Free Loralynn Kennakris 1: The Alecto Initiative by Owen R. O'Neill, Jordan Leah Hunter

punched
the bridge hatch open without losing stride. Lieutenant Fitz Lee Walsh was
manning the nav-station. Huron went and leaned over the display.
    “Fitz, show me our transit.”
    Walsh brought it up. Huron stared hard at it, muttering and
tracing the line with his finger. Close, but not exact. Well, she’d said that.
“What are we running?”
    “About nine-three,” Walsh answered. “Old Man’s in a hurry.”
    “Plot an optimum, would you?”
    “What for?”
    “Don’t give me grief, Walsh.”
    “Alright. Gimme a second.” Walsh reached out, blanked the
display, brought up the nav module, started fiddling. A minute or so later he
had a transform. He ran it through a pole checker to make sure there were no
unallowed singularities in the solution, then did a residue calculation.
Finally, he brought up the convolver, and stuffed the transform in it with the
residual inputs. The thin red line arced across the display to their
destination. The whole process took about three minutes—Walsh was a pretty
good navigator. “How’s that?”
    “Tap up my system.” Walsh entered the link commands. Huron
entered his passcode. “Grab that,” he said, pointing. “Merge the plots.”
    “What is this?” Walsh muttered testily as the two holo plots
overlaid perfectly. “A fucking test?”
    “Sort of,” Huron answered, “but not of you. Son of a bitch.”
He straightened and Walsh shot him a dirty look sideways. “I’ve got a girl back
there who plots transits in her head.”
    “No fuckin’ way!”
    “There it is, man.” Huron pointed at the display. “Living
color. I watched her do it.”
    “Son of a bitch.”
    “My words exactly. And she says she knows all the slaver
routes in this sector.”
    “Oh bullshit! You are pulling my leg.”
    “Not a nanometer,” Huron replied coolly. “She’s plotting
them up now. She got one already.”
    Walsh twisted around in his chair. “d’Harra? She gave
you that?”
    Huron smiled with just the edges of his teeth showing. “You
get a gold star, Fitz. What’s the Old Man doing about it anyway?”
    “He shot it over to PrenTalien. They’re whistling up
Shariati’s group out of Epona. Should be able to give them bastards a big
fucking surprise.”
    A quiet, self-satisfied smile warmed Huron’s features.
“That’s nice.”

Chapter Six
    LSS Arizona
 transiting the Cepheid-Sagittarian Belt
    By the time Huron got back to his cabin, Kris was
nearly done with the map. She was agonizing over the last few details as he
came in. “Almost,” she said over her shoulder, then muttered Shit! under
her breath. He came and stood quietly behind her. She typed and muttered,
poking at the holo volume with the stylus. After about five minutes, she threw
her hands in the air. “Fuck it. I can’t remember anymore.”
    Huron looked over her shoulder while she rubbed her eyes. What
he saw left him impressed. He glanced down at her, hesitated, then asked,
“Would you mind telling me how you learned this? Hyper-navigation is a two-year
graduate program. Not to mention astrocartography. It couldn’t have been easy.”
    Kris shot him a nakedly angry look. “It wasn’t.”
    *     *     *
    Trench had had an old
navigation text and Kris had read it. That made Trench laugh; no way was she
gonna understand that shit. She told him it had cool pictures. He laughed some
more.
    Kris found the text when she was fourteen and for a long
time he was right. Her schooling had ended at age eleven—the text assumed
college-level math and physics. But there were a lot of pictures and animated
tutorials, and for all her lack of formal education, she managed to grasp a few
basic concepts. She took down the text and looked at it whenever she didn’t
have work to do. That wasn’t often, but she wasn’t above trading sexual favors
to other deck slaves to have her chores done. That gave her more time alone
with the text. When she wheedled Trench into letting her log onto his system,
things