Read Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks for Free Online

one of these into the director’s glass. It was a Hesperian single-malt scotch he was pouring, twelve years old, and a reasonable approximation of the Terran original.
    Commander Trin Wesselby, the new director, lifted her glass and considered its amber depths while Chief Inspector Nikolai Taliaferro emptied the bottle into his own. Trin Wesselby was a short woman with an athletic build who normally looked rather bookish, but now the prim demeanor was nowhere to be seen. Her dark hair, which unlike most female CEF officers she kept long, was down, and the waves introduced by the plain twist she’d worn it up in softened her face remarkably. Combined with the flush that alcohol brought to her cheeks and her small, precisely cut lips, she was perhaps as near to prettiness as her countenance could reach—or would have been if there had been less worry, tension, and sadness in her expression.
    None of this was apparent to Commander Wesselby, however. There was nothing in her glass or elsewhere in the office to bring it home to her, to show the new lines around her pale gray eyes that turned slightly down, or the furrows lately etched into the aristocratic forehead, or the pinch between the dark, straight, thin eyebrows. This was good because it also kept her unaware of the hint of vulnerability that her exhaustion was revealing—she’d rather be hanged first.
    Nick Taliaferro noticed all that, and more, but if he looked like a gruff, old, battered colonial noncom, which is exactly what he’d been—Color Sergeant, Hesperian Royal Marine Corps, Class of ’81, retired—he was also a fairly astute judge of people and thus careful to reveal nothing. “No worries,” he remarked as the last aromatic drops fell with a metronome plit-plit-plit into his glass, now brimming full. “I have another.”
    Drinking was strictly prohibited within the confines of NBPS HQ, where Taliaferro’s office occupied a corner on the sacred Ninth Floor, but the Chief Inspector liberally interpreted this to mean during duty hours, and whatever time it was—he had ceased to take notice some hours ago—it was certainly deep into the graveyard watch and thus well past them. Further, he had not left his office for the past three days, which in his view came near to qualifying it as a temporary residence. Lastly, he no longer cared.
    “Complete write-off?” Trin asked. That’s what the preliminary reports indicated, but there was always a chance, however slim, they might be wrong.
    “Complete. Fifteen bought it during the firefight outside the compound. The other nine managed to evade for a while, but with their corvette taken down, they were eventually surrounded and they ANCAP’d.” ANCAP meant Anti-Capture Protocol, an anodyne way of referring to the charges implanted in the combat helmets of SOFOR teams that vaporized the wearer’s heads in the event of death or capture. With proper equipment, it was possible to extract a surprising amount of data from a decently preserved brain and ANCAPs saw to it there were no brains left to exploit. Such things lay at the heart of Commander Wesselby’s job, but she still could not suppress a shudder.
    “How long were they able to evade?”
    “Standard time? Three days, eleven hours and fifteen minutes. More or less.” Taliaferro had not had to look the numbers up.
    “Three days and eleven hours ? But . . .” Trin added some times up mentally—added them up again. The op had been staged out of Beta Crucis and the corvette deployed from New Madras, which lay just outside Bannerman space, a short hop from Lacaille. The CEF maintained a squadron at New Madras, most of which they’d pulled as part of the cover for the operation, leaving just three picket destroyers and the stealth frigate that had delivered the team. Even with the team’s corvette down, the frigate’s captain would have known when they were more than a few hours overdue, and the frigate should have been able to extract the