The Sea Without a Shore (23 page)
Read The Sea Without a Shore Online
Authors: David Drake
“Want an open-end wrench, sir?” Beezely said. “Or, hell, you can have the box wrench I was going to use myself.”
“
Kiesche,
send out the envoys,”
said the console, clearly audible in the hold.
“Send out the envoys immediately! Brotherhood over.”
“Open up, Cory!” Daniel said. He shouted toward the bridge instead of using his commo helmet, so that he informed the spacers also. They were already moving aft toward where the extra bunks had been fitted. The hold had been nearly empty even before the
Kiesche
unloaded its cargo of weapons.
Adele and Cazelet placed themselves in front of the hatchway, to either side of Colonel Bourbon. Tovera was to Adele’s left and a subservient pace behind. The greeting committee from the Garrison might wonder at Tovera’s presence; but as Daniel had said, they wouldn’t worry. In all likelihood no one would be looking at anything but Bourbon.
The releases clanged, and the hatch began to descend. More steam and ozone curled in. Bourbon began to sneeze violently. Adele’s nose wrinkled reflexively, but every landing was the same and she had experienced unguessably many landings by now.
Unguessably, but …
I could sort the logs of my voyages for landings, reduce the number by airless worlds and those with unbreathable atmospheres, and add those from before I joined the RCN and began formally logging them
… .
The hatch thunked into its cradle on the starboard outrigger. The port crew had already extended the wooden coupler from the quay to the float’s outer edge.
“We’ll go now,” said Adele. She settled the cap firmly and stepped onto the ramp. Her companions moved with her.
Captain Hochner and five other soldiers dismounted from the vehicle. Hochner now carried a submachine gun as well as the pistol in his cross-draw holster. The other men had Pantellarian-issue carbines.
A soldier stood behind the automatic impeller on a ring mount on the roof of the cab. The weapon was still locked in its travelling position, forward and horizontal. Either Hochner hadn’t wanted to be too obviously threatening at this point, or the Garrison troops were so badly trained that it hadn’t occurred to the gunner that he might actually need his weapon.
“I’ll lead!” Cazelet said as they approached the wooden extension. “Colonel, you wait till last. With us in the way, they won’t be sure of hitting you.”
“I don’t like—” Bourbon said. He paused and muttered, “Sorry.”
That saved Adele the effort of telling him to be quiet. She wouldn’t have minded the effort.
“Well considered, Cazelet,” she said as she followed him closely across the walkway. They stepped onto the quay.
The APC waited thirty feet away with its fans shut down. Adele put her left hand in her pocket as she moved up parallel to Cazelet. Bourbon took his place between them. Tovera was to the left as before.
Cazelet looked
nothing
like Almer, but the hat brim waggled in front of his face and the flowing tunic looked as well on the slender, taller lieutenant as on the chubby aide. Hochner and his nervous gang had eyes only for Bourbon, though. They were within ten feet now, poised to—
The loud squeal from the harbor was the
Kiesche
’s bow gun traversing. Adele knew that the plasma cannon couldn’t bear on the vehicle, but Hochner’s gang didn’t.
“What’s that?” a soldier cried. He brought his carbine to his shoulder, pointing toward the
Kiesche
. He wasn’t looking through the sights.
“How would we know?” Adele said shrilly. When the soldier glanced toward her, she shot him twice in the face. Convulsing from the brain shot, he slammed back into the side of the APC, then bounced forward again. Cazelet grabbed the carbine, but the hands of the corpse had locked on it.
Adele was aware only subconsciously of the rattle of Tovera’s little submachine gun. Hochner’s arms flailed as he pitched backward; the man next to him was going down also.
Adele looked up at the gunner just as his helmet spun high in the air.
Ticked by a bullet,
she thought. Then she saw the splash of blood and realized that Hale had shot the man through the bridge of the nose. The carbine bullet had hit the
inside
of the helmet after pureeing his brains.
Colonel Bourbon was wrestling with one of the soldiers. Adele couldn’t safely shoot, but Cazelet had finally pulled the carbine away from the corpse. He put the muzzle into the soldier’s ear—
And must have realized that he wasn’t mentally able to pull the trigger. He punched the weapon stunningly into the soldier’s head, knocking him against the APC.
