The Sea Without a Shore (30 page)
Read The Sea Without a Shore Online
Authors: David Drake
He shook his head angrily, glaring at the floor. “In fact, I don’t think that anything I appeared to support would pass a Council vote. I’m telling you this because I don’t want to see my troops sold into slavery to pay the cost of their transportation.”
His mouth worked as though he were about to spit, but he swallowed instead. “Not that I’m likely to survive long enough to see the final outcome.”
Daniel made a dismissive gesture with his left hand. “One thing at a time,” he said. There was a console of reasonable capacity at the other end of the table, but he didn’t think he needed it now. “The transportation costs will be covered by trade concessions, but that’s in the future. The most immediate question I see—”
He grinned. It was true that the Monfiores gained in the long term by being forced to share their profits with their neighbors. This plan too benefitted all parties, which pleased Daniel for its neatness as well as other virtues.
“—is what you would consider the best conceivable outcome to the present situation? From your viewpoint.”
“Asylum for me on Cinnabar,” Arnaud said. “The rest of my force returns to Pantellaria with an undertaking by the Council not to retaliate against them, guaranteed by the Cinnabar Senate.”
He shrugged. “If you can arrange
that
,” he said, “you’d be welcome to my firstborn if I had children. I could manage a nephew or two.”
Despite the joking bravado, Daniel could see real hope in the Pantellarian’s expression. It was easy to like Arnaud: he had come himself instead of sending an envoy, and his first concern was for his troops.
“You’ve told me what you consider the best practical outcome,” Daniel said, “but that’s not what I asked you. What do you consider the best
conceivable
outcome?”
Arnaud’s face hardened slightly. “You surrender Corcyra to me,” he said after a moment. “Which, to be honest, I don’t believe you have the power to do, but you’ve surprised me in the past.”
He nodded toward Adele. “You and Lady Mundy have.”
“Wouldn’t you rather be ruler of Pantellaria?” Daniel said. He smiled more broadly.
Arnaud pushed his fingertips together hard at chest height. “Explain what you mean,” he said.
“Will your troops support you?” Daniel said.
“I … think they would support me a long way, yes,” Arnaud said. “If I get them out of this mess alive, most of them would support me well beyond common sense. But I couldn’t conquer Pantellaria with this force. I couldn’t even conquer Corcyra, though …”
His eyes narrowed with a thought. “The plan Lady Mundy tricked me with—that might have worked. I still think it would have worked, and she said it was your plan. Are you offering to support me, Leary?”
Daniel laughed as though the offer was a joke. At the words, though, his mind had begun considering what it would take and what resources he might be able to raise on Cinnabar… .
No
.
Before he could speak, Adele said, “I can assure you as an official of Cinnabar, Commissioner Arnaud, that the Republic’s government would forbid any action by a citizen which would precipitate renewed war with the Alliance. As the armed overthrow of Pantellaria by an RCN officer would certainly do.”
I wasn’t going to do it anyway!
Daniel thought. His momentary irritation melted away.
But that’s an aspect of the business that I hadn’t considered
.
He grinned at Adele, then said to Arnaud, “No, you couldn’t conquer Pantellaria, but according to my sources—”
Adele.
“—the Council of Twenty isn’t very popular. Things were all right just after Guarantor Porra’s thugs were thrown out, but right now a lot of folks seem to think that the Council is a bunch of rich people screwing every piaster they can get out of everybody else. Not so?”
“Go on, Leary,” Arnaud said, his face almost blank. “But keep in mind that I’m not exactly a man of the people myself. I’ve improved the family fortune considerably, thanks to investment by Bantry Holdings in some measure—”
His sudden smile was half-amused, half mocking.
“—but we Arnauds are still one of the oldest families on Pantellaria.”
“You may have more popular support than you believe, Commissioner,” Adele said. “Your shipyard is regarded as a good place to work, and you’re a great deal more approachable than many of your
nouveau riche
fellows on the Council. Your popularity with the public is one of the reasons the rest of the Council has been trying to arrange the defeat of your expeditionary force as soon as you lifted from Pantellaria.”
“It certainly seems like that!” Arnaud said. “You know, I’ve had to use my own money to pay the troops for the past three months? The Council hasn’t transferred money into the expedition’s account.”
“I can show you internal communications among your fellows,” Adele said. “Though referring to the other councillors as ‘your fellows’ is probably a misnomer. But that doesn’t matter now.”
