Sera Lane was waiting outside when Ky finished the next 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.”
“You were, however, in contact with your great-aunt before you were rescued. She did not mention the change in law to you at any point?”
“I did not speak to her, but to Rafe; he arranged the special shielding for the skullphone link. He never said anything, but if she’d mentioned it to him, I’m sure he would have said something. I imagine she thought—”
“Please, Sera Ky, what you imagined is not useful in this context. What I need to know is exactly who said what to whom, and when. The law is very… practical.”
The law did not seem practical to Ky. It seemed—here and in every system where she’d had to deal with it—to be formed of the whims of the lawmakers who just wanted their own notions made into walls and bars. Best not to say that to an attorney.
Sera Lane tipped her head to one side. “You think it’s not practical, don’t you? Young people often do. But like my supposition about what you’re thinking right now, people are imperfect mind readers. What someone believes another person thinks is often wrong. That’s why the law—our system of law—relies on the closest thing we can get to a fact: observed behavior, acts, and words.”
Iskin Kvannis looked at the latest iteration of the plan to move the survivors into one facility—a facility cleared of all other prisoners—and then terminate them. Finally. It should have been over by now, the sealed coffins or urns distributed to the families with due ceremony and deepest apologies for the tragic deaths of their loved ones. With a careful hint that, though of course no charges could be filed, the fault if any lay with Ky Vatta for allowing their family members to come into contact with the dread infectious agent that had killed them.
Everything had taken too long. The debate over whether to call it a plague or a toxin. The debate over where to house the survivors in the first place. Calming the panicky shock of their civilian allies, for whom the notion of planning to kill innocent soldiers, victims of happenstance, rang oddly with the same civilians’ eagerness to start a civil war that would certainly kill even more innocents, civilian as well as soldiers. Trying to explain the realities of the situation, trying to persuade the media that there was no story there, just a sad aftermath. Trying to keep legislators pestered by families convinced that there was nothing else to be done but hold the personnel in quarantine. Three of the survivors had escaped before the plan was complete. True, nothing at all had been seen or heard of them since, and they might, as Stornaki kept insisting, have died of exposure. But what if they hadn’t?
And now this plan, once more, had holes in it that Kvannis could see easily. Granted, the chosen rehab facility was the easiest to clear out because it had the smallest inmate population. It was remote. The locals—not very local, in fact—had shown almost no interest in it since it was built. What happened there would stay there, as the saying went, and being so remote it had its own facilities for disposing of bodies. All that was good. What was not good was how long it would take, again because of the remote area, and the specific containment needs for its present occupants. The plan proposed a 120-day period for converting the existing cells into the milder captivity suitable to the survivors, who after all did not deserve the smaller, harsher cells. He scrawled UNNECESSARY across that. They wouldn’t be there long, and they’d be drugged. What difference did it make?
He marked changes on the rest of the plan, and called Stornaki in. “We need to go with this as marked,” he said. “If the Rector recovers enough, if Immigration doesn’t hold Ky Vatta, it will become much more difficult, if not impossible.”
“Yes, Commandant,” Stornaki said.
Later, on his regular afternoon drive, Kvannis stopped to buy a couple of stuffed pastries and a bottle of lemonade; the message to his co-conspirators and the receipt for the purchase both missed the trash can, but a helpful customer put the receipt in, pocketing the scrap of paper.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Corporal Hector Mata looked at the information his buddy Irwin handed him and shook his head. “That’s not enough. A form 431-B needs more—”
“That’s all I’ve got. That’s what the colonel gave me, that and ‘Make it happen; your pal in requisitions can do it.’”
“Yes, but I need something for every one of these boxes, or my colonel will be on me about it. You can’t just have transport for six people without their names, their units, and the name of the authorizing officer.”
“All I know is what my colonel said—”
“I can’t do it, Irwin. Give me something to put in these blanks.”
“It’s a classified transport, see? Nobody’s supposed to know about it. So the colonel didn’t tell me, and—”
“Classified? That’s not a form 431-B. Classified transports are 433-R. For Restricted.”
“My colonel said, get your friend in Requisitions to do the form 431-B. He didn’t say 433-R. 431-B. C’mon, Hector, just do it. Keep us both out of trouble.”