Into the Fire

by Elizabeth Moon

  “Yes, Rector.”

  “Do you also know that Ky’s citizenship has been revoked and she is about to be charged with murder, as a way to get her into custody?”

  “No—I didn’t know that.”

  “In addition, the materials that Ky preserved through that period—evidence that might be useful in finding out who sabotaged the shuttle and the survival suits that killed all officers aboard it but Ky and her aide—have disappeared. Ky turned them over to Spaceforce personnel upon her return to Port Major. Staff Sergeant Gossin held evidence of the investigation done after Ky shot Master Sergeant Marek. It has also disappeared; presumably it was taken from Gossin when she was in custody, after Ky left Miksland.”

  Morrison had not known about the sabotaged suits, or the missing evidence, but all that came out of her mouth was “Why wasn’t the admiral with her troops?”

  “Because, fearing for her life, I had asked Mackensee Military Assistance Corporation—the mercs we hired to intervene against the Black Torch, who’d been hired to kill everyone—to have her flown directly to meet me, and then she and I traveled together to Port Major. And she is not, after all, a member of Slotter Key’s military any longer.”

  “I see.” Morrison kept her face calm with an effort. She still wanted to demand how the Rector could possibly have ignored the welfare of the other survivors, but she sensed that yelling at the Rector would not help her find out. “What did you think had happened to the others?”

  “The other survivors? I was told that they were being interviewed and checked over medically after their ordeal and would be reunited with their families for thirty days’ leave. Initially I had no reason to doubt that report. I was faced with many other issues relating to the shuttle crash, including complaints from the Moscoe Confederation about the death of their citizen Commander Bentik. The legislature opened investigations—still ongoing—into the two mercenary companies—who hired them, who permitted them to land on Slotter Key soil—and I was called to Government House repeatedly to answer questions about that. At any rate, being assured the other survivors were being taken care of, I didn’t worry about them again until Ky called a few days ago. And the next night I was gassed when I came home and have been in the hospital until today.”

  “I did wonder…”

  “I’ll just bet you did.” For an instant those old eyes were sharp as spears and just as penetrating. “You wondered if I had deliberately let them be hauled off, drugged, and imprisoned for some reason—was it a Vatta reason or a military?”

  “I didn’t know, ma’am.”

  “Ah. Well. Natural that you would worry. Natural you’d want to snap my neck if you thought I’d done it.”

  “And there’s something else I should tell you,” Morrison said. She opened her briefcase and pulled out the old file. “Someone left this in my quarters on base. It was found by the same security squad that investigated the break-in. Major Hong gave it to me with orders to keep it safe.”

  “What—? Oh.” The Rector looked at the cover, then up at Morrison. “That’s my file? The one from the Unification War? They never let me see it.” She slipped the cover open. “Gods, I was young. And stupid.”

  “I read some of it,” Morrison said. “It was not…reassuring.”

  “No, it wouldn’t be.” The Rector leaned back a little, folding her hands on top of the file. “I don’t propose to read it myself; I have memories.”

  “Implant memories?”

  “No. They took my implant, stripped it, and put it back in with their edits. The only good memories of that period I have are the ones stored in the brain itself.”

  “Which ‘they’?” Morrison asked, fascinated in spite of herself.

  “The authorities. When I was brought back here and tried—surely you read that far.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then. Their intent was to make it impossible for me to forget the bad things I’d done—which, if they’d had any sense, they’d have known I couldn’t anyway—and make me miserable. I was already miserable. I was surprised when I finally got out of that place and back with the family, and more surprised when, after the attacks on Vatta, I was asked to become subrector and then Rector.”

  “Because of your family’s contract?”

  “Contract? No, not that I know of. Because there were still people who remembered enough to hate me. But really, it worked out fairly well. I don’t look like that anymore.” She glanced down at the page of images and tapped one. “Or that. And I’ve been functionally sane for decades.”

  “Your father signed a contract in which you were released to family custody on the condition that the family would not permit you to be active politically in any way,” Morrison said. “You were to be kept safely confined, medicated as necessary, subject to regular inspection by a court-appointed psychiatrist until at least age fifty.”

  The Rector’s eyes widened, then narrowed again. “Seriously? I knew nothing of that. Father told me he’d gotten me out and I should stay home, on Corleigh, in seclusion, for at least five years. Which I did. He said after that I could return to the mainland and he would provide a house and staff. Which he did. He said nothing about a permanent bar to any political involvement. I would never have taken the post otherwise, no matter what anyone said.”

  Morrison tapped the file. “It’s in here, the official copy. The rules under which you could live outside the hospital, and the penalties if you committed any crime or became political.” She watched the Rector’s face, and saw nothing but astonishment and confusion.

  The Rector paged through the file quickly, stopping when she found the reference, near the end. Her breath caught while she read, her eyes widened again. “He never told me. He should have told me.” She looked up at Morrison. “He was—he liked to keep family business in the family. And I was a disgrace, he said, when I asked why I couldn’t attend a family gathering. Then he died unexpectedly.” She looked down, read the next paragraph in silence. “So—this says my brother would be my guardian after my father died, but he never said anything about this contract, either. Things did change—my husband died—”

  “You were married?”

