The Chains That Break
by
Ken-Zero
Disclaimer: Kim Possible and all related characters are property of Disney. Honor Harrington, the universe, and all related characters are property of David Weber and BAEN books. The only original items in here are the plot and a couple of minor characters.
Kimberly Anne Possible, lieutenant (j.g.) in the Royal Manticoran Navy, held her head as high as she could while she walked in spite of the dread gnawing at her stomach.
The facade of pride was nothing new to her, nor was the sensation of impending doom. She just never felt both at the same time before, and the feeling was making her stomach do little somersaults in her abdomen as she strode through the halls of the Admiralty towards the office of one Vice Admiral of the Green Patricia Givens. The midnight-black of her uniform contrasted with the bright white lighting, seeming to absorb every stray photon without reflecting a single one; the hallway's dark brown, waist-high wood paneling and deep blue carpet giving the place an air of antiquity in spite of the copious amounts of technology visible.
Kim knew that lieutenants were never, ever summoned down these hallowed halls except for being scrubbed out of the service—at least, not if they weren't part of some admiral's entourage. So for her to be called down meant that either she had done something extremely stupid, an occurrence she could not remember happening...or her knowledge wasn't as complete as she thought it was.
Kim had returned a few months ago from her first post-midshipman cruise aboard the HMS Derring-do, a destroyer in the service of the Star Kingdom of Manticore; that cruise had lasted just over a year. She didn't think she'd done anything particularly glorious—the Derring-do hadn't had a terribly exciting deployment—so Kim's being summoned was confusing at best. She tried to ignore the flock of gulls that had beaten the butterflies to her stomach and marched steadily onward.
She only passed a small number of others in the hallway, most of whom wore enough of the gold ribbon of command rank to remind Kim more of sunflowers than anything else; the mental diversion was welcome. She made a right turn at a T-junction, proceeding into an area defined by several signs to be the territory of Naval Intelligence.
She continued on, ignoring the itch she felt under the massive ponytail her long, sunrise-red hair was bound in at the base of her neck. While longer than military protocol dictated, she'd also been back dirtside for long enough to allow it to grow out; as a result, her hair, though at one time trimmed to an orderly length, had quickly grown enough to pass her shoulder blades again, as thick as it ever had been in the past. The itch, she felt, was a direct result of all the people she was sure were staring at her, some sympathetically, others not, as they watched some poor fool lieutenant walk to her doom.
The only bright side to her current sitch—…uation, she corrected herself mentally—was that she was, in fact, headed for the office of the lead officer for the Office of Naval Intelligence, instead of the representative from Saganami Island, Manticore's naval officer training institute. She took consolation from that fact, and curiosity helped drive the darkness of doubt from her. After all, what could ONI want with an average young officer like her?
Guess I'll find out soon enough, Kim thought, coming to a stop in front of a door that was like all the rest down this particular hall. The name plate proclaimed it to be the office she was looking for, and, taking a deep breath and settling her stomach as best she could, she reached out and pressed the announcer.
Perhaps three seconds passed before the speaker announced, "Come." The door slid open as Kim stepped forward and offered a salute, and Vice Admiral Patricia Givens, Second Space Lord, Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, looked up from what seemed to be a small mountain of electronic paper.
"Ah, Kimberly." The second-ranking civilian head of the Royal Manticoran Navy said; her voice was lower than Kim was expecting, but at least it held the same Manticoran accent as Kim's own English. "Do sit down."
Kim obeyed, dropping her hand back to her side and taking the only chair on the entrance's side of the desk. She placed her hands in her lap, not daring to speak yet for fear that that nervous flutter would increase—or worse, give itself away.
Admiral Givens merely watched her for a few seconds, her own light green eyes studying the darker green of Kim's, before returning to the work on her desk, shifting through the various items until she apparently found what she was looking for. "I suppose you're wondering why I called you in. No doubt you weren't sure if this was going to be the end."
"Yes, ma'am," Kim responded, feeling every inch as if she were the seventeen years old she physically appeared to be, thanks to the standard prolong treatments, instead of the twenty-four T-years she actually was.
