Free Loralynn Kennakris 3: Asylum by Owen R. O'Neill, Jordan Leah Hunter

time, Captain.”
    Right-o .
    “And you may rest assured there shall be no shambles under this command.”
    Now that’s a big fuckin’ comfort . “Yessir. Is that all, sir?”
    “Yes— Oh, not quite. Almost slipped my mind.” He retrieved his xel and opened a window. “Do you know a Commander Wesselby, by any chance? DSI-PLESEC?”
    Lewis checked her move to rise, curiosity suddenly piqued. Most people involved with intelligence or SPEC-Ops knew of Commander Trin Wesselby in one way or another, and some of them lived to regret it. “Not personally, sir.”
    “She addressed a message to you. As you weren’t available, it seems, they forwarded it to me. Peculiar.” He batted the window around to face her. “What do you make of it?”
    Lewis leaned closer to read the document. It appeared to be a routine request for some reports, the serial numbers of which were listed in the annex. She flipped it open and scanned them.
    “These are the Anandale reports, sir. She probably wants more info on the Halith irregulars we encountered. They’ve deployed a lot of ‘em in Crucis, too.”
    “Yes.” Kerr swept the message back onto his xel. “But why send it to you? By rights, it should have gone to Regimental HQ.”
    “I submitted the AAR, sir. And those reports are under my sig-file. Whoever sent out the message probably thought I was the HQ point of contact.” Privately, she suspected there was something more to it. Commander Wesselby should certainly know her SPEC-Ops history, and this could well be a discreet request for a more privileged communication. Did Wesselby think she had inside info of some kind on Anandale? That could be good or bad. Probably not good though.
    “Typical,” Kerr muttered, swallowing the hook. He furled the xel and slid it back into a pocket. “We’ll let HQ deal with it then. I’ll send it along—don’t trouble about it. We’ve better things to do than play librarian, I believe.”
    “Of course.”
    “If it comes out there is something more to it, we may be in that neck of the woods anyway.” He made an airy gesture at Lewis’s mild expression of interest. “This Miranda business. Just getting the details now, but it looks as though Third could be light a battalion or two. It’s possible we’ll be assigned. Of course, there’s not much prospect of action there these days. Don’t suppose you’d mind that terribly.”
    Her lack of reply was more than reply enough.
    Kerr sensed it. He cleared his throat. “Yes, well. One final item: there’s an opportunity on the near horizon for some employment. As it’s not too soon to start working the people up, I think we should seize it. Half our people have barely had a taste thus far—that must change in a hurry. We need to start turning these kids into razors.” She winced inwardly at the archaic term. He must have thought that, being a colonial, she preferred it. “So staff meeting tomorrow at 0830—I’ll fill everyone in then.”
    Hallelujah and jubilee. Paradise, here we come . “Yessir.”
    He signaled the end of their meeting with a shallow bob of his head. “Then you may carry on, Captain. And . . . keep up the good work.”
    Fuck you very much, sir.
    “Yessir.” She got to her feet and snapped a parade-ground salute before she left.
    Her jaw was still tight and her boot heels were still hitting the pavement hard when she exited the building on the way to her temporary quarters at the BOQ. So they might be headed to the Pleiades and attached to Third Fleet? If Kerr thought that sector was all feather bed he was in for a big fuckin’ surprise—that much was clear. And what was Trin Wesselby’s interest in her? The commander wasn’t someone you wanted to get crossways of. She’d have to do some recon of her own. There were still back-channels open to her, and not all in the CEF either—or even in the League. Sometimes it was good to have friends in low places.
    Yep, the shit was definitely in a stir out there.