Into the Fire

^{CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE}

“I’ll come back right away,” Palnuss said when Ky told him about the evidence she’d found. “Major Hong’s taken over the investigation, reporting to General Molosay. Everything I brought out has been logged and is as secure as they can make it. Stornaki’s not going anywhere; he’s been screened for suicide and is presently sedated and prepped for interrogation. They don’t need me, really.”

“Good,” Ky said. “I hate to keep the police here too long but we want that chain of custody—”

“Of course. An hour at most, depending on traffic.”

Ky offered the police refreshments—it seemed the decent thing to do—and went on dealing with the items on her desk that needed work. Her driver came back after delivering Sera Vonderlane to her home and seeing her to the door. About a half hour later, her skullphone pinged.

“I’m safe,” Rafe said. Ky felt her shoulders relax, tension she hadn’t recognized in the midst of everything else. “I’m exhausted, hungry, dirty, and wearing the clothes of a mountainous thirteen-year-old farm kid. I’m being driven from place to place by friends of the first farmer. Can’t take other transport without ID. Just got in range for calling again. Where is everybody? Where are you?”

“In the Commandant’s Residence at the Academy,” Ky said, over the pounding of her pulse.

“Why?” Rafe demanded. “Are you in trouble?”

“Haven’t you heard?” Ky said, in the most honeyed tone she could manage. “I’m the new Commandant.”

Silence for a moment, then a snort of laughter. “You. The new Commandant. What happened to the old one?”

“Ran away in the nighttime,” Ky said. “Where were you?”

“Running from trouble up and over a small mountain. Then it got dark. Not just dark: cold, wet, and full of big hairy monsters with horns and hard hooves, and I did battle with them. Outnumbered, I fell, was trampled, and rescued by heroes—”

“In other words you stumbled into a pasture and bumped into some cattle and the farmer drove them away.”

“No, I drove them away, but they chose to run over me first. Also, it was a total dead zone for communications. Some of these farms don’t even have electricity. Right now I need a faster way home than from farmhouse to farmhouse, and a change of clothes. But when I finally get to Port Major, I can come over there and rescue you.”

“I don’t need rescue,” Ky said. “I’m fine—new uniform and all.”

“You really are the Commandant of the Academy?”

“Yes. With a full schedule and add-on excitement. Police, military security, attempted assassinations, traps—”

“Gods. Any chance you can arrange a free ride on a Vatta truck for me? I’m a few kilometers outside some town called Stone Crossing.”

“May be much later, but yes. I’ll call you. Or Stella will. Stay where you can catch a ping.”

“Yes, Commandant.” Lilting, sweet.

Relief felt like the bubbles in wine. All the people from Miksland had been rescued. And now Rafe was safe. Or would be, when she’d found him transport. She called Stella.

“Rafe’s called; he’s stuck out on a farm near… uh… Stone Crossing. With no ID, and his visa status still not fixed. Does Vatta have anything nearby he could hitch a ride on?”

“Let me look—Stone Bay, Stone Center, Stone… there it is. We don’t have a warehouse there, and the daily eastbound truck went through there two hours ago; the next truck is westbound, in an hour. He could connect to an eastbound at… um… that’s another four hours and then more hours back. Stone Crossing has a small general-aviation field, no commercial flights. It would take one of the little planes. Is that safe? I heard one of our long-haul planes was threatened.”

“It should be safe; they don’t have any checks on passengers there, do they?”

“Not in their listing. It’s only Rafe? Just one passenger?”

“Yes…”

“I’ll send the Pug. Two-seater, no Vatta logos on it. It’ll be… a two-hour flight or more depending on weather, plus prefight prep. Dark there when it arrives. Can he be there in three hours?”

“I’m sure. But does the field have anyone there at night?”

“Probably not. Morning, 0900. It’ll be light by then. Still the Pug. Let him know.”

“Thank you,” Ky said. “Where can he go when he gets here? Not the Vatta house, obviously.”

“Aunt Grace’s. Rafe can stay there if he can get in undetected. Ummm—he should come here, to Vatta headquarters, the freight entrance. I’ll let the airfield know to have someone drive him in.”

“Thank you,” Ky said.

“Got an appointment,” Stella said. “Talk to you later.”

Ky shook her head. Stella sounded different—none of the usual edge in her voice. She called Rafe back; he assured her he could find a safe place to stay overnight and make it to the airfield on time.