“No,” said Daniel. Arnaud was seated between him and Adele, so the Commissioner was snapping his head around like a spectator at a tennis match. “Ordinary people don’t have to support you, so long as they don’t oppose you. As the residents of Corcyra most certainly have been doing.”
“I have provided Captain Leary with a breakdown of the private troops in the service of your other councillors,” Adele said. “He is convinced that the force available to you would be sufficient to defeat—”
“You’ll scare them into taking their badges off and hiding,” Daniel said.
“—or simply overawe them,” Adele went on, nodding.
“And your forces aren’t simply those you brought to Corcyra, Commissioner,” Daniel said, leaning forward. “There are other troops here who would be more than happy to follow you to Pantellaria. To go back, in many cases.”
He and Adele were selling Arnaud on their plan. It was a good course for the Pantellarian, but it was the only course which would also accomplish all of Daniel’s objectives.
Arnaud blinked and stiffened. “No,” he said. “You mean the exiles, don’t you? I won’t do that.”
“The Self-Defense Regiment and the Navy of Free Corcyra,” Daniel said, keeping his voice genially calm. “Which in the past have been paid by exiles, I believe, but that needn’t continue to be the case. And the Corcyran garrison, whose members will be particularly willing to leave here. Their commander, Colonel Bourbon, is both competent and honest.”
“Look, I know the people, the families mostly, who bolted here when the Alliance pulled off of Pantellaria,” Arnaud said. “I don’t have problems with them, no more than usual, anyway; I was in pretty tight with Porra’s last administrator myself, to tell the truth. But I’m not going to have a bloodbath back at home
or
a return to Alliance control. That’s what they’ll want, some of them.”
“What most of them want,” said Adele, “is a return of their property on Pantellaria. And revenge against the political enemies who forced them into exile and expropriated that property, of course. But none of them, and not all of them together, can force through that agenda over your opposition.”
A computer-synthesized voice would have had more warmth; it would have been programmed to seem human. Adele didn’t bother to do so. And at that, her cold, precise delivery gave the words the solid certainty of a stone wall.
“You’re buying internal peace for your planet,” Daniel said. “That’s a very good return for simply giving back the property of fellow citizens. The Council of Twenty had a good opportunity to bring Pantellaria together when the Alliance left. Instead you simply made yourselves richer.
You
did, Commissioner.”
Arnaud’s immediate response was an angry glare. Then he coughed a laugh and said, “Point taken. The silver lining in this is that because the spoils were divided pretty much among Council members, it’ll be relatively easy for us to correct our mistake. Although—”
His eyes went unfocused as his mind leaped to a different thought.
“—not all of my colleagues will see what we did as a mistake. The Alliance administrators had us at each others’ throats all the time they were in charge. You can say we should have done better when they left, but what happened to most of the exiles was no more than justice for what they’d done to others.”
“All the more reason to stop doing Guarantor Porra’s work for him, I would think,” snapped Adele.
“And your colleagues don’t have five thousand troops with combat experience,” Daniel said. “Don’t sell your force short, Arnaud. No, they’re not a Land Force Commando, but they’ve trained together, they’ve been shot at and they’ve shot back. That puts them in a whole different class from what anybody else on Pantellaria has obeying his orders.”
“Look,” said Arnaud. He stood up abruptly. “
Look
. I don’t want to be dictator of Pantellaria. I don’t want to be a penny-ante Porra myself.”
“Then don’t be,” said Adele. She didn’t raise her voice, but her words snapped like a whip. “The Council of Twenty was supposed to be a transition to the elected assembly that ruled Pantellaria before you were absorbed into the Alliance. Go back and tell your colleagues that the Council is going to hold elections for a new Assembly in three months time.”
“But—” Arnaud said.
“But
nothing
,” Daniel said. “You’ve got five thousand veteran votes for the proposition, and everybody on the planet except maybe a few of your colleagues will support the idea. And if any other councillors really want to make an issue of it, put them in jail for a few days.”
“You may find that more of the Council is on your side than you expect,” Adele said. “According to my information—”
Pantellaria had been a major Alliance ally during the war. Mistress Sand’s array of spies there obviously hadn’t been disbanded when the Treaty of Amiens was signed.
“—some of the minor councillors are concerned at the chance of civil war between their more powerful colleagues, and the smarter councillors—”
Adele’s smile was the visual equivalent of her clipped tone.
“Not a majority, I fear. The smarter councillors, as I said, are concerned about revolution if things don’t change. Both concerns are valid, even if Alliance agents don’t work to increase their likelihood. Which is also a valid concern.”
