Orion's Price (Loralynn Kennakris Book 6) Read online

  “Kat. Do you recall her full name?”

  “I, um . . . no. She was from—Ascalon? I think.”

  “Anything else?”

  “We dated. We were together . . .” Until she met Rafe. We must’ve screamed “fucking bitch” at each other a hundred times that night before she ran off crying. Came back wasted at 3 AM and I slammed the door in her face . . . “Over a year. I was . . . nineteen. Twenty.”

  “A long time, then. For a relationship.”

  “Yes . . .” Mariwen was attacking her wine with rapid shallow sips.

  “Was she your first serious relationship?”

  Mariwen looked away, her brows pinching together. “Probably? I can’t . . . tell—now.”

  More tapping. Trin thumbed down a screen. “You knew Rafe Huron then too, didn’t you?” She noted with interest that the hand with the wineglass descended slowly, as if Mariwen relaxed at his name.

  “Yes, I . . . I didn’t remember that for the longest time. Once it came back, I thought I recalled it all quite well. But then . . . I’m not really sure.” She said it with a look Trin was coming to recognize: part mask, part misdirection.

  “What happened?”

  “Kris and I went Taos. In an art gallery there, she found a painting. It’s . . . Rafe has it. The original, I mean. She asked me if I knew it . . . if it was there—at Oscoda—when I was with him. I didn’t remember it. But it must’ve been there . . .” Pausing, she took refuge behind a sip of wine.

  “Why do you say that?”

  Setting the glass aside if she were afraid her nervous grip would snap the slender stem, Mariwen trapped her hand between her knees. “Because it’s his mother.”

  Trin put down her pad and, saying nothing, waited.

  “I know it’s his mother. I know he commissioned it at the end of the first war. But I don’t remember it. You see, the memories . . . they come and go. It’s like waking from a dream and being so sure you did something or have something—to the point you’re about to get up and look for it—and then realizing it was a dream. But I can’t tell. I can’t ever tell . . . what to believe. What actually happened.”

  “Seeing this painting triggered those memories? That it’s his mother and when he had it painted?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did that change how you feel about him?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “You’ve always been comfortable with Rafe, even after you were involved?”

  “Yes. He’s . . . easy to be with. He makes you feel . . . safe.”

  Trin’s lips bent in an odd smile as Mariwen said this. “He’s a good friend,” she remarked with well-practiced neutrality.

  “He’s a wonderful friend.” Mariwen’s smile came out, lighting her face for an instant. “So generous and thoughtful. Although he can be so thoughtful, it gets a little awkward at times.”

  “Did you love him?”

  “I—ah . . .”

  Trin waited while Mariwen wrestled with her ellipsis. Wrestled and lost. She picked up the bottle and looked at Mariwen’s depleted glass. “More?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  Topping off her glass, Trin scanned down her list of questions. Skipping over those remaining that pertained to older events, she concentrated on things that happened in the months leading up to Mariwen’s kidnapping. Mariwen’s answers became quite hit-and-miss. Mostly miss. As the strain began to tell on Mariwen’s features, she suggested they take a break.

  After a few minutes of silence, Mariwen gestured at Trin’s file-littered desktop. “Where does all this info come from?”

  “Most of it’s from Zeta,” Trin said, naming the largest of the cloud-nations. “The most extensive and dangerous data mine in existence.” She closed dozens of files. “Also a monument to the boundless nature of human stupidity.”

  Mariwen glanced over at Trin—at the genuine bitterness in her tone. Lora had been expert at using Zeta to find new opportunities and expand old ones. Mariwen had hardly touched it. She’d had profiles on it naturally, all managed by Lora, but she had inherited much of her mother’s prejudice against social cloud services (her mother called them all Cloud Cuckoo Land with a fine lack of discrimination), and she hadn’t been on any of them since before Lora died.

  Trin saw her looking and said, not covering the bitterness at all now. “About half their revenue derives from selling their member’s private info. Nestor Mankho was an investor.”

  “Did they know?”