Admiral Givens must have detected some of her nervousness in spite of Kim's best efforts, because she smiled. "At ease, lieutenant. As a matter of fact, I called you here for just the opposite reason." She waited to see if Kim would respond to that, but when Kim didn't, she moved on. "Tell me," she said, "how much do you know of the current state of the galaxy?"
Kim felt like she was back at Saganami. That was the kind of question that usually got her classmates trapped in a "Gotcha!" moment of ignorance. "I'm not sure what you mean, ma'am," she answered carefully.
"I know your assignment just returned recently, lieutenant, but surely you weren't out of the loop while aboard."
"No, ma'am."
"So tell me, to the best of your ability, how things stand around the Kingdom."
Kim took a breath. "The shooting with Haven seems to be over, for one. We don't have any other real problems except for how much hardware Erewhon had when…they left." She very carefully did not say anything about the previous administration in her star nation's government, which had done a very good job of scaring their interstellar neighbor away. "A lot of us suspect that with Duchess Harrington in charge of Eighth Fleet, nobody in the galaxy, in their right mind, would challenge us."
Admiral Givens nodded once. "Back to Haven…are you aware of the recent proceedings?"
Kim blinked. "I know that, just recently, their president has been offering the olive branch with one hand while hiding the pulser behind her back…"
This time the admiral shook her head. "I'm going to tell you something, Kimberly, and it does not leave this room. Is that understood?" At Kim's meek nod, she continued. "Haven's Secretary of State had been corrupting every communique issued from President Pritchart to the Queen. Before he died, he apparently had some very complete designs on taking the office for himself, once he could engineer her failure and ensure his own good standing with the people. Recently, though, he and his brother were killed by some drunk in a speeder." Her voice told Kim exactly what she thought of that "accident," and the young girl nodded.
"The resources, though, that it took to put together that sort of attempted coup are…formidable, and it's our suspicion that there was outside influence on this setup. Granted, there are undoubtedly elements with Haven itself—and probably here at home—that would rather the war not end until one side or the other is ground away to nothing...but they don't have the capability, financially speaking, to orchestrate something like this. The Andermani are still too taken with Dame Honor's stint with their navy to try to interfere, and they're smarter than that, regardless. The Sollies couldn't care less about our existence, with one exception: Manpower Unlimited."
Kim blinked. "The slavers?"
"The same," the admiral confirmed, her expression grim. "Manpower has the kind of resources to buy their way into damn near anything they want, and make sure their tracks are covered. By keeping us and Haven at each other's throats, they keep themselves in the dark. Realistically speaking, mounting operations against them would be one of the very few things that would actually allow us to form an alliance with Haven. I'm sure you know they're just as anti-slavery as we are."
She stopped for a moment, and Kim took that time to digest what she'd been told. So far, she felt less like she was being dressed down, and more like...like she was being briefed. The flutters in her stomach ceased suddenly as her curiosity fully took over.
"Excuse me, ma'am, but...why are you telling me this if it's not to leave the room?"
"Getting there, Kimberly," Admiral Givens said with half a grin. "As I was saying, Manpower doesn't like the idea of us and Haven teaming up against them, so they've taken steps to reduce that possibility. The Powers That Be have decided that it's time for us to take the fight back to them. At best," she went on, holding up one hand, "we secure ourselves another ally and end this war. At worst, we stunt the operations of a notorious group of genetic slavery thugs." She brought her other hand up to contrast her points, then folded them together on the desktop. "To that end, we've been culling the best and brightest out of Saganami for additional training in the hope of organizing a clandestine force of sorts to take the fight to Mesa, and by extension, Manpower."
Kim almost felt flattered—almost—but she knew there was more to come. Still, her curiosity grew by leaps and bounds, and ideas and assumptions began to come together in her head.