  “Oh, yes. For a few years. My father insisted; he arranged it all. It would make me seem normal, he said. My husband was older, a distant relative, a widower. My father trusted him to keep family secrets in the family. He was gentle and put up with my—my nightmares and things without complaint.”

  Morrison tried to imagine what it had been like for the young girl, a survivor who if not convicted of war crimes would have been treated for combat trauma, not criminal insanity.

  Morrison believed her. “Is your brother still alive?”

  “No, he died…twenty years ago or so. The guardianship would have passed to either Gerry or Stavros, probably Stavros as the elder. Neither of them said anything about it. They kept me busy in the company, but that’s all.”

  “What did you do in the company?”

  “Security. Typical commercial stuff—competitors always want to know financial details they can use. Sabotage of products or production lines or other company infrastructure. We’re diversified—not just a transport service anymore, and not limited to one planet. Vatta Transport alone has land, sea, and air cargo service here, and we’re a major interplanetary shipper in this quadrant. We have both scheduled and chartered service. Then Gerry, Ky’s father, expanded the tik plantation on Corleigh, gradually buying out others, and we moved into other products, as well. I supervised security procedures, researched new markets for possible dangers—political instability, for instance.” She paused, shook her head, then went on. “They didn’t want me traveling offplanet, so I had to train others when we needed someone on the ground in another system.”

  “Do you think your brother and your—nephews, would it be?—knew about the contract? Wouldn’t your father have passed it on?”

  “If he’d lived longer; if he’d foreseen his death. But if he had, I’m f
airly sure my brother would have told me, and his own heir.”

  “Mmm.” Morrison thought about that. It seemed a risky approach, but after all the family was civilian. And yet this file existed, with all the data. Where had it come from? Who had left it at her house?

  “I’m wondering where this file has been all these decades,” the Rector said, echoing her thought. “Someone’s had it, or known where it was. If they knew what was in it, why didn’t they protest when I was brought into the government? A protest would have succeeded—I’d have refused the appointment. It couldn’t have been kept at Vatta headquarters; that was utterly destroyed in the explosion, and so were the libraries on Corleigh.”

  “I don’t know,” Morrison said. “But I’m willing to bet that whoever placed it in my quarters made a copy.”

  “Oh, obviously,” the Rector said. “Of course they would. More than one. I wonder who they most wanted to get in trouble, me or you? If someone had found you reading it and told me—they might think I’d suspect you of something dire.”

  “Meaning you don’t.”

  “Meaning I don’t, that’s right. Why would I?”

  “Rector, I’m from Esterance. I might have known something about you through the family—”

  “Did you?”

  “No. Well before my time. Even before my parents’ time. I knew very little of you at all, until you became Rector and intersected with my duties.”

  “Well, then. You’ve read it, or some of it, and you know what I was charged with—and was guilty of—so let’s get to the meat. Will you work with me to get those people free of the mess they’re in and back with their families, beyond harm?”

  “If that’s your intent, absolutely.”

  “Good. I don’t know how long I’ll remain Rector, but we need to fix this quickly, before someone else with different…um…priorities takes over. Stella Vatta, who has reasons to visit me, and lives in the house where Ky and the three who escaped are staying, can carry word from here to there. You know where they’re held now, or soon will be held, I gather?”

  “Yes. And we have at most ten—no, five days now—before the first of the dispersed groups is moved there. The place was full; it’s taken time to move the others out quietly and without notice to make room for them.” Morrison looked down at the Rector’s hands, folded now on the desk; she had pushed the file aside. One old, dry, wrinkled; the other smooth, obviously young. For a moment she wondered how it felt to live with one limb so obviously younger than the others.

  “Do you have any information on what they’ll use for transportation or more details on the schedule?”

  “My guess is they’ll use vehicles that look civilian, at least part of the way, if they’re worried about a rescue attempt,” Morrison said. “And the committee did not define a particular schedule, only an end point. Which they might well ignore. We must hope they don’t expect a rescue.”

  “They tried turning off the vehicles’ tracking codes originally,” the Rector said. “Ky’s got a crew who managed to locate some of them, including Clemmander, that way. But they could use more information from you.”

  “I’ll write them for you.” Morrison reached across to the pad of paper and quickly wrote down all the names, locations, and contact codes she had. “I don’t know many of the names. We were introduced to a Lieutenant Colonel Oriondo and a Doctor Hastile at Clemmander. Oriondo was supposed to be the military watchdog for all the rehab centers in that region; I haven’t enough access through my office to find out if he’s got a history of that assignment or not. I didn’t like Doctor Hastile, if that means anything. When I asked permission to meet with the survivors separately, he made it clear that if I did I’d have to be quarantined for ten days or more. I took it as a threat.”

  “Wise,” the Rector said, nodding. “Do you know their first names?”

  “Only the initials that were on their badges. M. T. Oriondo and R. J. Hastile.”

  “That’s a big help, Sergeant Major.”

