Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks (5 page)

CEF Academy Orbital Campus
Deimos, Mars, Sol

Deimos was an indifferent satellite—as a moon, its qualities would have recommended it nowhere—but as an orbital campus, it served very well. Extensively hollowed out, it afforded plenty of room for every environment a naval education could make use of, from weightless spaces that could be used for EVA training and drills, in vacuum and not, to classrooms and living quarters supplied with a full gee, to replicas of the interior spaces of various ship classes where the atmosphere and gravity could be regulated at will; and almost anything the cadets might be called on to do as officers could be simulated with a high degree of precision.

The fifty-six members of Class 1861 installed themselves in these new surroundings, and except for the lack of anything like an outside, they were comfortable enough. In spite of the promises of bad food, bad air, and cramped quarters, all of these were adequate, and to Kris, more than adequate. She’d had a taste of genuine luxury on Nedaema and while it was certainly pleasant enough, Kris liked what she was used to and this was much more like what she was used to. The same could not be said of some of her classmates, a few of whom appeared to have led quite pampered lives, but after a few weeks even their complaints took on a
pro forma
nature, as if in rehearsal for the inveterate bitching some of them imagined military personnel constantly indulged in.

They were divided into fourteen studies, four cadets to a study, and expected to live, eat, train, and learn together. Cadets were required to surrender their calling cards, if they had any, and their personal xels to the Sergeant-at-Arms, and they were issued a derated military version along with a tablet they would do all their course work on. No outside contact was allowed for the first month—not even email—and thereafter communication with family and friends was strictly limited, while cloud access remained embargoed.

This was the most painful dislocation of all for most cadets, especially the Homeworlders who were accustomed to living in a flurry of virtual activity: constantly messaging, updating their various profiles and monitoring those of their friends (some physical acquaintances but most not) and following the fads, fashions and entertainments that are the perennial concerns of young people everywhere. The abrupt amputation of their virtual existence caused more attrition among entering classes than the rigid discipline, lack of privacy and demanding course work combined, but these factors touched Kris not at all.

Where Kris came from, people still used mempads and old thin-net cels, the clouds were rudimentary, and privacy was a luxury only the rich could afford. During her stay on Nedaema, the constant inundation of data in every form, spewing from xels and the omnipresent consoles, tended to afflict her with a kind of claustrophobia which she relieved by soaking for much of the day in a large tub of warm water. The spartan isolation of the Academy came as a profound relief to her, as much as she missed having a tub.

The studies were organized with careful disregard for origin and social status, so Kris found herself with two Homeworlders and a somewhat boisterous colonial from Port Mahan, out in Cepheus. One of the Homeworlders was a long-limbed youth from Phaedra named Ferhat Basmartin, who was quite handsome, having clear bronze skin, strange pale violet eyes, and coppery-gold hair cut short.

The other was a New Californian named Nataly Brunner—one of the pampered set—whom Kris disliked on sight and who appeared to return the favor through a tight-lipped and utterly unconvincing smile. Brunner was a girl of striking good looks—mildly exotic, with dark eyes and overfull lips in a longish face with a delicate chin—though it had be to acknowledged that a fair degree of artifice did some of the striking. That artifice had rendered her complexion a flawless ivory; her hair straight, black and glossy, and her breasts more than ample. She was of average height, though her unusually long legs made her look taller, and rather lightly built. Kris, who in the units of her home colony was five-nine and a muscular hundred and fifty-seven pounds with broad shoulders, a trim (but not especially narrow) waist and well-rounded hips surmounting strong legs, preferred to think of her as short and thin. Her nickname was Minx and there was little doubt as to how she’d gotten it.

The colonial cadet had the resounding name of Franklin Gustavus Adolphus Tanner. He was a compact young man, older than the rest of them, with a round head, beer-colored hair and eyes, and a cheerful demeanor. It was rumored he’d served some time in a colonial militia and his habits did suggest some familiarity with military discipline, but he volunteered nothing and inquires of that nature were strictly disapproved of. Kris took a liking to Basmartin quickly, treated Tanner with guarded cordiality, and was obscurely delighted to learn that Minx snored.