A Garrison soldier tried to escape through the hatch in the side of the vehicle. Adele shot him through the back of the neck. The second round of her double tap disintegrated on the fellow’s helmet—her light pellets were glass propelled by an aluminum skirt which vaporized in the flux of the driving coil—but one was enough.
Another of Hochner’s gang must have already gotten back into the APC. Bourbon had the carbine he’d been struggling for. He fired one round through the hatchway.
“I give up!” the man inside shrieked. “I give—”
Bourbon threw the carbine’s selector to Full Auto. He fired a ten-round burst into the compartment. A slug ricocheted into the cab windshield, starring the bulletproof panel mounted inside the glass.
The bombardment rockets nearby on the quay blew up. The orange fireball was speckled with bits of the launcher and sheets of rocket casing. Hogg must have kept shooting into the rockets until the fuel of one had ignited and set off the other seven in a very fierce blaze. Technically it had been a deflagration rather than an explosion, but the pressure wave knocked Adele down.
The shock had thrown Colonel Bourbon against the APC. He straightened and aimed the carbine at the hatchway again.
Adele lifted the weapon’s muzzle. “Come out with your hands up!” she shouted through the hatch. The burst’s high-intensity
snap
s beside her had made her voice sound thin and flat in her own ears.
They could use another prisoner, and there didn’t seem much risk that the fellow whimpering and blubbering in the vehicle was going to come out shooting. If he attempted that, Tovera would kill him before he finished squeezing the trigger.
Another roar slapped the harbor. This was more distant than that of the rocket launcher destroying itself, but it was sharper as well. Adele glanced to her left. The Garrison’s three antiship missiles rippled in quick succession from their concrete emplacement. They were aimed back toward Brotherhood.
The first missile was already hypersonic when it struck the edge of the plaza and exploded in a bubble of orange—from expended fuel—and black—the powdered basalt. The missiles depended on kinetic energy rather than warheads, but at such short range a layman would not have been able to tell the difference.
The second and third missiles punched through the flame. One struck the ground floor of the Gulkander Palace; the other scattered the upper portions of the building, which were already billowing outward as the sidewall collapsed.
Daniel, Woetjans, and most of the
Kiesche
’s crew sprinted up to the vehicle, wheezing and puffing. Spacers didn’t spend a great deal of time running, and the would-be rescue party had winded themselves with a short gallop. Adele didn’t doubt that they could have fought if there had been anyone left to fight.
Adele released Bourbon’s carbine and shook her right hand. She would have blisters from vents in the barrel shroud. The Medicomp would take care of it; and anyway, it wasn’t her usual shooting hand.
The Garrison soldiers—two of them; Adele had forgotten the driver—crawled out of the compartment on hands and knees. The driver was gray-faced, and his right trouser leg was bloody; apparently a ricochet had touched him. The other soldier was untouched despite the number of slugs bouncing around the vehicle’s interior, but he couldn’t have been more abjectly helpless if he’d been shot in the head.
As so many of his fellows had been.
Colonel Bourbon cradled the carbine in his left elbow. “Thank you, Lady Mundy,” he said, though she wasn’t sure precisely what he was referring to. “And thank you also, Cazelet. I try to stay fit, but between the voyages and captivity I wasn’t as ready for a tussle as I should have been.”
“Adele?” Daniel said. “Can you set up a general broadcast to Brotherhood? To all receivers, I mean.”
“Yes, easily enough,” she said. “We can do it from here if—”
She started to enter the vehicle, then paused to tug at the man she had killed in the hatchway. Barnes grabbed a handful of the soldier’s tunic and tossed him over the seawall.
The APC’s communicator was in the console between the seats in the cab; personnel in the rear compartment could use it also. The late gunner’s boots dangled over it, but they weren’t in the way.
Adele switched the unit to the
Kiesche
’s external frequency and said, “Cory, this is Mundy. Six wants to broadcast to everyone in Brotherhood. Patch us into the town’s emergency alert system. I set up the link when we first arrived.”
She realized she was still holding her pistol. She set it on the console and flexed the fingers of her left hand.
“Done,”
said Cory.
“Ma’am? I apologize for the delay in getting the missiles away. They had a directional lockout that I didn’t notice until they didn’t launch the first time.”
As Adele opened her mouth to speak, Cory added,
“Ma’am? I angled them so that the basement level was clear. So long as the ceiling held in the collapse, the library ought to be fine. When they dig the rubble off the floor above, I mean.”