  Trin gave her a sidelong look. “What do you think?” She resumed her fishing. “They’re clever with bots too. As our favorite fighter pilot likes to say, ‘Once your xel touches Zeta, you can put your head between your legs and kiss your sweet privacy goodbye’.”

  “Rafe said that?”

  “He never told you?”

  A chill settled over Mariwen’s features. “I don’t remember.”

  “How do you feel? Headache?”

  Mariwen rubbed her temples, eyes squeezed shut. “No. It’s more . . . buzzing. That’s characteristic of something, isn’t?”

  “Could be the neural scanner,” Trin answered. “Would you like something for it?”

  “No. Doesn’t—” Mariwen, grimacing, stopped herself and picked up her wine again. “Sorry. I don’t mean to snap.”

  “That’s quite all right. What were you going to ask?”

  Fingers wrestling with each other around the stem of her wine glass, Mariwen shook her head. “I’m afraid I don’t quite see what this . . . where this—is going. How it’s relevant.”

  “Ms. Rathor, you had a very wide acquaintance among the rich and powerful. Not just here in the Homeworlds, but in the colonies, in the New UK, the Sultanate, even—”

  “Even Halith.”

  “Even Halith”—with a deep nod. “Some of these rich and powerful people you knew casually, some much more intimately. And it is well known that when people are involved with a woman such as yourself, they are not always quite . . . well, they are sometimes indiscreet.”

  Mariwen enjoyed a nice parlor game of manners more than most, but she was sensing a constraint here and furthermore this was going on too long. “Captain, are you using indiscreet as a euphemism for fucking around, or did you have another meaning in mind?”

  Trin surprised her by smiling, and it was like the sun breaking through clouds. Trin Wesselby would never be really pretty, still less beautiful, but when she smiled like that—

  “Fucking around is one species of indiscretion,” Trin replied, “and definitely of interest, but loose talk is of greater interest. Obviously, the two are often related. Sex is a great lubricant for loosening tongues and among people in the higher echelons, information is the true currency. Many can’t resist showing off their wealth, as I’m sure you know.”

  “Yes. I recall the mantra too—loose lips, starships.” She rubbed her temple again.

  “That was a mantra?”

  “More of a joke, I guess. My father, he’d—um—” Wincing, she bit her lower lip.

  “Here. Try this.” Trin held out a thin foil-wrapped slab she’d taken from her desk. “It helps.”

  Mariwen accepted it, peeled back a corner and lifted an eyebrow. “Dark chocolate?”

  “Theobromine. I find that a superior way to administer it. Goes better with the wine too.”

  It was impossible not to smile at that, and Mariwen made no attempt to refrain. She liked her chocolate dark, rich and bitter—only the barest hint of sweetness—and breaking off a piece was not at all surprised to find that the captain’s tastes matched hers exactly. “Thank you. But about these possible indiscretions you were mentioning?”

  “Indeed.” Trin set her wine to one side. “Perhaps I should expand on some of the pertinent history. How much do you know about Halith between the wars? The political situation?”

  “The Minoan Controversy, iridescent petal skirts, and that thing they had for orange one year probably aren’t relevant to their politics?”
>
  “Only in specific contexts. The Founder’s Birthday, for instance. But aside from that—”

  “I’m afraid I’m an ignoramus.”

  Trin pursed her lips, locking in what Mariwen guessed was a chuckle. “In that case”—I asked for it—“I’ll do my best to keep this to the high points.”

  The threshold for what constituted a “high point” in the captain’s view seemed rather modest to Mariwen, but it was just nice to have a break from the questions, so she was happy to sit and nibble delicately at the chocolate while Trin talked. Within a few minutes, the theobromine began to do its work; the strange tight buzzing receded and bit by bit her equilibrium reestablished itself, to the point where she could actually try to start paying proper attention.

  When speaking this way, Captain Wesselby adopted a rather professorial mien that Mariwen found somewhat amusing; her voice changed timbre and she had a habit of tucking her elbows into her sides, interlocking her fingers and gesturing with her thumbs as she spoke, just as one of Mariwen’s mother’s friends—an eminent art historian—did when he lectured. It appeared to be entirely unconscious and was more than a little charming, especially when she disengaged her hands to rub the bridge of her nose as if pushing up a pair of spectacles she did not wear.

