Элизабет Мун - Into the Fire

“We’ve made a start,” Ky said. “And you’re saying we can’t go further without more personnel. So, Teague, how are you coming on the security end?”

“Not done yet—I need Rafe to check results while I test.”

“We need to do what can be done now,” Ky said. “Let’s finish getting the kitchen wing and garage better protected, and talk this over with the others and Stella when she gets home. Which should be in—less than an hour, now.”

They looked at her. Then Rafe shrugged. “That’s why she’s the admiral. Yes, sir, Admiral sir, you’re right.”

“Start in the kitchen,” Ky said. “And fix whatever lets scans count the number of people in there.”

Ky gathered her troops, as she thought of them, in Stella’s office, for a tactical discussion. Two days of safety and rest had done them all good. Barash, in the disguising wig and cook’s outfit, showed a witty side Ky had not seen before; Inyatta was back to her former energetic, serious self, eager for something useful to do. And Kamat, though still distressed about having an “immoral” implant, now seemed focused on rescuing the others.

“Do any of you have any knowledge of these regions?” Ky asked, highlighting the areas Rodney had pointed out on the image.

“I’ve got some relatives near there,” Inyatta said. “An uncle, some cousins. They’re out in the country, though. Livestock.”

Barash and Kamat shook their heads.

“But shouldn’t Slotter Key military be the ones to get them out?” Teague said.

“Except that they haven’t.”

Benny Quindlan had read—at least skimmed—the entire file by the time he left the office. But he still did not understand it well enough to present on it the next day. Oralie would be annoyed, but he had to take the work home, and he would have to skip the evening they’d planned. Third time in the past ten days… actually, Oralie would be furious .

But he knew his uncle too well to risk being unprepared the next day. He’d considered just staying in the office—a space Oralie couldn’t reach—but decided against it. She might, being angry, go out with friends and talk about how he was working nights too many times, and that… would not please Uncle Michael, either.

A man should manage his household well. One of the twelve rules of the family, the unbreakable ones. When he walked into the foyer, briefcase in hand, she was there, a drink in her own hand, and more challenge than welcome on her face. “You’re going to work, then.”

No use trying to explain now. “Yes,” he said. “And no, we’re not going out tonight.”

“Then I am,” she said, and upended her glass, eyes on him as the liquid flowed down her beautiful throat. She knew he would watch the ripple; she knew him well. He wanted to put his hands on that throat, stroke it, lead her to the bedroom… He dragged his mind back to business.

“You are not going out,” he said. “There’s a reason.”

“You got the promotion? We’re going to be rich and I can have that necklace you said was too expensive?” Her voice could cut like a knife.

“Not yet; there’s a job to do first. But the necklace…” It was a small price to pay for her cooperation. “You will have the necklace when I give it to you—very, very soon.” Her birthday was coming up; she would think it was that.

Her voice changed with her mood, and she shrugged. “Well, if you have to work, you have to work. What would you like for supper?”

“Simple. That thing you do with rice would be great.”

An hour later, she set the plate on the end of his desk. Rice with vegetables and chunks of crab meat in a red sauce. He smiled and thanked her; she went away silently, for which he was grateful. The full scale of the plan was just beginning to emerge from its nest of figures, charts, and documentation. Four hours after that, Benny leaned back in his chair, more frightened than he had ever been in his life. His uncle had trusted him with Quindlan’s darkest and longest-laid plans—not just for wealth, but for ultimate political power—which meant his uncle would kill him if he made a hash of it. And the plans were so… he hunted for an adjective and gave up. It was too much, too big, and far, far too dangerous. Stealing a continent was one thing—no one had wanted it, at least not then. But plotting to steal several more, all inhabited and thriving under the current government? Was Michael insane? Were all the elders insane?

He looked again at the security cylinder on his desk, the green lights along its side reassuring. But—for such a plan—could his uncle have planted surveillance even here, in his shielded home office inside his shielded home inside the gates and walls of the Quindlan estate? Of course. He dared not even murmur the thought running traitorously through his mind: I wish I’d been born a Vatta.

Staff Sergeant Gossin, senior surviving NCO from the shuttle crash, said nothing when the morning meal packet slid through the slot. She did not move for another five minutes, as near as she could determine, having no timekeeping device. Her well-stocked implant was gone, replaced by a very basic one that seemed to have, as its main function, dispensing drugs she very much did not want to have in her system.

As she lay there, silent and not quite motionless, she thought over the same miserable string of events. Their escape from the mercs sent to kill them. Their airlift out to what they’d all thought was safety. But had they all thought it was safety? Or had Admiral Vatta—who had been determined to get them out safely—betrayed them at the last? Or had she been betrayed by her great-aunt, the Rector? Or was it someone else?

Because betrayed, they certainly had been. It had been reasonable for them to be debriefed separately, that first day, and it had seemed reasonable for them to be in separate compartments on the flight from Pingat Islands Base back to Voruksland, on the way to Port Major. Except she had woken up, more or less, strapped down in a ground transport vehicle carrying not only her, but also Staff Sergeant Kurin and Sergeants Cosper, Chok, and McLenard. She’d scarcely had time to notice that before someone in a green decontamination suit had reached over and tweaked a tube, ending that brief period of consciousness.

There have been two more debriefings—somewhere—somewhen—with never a sense of being clearheaded until she woke up here, in a five-cell pod in some kind of jail, with her head shaved, guarded by people in decontamination suits, whose faces she could not see. They answered no questions, gave only brief orders.

Periodically, she was taken out of the cell and allowed to shower, provided with a clean orange short-legged jumper, clean cloth slippers, and a clean striped robe. Then for an hour she was interrogated by someone behind a window. Every third interrogation was followed by a brief visit with the others confined here, and then by a physical exam and a return to her cell.

She was the senior. She was responsible for the others—all the others, from Staff Sergeant Kurin, next junior, to Ennisay, the most junior—and she did not know where most of them were, or what had happened to them, or even why she and the other senior NCOs were confined here.

Asking had brought little information, and only in the first interrogation. Supposedly they had been exposed to a deadly contaminant, and were in quarantine. Supposedly Admiral Vatta had the same thing and had died. No one would tell her—if they even knew—what the contaminant was, toxin or disease. She didn’t feel sick—when she wasn’t drugged—but she did feel uneasy, annoyed, and bored.