The Sea Without a Shore (34 page)
Read The Sea Without a Shore Online
Authors: David Drake
He grinned and turned toward Daniel. Adele watched his face, now in profile, as an inset on her display.
“You may be too polite to ask whether I could have made a mistake, Captain,” Graves said. “Yes, of course I could, though these images don’t require very subtle analysis. I asked two other engineers to look over the scans. They aren’t members of our community, but I trust them personally and professionally. They came to the same conclusions that I did.”
Graves shrugged. “The mudstone appears to have formed over the object,” he said. “If it’s an artifact, it isn’t a human artifact, and it certainly isn’t something that Captain Pearl buried.”
Adele had a great deal of experience in sharpening fuzzy images, but these had not been manipulated. She was looking at raw data as it came from the surveying equipment, and they were razor sharp even at the highest magnification.
“Brother Graves?” she said. “What is the object made of? It would appear to be very dense.”
“Yes, Lady Mundy,” Graves said, turning toward her with a troubled expression. Adele had inset real-time images of the three other principals on his display, but Graves seemed to be trying to look through the holographic screen to see her directly. “It’s almost impossibly dense. Granted that our scans have a degree of error and that gravity plotting is suggestive rather than solid proof—”
He shrugged again. “My colleagues and I believe that the artifact is made from a stable transuranic element,” Graves said. “Element 126, presumably, though the element’s existence is merely a prediction, and it has no name. Well, unbihexium, but that’s a placeholder unless and until the element itself is discovered. Which we apparently have just done.”
“Then it’s valuable after all,” Cleveland said. He too looked worried. “Even though it isn’t a case of jewels.”
“I suppose you could say that the artifact is of incalculable value,” Graves agreed. “There isn’t a market for such a thing, because it would be unique in human experience, but it’s certainly valuable.”
“I don’t see any sign of an antenna, a wire, or a spike on the end,” Daniel said. “I thought it might be a sort of cavity resonator, trapping signals and reemitting them on a different wavelength.”
“What sort of signals, ah, Captain?” Adele said. “I didn’t make a detailed search of Pearl Valley, but I think my equipment would have noticed anything that didn’t fit standard parameters.”
“I don’t know,” Daniel said. He grinned engagingly. “Nothing electronic, then, not if you didn’t pick it up.”
He looked from Graves to Cleveland, then said as if idly, “You believe Pearl Valley is a good place to live, Master Cleveland. For that matter, I liked the atmosphere myself, though I’m probably not a good example. I generally like places.”
“Yes, that’s so,” Cleveland said, obviously puzzled at the change of subject. “About the valley, certainly. And I’m glad to hear that you’re a happy man, sir.”
“Pretty generally, yes,” Daniel said, still grinning. “What do you suppose feelings look like? And how would you transmit them?”
“There’s no evidence …” Graves said. He let his words trail off, perhaps because he had thought further and had realized that there was no objective evidence on
any
part of the matter. The healthful, welcoming nature of the Transformationist community was wholly subjective.
“Since we don’t appear to need weapons anymore, thank goodness,” Cleveland said, “then we don’t need the money we were going to buy weapons with, do we, Brother Graves?”
“I don’t accept the connection between the artifact and our faith,” Graves said. “I’m confident that if we drill down and bring the object to the surface, which we could do very easily, it will have no adverse effect on Pearl Valley or the Transformationist community.”
He shook his head slowly and continued, “But no, I don’t see that the community has a serious need for money. Many of those who join us do so after successful careers in the wider world, and the members who guide our investments are quite skilled.”
“Then I suggest—” Cleveland began.
His face changed, and he straightened on his seat. “Captain Leary,” he said in a formal tone. “Forgive me for forgetting that you and my mother are each due a third of any treasure which the expedition finds. And it appears that we
have
found a treasure.”
“If my sister were here,” Daniel said, “she might have an opinion on the matter. But she isn’t here, and I’m not in the business of money.”
He shrugged and said, “No treasure has been recovered. You owe me absolutely nothing, and I’m confident that Mistress Sand would say the same. Not that it matters, because she isn’t here any more than Deirdre is.”
Daniel looked at Adele and raised an eyebrow. “Do you have anything to add, Lady Mundy?” he asked. “You had some business of your own to transact on Corcyra, I believe?”
“I’ve accomplished everything I came to do,” Adele said.
In a neater fashion than either Deirdre Leary or Mistress Sand can have imagined that I would. Neater than I imagined myself
.