  But aside from the amusing aspects of the performance and Mariwen’s fascination at Trin’s ability to glide seamlessly from the commanding presence expected of a senior naval officer to the wry and acerbic wit of a jaded intelligence professional to this new scholastic attitude, there was the effort of trying to keep track of the salient points. It was not that the discourse was boring—Trin knew how to tell a good story when she wanted to—but that the narrative was frequently in danger of being swamped by her love of detail.

  The upshot was, as near as Mariwen could grasp it, that in the atmosphere of increasingly nasty polarization that followed Halith’s defeat in the first war, the proconsular elections for the year ’36 placed in office two men so thoroughly opposed to each other that by midway through their term they had given up any pretense of trying to govern together and simply concentrated on sabotaging each other’s policies and initiatives. The vacuum this behavior created at the top of the Halith power structure was exploited by a faction within the military to engage in a period of adventuring—the Alecto Initiative had been one such adventure—culminating in the current war, now in its fourth year.

  At first, the adventuring seemed to pay off, as the Imperial Halith Navy ran off an impressive string of victories while the League bickered and dithered. But then came the expensive tactical draw and strategic setback at Miranda, followed by a shattering defeat at the Battle of Wogan’s Reef. Faced with what they considered to be the humiliating terms of the Crucis Treaty, the militarist faction, which was led by Admiral Heydrich, then Halith’s chief of military intelligence, originated the ill-considered scheme to invade Regulus through Maxor space, in accordance with their secret treaty. Its failure forced Halith to accept the Crucis treaty with additional and event sterner stipulations.

  The consequences were not as expected, though in hindsight, they should have been. One of the original militarist leaders, who was also one of the two proconsuls elected after the disastrous reign of ’36, was a man of undoubted ability and exceptional charisma named Jerome Paul Augustus. Jerome, as he preferred to be called, had managed to gather to himself most of the laurels for the Halith’s initial string of victories. He also succeeded in laying the blame for the subsequent defeats of the more pragmatic factions who’d counseled restraint. Had the militarists been given free reign, he argued, Halith would have moved irresistibly from strength to strength.

  Jerome, then serving his second term as proconsul—an unusual event—had been removed from office after Wogan’s Reef, but the terms of the Crucis Treaty gave him the opportunity to stage a political comeback that had all the hallmarks of a coup, and he succeeded in being elected to an unprecedented third term. It had long been known in the rarified reaches at the top of the Halith aristocracy that he coveted the unused title of emperor—his byname was “the Pretender”—and what had once been viewed as a mostly harmless idiosyncrasy to be winked at because of his usefulness was now on the cusp of becoming a reality.

  The question Mariwen struggled with was how all this bore on the question of not exchanging POWs—a policy that had been put in place by the League, not Halith.

  “Because things have changed, especially since the Regulus Offensive,” Trin explained. “When we stopped exchanging prisoners over the Asylum business, Halith was defeated. The POW issue was left unresolved in the Crucis Treaty partly because of security concerns”—meaning what really happened at Asylum and how they had discovered the planned invasion—“and partly because the Plenary Council thought they could use it as a stick to beat even more concessions out of Halith.” Her face clearly showed her opinion of that policy. “But since then, life has changed and exchanging prisoners has become emblematic of defeat—of giving in—particularly to the militarist faction. Now that the militarists think they’re on top again, they’re in no mood to negotiate.”

  “Oh,” Mariwen said as the pieces started to shuffle into place at last. “So . . . so what’s the point?”

  “The point is that Apollyon Gates and Operation Overlight hurt Halith a lot more than the militarists can afford to admit. And now that the Plenary Council looks to have finally gotten its head out of its collective ass”—this was the first unsolicited off-color comment Mariwen had heard Trin make and she quashed a smile at this evidence of ordinary humanness—“time is not on their side. So while Halith is feeling better about itself at the moment, it can’t last.”