"I called you here, Kimberly, in the hope that you would agree to be part of this special force." The admiral held up a hand just as Kim opened her mouth to do just that. "Understand this: what I'm looking for is someone willing to go deep under cover. Deep enough that you probably won't have any support from the Star Kingdom at all, beyond what you have in your mission parameters. You will be on your own until your mission is accomplished."
Admiral Givens' suddenly serious tone did little to stem the flow of Kim's curiosity, but she made herself think on the warning and all its implications for over a minute. "I understand," she said finally.
"Good. I don't mean to scare you, but I do need you to be aware of the realities involved." She rose, walked to the door, and pressed a thumb to a section of the frame. Kim heard the faint whine of capacitors charging before Admiral Givens took her thumb away. "Now that we're totally secure, I can officially ask. Are you willing to accept this mission?"
Kim smiled easily, her green eyes shining. "Absolutely."
Admiral Givens returned the smile. "I thought as much. Your profile," she continued, crossing back to her desk and sitting again, "suggested a willingness to tackle impossible problems...and showed that you had a history of solving them."
Kim waved a hand. "No big—uh...sorry, ma'am." She blushed deeply as her pre-Navy years resurfaced.
"Don't worry about it, Kimberly. I did tell you to be at ease, remember?"
"Well, yes, but—"
"For the moment, I think I can stand a little informality," the admiral said wryly. "Nevertheless, what I've already told you is the limit on what we know." It wasn't, and they both knew that, but some appearances had to be maintained, in spite of Admiral Givens' word on informality. "How well-versed are you in espionage tactics?"
"That...wasn't something they really covered at Saganami Island," Kim replied hesitantly, going with the quick change of subject easily.
"Mmm." The admiral picked a seemingly-random datacard off her desk from under the piles of junk and slid it into the only clear spot: the card reader. "It says in your file that you received exactly one black spot on your record the entire time you were there."
Kim blushed again. "I...got into a fight, ma'am."
"So it says. Thrashed him pretty good, too, it seems?"
The blush went even darker. "Yes, ma'am."
"It says you know a rather remarkable number of fighting styles, most of them from Old Earth. Why didn't you study coup de vitesse instead?"
"I didn't like it as much," Kim admitted easily. "It's like old languages versus English. I'm more interested in what it's based on, than the end result. Plus," she grinned, "shifting between styles every few seconds confuses the hell out of my sparring partners."
"I suppose I can see that. So why the fight outside the sparring area?"
Kim hesitated before answering. "He...he was trash-talking Lady Harrington, ma'am."
"And you thought she couldn't take care of herself?"
"She wasn't anywhere near at the time, but...it was driving me crazy."
"Why?" The admiral leaned forward in her chair.
A sigh escaped Kim before she could stop it. "Because I had a crush on her," she explained.
Patricia Givens blinked once before sitting back again. The silence hung between them as the admiral checked and rechecked Kim's profile, and finally she turned back to Kim, who looked like she clearly wanted to be invisible. "Forgive me for asking this, but your profile makes no note. You are attracted to women?"
"...Yes, ma'am," Kim said. She felt no shame in that, of course; homosexuality was far from unheard of in either the Star Kingdom or the Republic of Haven. She felt shame because of how it had affected her judgment.
"I see. Why hide it?"
"I didn't, ma'am, until I started at Saganami Island. My class was the first with a significant number of Grayson recruits, and I knew that I wouldn't exactly be the most comfortable person to be around with them...so I tried to keep my preferences from being public knowledge." Grayson was a theocratic planet whose people were so conservative they made Kim's prudish home of Manticore look positively decadent.
"I see," she said again. "And after? What about your middie cruise, and so on?"
"Those aren't exactly the time to pursue romantic interests, ma'am," Kim answered with a small, self-effacing grin.
"Good to hear, Kimberly." Admiral Givens closed Kim's file and looked the girl square in the eye. "Understand this: What I am looking for is someone like you. You're a quick study, which leaves me with no worries on your being able to pick up the concepts." She paused, and Kim nodded. "I've chosen a handful of your class—and only your class—as potential agents for a small, new organization. As I'm sure you've guessed by now, you're on that list. You will be trained in undercover tactics and espionage, and I will be sending you to a very sensitive area. Know that if you accept, you will have next to no contact with the Star Kingdom until I, and only I, deem your mission accomplished. Are you prepared to accept that?"