“Then I think we’re done with necessary business,” Daniel said nodding. “However—”
He looked around the compartment. His grin was just short of splitting his face. “Although it doesn’t matter to anybody and therefore nobody can be disappointed, I
do
have an idea as to where Captain Pearl hid whatever it was he brought from Bay. Anybody else interested in seeing if I’m right?”
He’s really a little boy,
Adele thought. Then,
May he never change!
Cleveland stood up, grinning back at Daniel. “I may have found peace and enlightenment,” he said, “but I haven’t lost my sense of curiosity. I certainly would like to learn!”
“And I,” said Graves, rising also.
“Hogg?” said Daniel, getting to his feet. “You usually carry fishing lures, don’t you?”
“Aye,” said Hogg. “And I’ve got a shotgun if you’d like to try the local game besides.”
“Just the lure,” said Daniel. “We’re going fishing for treasure.”
CHAPTER 31
Brotherhood on Corcyra
The
Kiesche
’s whole crew stood near the pool in front of the Manor, waiting for Daniel to do something. He hadn’t made any announcement, but obviously somebody had.
He looked at Vesey. She nodded. The set of the lieutenant’s jaw showed that she was uncomfortable, but her voice didn’t tremble as she said, “Sir, it seemed to me that this is what we came here to do and that the crew ought to have a chance to watch if they wanted to.”
She drew a deep breath and swallowed. She said, “And before you ask, I talked to Captain Samona—”
Arnaud had made the former exile leader second in command of the Pantellarian naval forces on Corcyra.
“—and he offered to send ten spacers under Commander Angelotti to the
Kiesche
, so that I could relieve Lieutenant Cory and the anchor watch to join us.”
Daniel thought for a moment, then grinned and said, “Very good, Vesey.”
His only hesitation had been his surprise that Vesey, of all people, would make such a decision on her own. It was
good
that she had—but surprising.
Sweeping the gathering crowd with his eyes, he said, “If this is the way you Kiesches want to spend your time, you’re welcome to do so, though I’ll say that I usually found more interesting things to do on liberty. Before I became a staid and proper commanding officer, that is.”
He cleared his throat and said, “And you know, I might decide to get a little improper myself once I’ve taken care of this little problem.”
He grinned at the laughter. “I don’t expect this to be very exciting, though.”
“Well, we’re ready for it if you’re wrong,” said Barnes. He and Sun had drawn stocked impellers from the arms locker, while Dasi had a submachine gun. Woetjans held a cutting bar instead of her usual length of pipe.
What in heaven’s name has Vesey told them?
Daniel trusted those four spacers with the weapons they carried, which he wouldn’t have said about everyone even in this picked crew. He couldn’t imagine how their hardware would be useful in the present situation, though.
“People want to help, Daniel,” said Adele quietly from his right side. “They don’t like to feel that they’re useless, even when they obviously are. None of us like that.”
She smiled. Daniel was used to Adele showing nothing in her expression. He had never seen her looking so sad, though.
Hogg squatted on the lip of the pool, working with the controller. The lure dangled in the water, collecting nerve frequencies which the controller sorted and analyzed.
The shallow end of the pool had originally been four feet deep. Several inches of detritus, mostly organic, covered it. Woetjans had used a whipstaff to probe down ten feet before she found hard bottom at the deep end, but the muck over the plasticized base was at least four feet thick. You could no more stand on it than you could stand on the water itself, but things certainly lived in its darkness.
Daniel stripped his tunic off, then cinched his belt tighter to make it more difficult for things to wriggle down inside. He had bloused the cuffs of his trousers under the tops of his spacers’ boots, which themselves were tough though flexible. They could be worn within a rigging suit as well as by themselves. While the boots didn’t make swimming easier, neither did Daniel expect them to be a great hindrance.
Hogg looked up and said, “You know, master, I’ve never been the hand at one of these that you are. How about you take the controller and I get in the water? It’s hot, and I wouldn’t mind the dip anyhow.”
“We’ll do it my way, Hogg,” Daniel said. He didn’t try to argue: there was nothing to argue about. One or the other of them was going to take his chances with the sponge, and Daniel Leary would make that decision.
Had
made that decision.
The water in the pool circulated clockwise, driven by slow strokes of the sponge’s tentacles, but the surface remained a mirror to the eye. Daniel could see the bottom here in the shallow end, though the water itself was dark and the muck was smooth except where something—a twig or in one case what looked very much like a surgical pin of stainless steel—stuck out of it.
