soft, rapid pants. Shifting tempo, she tossed her head back and, shaking the fine-spun, white-gold hair that washed against muscular shoulders, squeezed rhythmically with her pelvic muscles. The man groaned, deep and guttural, lifting her clear of the thin mattress. His breath caught as he pulsed inside her, then erupted in a series of barking laughs. Subsiding at last, he chuckled low in his throat as she rose a few inches with a parting squeeze and resettled astride his stomach.

  “Fuck me, bitch” giving one moderately sized, well-shaped breast a playful pinch. “Where ya been all m’life? I’m buying your contract sure as fuck. And I’m never lettin’ ya loose.”

  She arched down, kissing him and running the tip of her tongue teasingly across his rough upper lip before nuzzling his battered ear. “An’ ya won’t ’ave ta” spoken in a softly accented, husky murmur.

  Straightening, she reached for a makeup compact on the side table and opened it. The little mirror inside caught her eyes the color of some varieties of flint shot with gold as she lifted the tray to slide a thin, flexible metal strip into her palm. Setting aside the compact, she gave him a dazzling smile and placed her left hand across his eyes, while the middle finger of her right stroked the side of his neck suggestively, feeling the strong pulse there.

  He laughed. “What’s this here, now? Dessert?”

  “A surprise.” The hand with the razor-edged strip of metal moved expertly, opening his carotid. Within a second, the blood pressure in his brain dropped to zero. His beefy face went gray and slack. She kept her palm cupped over the incision, the hot spurts beating against it as the frantic heart pumped for all it was worth. An average adult human had about five liters of blood in their veins; his must’ve held closer to six. No matter how many times she did this, it always surprised her how much there was.

  Finally, the jets ebbed, and, damming the body with blankets and pillows to keep the blood from pooling on the floor, she rose to wash her hands, face, arms, breasts and crotch in the dingy room’s small metal sink. Dressing swiftly in the robes she’d arrived in the muddy lavender of a common whore with a mottled saffron headscarf, reminiscent of her eyes she took his wallet and sidearm, tucking them deep in the voluminous folds. Producing a xel from these draperies, she mated it to the entry pad and reset the entry and exit times, then slipped through, gliding silently down the corridor on slippered feet.

  Across the courtyard below, in a dark alcove into which the silvery light from the vast trail of stars above did not reach, waited a sparely built man in a conscript’s faded uniform with a single stripe on the sleeve. When he saw her, he pushed off the wall and tossed away the twig he’d been chewing on. It was just past local midnight.

  “The supplies are to the left, second unit on this side of the gate,” she whispered, eyeing the bank of towering clouds that was blowing up from the southeast. She pressed the wallet into his hand. “Here are the entry codes, the gate pass, and his ID chit to log the xfer. Get the mule in here and load up as fast as you can. I’ll meet you at the edge of town. Keep the people hard at it we need to be over the mountain within two hours.”

  The man’s sharp-boned, weather-beaten face fell. “Aw shit, Colonel! You didn’t. Not again!”

  “Shut up and fall in, Major,” hissed Colonel Christina Yeager. “You’ve got work to do.”

  Back in uniform and piloting the mule through billows of snow along a narrow track in a forest where giant conifers shut out the sky, Colonel Yeager wore a look of grim satisfaction. The storm had broken precisely as indicated by the satellite data, and while it meant careening at breakneck speed between tree trunks that would have dwarfed a giant sequoia and boulders the size of monuments, guided only by passive SWIR (shortwave infrared), it also meant not a sensor on the planet could track them. For a girl who’d grown up racing starclippers, this type of flying was child’s play.

  Their haul hadn’t been spectacular, but combined with what remained of the dried meat, they now had enough food to last her thirty-eight survivors another two months three if they tightened their belts a little. Three months these days amounted to eternity. More importantly, they had a new set of fuel cells and, best of all, medical supplies. After more than eight hundred days on a strange planet without tune-ups, their immunocyte implants were starting to fail; a quarter of her people were already sick. The medications the locals produced weren’t good for much, and the Halith knew the best way to command the beggar’s knee was to command the health of it. So the colonial authorities saw to it the best meds the ones her people needed were not available at any price. They could be stolen, if you were lucky. This time, they’d been lucky. Maybe not as quite as lucky she could’ve wished it would have been nice if they’d scored more ammo, or even a light chain gun to give them some anti-air capability but you couldn’t have everything.

  “Ya didn’t hafta do it, Colonel.” Major Sutton, who’d had been sitting silently in the shotgun seat, gave her a bitter look. “Not this time. No one’s gonna get spun up over a short ton of rat-packs, a couple of fuel cells and some meds. They probably wouldn’t even notice for a month and who’d remember then? Ya just pipe the guy and download his data while he’s zee-in’ off. We pop the place an’ go. But now we’ll have those fuckers comin’ down like goose shit all over these woods by daybreak! How long ya think we can keep runnin’ like this?”