“Understood, Cory,” Adele said; and she
did
understand. It was war. Worse things had happened in wars than the destruction of an ancient library—but that hadn’t happened this time. Cory was a civilized man, and he had been well trained. “Hold for Six.”
Daniel and Bourbon had entered the compartment behind her. “Colonel,” Daniel said, “I want you to take the handset—”
Adele offered it.
“—and tell everybody that Pantellarian saboteurs have killed Major Mursiello and attempted to destroy the harbor defenses, but that you’ve taken charge and defeated the threat. You can end with ‘Long live Corcyra!’ or whatever seems appropriate.”
Bourbon squatted before the console. Adele backed away and said to Daniel, “We don’t know that Mursiello was killed in the building collapse.”
“We know that he’ll be found dead,” said Tovera from the hatchway. She smiled, in her way. “Trust me.”
“And when Bourbon has finished his broadcast,” Daniel said, seemingly oblivious of Tovera’s words, “he and I will have a discussion. About ending this war.”
CHAPTER 20
Brotherhood on Corcyra
Daniel sat with Adele on a loggia built onto the side of the Spike. A curving staircase led down from the garden of one of the mansions facing the plaza. The rock was sheer enough at this point that the roof of the nearest house toward the harbor was still a dozen feet below the stone-railed alcove. It was a private spot, especially with Hogg and Tovera at the head of the stairs.
“I’ve been thinking about the next stage of the war,” Daniel said. He glanced toward Adele, then looked away.
He wondered whether he shouldn’t have chosen a different place to talk with Adele. She didn’t seem to be concerned that a carved lion crouched on the parapet looked over her shoulder, but the juxtaposition disturbed
him
.
“I didn’t realize there was any difficulty,” she said, her eyes on the display of the data unit on her lap. “I’m not a military professional, of course, but I understood you to say that you would leapfrog missile batteries until they’re close enough to Hablinger to cover another assault. With the missiles in place, the Pantellarian squadron won’t be able to respond as they did before.”
“That’s true,” Daniel said, “and it’s about as straightforward as any military operation could be. All we, well, all the Independence Council has to do is wait a month until the deliveries from Karst start arriving. Maybe a little longer, knowing Karst. And then put out a general call to the miners. There won’t be as many as there were for the first attack, but there’ll be enough.”
He shrugged. “When the Pantellarians realize the missiles are in place, they may simply abandon Hablinger if they can arrange safe passage.”
Daniel hadn’t chosen this spot for the discussion out of concern for security aboard the
Kiesche
. Yes, of course he and Adele would have been overheard, but the only crew members who might have understood what they were talking about were the present or former commissioned officers.
It was possible that a rigger might get drunk and blurt something in the wrong ear. It was no more likely that one of Daniel’s officers would do so than that Daniel himself would.
The problem was that he was working possibilities over by voicing them to Adele. With her as an audience, things that had seemed acceptable in his own mind might be reflected as embarrassing foolishness. She didn’t have to say anything: Daniel would see it himself as soon as he articulated a bad plan.
Adele was a cool, uninvolved wall from which Daniel bounced ideas. No one else whom Daniel knew could as ably fill that role for him.
“Is a month’s delay,” Adele said, “or somewhat more, unacceptable?”
“The deal with Karst is unacceptable,” Daniel said, “if there’s any other way of getting the same result.”
He was smiling down on the red/orange/tan roofs stretching down the slope to the harbor. From this angle, the houses were smothered in the foliage of the trees which grew in every garden and courtyard.
Previous experience with mining worlds had led Daniel to expect raw earth and ugly piles of tailings. That was probably true upriver where the mines were actually located, but Brotherhood itself reminded him more of the Bantry estate than of an industrial wasteland.
“I had Cazelet and Cory look at the terms of the contract which the envoys agreed to,” Adele said. She looked up from her display for the first time. “They felt that while the Karst junta couldn’t be described as a charitable institution, the deal was fair and that they themselves would have agreed to it.”
Cazelet’s family had owned a medium-sized shipping line before they were killed and their property expropriated by the Alliance bureaucracy. Cory’s father was the largest paving contractor on Florentine, his homeworld. Daniel himself couldn’t have chosen better business advisors than those two, save for his sister, Deirdre.
“Oh, I don’t question that it’s a fair deal,” Daniel said. “I just don’t like to see Karst getting the profit after the way they treated a Cinnabar envoy a few years ago.”