  Mariwen nodded.

  “Our evidence says that at present, the pragmatists are of a mind to deal while they still have some appearance of strength. The militarists have hardened their position to final victory or dying in the last ditch. Jerome is stuck with the militarists—being emperor is a dramatic position, he’s a dramatic guy. He’s aware of the pickle he’s in, but he can’t support being emperor by overseeing a muddling negotiation, even if it leads to a lasting peace. That’s not what emperors do. But he doesn’t much like the idea of dying in a ditch either.”

  “Uh huh.” The threads were beginning to tangle and blur again.

  “General Heydrich is a top leader among the militarists, as was his brother. He seems, in fact, to have largely picked up his brother’s mantle, along with many of his assets.”

  Mariwen knew all that, or rather the parts that mattered.

  “Admiral Caneris is the military leader of the pragmatists. He’s the guy who lost at Apollyon Gates. We think Jerome picked him for that operation because he appears to have opposed the scheme. There are indications they were trying to either set him up to fail or, if the op succeeded, make sure he couldn’t claim the credit. That way, his earlier opposition would make him look weak and defeatist. Either way, he’d be discredited. Anyway . . .” Trin waved her hand at the digression, realizing she’s strayed off the line. “More wine?”

  “Yes. Thank you.” Mariwen offered her glass. Trin poured.

  “Anyway, things didn’t quite work out like that and—mostly as a result of Amu Daria, I’m afraid—Caneris is now looking pretty good. Also”—filling her own glass—“he and Heydrich don’t get along.” Mariwen leaned forward with rekindled interest at this new tidbit. “Caneris recently killed his nephew in a duel.”

  “Oh.”

  “That means Caneris is highly reluctant to agree to anything General Heydrich wants—which could include handing over Kris.”

  Kris? Not Commander Kennakris? Interesting. Was it the wine?

  “And there’s the fact that Kris is the person who beat him at Apollyon Gates—well, Kris and Rafe. So they have his respect. He’s old-fashioned that way. All that buys us some time.” Trin sipped.

  “Excuse me,” Mariwen exploited the pause. “Maybe it’s the wine, but I’m afraid I’m not following just
how I—we—”

  “Getting to that,” Trin said with a conspiratorial smile. “The thing to understand is that currently it’s all in flux. Where that flux flows depends on the people I haven’t mentioned yet.” She sampled more wine. “What we like to call the Muddling Middle.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “The muddlers just want to keep their position—they’ll throw in with whoever they think will win. Between the wars they were mainly with the pragmatists. After ’36 they gravitated towards the militarists. After Wogan’s Reef, they tilted back. See?”

  “Uh huh.” Had to be the wine. Trin was into her third glass.

  “The leader of the muddlers is Councilor Lord Nigel Geris.” Trin smiled again. “He’s an interesting fellow—a born muddler. Between the wars, he married a girl from New California. Very romantic. Older man, lovely young woman—they go in for that. See what I mean?”

  “I’m not . . . sure.”

  “The point is,” Trin said, “it makes Geris a natural go-between—a role he fulfilled between the wars—pretty good at it too. Met his future wife at a state dinner—her daddy’s a diplomat. Anyway . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “So if the pragmatists want to explore a deal while they are in the ascendant, they need a lever—a foot in the door, so to speak. Something that doesn’t commit them to anything and definitely something that doesn’t look defeatist since that will never fly, even with the muddlers.”

  “Right . . .”

  “POW exchange is the natural place to start. Humanitarian, low risk, gets their people back—the proles like that—even the Halith have to listen to the proles some of the time—commits them to nothing further. Just puts things back to the way they always were.”

  “I see.”

  “Geris is the natural person to introduce this in the Council of Ministers. The pragmatists can’t because they are suspect and the militarists will oppose them by reflex—meaning Jerome probably will too. But if Geris brings it up and the pragmatists give him the right sort of support and Jerome sees an opportunity to broaden his base and not look weak and maybe not die in a ditch, he’d likely support it and then it would have real legs, not the least because they know we’ll listen to him.”