Kim's curiosity exploded into full-on excitement, and she felt her whole body start to quiver, but she squashed the movement with an iron will and forced her face to remain as impassive as she could make it. "I am."
"I will not pretend that this won't be dangerous. Espionage is a life-or-death game, and should you be discovered, you will not receive any support; your survival will be in your own hands."
"I understand," Kim replied, and she did, even though she wanted more than anything to get right to her new job.
Admiral Givens nodded once, sharply, then held out a hand, a smile on her face. "Then welcome to the Hounds."
--
Kim almost couldn't believe her luck as she practically danced on air back to her quarters, far and away from the primary Navy building, on Manticore. Her mind was awash with excitement, a marked contrast from earlier in the day while approaching the ONI office.
Admiral Givens wanted me for undercover ops! And I'm gonna be hunting down Manpower! Ohmigod this is so totally spankin'! I just wish I could tell...
Kim's very nature stood at odds with almost everything that Manpower Unlimited represented, hence her excitement at taking them on. She had spent almost all of her teenage years with her best friend Ron Stoppable, constantly tackling odd jobs, doing favors for anyone that asked of her, and standing up against perceived injustices—especially when she and her family had moved, following her father's job, off of Manticore for a few years to Saginaw, a planet in the nigh-lawless Silesian Confederacy. The Silesian authorities turned such a blind eye to their systems that the entire sector was practically run by the criminal element, and it was there that Kim's heroic nature had fully matured. Indeed, it was partly because of her vigilantism that her father had had to relocate back to Manticore. Kim had decided that she needed to be part of something larger to effect greater change in the region; her conscience demanded it of herself.
Upon her family's return to Manticore, Kim had informed her parents of a decision she'd actually been thinking on since just before they first left. She told them she was joining the Navy as an officer, and they had been nothing but supportive after their initial, somber reaction; after all, a career in the military, these days, was not exactly a promise of a long life.
Still, Doctor James Possible and his wife, Doctor Anne Possible, respected their oldest child's decision; Kim's younger brothers, budding geniuses in their own right, had teased her about it, saying that she was less likely to catch a girl in the Service than she was walking about a street at night blindfolded. Kim, of course, had responded in kind, vowing that the Tweebs (as she less-than-affectionately called her brothers) were bothers she would be glad to be without, but she could admit now that she did miss them...and her parents.
Both of her parents were well-respected in their fields; her father worked for one of Manticore's top R&D companies for impeller drive technology, the centuries-old drive system that propelled every single starship that hoped to travel farther than in-system destinations. James Possible had been project lead on a couple of the more recent innovations that the military had adopted; it was people like him and his team that lent the Royal Manticoran Navy its technological edge over virtually any other contender.
Kim's mother was a neurosurgeon. That, in and of itself, would have suggested she was more intelligent than most, but most people didn't realize that Anne Possible, before marrying her college sweetheart, had earned her doctorate on Beowulf. That, plus her slightly more-than-professional friendship with one Dr. Alfred Harrington (the father of Admiral of the Red Lady Dame Honor Harrington, Duchess Harrington, Steadholder Harrington, and holder of a half-dozen other titles), meant Kim's mother was well-connected in some very high social circles.
It was also because of that Beowulfian training that Anne passed to her children that Kim hated Manpower so much. Beowulf, home of the prolong treatments that convinced the human aging gene to "shut off" for a couple of centuries, was the foremost place in the known galaxy for medical research; it was considered second only to Mesa, home of Manpower, in advances in genetic engineering. Fears of a return of the Last War that had devastated Earth, using genetically-designed super soldiers, had convinced the entire planet of Beowulf to adopt a new medical ethics code banning excessive tampering with the human genome. As the Beowulf Code came into practice, a small group of separatists rejected the notion and were banished. They took up shop on Mesa, carving their business empire from the ground up.