  “As long as one of us still has legs, Major. Are you forgetting there’s still a war on?”

  “That’s just it, Colonel!” Sutton raised his voice
to be heard over the howl of the blizzard. “We ain’t at war! Our war’s over! It’s been over for two years and more.”

  Christina Yeager, CEF Marine Corps, stared hard into the thickening swirls of snow. “Mine isn’t.”

  Part 1: The Sweet Influences of the Pleiades

  “Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades or lose the bands of Orion?”

  – Job 38:31

  Chapter 1

  Northern California Territory

  Western Federal District, Terra, Sol

  “Don’t worry. She won’t bite.”

  Kris, looking at the size of the animal’s teeth, was unconvinced. “You sit on this thing?”

  “Technically,” Mariwen said with a becoming pout, “it is known as riding. And yes, people have been doing it for thousands of years.”

  “Not my people,” Kris muttered under her breath as Mariwen guided her hand to the velvety nose of the immense animal. It fixed Kris with its huge, brown and surprisingly intelligent limpid eyes and blew an enormous snort through its wide nostrils that made Kris jump.

  “That’s okay, baby,” Mariwen whispered into a pointed ear as she stroked the animal’s cheek. “She didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

  Absurd amounts of cooing followed, and Kris stared to see Mariwen lavishing all this idiotic affection on the beast until Mariwen cast an amused yet admonishing glance at her and said, “She’s not a thing. She’s Brandee,” and slipped Kris half an apple. “Now say you’re sorry.”

  Kris held out the apple, fingers carefully curled under, but Brandee dipped her head and gently lipped the treat from her hand. Brandee might indeed have been the biggest animal Kris had ever met, but she was small for a horse, barely thirteen and a half hands, not much bigger than a pony. She was a compactly built little filly, barrel-chested and close-coupled, mostly white with large irregular cinnamon-colored blotches along her flanks and a surprisingly delicate head, which now thumped Kris solidly in the midsection.

  “No begging horses,” Mariwen reproved her with mock severity and pulled up on the halter. Brandee snuffled and nosed into Mariwen, unwilling to be done out of her due.

  “Why do they call her a quarter horse?” Kris asked. “Are whole horses bigger?”

  Mariwen looked at Kris, trying to discern if she harbored some hazy notion of elephant-sized horses (recovered relics from the Pleistocene perhaps?), noticed the sly gleam in her eye, and rolled her own. “I didn’t introduce you so you could insult my baby.”

  “Must’ve been a hell of a labor,” Kris replied with a grin.

  “You are impossible!” And she swatted Kris with the coiled lead. “Now” scratching Brandee behind the ear “Mommy and Brandee are going to get some exercise. And you, Commander, are going to fixed us both lunch.”

  Kris knuckled her forehead in a mock salute. “Certainly, ma’am. Right away, ma’am.”

  * * *

  “How long have you had her?” Kris asked. They were sitting in the kitchen, the most cheerful room in the spare but elegant house, the afternoon sun streaming through the windows to bring out all the virtue of the warm stone tiles and graceful cabinetry and enlivening the plate of fruit between them.

  “Over two years now.” Mariwen selected a strawberry and popped it into her mouth. They were unlike any strawberries Kris had ever encountered, not much bigger than the end of her thumb deep, deep red, with an astonishingly intense flavor. The strawberries, a wedge of triple-cream brie, apples, two varieties of melon, and thin slices of what Mariwen explained was a terrine of duck with cranberries and hazelnuts rich beyond the bounds of sin constituted lunch, a lunch that had not taxed Kris’ limited culinary skills beyond slicing the elements and arranging them on plates.

  Dabbing her lips, Mariwen looked over at the paddock, where Brandee was munching peacefully. “I think she saved my life. Before that . . .” The mask of cool imperturbability settled over Mariwen’s features, erasing her expression, and all the more painful to Kris for knowing what it hid. But it lasted only long enough for Kris to consume a bite of melon before Mariwen’s lips twitched up in a faint smile, her forehead furrowing as the shadows receded from her eyes a little. “Sorry moody. Wine?”