All this took place under the watchful—some swore all-seeing—eye of their drill instructor, Sergeant Major Yu, who fulfilled both the roles of guardian angel and house demon but primarily the latter, especially for those who had not developed a habit of promptness, were overfond of their beds or lax in their dress, or who after three weeks still could not properly shine a buckle or a pair of boots.

Their time was more-or-less evenly divided between classes, various training exercises, and some basic drills, with a few hours set aside for the luxury of sleep. A good deal of physical effort was involved, and sometimes a degree of discomfort, as in their first evacuation drills. EVAC drills were not an academic exercise on a satellite like Deimos: at any time, the claxons might sound, and they would have less than three minutes to don their EVA suits and report to the designated portal.

Their first exposure to EVA suits had resulted in a crop of bright red faces, for getting into one involved stripping down in front of your classmates and attaching the suit plumbing before pulling on the rest of the bulky apparatus, which was lined with a conductive gel that definitely took some getting used to. With all the giggling and leering and the occasional yelp, the whole class except for Kris would have died had there been a real emergency. Kris, for whom such drills were second nature, had her suit on, sealed and checked in less than a minute, and had breezed into their EVAC station to wait by Sergeant Major Yu until her classmates began to arrive in disordered heaps and lumps well past the deadline, and blunder into place.

The sergeant major’s assessment was deservedly scathing. Kris took advantage of the darkened visor to privately express her own opinion, and the drill was repeated, only Kris being excused, and repeated again for those who still failed to meet the relaxed time standard—four minutes today—until only a handful of now meek and seemingly hopeless cases remained.

Kris’s performance excited more curiosity among her instructors that it did in her classmates. She was known to be an Outworlder—one of the few things that was known about her—and while most of her fellow cadets had probably heard of the Methuselah Cluster, all but a few would have been hard pressed to do more than quote from a hastily skimmed encyclopedia entry about it. To them, especially the Homeworlders, the Outworlds were a distant, dangerous and primitive place—an alien, semi-barbaric region where they lacked xels and clouds and proper medical care and the other appurtenances of civilization. A lawless place too, infested with slavers and pirates and god-knows-what-else, where colonists scratched in the dirt to raise food, burned hydrocarbon fuels and made things by hand. A place whose virtues, if it had any, were limited to being the setting for some popular video entertainments (which were never actually recorded there) and that some people considered its backwardness rather quaint. Of course, its denizens would be proficient at EVAC drills.

Those who sought validation for their opinions of Outworlders—like Minx—could find it in Kris’s course work. Her formal education had ended at the age of ten, and what she learned on her own through eight years of captivity on the contract slaver
Harlot’s Ruse
, while up to university level or beyond in some areas, led to some uncomfortable lapses in others, as when she couldn’t recall all the names of the League’s thirteen Homeworlds. She was aware that the League was named for, and had its capitol at, the ancient settlement of Nereus on Mars, but the history behind that now irrelevant political compromise she’d forgotten, assuming she was ever taught it—a dubious proposition for a colonial from a planet as remote as Parson’s Acre.

Even so basic a thing as the calendar could be a problem. The CEF, like all League organizations, used Galactic Arbitrary Time, which preserved a 365-day year of twenty-four-hour days, and reckoned dates from the armistice that marked the formal end of the Formation Wars (Kris had read about them). Each planet had its own local calendar: in the Homeworlds, it was based on the GAT epoch date, while the colonies often used their date of founding. Kris, in her years on
Harlot’s Ruse
, had come to think of dates in terms of what she knew merely as
ship-time
, but was in fact a calendar employed by large slaver syndicates to coordinate their operations. Further, half of Kris’s life had been spent traveling at small but significant percentages of light speed, so her concept of
when
required a relativistic correction to properly relate to planetary time. Switching to GAT caused an unsettling dislocation in her memories and the timing of events.

Most of this could be glossed over in class and during conversation, but other traits could not, especially the way she spoke. Kris had a pleasant alto voice with a light burr and a gently sibilant intonation, but when she was tired, nervous or upset, it tended to drop a couple of registers and slip into a drawl that lengthened the short vowels and clipped the consonants in a manner that her classmates assumed was a typical Outworld’s accent. It wasn’t: Parson’s Acre had been settled only a century ago, too short a time to develop its own speech patterns, and the colonists there still retained the accent of their origin, Fredonia in most cases, that being the first-gen colony which had chartered the settlement.

