Loralynn Kennakris 3: Asylum Read Online Free PDF Page B

a hint? Or . . .”
    Huron shrugged, smiled, swirled his coffee, and began. “We’ve been trying to engineer this for about a year now . . .” Ever since the disastrous Battle of Kepler at the beginning of the war, in fact. The Speaker of the Grand Senate, Hazen Gautier, had first expressed the desire to strike Halith a direct blow at a secret meeting of the Plenary Council within a month of Kepler. As defeat followed humiliating defeat, with the subsequent loss of Crucis, where one system after another succumbed to the onslaught, it became ever more important to bolster public morale by demonstrating, somehow, that Halith was also vulnerable to attack. But ten months elapsed before an opportunity presented itself and when it did, Trafalgar was the chosen instrument. That was why she’d been inexplicably saddled with eighteen specialized starclippers.
    Using starclippers to conduct a raid on the Halith core systems was the brainchild of a marine, Colonel Christina Yeager. It might have been unexpected that such a notion would originate in the CEF Marine Corps, but the colonel was the daughter of Ed Yeager, the famous yacht racer, and in the days of her youth, little ‘Chrissy’ had learned a thing or two about handling those fast, finicky beasts from her old man. Furthermore, her family was Karelian, and she had a good idea of what Halith’s reaction would be to a strike, however small, against their ‘sacred space’.
    “You knew the Colonel, didn’t you?” asked N’Komo, rising from his seat.
    Huron shook his head. “I’ve met her. Our families are friendly. Can’t say I know her, though.”
    “My mistake,” N’Komo said with a wink that seemed to be aimed at Kris. She had no idea why. Huron had a certain reputation, but— “Anybody else want a beer?” N’Komo asked. No one did.
    “So . . . that’s it?” Kris sensed there was much more to the story.
    Huron glanced over at N’Komo, although he was used to being ribbed by his old friend. “Yeah. For the most part, that’s it.”
    That wasn’t it. In fact, it wasn’t even close to it. The rest of the story he was not at liberty to relate and did not, in fact, know in any official sense—which was true of a great deal of what he knew. To begin with, he knew that Fleet Admiral Westover, Chief of Naval Operations for the CEF, had inclined toward the idea, and Admiral Zahir was positively eager to give it a go. But cooler heads in the General Staff’s Operations Department felt themselves duty-bound to rain on the parade. The problem wasn’t dispatching eighteen extremely expensive boats and their crews on a one-way mission to deliver a pin-prick to Syrdar—the chosen target, it being the most vulnerable of Halith’s core systems—but how to get them within range. The only ship in the right place with enough capacity was Trafalgar , and she’d have to completely denude herself of her three fighter wings to cram the starclippers in. G-Staff was understandably reluctant to expose their newest, biggest and fastest fleet carrier to this sort of risk for what was, in effect, an IW mission.
    At this juncture, Lady Luck (or the Goddess Fortuna Major, depending on where you hailed from), who had been notably stingy thus far, served up an ace. Sent on an independent cruise to reconnoiter the Halith defenses at the outskirts of Crucis, the redoubtable Captain Lawrence had captured two ships in a single engagement, the heavy cruiser IHS Polidor and the light cruiser IHS Vistula . Sir Phillip, who prized his dedication to the ‘old ways’, had fought a running gun battle with the two ships, taking them under fire from his battlecruiser’s 14-inch chase mounts.
    Retribution was one of the few ships in the CEF who still owned these long railguns, and they proved their worth. Disabling the Halith cruisers at stand-off range with unhurried, precisely aimed salvos, his marines boarded Vistula to find that a 14-inch quark-diamond warhead had gone right