A worm-shaped animal the length of Daniel’s thumb writhed into view, then vanished again beneath dead fronds from the plants in pots on the Manor’s porch roof. The creature had scores of tiny legs and a pair of mandibles half the length of its stubby body.
Hogg rose, holding the controller in one hand and the lure in the other. The filament that connected them was a ghost in the sunlight. It coiled itself on a reel in the controller when the lure came out of the water.
“Suit yourself,” Hogg said with bad grace. “If it was me doing it, though, I’d lob in a grenade first.”
“That would divide the sponge into bits,” Daniel said, “without killing them. It would make the pool into the equivalent of a bath in acid for any animal life, unless the lure works. If the lure does work, then the grenade wasn’t necessary. And it
will
work.”
“I said what I said,” Hogg muttered, but he wasn’t really arguing.
Daniel couldn’t imagine why the trick with the lure wouldn’t work. Even if things went wrong, the Kiesches would get him out before he was devoured and the Medicomp in the ship would take care of the stings.
It’s going to work fine!
As soon as Daniel and his crew had arrived, loafers on the plaza had begun drifting over to see what was going on. Now more civilians joined the spectators, some of them people who had been crossing the plaza but also guests from the hotel portion of the Manor and staff members from government offices on the ground floor.
Daniel hadn’t paid much attention to the audience. Logically he had nothing—well, almost nothing—to worry about, but millions of years of instinct told his nervous system otherwise. Then Adele called, “Good morning, Captain Monfiore,” and Daniel looked away from the surface of the pool.
“Giorgi!” he said. “Say, you must have made good time.”
Hogg placed the lure against Daniel’s chest and covered it with a length of cargo tape. The tape could be removed easily with alcohol, though it would leave a red patch that itched like a case of hives. That was inconsequential against what might happen if the lure didn’t stay in touch with his bare skin, masking Daniel’s own electronic signature.
“When we get an offer like yours,” the young Ischian said, “we make the best time we can. And I’m here as a representative of the planet, not just the Monfiores. Though other clans will be sending their own negotiators shortly, you can count on that.”
Monfiore shook his head with an expression of amazement. “Daniel,” he said, “you’ve saved Ischia. There’ll be a statue to you in every clan capital on the planet, I swear it. And any help I can give you myself, well, just let me know.”
“You and Ischia generally have already helped a great deal,” Daniel said. “And believe me, you’re going to earn whatever haulage fees you work out with Commissioner Arnaud. But you’ll have to forgive me for the moment, because I have to clean up a little job right now.”
Hogg had finished cross-taping the lure. He stepped away, looking at the readout on the controller. His face was stony.
“What are you … ?” Monfiore said, looking down into the pool between himself and Daniel. He blurted, “By all heaven, Leary! Is that a firepot? I’ve never seen one that big! And what’s it doing here anyway?”
“That’s what I’m going to learn,” Daniel said. “I think that a spacer named Captain Pearl brought it from Ischia, and I hope to learn that he brought something else with it.”
Cleveland and Graves, the only civilians who knew what Daniel was about, waited patiently. It was a credit to their philosophy that they showed no signs of impatience.
Though surely they must
feel
impatience?
“Wait!” Monfiore said. “Daniel, you’re not thinking of getting in there, are you? Those pants won’t be any protection if the firepot grabs you, and one that size, well, I wouldn’t doubt if its tentacles could reach the whole length of this pond. You don’t know what the stings feel like, but trust me, it’s worse than you can possibly imagine.”
“I’ll be all right, Giorgi,” Daniel said. “The sponge, the firepot, will think I’m one of its cleaner lice, that’s all. The trousers are for other things that might take a nip out of me. I’ll risk losing a finger, but there’s parts I won’t risk.”
Daniel was impatient, however well the Transformationists were handling the delay. He sat on the lip of the pool and looked up at Hogg. “Ready, Hogg?” he said.
“I’m ready,” Hogg said. “And you’re as pigheaded as any man born. Except that pigs is really pretty smart, and you bloody well aren’t!”
“Daniel, please,” Monfiore said. “I was stung by a firepot when I was clamming, no bigger than my little finger, so I didn’t see it when I reached down to clear the scoop. I was in bed for a month!”
He started to come around the pool, but he had fifteen feet to go and one of the Kiesches would stop him if necessary. They didn’t know what Six was doing, but they knew that no civilian was going to keep him from doing it while his spacers were alive.