Kris’s accent wasn’t Fredonian either: it was an affectation she’d cultivated, mostly by watching vids, because Anton Trench, the captain of
Harlot’s Ruse
and her owner, liked her to sound what he called ‘classy.’ He didn’t approve of her speaking with the slaver accent she’d picked up, and which she’d come to instinctively consider her ‘natural’ speaking voice, and he got seriously annoyed when she sprinkled her conversation with
fuck’n
, just like he did, especially when they had ‘company.’

That was one of several habits Trench had never managed to beat out of her, but in the months since her release she’d labored to eradicate it, with modest success. It still appeared at inopportune times, although these days she usually managed to keep it under her breath. She’d also tried to eliminate her drawl but that was harder. Constantly paying attention to her speech made Kris even more reserved in public, and since she wasn’t inclined to be gregarious in her new surroundings anyway, she often came across as cold, even condescending.

So when her classmates foregathered during their few leisure hours to discuss the prevalent manias, Kris was sadly out of her depth. What took the place of her classmates’ encyclopedic knowledge of the particulars of popular culture—an intimate understanding of slaver society, from their trade practices to the way they graded what they called their ‘merchandise’ to the meanings of the clan tattoos of Tyrsenian pirates—was hardly fit for casual conversation even if she’d felt like talking about it, which she most certainly did not.

Those of her fellow cadets who were inclined to resent her behavior could not imagine what grounds an Outworlder could possibly have to snub them, and this led inevitably to speculation about her rumored connection with the Huron family. It was known that Kris had been sponsored by Grand Senator Huron, the current Speaker of the Grand Senate and thus head of the Plenary Council. That was supposed to be private data, but such an unprecedented event, involving one of the League’s wealthiest and most powerful families, simply could not escape public notice. The only rationalization her detractors found plausible was that the grand senator had been acting on behalf of his son, Rafael Huron V, with whom they believed Kris had enjoyed a romantic entanglement.

The foundation of this belief was that Kris and the younger Huron had spent some months together on Nedaema; slim evidence to be sure, but in view of his reputation, inculpatory. Rafe Huron was well known for his many affairs; they provided considerable fodder for tabloid gossips who loved to portray him as a charming rake. He was even rumored to have had a brief fling with a young Mariwen Rathor, a leading interstellar celebrity until her horrific kidnapping last year. That alleged relationship was said to have taken place years ago, before her meteoric rise, and was generally dismissed as mere wishful thinking on the part of those whose job it was to manufacture scandal.

But there was no question about his weakness for beautiful women, and Kris was beautiful. Not beautiful in an uncomplicated, everyday fashion—no small number found Minx more attractive—but in a proud, almost combative sense that, combined with her athlete’s build and an easy, economical grace bequeathed by years of ship-life, gave her an allure that most were sure a man of Huron’s character could not resist. It was equally inconceivable that a young colonial woman, especially one seeking a military career, would resist the advances of the eldest son of the Huron family, for in addition to his social standing, Rafe Huron was one of the CEF’s most decorated active fighter pilots.

Which fact conveniently explained Kris being placed in the elite fighter program. The cadets in the fighter track tended towards cliquishness, especially the upperclassmen who’d made it into the Advanced Fighter Program, and while hazing was strictly forbidden, a few saw it as their duty to ensure that the SRF was not overburdened with those they considered to be ‘the wrong sort.’ With her outlandish accent, obscure origins, and wholly improper lack of a decent sense of subordination, Kris was indisputably
wronger
than most. Accordingly, a month into the term, one of these self-appointed social guardians decided to question Kris publicly on her relationship with Rafe Huron, and when she failed to rise to the bait, began to loudly speculate on the sexual gymnastics she must have employed to purchase her admittance. Kris instantly rounded on the burly young man with a look of such undiluted savagery in her hazel eyes, which had turned a shocking lambent yellow, that he fell back, dribbling apologies, while his friends urged him to the nearest exit.