The rest of the galaxy abhorred Manpower for its primary product: genetic slaves. Most of Manpower's business took place in the Solarian League, the largest, wealthiest, and oldest of the star nations; the Silesian Confederacy, Kim's old temporary home, was the other star nation known to do business with them. The League's officials often paid little attention to Manpower's business, preferring instead to look the other way while reaping the benefits of the various slave types the corporation produced.
As Admiral Givens had told Kim earlier, Manpower was a common enemy of both the Star Kingdom and the nascent Republic of Haven. Both nations had strictly outlawed slavery ages ago in the Cherwell Convention, and slavers were punished to the fullest extent of the law, often including death by shoving them through an airlock. In spite of the fact that the Solarian League was larger than both Haven and Manticore combined, Manticore's navy had at least technological parity, while Haven's simply had a very very large number of ships. The combination was potent enough to worry Manpower, leading to Admiral Givens' suspicion that the company was behind the latest attempts to maintain open hostilities between the two nations.
And getting this chance to shut down Manpower—or hurt them, at least—means this war between us and Haven can actually end, Kim thought. The idea was very appealing, especially since another of her old friends had been caught on one of Haven's conquests early on in the war. She'd not heard any news, hide nor hair, of Monique since then, and she constantly worried for her friend's safety, and that of Monique's family. An end to the war meant Kim could finally get a message through, which would ease that part of her mind tremendously. But for that to happen, Kim had to do her job.
And her job had just gotten a whole lot more interesting.
--
Over the course of the following month, Kim was subjected to a training regimen so focused and intense, she almost felt like she had back when she entered Saganami Island's campus for the first time.
Beginning the day after her meeting with Vice Admiral Givens, she'd been awoken by a message in her queue stating that she had to report in forty minutes. She almost hadn't made it; the resulting embarrassment only intensified when told by her instructor—a female, she had noted—to strip down to her skivvies. Kim had spent the rest of that day like that, and the next, and the next; on the fourth day, she'd managed to ride herd on her reaction enough to not even flinch, much less blush, when ordered to undress. At the drill instructor's satisfied nod, Kim knew she'd learned whatever it was she was supposed to learn from that peculiar exercise.
After the first week, which was filled with enough physical training to make even Kim sore—and she prided herself on her boundless energy and flexibility—she received crash training in what she dubbed Lying 101. She'd always been able to think quickly on her feet; it was one reason she was so successful in her pre-navy days, dealing with the increasingly unorthodox ways people in Silesia tried to skirt the already-loose laws. Her current instruction, though, gave her frameworks she could draw on in a pinch, bits of story she could cobble together to make a decent cover while under instant pressure.
Kim could remember the last story she'd had to come up with; it made her blush just thinking about the ridiculously risqué yarn she'd spun in her head while engaging in polite conversation with a random person at a diner. She knew the person wasn't exactly "random," but it was someone she'd never seen before, which actually made it easier to fall back on the repository of random bits of tales she now possessed. It had turned into something of a game of one-upsmanship; the photogenic, convivial blonde woman with whom she sat, calling herself "Vivian," tried to make her own story into something obscure, to which Kim replied with an "anecdote" of ribald origins. The blonde looked aghast, then ashamed before recounting a similar story, but with more graphic detail. Kim fired back with a lurid description of her mythical first sexual encounter, which had shut the woman up for good.
After that came the requisite instruction that Kim had expected earlier. Among those items were how to actually remain inconspicuous; how to search for items in the environment that might give her away; what the best and most likely places to hide people and items were, and how to look for them; and so on. By the end of it, Kim found herself able to canvas a decently-sized room in about the same time it took for her to take off her boots.
The end of the training saw her back in Admiral Givens' office, except this time she was able to note the sheer number of devices hidden in corners, between books and binders, disguised as decorations, even hiding in the woodwork. Her attention refocused, though, when the admiral finished her obligatory time-wasting by setting more paperwork aside. "Welcome again, Lieutenant Possible."