“Lady Mundy and I have seen revolutions,” Daniel said.
We’ve seen the next thing to revolution on Cinnabar, and it was the blessing of heaven that it wasn’t the real thing
. “If you go home and knock a few of the harder heads together, you’ll be doing everyone on Pantellaria a favor.”
“Including the people who’ll curse you every day till they die,” said Adele. “Because they don’t have your good sense.”
“They also don’t have your army,” Daniel said. “So long as you’re satisfied with being rich and powerful, my bet is that your rich, powerful colleagues will come to believe that you’re offering a better alternative than hanging from a lamppost. Now, are you willing to try?”
Arnaud gave Daniel a lopsided smile and sat down again. “I’d been wondering what I was going to do with myself on Cinnabar,” he said. “I guess that on balance I’d rather go back to Pantellaria and straighten things out. I knew something had to be done before I brought the army here, and from what you tell me things haven’t gotten better.”
He took a deep breath. “All right, Leary. What’s the next step?”
“The next step,” Daniel said, “is that we tell Hogg and Tovera to let in the Corcyran leaders and Giorgi Monfiore. I’m sure that Lady Mundy summoned them while we’ve been talking.”
Adele nodded agreement and said, “I have.” Her smile was almost that of a normal person.
“We’ve got a great deal of negotiating to do,” Daniel said, rising to walk to the door, “but Corcyra and Pantellaria both will gain from it.”
And with luck so will Rikard Cleveland, who’s the reason I came here in the first place
.
CHAPTER 27
Outside Hablinger on Corcyra
Adele worked at her usual station on the
Kiesche
, sifting the data from Arnaud’s personal console. She allowed herself a smile, though it didn’t reach her lips: she probably had the only complete copy of the contents, now that Arnaud had melted the unit to slag.
I wonder if he would like the data back, now that things have settled down?
Probably not, and in any case Adele didn’t see any reason to offer it. If Arnaud asked, she would consider the matter again.
The watch officer, Pasternak, was asleep in his cubicle, and the three crewmen on duty were playing some sort of card game with Tovera in the hold. If necessary Pasternak could light the thrusters and even lift the freighter into orbit using the computer’s automated systems.
The remaining RCN personnel were in Hablinger or were involved with salvaging the Pantellarian squadron. Pasternak was there on most days also; indeed, he appeared to be overseeing the operation.
He wasn’t a young man, however. Daniel had rotated him back to the
Kiesche
today and for however long he was willing to rest. Although the chief engineer was technically a watch-standing officer, no one would willingly put him in a position in which he needed to run more than a fusion bottle—which he did as well as anyone else in the RCN.
Cory and Cazelet were involved with repairs also, though they were in charge of crews which were reconfining the Cephisis and constructing the new harbor. Hablinger Pool was literally high and dry. It was easier to move the facilities to a new location than to force the river into its former channel.
The latter might not even be possible with the available equipment: the Cephisis continued to eat away the previous levees as it tumbled thirty feet to the level of the rice fields. In the fifteen days since the charge went off, the gap had expanded at least ten miles back upriver.
A freak of the breeze brought the sound of a power saw onto the
Kiesche
’s bridge. Just as the Southern Cephisis region was well-stocked with mining supplies and equipment, so in the Delta, supplies for working with water and soft earth were on hand.
The huge earthmovers were on floatation tires, but they still needed better support than they could get from soupy mud. As soon as a simple berm confined the river, the ground behind it would quickly dry to adequate stability, but that initial berm required trackways of structural plastic for the equipment to move on.
The river’s new western bank had been roughed in, so that the
Kiesche
was again on reasonably solid ground. Now the farther bank was under construction, and sheets for more trackway were being cut to size.
Ordinarily Adele would not have noticed outside noises while she was working, but the scanning she was doing at present wasn’t really work. There was no rush on the business; in fact there was no real purpose. She had time to think.
She smiled with wistful humor. That was never a good thing for her. Because she had been immersed in a study of recent Pantellarian politics, her thoughts had swerved into particularly unpleasant channels.
Within Adele’s lifetime, Cinnabar could have broken up as several different factions fought one another in a civil war that could not have a true winner. The fighting among powerful families would also have set off a class revolution in the slums of Xenos. Several, perhaps most, of the worlds which the Republic ruled in a more or less paternalistic fashion would have declared independence.
And all that would have happened even if Guarantor Porra had not been stoking the fires for his own purposes, which he most certainly would have been. The Three Circles Conspiracy had been funded in part by Alliance money. Adele was able to hope that her father had not known precisely where the funds were coming from, but Lucius Mundy had not been stupid or unobservant. He must have guessed.
