“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?”