  “Please.” Kris proffered her glass, and Mariwen poured; a subtly complex local white, slightly off-dry called verdelho. Mariwen had an educated taste in wine, and Kris had learned a little from Huron, whose family was in the business and whose knowledge was near encyclopedic, but she had yet to overcome a degree of self-consciousness about the topic. That self-consciousness had her on the verge of teasing Mariwen about reflexively apologizing for her unpredictable moods, but she caught herself. Kris’ arrival and all that had happened since had overset much of Mariwen’s carefully reconstructed life, and while the changes were good overall, that did not mean they were accomplished with perfect smoothness or without cost. She reached out and placed her hand on the table, palm up, and Mariwen covered it with her own. Kris felt the tiny tremors in the long, delicate fingers and stroked the inside of Mariwen’s wrist with two fingertips. That earned a smile, stronger but still not unclouded, as they sipped their wine together in silence.

  “We lose to your native element soon, don’t we?” Mariwen said with an affected lightness a minute later. She knew Kris’ leave was almost up and that she had applied for command of the reconnaissance wing on the LSS Trafalgar. Kris knew that Mariwen would have preferred she take a staff posting or a position as an instructor at the CEF Academy on Mars. But Kris didn’t think the Academy was quite ready to welcome her, and she’d spent eight months in as a staff officer on Lunar 1 during the interval of peace that preceded the current conflict. It had not suited her then, and she knew it would not suit her any better now. Mariwen hadn’t said anything, nor would she, Kris was confident their relationship was anomalous, at once years old and very new and that made for shifting ground. So far, they’d kept their balance, but Kris felt no need to test it. Mariwen, she thought, felt that way even more so. But there was something in Mariwen’s gaze or maybe simply the fact she was avoiding Kris’ that unsettled her certainties, and she raised her wine glass like a shield.

  “I expect to hear something next week.”

  Mariwen picked distractedly at the remaining fruit. “Have you heard anything about Rafe?” Commander Rafael Huron, currently on-staff to Admiral PrenTalien, was angling for the group leader’s slot on LSS Trafalgar. Huron had a number of qualities that made him an excellent staff officer not the least of which was that he was the son of Grand Senator Huron, the former Speaker, now officially in retirement but unofficially almost as active as ever but he was also the CEF’s most decorated active flight officer, and there was no question which role he preferred.

  “I know he’s trying for a spot under Captain RyKirt group leader if he can get it, or maybe even fighter boss.”

  Mariwen answered with a slim smile that could have any or all of several meanings. She had known Huron long before Kris met him; they had also been lovers for a brief time. “Has Rafe ever not gotten what he wanted?”

  Once . . . How long has it been now? Fourteen months already? Shit . . .

  Kris had not forgotten would never forget that last cold morning at Huron’s place in Michigan, about thirty-eight hundred kilometers east of here. The still, frozen landscape outside the windows, the early sun so brilliant on the snow as they ate breakfast in silence. Leaving, her final words sounding as cold as the scenery; the look in his eyes or the absence of any look her boots crunching through the crust of ice into the ankle-deep powder beneath. Not looking back . . .

  Nine months and seven days their relationship had lasted. Mariwen knew that; she knew some of the reasons Kris had broken off the relationship, but she sincerely believed it was merely an interruption, not an end, and Kris was not at all sure she was wrong. The times she’d met Huron since then especially the last time argued that Mariwen was probably right.

  That likely bothered her more than Mariwen, who sho
wed no signs of jealousy indeed, Kris thought jealousy formed no part of Mariwen’s character. She wondered if it ever had. Mariwen had once been and in a sense still was one of the most the famous people alive, a person known on virtually every inhabited world. Her career as a leading celebrity and in important ways, her life had been destroyed by her kidnapping five years ago. The public Mariwen was now an icon, a revered victim, a symbol of Halith brutality, while the private woman was a refugee from society and still, all too often, from herself, inhabiting an intensely private space, a space that had opened so unexpectedly to include Kris.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Mariwen said, resting her chin on curled fingers and looking out the windows. The sunlight caught her profile in a way that seemed to translate its beauty to a higher plane entirely, above and beyond that of mere humanity, and Kris’ heart skipped a beat. “And I know we promised to make no promises . . .”

  Kris opened her mouth, but her breath froze between her palette and her tongue.

  “ . . . and I’m not going to go back on that. I understand about you about Rafe.” She leaned back in her chair, out of the piercing light, the shadow making her accessible again. “As much as I can, anyway. I’m not the tragic heroine of some melodrama.”

  No, thought Kris. For one thing, no melodrama heroine had ever suffered as Mariwen had.

  “And I don’t miss being the Great Mariwen Rathor. I like it here.” She glanced around, maybe a bit defensively, as if she expected Kris to challenge that a few dozen acres of dirt fairly idyllic dirt but impossibly narrow compared to a life whose horizons had been measured in light-years could possibly make her happy. “But I don’t expect you to feel that way at least not for very long.” Her eyes moved again to the low, gently sloping hills beyond the windows, with their oaks and vineyards and fruit trees. The cherries were just beginning to blossom. “Not your native element.”