He let his smile spread as he looked down toward the harbor. Three freighters similar to the
Kiesche
were loading copper. One was anchored at a buoy in midwater; her crew was bringing the ingots aboard from the barge moored alongside. A backbreaking job… .
“I recall the incident,” Adele said. Her voice was as cool and measured as if she hadn’t herself been present on Karst when young Headman Hieronymos insulted a Cinnabar senator and refused to renew Karst’s long and friendly association with the Republic. “That said, Hieronymos is dead. The reason the contract is in place is that you rescued the envoys so that the arrangements
could
be finalized.”
“One step at a time, Adele,” Daniel said. “Now that we’ve reformed the Independence Council into a body which actually
wants
to win the war, we can refine the means by which we achieve that.”
Adele continued to look at him. “There are those in Xenos,” she said, “who would be pleased to hear that the strongly pro-Cinnabar government of Pantellaria has recovered Corcyra from the pro-Alliance exiles who had taken power there.”
Daniel laughed and met her eyes. “Those are political considerations,” he said, “and I leave them for politicians. We’re on Corcyra to enable Rikard Cleveland to recover the treasure which he believes is buried here. I continue to think that a Corcyran victory is the best way to create conditions in which that will be possible. I would just like to achieve that—”
His smile remained broad, but he felt the muscles of his face tighten.
“—without bringing economic benefit to Karst.”
Adele watched him without replying. Something was going on behind her eyes, but it didn’t leave readable signs on her face.
“I know that the Senate is willing to leave Karst be,” Daniel said. “Even Senator Forbes is.”
“Senator Forbes may be more willing to forgive the insult she received as envoy to Karst,” said Adele, “because that was the start of the sequence that led to her becoming Defense Minister. And led to the assassination of Headman Hieronymos, of course, but I believe that the Senator is too much of a politician to care about revenge for its own sake.”
“The junta which killed Hieronymos and took power in Karst,” said Daniel harshly, “includes the advisors who convinced the boy to break with Cinnabar in the first place. The fact that they’re fawning on the Republic now doesn’t make me forget the way they insulted us in the past. You see—”
He grinned, restored to good humor by the thought.
“You see better than most, I suspect. You see that they not only insulted a Cinnabar envoy, they tried to humiliate a Leary. The Senate does as it deems politic, but a Leary takes care of his own honor.”
“Understood,” Adele said with her usual lack of emotion. Daniel read amusement in her blankness, however.
She pursed her lips and said, “Daniel, while we were still on Cinnabar I was given commissions—I won’t say assignments—which go beyond our private agreement with the Sand family.”
Daniel shrugged. Of course Adele was involved in other matters. She was too valuable to the Republic
not
to be tasked with additional duties.
“Go on,” he said aloud.
“It is possible,” said Adele, “that at some point our purposes will conflict.”
Daniel pressed his fingers against the stone bench; he didn’t drum them, just let his conscious mind focus on the moss-cushioned roughness.
“If that should happen,” he said carefully, turning to meet Adele’s eyes again, “you will inform me that there is a conflict. I will decide on a further course of action then. At this moment, I would expect to trust your judgment and honor, and therefore I would defer to you.”
She nodded crisply.
“And now,” Daniel said, rising to his feet, “I will meet with Colonel Bourbon in the Manor. Would you care to come along?”
“Lieutenant Cory says the
Kiesche
has received a message which he’d like to show to me,” Adele said as she put away her data unit. “I’m going back to the ship. I’ll keep you informed as developments require.”
Which was something less than “I’ll keep you informed of developments,” Daniel realized as they started up the stairs. But there were many aspects of Adele’s business on which he preferred to remain ignorant.
* * *
Adele entered the
Kiesche
’s bridge, expecting to find Cory, the duty officer, sitting at the command console and no one else in the compartment unless a spacer was asleep in a bunk. The crew had performed without a real break since the ship lifted from Xenos, and Daniel believed in granting liberty to as great a degree as he could.
Cory and Cazelet stood beside the console, facing the hatchway. When Adele stepped through, they braced to attention.
“Ma’am!” said Cory. “I asked Master Cazelet for some help with this, but the responsibility is mine.”
“Very well, Cory,” Adele said. “Please explain the situation.”
She sat at one of the jumpseats and accessed the console through her personal data unit. She was certainly interested in what Cory had to say, but she had found that an individual’s explanations were mainly valuable in illuminating the hard data which was an approximation of truth.