  “Rector, I’d be careful doing deep searches on them. If they’re involved in some kind of conspiracy, they’ll be watching.”

  The Rector grinned. “Grandmothers. Eggs.”

  “Sorry, Rector.”

  “Don’t be. I appreciate warnings. But as Rector I can decide we need to…oh…review all contracts related to military rehabilitation, starting way over on the other side of the planet and working our way back to this continent, where of course we don’t expect to find any irregularities because it’s the main one and the seat of HQ.”

  “I worry—they’d be so easy to kill in the state they’re in now. And if the others move up the timing…”

  The Rector’s expression sobered. “Yes. I know that. It’s my intention to probe only enough to come up with a feasible plan to get them out before that happens, and then go after the bad guys.”

  “You’ll need some military personnel with valid IDs to help,” Morrison said. “But they must not be associated with anyone in the conspiracy—that will take time.”

  “Will it?” The Rector leaned forward. “I suspect if we check with the three survivors who got out, we can get some names of those colleagues who would be reliable.”

  “Unless they were assigned to that shuttle not as an honor but to get rid of them,” Morrison said.

  “That…had not occurred to me.” The Rector scowled at the desktop. “I wonder what kind of mind would think that up. I suppose similar to the one that decided to destroy the Vatta family to…accomplish something I still haven’t quite figured out. Still, there’s got to be some high-level person who could help us with this. Someone other than me, that is. Or you, since you’ve already been targeted by someone involved.”

  “There are the branch sergeant majors,” Morrison said. “We all know each other, and—it’s hard to think of any of them being involved in something like this.”

  “Ky found it hard to believe Master Sergeant Marek was the traitor in Miksland,” the Rector said. “He nearly killed her.”

  “I thought she killed him. Wondered what for.”

  “For his second attempt to kill her. Briefly, he rewired her quarters to make using the outlets lethal. She discovered the problem. He realized she was suspicious; she anticipated that, and when he shot at her, she killed him. She can tell you more.”

  “How did the others take it?”

  “Shocked. Horrified. Ky ordered Gossin, as senior NCO, to make a full investigation for later judicial inquiry and gave her custody of the data. That, and the fact that Marek had clearly shot first, settled things down. If we had the evidence Ky had insisted be collected, we’d know whether the Cascadian woman was killed by a ricochet or a direct hit.”

  “Marek wouldn’t have had a weapon on the shuttle—”

  “No—this was after they were underground. There was an armory, and a former commander in that secret base had also left a weapon in his desk. Marek got a junior enlisted to change the code so it could be palm-locked to Marek.”

  Morrison could scarcely believe a master sergeant would do that. But the Rector went on.

  “Ky thinks he was threatened, sometime earlier, and that’s what pushed him to it. Says she knew he was conflicted, and figures he was trying to save the others from the people who had pressured him. He might talk them into keeping a secret, but Ky—well, you don’t know Ky, but—”

  “I’ve met her,” Morrison said. “She wouldn’t lie.”

  “Not even when it’s in her interest,” the Rector said. “We had the hardest time pounding manners into that girl. Said what she thought. I will say, she never shirked the consequences.” She shook her head, then looked at Morrison, those old gray eyes fierce. “We are going to get those people out. If you think of anything, any clue, any new bit of information, call me or come, day or night. We can’t do it without you; you have the current knowledge. And none of us can do it alone.”

  —

  Sera Lane was waiting outside when Ky finished the n
ext two hours of downloading from her implant. “I’m making progress,” she said. “We aren’t there yet, but Immigration has at least agreed that your application for reconsideration of citizenship is not, as they originally insisted, two hundred days overdue. Also that you did not bring a warship here with intent to make war on Slotter Key, and did not keep it here for the length of time it stayed—that, on the contrary, you were unable to communicate with anyone until after it had already left, though on that I’m not entirely sure. When did you first contact someone off the continent?”

  “When did the ship leave?” Ky asked. She didn’t intend to tell anyone exactly when, certainly not someone who might feel obligated to pass it on to Immigration. She could imagine them deciding that she could have found out about the deadlines from Rafe—though he hadn’t known—and then still insisting she should have applied sooner.

  “You don’t know?”

  “No. It was gone when I came back. I was told it had left sometime before, but the only contact I’ve had was one-way: a message from my—from Space Defense headquarters—informing me that due to my long absence, my death was assumed and a successor had taken command of Space Defense Force—”

  “Your fleet? The one you created?”

  “Yes. That message said SDF were intending to forward back pay up through the date of change of command to my next of kin, but the Moscoe Confederation put a lock on my funds banked within that system.”

  “Because of their concern about your aide’s death, yes. That was in your first statement.” She paused. “You have no idea if you had any contact while your ship was still in Slotter Key nearspace?”

  Ky tried to think back. “Just as we were going down I managed to contact them, but then communication cut off. I remember Rafe or Aunt Grace—don’t remember which—didn’t want the ship to know we were alive because if someone hacked that conversation they might move up their attack. But then the ship left; the next time I mentioned it they said it had gone. I know I didn’t talk directly to the ship at all.”