When Major Palnuss arrived, he took custody of the other items, and after a discussion between Palnuss and the senior police officer, the police departed.

“Tell me what other searches you think we need to do. Stornaki’s office—?” Ky still felt energized by hearing from Rafe.

“A more thorough search, yes. And his clerk. What are you doing about Sera Vonderlane? You need some kind of assistant—”

“Military, but I don’t know how previous clerks were selected.” Ky glanced at the paperwork already stacking up.

“Kvannis insisted on her,” Palnuss said. “Said we didn’t need to do a full security screen; she was part of his household and he vouched for her.”

“Yes, she told me that. I may find her a job over at Vatta, depending on the results of a security screen. She’s got a disabled daughter, and is disposed to be loyal to anyone who pays her. At least, that’s my interpretation. You?”

“Not much initiative, not too bright, worshipped the ground Kvannis walked on. I can find you a decent clerk pretty quickly—say a day or so.”

“That’ll do,” Ky said. She nibbled on a cookie on the tray she’d had sent up for the police. “You know… Kvannis could’ve destroyed the evidence we found. Whatever his reasoning was, maybe he saved all of it. Want to go looking for the flight recorder?”

“Would you mind if I grabbed something to eat first?”

Ky blinked. She hadn’t had anything but the cookie since—a scant and hurried breakfast. “Good idea. First food, then search.”

“And that list of things you had to do?”

“It’s only my second day. How far behind can I get? And if I’m seen stalking around and peering into things, everyone will know I’m here and working.” She watched his reaction: surprise, then humor, then appreciation. “Now—that food you mentioned. I don’t suppose you can nudge the kitchen into producing some quick, sustaining food, preferably with protein?”

“So where do we start?” Palnuss asked, after they had demolished a tray of sandwiches and Ky had dealt with four calls.

“It’s about this big,” Ky said, demonstrating with her hands. “Bright orange, with a striped design in a band around it. Not too heavy; I carried it around in the chest pocket of my survival suit for ages.”

“About twenty by twenty-five centimeters, then? Not quite as thick as that briefcase? Looks like a part of something mechanical?”

“I guess. It’s a box, basically.”

“So it would look out of place in an office, unless it was inside a safe or something like that. And the safe here was drilled out—and the one in the residence, too, right?”

“Right.”

“So I think we should look in places where something like that would fit in.”

“Machine shop?”

“And every other place here that has boxes about that size.”

“And where things aren’t inventoried on a regular basis,” Ky said, thinking of various stores units she’d seen. “Maybe where flight recorder spares are, or things waiting repairs…”

They set off through the Academy. Despite her desire to find the flight recorder, Ky paused to look into one classroom after another—not to search, but to show herself present and interested. Finally they reached the labs where cadets learned to maintain and repair those machines they would use later—a large lab for each branch—and the shops where skilled technicians maintained all the military equipment and machines the Academy used, from firearms to robots. They prowled through one after another, almost as if they were an IG team.

Palnuss called attention to several surveillance modules that were not working properly in a passage that connected two storage rooms in the Land Forces lab and suggested to Ky that a complete inventory of that stockroom might be a good idea. The tech 2 behind the counter of the first started sweating. Ky nodded. “Best call in your team, perhaps.”

When they passed on to the actual shops, they found most moderately busy, tools in use, technicians willing to describe what they were doing, seemingly quite at ease. Ky entered each one, glanced around, asked a few questions. The technicians opened cabinets and closets happily, showing off how neatly arranged they were. As they neared the end of the row, Ky said, “I’m wondering about something that was on an inventory list in Commandant Kvannis’s office—but it’s not there. Do you have any idea where I’d look for number 238–665–9817?”

“What size, Commandant?”

Ky outlined the box with her hands. An assistant looked up sharply. “I remember—it was an orange-striped thing, kind of like a flight recorder?”

“The list didn’t give a description.”

“I’m sure of it. It’ll be down in room one-twelve-C. That’s the Air Safety Investigation and Research Unit, and they have a pile of those things. Their staff isn’t there right now—they’ve been off investigating a crash since yesterday—but I can let you in.”

Indeed, the shelves along one side were stacked with flight recorders. Their guide rattled on. “They said some of these are really old—sixty years or more—from all kinds of aircraft. They do some kind of testing—lots of kinds, I guess. But they’re not here all the time, like today.”