Daniel slid into the pool. Trickles dribbled down into his boots before the water really penetrated the fabric of his trousers. It was much colder than he had expected. He wondered what the rate of flow of the spring feeding the pool was.
His feet squished onto the bottom, lifting the muck. The current was too slight for Daniel to notice a direction in the way the cloud spread. He didn’t move for a moment, waiting to see how the sponge would react.
There was no reaction. Despite Monfiore’s warning, Daniel doubted whether the creature’s tentacles could reach him here; the handbook on Ischian natural history which Adele had found said that the tentacles rarely were longer than the firepot’s body. The specimen here was probably larger—and much older—than the creatures got on their world of origin where they faced predators; but even so.
Daniel moved forward by slow steps. He’d be in over his head shortly, but he preferred to walk for as long as he could, hoping to make less disturbance that way.
The water on his bare torso was startling at first, but as expected Daniel didn’t notice it after the first few moments. That was one of the reasons why he hadn’t gone straight into the deep end where the sponge was attached, though that would have been the least disturbing way of getting there.
Entering at the deep end would also mean that his first contact with the sponge would be full-body. That seemed an even better reason to move up slowly.
Weed rooted in the bottom trailed across Daniel’s skin. The leaves were fan-shaped but so thin that he hadn’t noticed them when he looked into the water from above. They were being browsed by inch-long creatures—worms? larvae?—wearing cases glued together from bits of debris. They must be why the weed hadn’t completely choked the pool, since the sponge wasn’t a browser.
“Hey!” cried an onlooker. “Hey, get that feller outa there! There’s a thing in the end that’ll eat him alive, and I don’t mean maybe!”
“Shut up, ye bloody fool!” Woetjans said. “Six knows what he’s doing!”
I wonder if the weed and the insects are native to Corcyra?
It was a less disturbing subject to consider than wondering whether tentacles were going to grip his waist and snatch him into excruciating pain.
The Medicomp won’t help if I die of anaphylactic shock before they get me to the ship
.
Daniel’s next step put his chin into the water. He bobbed up and stroked forward easily with both arms. The trousers were a drag, and he wasn’t kicking his booted feet, but his arms would support him well enough for the few yards he had to go.
Something trailed across Daniel’s bare belly. It had been a tentacle, six feet long at least. The natural history database had been wrong, or at least it wasn’t correct for Ischian firepots transplanted to Corcyra.
The tentacle had brushed him instead of grabbing, and the stingers which covered the sponge’s arms as well as all other portions of its exterior skin had not come out. The tentacle had simply been moving the water to bring food toward the creature’s maw.
Daniel took a deep breath. Another tentacle danced over his skin, trailing from his right shoulder to his left. It felt like the caress of an insect’s wing.
He ducked under water. The sponge was a mass of pink and brown as big around as a washtub. The dark water muted its colors, but that filter blurred everything else to make the sponge stand out sharply.
The creature was attached to the end of the pool. Daniel extended his right hand to feel the wall. The body of the sponge felt like a half-full wine sack against the inside of his arm. His fingertips touched a hard, slick surface, the pool’s plasticized end wall. The long side nearest the Manor was natural stone through which ground water percolated.
Daniel pushed hard at the sponge, his mind disconnected from knowledge of the thousands of fiery cilia he was trying to squeeze out of his way. He touched a latch, but that took the last of his breath. He surfaced with a splash and a loud gasp, his eyes shut.
“Six! You all right!” Woetjans bellowed. Other Kiesches were shouting a mélange of similar things.
“It’s fine!” Daniel said and almost splashed under again. “I’m fine. I think I’ve found it.”
He took three deep breaths in sequence. He didn’t try to answer questions as he trod water. With his lungs full, he ducked under again.
Daniel knew where to go this time and thrust down with both hands. The sponge’s body resisted like a roll of rubber matting, flexible but too massive to be easily moved.
Cleaner lice the size of his thumbnail crawled onto his arm. His skin prickled as they nipped off hairs—dead protein.
Daniel gripped the latch lever and tried to pivot it downward. The tentacles touched him, trying to shove him away the way they would have done a floating log. The sponge was a communal entity which had no central nervous system, let alone a brain. Nevertheless, the species’ responses had allowed it to survive since the appearance of multicelled life on Ischia.
If the tentacles rip the lure off my chest
… Daniel thought.