Cinnabar hadn’t spiraled down into the chaos which now threatened Pantellaria because Speaker Leary had crushed the conspiracy. His tool had been the Proscriptions, directing the death of thousands of his fellow citizens without trial; the
murder
of thousands of Cinnabar citizens, Adele’s immediate family among them.
And if I’d been advising Corder Leary, I would have told him to do just what he decided to do on his own
.
Daniel wouldn’t have ordered Proscriptions. The most he might have done was to look the other way while his advisor, Lady Mundy, saved the Republic. That would have been good enough.
Adele went back to sorting Arnaud’s data and correlating it with the information from Mistress Sand’s files. She wondered if she should share some of that information with Arnaud. Used wisely, it would greatly ease the job of remaking Pantellaria; Arnaud had regularly showed himself wise, particularly in taking advice when he realized his ignorance.
Mistress Sand’s clerks and administrators would oppose giving Arnaud information, since that might compromise the spies and techniques which had gathered it. Mistress Sand might herself agree with her underlings.
But Adele Mundy was the officer on the ground. She was a librarian, not a bureaucrat, and her instinct was always to share information.
Arnaud will see anything which I think may help him. Mistress Sand can dismiss me if she doesn’t approve
.
Smiling at the joke no one else had heard and very few would have understood if she had spoken aloud, Adele went back to Arnaud’s viewpoint on a conspiracy involving himself and five other councillors to fix the price of fish protein. They had failed, but only because Arnaud had secretly backed a rival bid to do the same thing. Arnaud had come out of that very well, at a cost paid by his former partners and the Pantellarian public generally.
People can change for the better
… .
Adele didn’t really believe that, but she did believe that an intelligent and motivated person could learn to
imitate
a better person. Tovera, as an extreme example, did very well at appearing to be a human being instead the conscienceless killer that she really was.
Conscienceless killers tended to have short lifespans. The people closest to them, the ones who would be described as “friends and colleagues” if the killer had been human, quickly realized how dangerous the killer was to them if they allowed him or her to live.
Tovera had found a niche by killing only people whom Lady Mundy directed her to kill. Not that Adele felt that she herself was really the same species as those with whom she worked. The Sissies accepted her because she was Daniel’s friend, and Daniel accepted her for some reason Adele couldn’t fathom.
Perhaps because I
am
his friend
.
While the
Kiesche
’s junior officers were working on the levees and harbor, Daniel was closeted with Arnaud and the leaders of all the anti-Pantellarian factions on Corcyra. They were trying to merge their forces into an effective weapon to take to Pantellaria.
Well, they were discussing a merger; most of them were more concerned with enhancing their own position than with real coordination. That was normal for human beings, in Adele’s experience as well as from what she had learned by reading. Daniel was present as an advisor, but he had quickly become the referee. He was the only neutral at the conference, and he had the respect of all the other parties.
Daniel had told Adele that he would not take an active part in what was at least the next thing to a coup when Arnaud returned to Pantellaria. He hadn’t lied to her—Adele didn’t imagine that Daniel would ever lie to her—but neither was she convinced that he would avoid being talked into coming along when the convoy of troops lifted. Just as an advisor, at first.
Adele smiled faintly. It didn’t matter to her; and it certainly didn’t matter to Tovera, who could reasonably expect to be pointed at further targets.
A corner of the display glowed amber. Adele reduced the data she was mining. The incoming call, though classed as nonemergency, was from Brother Graves, so she answered it immediately.
“Mundy,” she said. She was using video despite her long habit not to do so. Her duty now was to gather information as well as to dispense it, and a person’s face provided a great deal of information.
Graves’ face was worried, though he was obviously trying to sound cheerful when he said,
“Lady Mundy? I was wondering if you know where Brother Rikard is?”
“I believed he was with you in Brotherhood,” Adele said, “though I haven’t given him any thought.”
She was mildly embarrassed at the truth of the latter statement. Granted, Cleveland was technically Daniel’s responsibility—but she had undertaken to help Daniel, and “technically” was a coward’s word. She was a Mundy.
“Yes, Rikard has been acting as my aide here,”
Graves said. “
There’s more going on in Brotherhood affecting the community than there is usually, of course, and it really makes it easier to, well, to be away from Pearl Valley if it’s two of us together. Instead of just me. Now—well, I’m probably being silly.”
Graves cleared his throat.