“How long has this unit been here?” Ky asked. “It wasn’t here when I was a cadet.”

“Oh—not that long. I think it came in sometime last spring.” He stepped to the door. “Hey, Louie—Commandant wants to know when this unit came in!”

“Before or after the shuttle crash?” Ky asked, without waiting for an answer.

“Oh, just after, I guess.”

Ky looked at Palnuss and he looked back. “Well,” he said. “The Commandant may want to look around some more. I don’t think either of us has ever seen this many flight recorders in one place. You can return to your work.”

Ky added a nod to that, and the guide wandered out. Palnuss shut the door behind him. “Now what? We look at every one?”

“If we have to,” Ky said. “But just let me prowl for a minute or two. If he’s hidden it in here, it’ll be where someone who finds it will be marked in some way. So where is something especially dirty, or balanced where dusty or dirty ones will fall, something like that?”

“Not just behind a stack?”

“The shelves aren’t that deep. They’re not hung on the wall; they’re freestanding racks. I think they were moved from wherever this unit was before, and were purpose-sized to the more modern recorders. If I’m reading his thought processes right, he’ll assume a searcher will expect it to be at the back, or under something… hidden.” She turned around, eyeing all the shelves.

Major Palnuss, following her gaze, looked along each shelf in turn. “I don’t see—”

“There,” Ky said. She went toward the door, to the narrower rack beside it, with a clipboard hanging from a string and a battered pencil thrust into the clip.

“Why that?”

“Because every shop I’ve ever seen had the formal, official list of what was there—on some kind of tablet or computer—and then it had the real list, usually on actual paper. A clipboard or a spiral notebook, kept where it is handy to the techs but could pass for a sign-in/sign-out sheet if the brass comes by.”

“You think it will be listed?”

“Yes. Even if Kvannis told them not to put it in the official catalog for some reason, they’ll have it here.” She took the clipboard down; Palnuss craned his neck to see the top page. SIGN IN/SIGN OUT.

“I’ll be—is there something like this in the other shops?”

“Yes—I noticed them when we were there. Just like other stores and shops I’ve been in, civilian, merc, military alike.”

She flipped up the pages until she came to something different. “Aha. This is their personal stack map. With initials, how handy. D for drop-offs, CI for currently investigating, R for removals. Item’s accession number. And a column for who dropped it off or picked it up, conveniently labeled WHO. And date. And this at the end is where it is.”

“And you can figure out that code?”

“I think so. The most recent item dropped off was six days ago, by RG, whoever that is. If L2-T means top of the stack on the second shelf of the left-hand set of shelves… now, is that coming in, or going out?” She was facing the back of the room. “I’ll take the one on my left, you take the one over there.”

“What’s the accession number?”

“For this entry? XRM-VTOL-2914M8.” Ky looked at the second shelf on her side without success. Three stacks and the top item in all three had the wrong number.

“Three stacks on this shelf,” Palnuss reported. “Aha!”

“So they mapped facing the door,” Ky said. “Now, how long would it have taken for that item to get here, after I turned it in?” She worked backward through the scribbled notes until she saw IK in the WHO column. Two days after she’d handed the flight recorder in, Kvannis had turned it in here. “Accession number correct, Kvannis’s initials correct, but—no map code. Wait. They put it in and he must have made them erase it.”

“That I can fix,” Palnuss said. “We’re good at forgeries, invisible inks, and the impressions left by pencils. Let me see it.” He dusted it with powder, blew softly, and said, “B. Back, that should be. L… lower or left. Three T. Let’s try the third shelf near the left end, on top. Or, if Kvannis made them move it, somewhere nearby.”

“If he annoyed them enough, they probably put it back where they wanted it,” Ky said. Ky recognized the right flight recorder as soon as she was close enough, on top of the end stack on the third shelf. It had snagged a thread in the pocket of her survival suit, and the short length of orange thread was still there. She checked the number anyway.

“Where do you want it now?” Palnuss asked. “The safes won’t lock.”

“Do you have one in your office that will?”

“Yes, but all my personnel have the combination.”

“And do you trust them?”

“Yes.”

“Then keep it there. It won’t be long, I think, before you or I will be asked where it is. We should know that.”