"Thank you, ma'am." Kim was significantly less nervous this time around in the office.
"It seems you've taken to the training well," Admiral Givens remarked, studying what Kim guessed were reports from the small handful of instructors she'd seen over the last month. "I'm heartened to see that; about half the time we see potential agents take up to a year to learn everything you did in five weeks."
Kim blushed lightly at the implied compliment. "I just...didn't see it as especially difficult, ma'am."
"I noticed," the admiral replied dryly. "Still," she went on, her voice serious again, "I have to stress that quick thinking will save you as often as your training will. Always remember that, because it's when you freeze up that suspicion begins to grow. Keep a handle on your story, and use what you've got to flesh it out."
"Understood."
The Second Space Lord nodded. "In a few days, you will receive your first orders." She rose and went back to her door, thumbing the dampening field to life the same way she'd done when Kim had first been in the office. "We'll be sending you to a smaller planet called Orthua; it lies, generally, halfway between Mesa itself and the Talbott Cluster." The cluster was a loose grouping of planets located to galactic northwest of the Solarian League; Kim knew that the Star Kingdom was attempting to improve its diplomatic relations with some planets in the cluster, and that it had something to do with the discovery of a new wormhole terminus located therein.
"Orthua has been off the radar for ages," the admiral went on, "because of its relatively low importance; it was settled about nine hundred years ago, but four hundred years after that, Manpower set up a slave breeding ground. They kept it low-profile, too. We didn't even know about it until some of our survey ships came back with scans after the recent fracas in Talbott."
Kim nodded slowly. "And I'm going there, instead of Mesa itself, because its secrecy is its best defense?"
"Precisely." If Admiral Givens was surprised at Kim's deduction, she hid it well. "It's also, as nearly as we can tell, a fairly significant operation; disrupt it, and we hamper Manpower's slave production by something like thirteen percent."
Kim's eyes widened. That was a huge blow to a corporation that size. Keen on the idea, she asked, "How do I disrupt it?"
"We will be following your reports," Admiral Givens answered, "and we'll alert you when the time for the strike comes. You may do what you can on the inside, but when the alert arrives, you are to evacuate as far and as quickly as you can."
Swallowing, Kim nodded. That kind of order, she figured, meant one of two options: a nuclear strike on the facility, or kinetic bombardment; the former would feature the usual several megatons of brilliant energy from an unleashed hydrogen fusion reaction, while the latter would generate no radioactivity, instead relying on pure energy transfer from high-velocity, solid objects of incredible density. The idea of killing all the slaves in the facility didn't sit well with her, though, and she told the admiral as much.
"I understand," Givens replied gravely, "and I empathize; were it entirely up to me, I'd like to have them evacuated before commencing any kind of operation. Unfortunately, it's not entirely up to me, and we had to weigh the lives of those slaves over the capacity of Manpower to create more there for years to come."
...And that's the worst part about being in command, Kim thought uneasily. She wasn't sure she could make decisions like that—trading a small group of lives for the greater good, as it were. In fact, part of her mind, even right now, was trying to devise a way to get those slaves out before the strike came, a task the rest of her mind knew would be difficult at best, impossible at worst.
Finally Kim said, "Understood, Admiral."
Admiral Givens nodded, having watched Kim's expression during the brief internal discomfort; apparently, she was satisfied with the result. "Very well, Lieutenant Possible. You will be departing as soon as you receive your orders. Any further questions?" When Kim shook her head, she held out her hand, and Kim took it in a brief handshake. "Good luck and God speed, Kimberly. Dismissed."
--
A/N: Well, so begins a new tale that I hope garners some enjoyment. I'll be doing my best to explain unfamiliar ideas as we go along so that there's not one chapter of pure information; if you can't wait, there's always wikipedia, where damn near everything in the Honorverse is explained. Just search for that particular term (and by that, I mean "honorverse").
Second note: yes, this is actually all planned out, so there won't be the ridiculous delays as there have been in my other works. Cheers!