I’m not the only one in the conversation who feels embarrassed,
Adele thought.
“Rikard went to the Manor yesterday morning to coordinate the return of our contingent from Hablinger,”
Graves said.
“We’ve been helping with the reconstruction work, you know, since some members of our community have useful skills from before they joined us. I wasn’t really worried when he didn’t return immediately, but this morning I asked the officer whom Rikard had gone to see.”
Simply because it was what she did, Adele checked a directory on the left half of her display while she listened. The deputy adjutant in Brotherhood was a Lieutenant bes-Shehar, seconded from the navy.
“She said that Rikard had left her office at about midday, but that she’d seen him in the lobby a few minutes later when she went to lunch,”
Graves said.
“He was with some spacers whom he seemed to know. So I thought perhaps Captain Leary had sent personnel to take him to Hablinger and he hadn’t had time to inform me. Rikard hasn’t had contact with any spacers that I know of except the crew of your ship.”
“Brother Graves, I’m going to break this call now,” Adele said. “I’ll deal with the matter. Six and I will deal with the matter. Out.”
Daniel wore a commo helmet during the present discussions because it gave him access to the
Kiesche
’s database. Adele opened a two-way link to him. As it connected, she brought up a list of shipping in Brotherhood Harbor.
Adele was already fairly certain of what she was going to find. The
Kiesche
wasn’t
quite
the only starship whose complement Cleveland had had dealings with.
* * *
Daniel swayed, but he held himself upright when the converted tank skidded over a dike and slammed down on the other side. The four other spacers took the shock with equanimity also: bad as the ride was, a starship descending through an atmosphere bounced around worse.
Hogg gripped a stocked impeller with his right hand. His left alone wasn’t enough to prevent his hobnailed boots from slipping on the sloping armor. His whole considerable weight hit Daniel in the back like a giant beanbag. Daniel grunted, but he managed not to go down, or worse—to go over the side.
The vehicle was a light air-cushion tank with a superstructure of woven-wire fencing. The six passengers clinging to the fence-stake struts supporting the basket badly overloaded it. Military vehicles were always overloaded in the field anyway, so the extra half ton didn’t prevent the makeshift bus from roaring across the paddies. It certainly prevented it from doing so smoothly, however, and the fact that the Pantellarian driver was a hotdog didn’t help.
“Can’t that stupid bitch slow down?” Hogg growled, using Daniel’s shoulder to brace himself upright again. “Sorry, master. Won’t happen again.”
“She’s not driving any faster than you would be if I’d let you,” Daniel said, shouting over the intake rush of the drive fans. “And there’s the
Kiesche
right ahead. We’re almost there.”
This tank was one of twenty which the expeditionary force had brought to Corcyra as cavalry. Their armor was proof against slugs from the carbines carried by most of the fighters—calling the miners’ militia “soldiers” would be a stretch—but a burst from an automatic impeller would go through the hulls the long way. The fixed barbette holding a five-centimeter plasma cannon was thicker, but not a great deal thicker.
The Pantellarians had converted half a dozen tanks into light trucks by welding a framework to the superstructure and wrapping fencing around it. The vehicles could still be used for combat as-is in an emergency, though a workman with a cutting bar could remove the framework in a minute or two.
The Delta region had very little civilian ground transport for the invaders to commandeer, so they had had to improvise. The jury-rigged trucks couldn’t have been very satisfactory, but they would have greatly eased the problem of resupplying the strongpoints across the mud.
The crust on this side of the Cephisis had dried to a thickness which could almost support the tank’s six tons, but when the vehicle leaped over the dike, it splashed liquid mud to all sides. They didn’t bog—it was almost impossible to bog an air-cushion vehicle unless it sank in over the fan intakes—but balls of mud spattered the passengers as they bulled their way forward.
“The next time I’ll walk,” said Vesey. She flicked mud off her visor, though that further smeared what was left. “Or swim.”
“We’re almost there,” Daniel said, smiling toward her. For a long time after Midshipman Dorst’s death, Vesey hadn’t been able to joke. The presence of Midshipman Cazelet, now passed lieutenant, had been an even greater benefit to Vesey than it was generally to Daniel and the crew of whatever ship he commanded.
The Pantellarian driver had a higher opinion of her skills than Daniel thought justified. She began to swing the vehicle when they were twenty feet from the base of the
Kiesche
’s boarding ramp, planning to raise the leading edge of her skirts to brake them to a stop. She had forgotten to allow for the extra weight of the passengers above the center of gravity.
