“Yes. We can open the gates for you and you can park near the garage.”
“Excellent. I’m in a small green two-seater.”
Sera Lane clambered out of her small car and unfolded into a tall, lanky, slightly stooped woman with steel-gray hair braided around her head. She came in the kitchen door and sniffed appreciatively. “Who’s the baker?”
“Our cook, Allie,” Ky said. “Let’s go through to the dining room—we can spread things out there.”
“Howard left me all his notes,” Lane said. She set her briefcase on the table, opened it, then sat down. “I’ve perused them, and the other information we have on you. As he did, I fear this is a very difficult situation, if—as you say—those personnel who might be witnesses on your behalf are in some kind of illicit custody and not free to help your case.”
“In Slotter Key law, are attorney–client communications privileged?”
“Yes, with a few exceptions: threats of harm to another person are not privileged and will be communicated. Why do you ask?”
“Because I have scant experience with Slotter Key’s legal system—I left here young and very naïve. Within that privilege I can tell you that the best possible witness to my shooting Master Sergeant Marek in self-defense has escaped from custody intended to silence her, and will be available to testify if we can protect her from recapture and the kind of treatment she endured before.”
“How do you know this?”
“She is here,” Ky said.
“Here? Where?” Lane looked around as if someone might pop out of the dining room paneling.
“In this house, presently writing up her account of what happened. So is another witness, not quite as well placed to testify to everything that happened. We have recording equipment downstairs; I wondered if you would be willing to witness a recording of their accounts.”
“I—I had not expected this. Does the military know they are here?”
“No. It would risk their lives. Revealing their location could be fatal to them and to others still in captivity.”
“Where are the others?”
“In several remote locations, originally designed for long-term confinement of the criminally insane,” Ky said. “So far, they have been drugged and refused contact with anyone outside the facilities. They were carefully dispersed so they could not have contact with one another, or their families, under the guise of their being contaminated by something in Miksland. Their implants were removed and replaced by others with less function; Miznarii personnel had implants forcibly inserted.”
“That’s—that’s against our Constitution!” Lane glared at Ky. “No adult individual can be required to accept any internal electronic device.”
“It happened,” Ky said. “I don’t know who did it, or why, except that Miksland and its base was a huge secret for centuries and someone does not want that secret to come out. Consider that no media interviews with the survivors from Miksland—except for the very brief one I gave—ever appeared. The evidence I preserved has been ‘lost’—such as the logbook of the former base commander, who conveniently died before he could be interrogated.”
“Do you think this is why Grace Vatta was attacked?”
“Yes,” Ky said. “And not only with poison gas in her house. Before that, one of the squad that came here seeking fugitives tried to attack her physically in her office. So I suspect that much of the legal mess I’m facing is intended to force me into detention where I, too, can be silenced.”
“That seems far-fetched,” Lane said. “I see where you might think so, but in fact, by a strict interpretation of the law, you are in violation of the citizenship requirements. The fugitives—are you sure they are not harboring some dangerous pathogen?”
“You need to meet them, and—if she can get here—the person who witnessed the incarceration of some others.”
Lane shook her head. “I can see this is going to be a long, long session. It’s a good thing Howard wasn’t free; he becomes quite testy when he has to work late. Better the judge in that case should deal with it than you.” She pulled a voice recorder from her briefcase. “I’d like to start with you, and hear your account of all the events leading up to the death of Master Sergeant Marek.” She turned the recorder on.
Ky had been over this enough, both in the recent past and in her head, to give a clear summary, from the moment she realized her electrical outlets had been sabotaged through her analysis of who might have done it, and what could be done about it, under the conditions at that time.
“I had two main problems,” she said. “First, I had no way to commission a court to try Master Sergeant Marek; the only other officer there was Commander Bentik, even less attached to Slotter Key than I was. And she had been partly suborned by him—”
“How do you mean?”
“He had lied to her, and attempted to convince her that I was sexually attracted to him and wanted a relationship. She was apparently convinced that I had had sex with him one afternoon—the afternoon that I believe my outlets were sabotaged—because she saw him come out of my quarters.”
“You didn’t lock your quarters?”
“I did, but as we found later, he had a master key.”
She nodded; Ky went on. “Commander Bentik was my second problem, both because she was foreign to Slotter Key and the procedures and traditions of Slotter Key’s military, and because she was so influenced by Master Sergeant Marek. That may well have been, at least partially, the result of her unfamiliarity with our culture. At any rate, she was older than I, and had already shown herself inclined to dispute my decisions—”
“But she was staff, wasn’t she? Had she combat experience?”
“None. But she was older, and felt that gave her natural seniority. I was already considering how to replace her without alienating her family—prominent politicians on Cascadia Station—when we came to Slotter Key. I had not succeeded in gaining her wholehearted support, and though she was an expert organizer, good with paperwork, she had managed to cause problems with the Moray government on an official visit there.”
“I thought Cascadians were supposed to be super-polite.”
“They are—or think they are.” Ky huffed out a sigh. “They’re polite in their own terms, but they are convinced their terms are the only terms. It has given them a homogeneous and peaceful population, on the whole, but they can get prickly with outsiders.”
“So—you and she did not get along.”
“I wouldn’t say that, not until the very end, when she joined with Marek in opposing my command. I don’t think she had anything to do with the sabotage—in fact, her electrical outlets had also been sabotaged, I found out afterward. That part was all Marek, and he was prepared to kill her as well as me, as that sabotage proved. But I found her…” Ky thought for a moment. “Prissy and rigid, is the best way I can put it. When we crashed, she did not—I suppose could not—rise to the occasion, and panicked more than once, endangering others as well as herself. It was a very scary situation, of course, but nearly all the others remained calm and tried to cope.”
“She knew you disapproved of her behavior?”
“I suppose… though I suspect that did not bother her. She was more focused on my failings; she regarded the hardships of our time in the life rafts, and on the coast of Miksland, almost as insults to her personally.”
“There’s been nothing about that in the media,” Lane said.
“I didn’t notice. When I arrived back in Port Major I was plunged at once into the legalities of transferring my shares to Stella—conferences with lawyers, two court appearances—and the official interviews with Slotter Key Spaceforce about the crash and the evidence I’d managed to save. I didn’t have the time—or frankly the interest—to see how the media handled it. I was, if you’ll forgive me, exhausted from the survival itself.”