“The
Kiesche
received a message in an unfamiliar code,” Cory said, still standing at attention. “It was addressed to Shipping Representative, Bantry Holdings. I asked Master Cazelet to take a look at it while I checked the source of the communication.”
“Because I had been in the shipping business,” Cazelet said. They were both very tense. “I recognized it as a standard Pantellarian shipping code, keyed to the date of the first message in the series. Knowing that and the fact it was Pantellarian, it was easy enough to run it back till the contents stopped being garbage.”
“Yes,” said Adele. An astrogation computer could handle brute-force computations like that in a heartbeat. Even without knowing that the key was in the Pantellarian calendar, the delay in reading would be insignificant. It was, after all, a shipping code meant to conceal arrival and pricing information from trade rivals for a few days.
“Did you read the communication?” Adele asked, her eyes on the decoded message on her display. She spoke mildly.
“Ma’am, we didn’t,” Cory said. “We just saw enough to know that it was none of our business.”
“Umm,” said Adele. “You couldn’t be faulted if you had read it, it seems to me. But you’re probably better off not having done so.”
“We weren’t sure whether it should go to Six or to you, Adele,” Cazelet said. “I said that since you had carried the Bantry Holdings authorization to the negotiations on Ischia, we’d start with you and you’d take it to Captain Leary if he was the correct recipient.”
“Ma’am,” Cory said, “the origination of the message was Pantellarian HQ in Hablinger. The sender tried to disguise it, but he wasn’t very good.”
“I think one can take as a given,” Adele said, feeling the humor of the situation, “that someone who uses a commercial code that’s at least twenty standard years old—”
The inception date of the series.
“—isn’t an expert in cyber security.”
The code was probably the one that the Arnaud and Leary businesses had used to communicate from the beginning. When Pantellaria had joined—had been joined to—the Alliance of Free Stars, the communication became treason on both sides, but the code hadn’t been changed to something more secure.
Arnaud—because the message was from Commissioner Arnaud—had used it here because he assumed that a ship under Captain Leary brought an agent to discuss his demands for help from Cinnabar in reconquering Corcyra. He was right in his assumption, though possibly not in the way he thought he was right.
“I’m the correct person to deal with this,” Adele said. She looked up at the two officers—at her protégés, both of them. They deserved more than a brush-off.
“This is a matter that Captain Leary isn’t aware of as yet,” she said. “Though obviously it concerns him. You may reasonably think it your duty to take it to him directly. I will … that is, I won’t blame you if you do.”
Cory looked at her incredulously. “Ma’am!” he said. “We wouldn’t do that!”
“Lady Mundy,” Cazelet said. He was standing more stiffly, if that was possible, than he had before. “You’ve said that you’re dealing with the matter, whatever it is. All that I, that
either
of us, need to know at this point is if there’s any help we can give you. And you’ll tell us in that case, I’m sure.”
Why are they loyal to me?
Adele thought.
They should be concerned that I’m plotting with the enemy and hiding information from Daniel. Which is just what I’m doing!
Cory and Cazelet accepted that she wasn’t Daniel’s enemy, even when the data would support the conclusion than she was. “Support” did not mean “compel,” and they trusted her. As they had every reason to do.
“Very well,” she said. “I have nothing at present, but I will give you such tasks as circumstances require. As I have always done.”
“We’ll be in the hold, ma’am,” Cory said. “Just call if you need us.”
“No,” said Adele. “Cory, you’re on duty. Stay where you would ordinarily be, which I take to be the command console. Rene, I presume you’re at liberty, so do as you please. Chatting with Cory appears much more reasonable than twiddling your thumbs alone in the hold, however.”
“We won’t disturb you?” Cazelet said.
“No,” said Adele, who lost herself so thoroughly in her focus that the world outside ceased to exist. “I will continue to access the console from where I am now.”
She had to respond to Arnaud, but she couldn’t say anything substantive until she had more information; she composed a neutral placeholder and sent it back along the convoluted track that would take it to Pantellarian headquarters.
The original message demanded that, within three days, Daniel Leary make a public promise of Cinnabar support for the Pantellarian position—that is, for Commissioner Arnaud’s invasion. Because of Daniel’s public stature, the Independence Council would believe the promise and therefore be willing to compromise on terms that Arnaud would be able to claim was a victory for him.
