The Sea Without a Shore - eARC

by David Drake

  Adele’s tiny grin would have puzzled anyone—anyone but Tovera—who knew the thought behind it.

  “I’ve been shot at before,” Bourbon said. “Can somebody find a gun for me?”

  “No,” said Adele. “You didn’t carry a gun when you left for Karst, so you shouldn’t have one now.”

  Adele took the pistol from her pocket, then tossed her tunic onto the bunk. Angelotti held out the red garment. Adele put it on and transferred the pistol. Since she had kept her own trousers, she still had the personal data unit.

  The lieutenant was slightly plumper than Adele and had larger breasts, but the exchange—in this direction—would go unremarked. It would probably go unremarked aboard the Kiesche also, at least until the present business was over.

  “Wait, what is happening?” Almer said. He was standing and had lost his appearance of fashionable delicacy. “I’m not a soldier! Problems inside the Garrison are nothing to me!”

  “Be quiet,” Adele said. “We need all three hostages or they’ll wonder.”

  “Four,” said Tovera. “Lieutenant Angelotti’s secretary is coming.”

  Adele looked at her. Tovera hadn’t asked a question, but Adele was in charge of the operation and would make the important decisions.

  “Yes, she should go,” Daniel said. He met Adele’s eyes. “Nobody looks twice at her.”

  “Yes, all right,” Adele said. She put on the billed cap prescribed for Dress/Casual uniforms in the Pantellarian—and now Corcyran—navy. The original badge, a silver double-headed wolf, had been replaced by crossed pickaxes, rather crudely embroidered.

  She, Daniel and Tovera had just carried out a complex negotiation in fewer words than many people required to decide what to have for lunch. Dealing with people wasn’t difficult, so long as all parties were smart and decisive.

  “Look, you have three now with her!” Almer said, reaching toward Tovera. Possibly he intended to grab her sleeve.

  Cazelet, who had entered the bridge from the hold, stepped between them and shoved Almer back. “Give me your hat and tunic, Almer,” he said. “Adele, I’m taller but I’ll pass.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Adele said. She wasn’t angry about Almer’s behavior—that was a problem for Mistress Tibbs to deal with—but someone on or beyond the verge of panic was dangerous to have with you in a situation like the one shaping up.

  Daniel had set the main display to a real-time view of the land side of the harbor. An armored personnel carrier lifted from the Plaza and skimmed down Central Street toward the water. It was the less spavined one of the pair which had flown the Garrison delegation to Pearl Valley.

  Despite being in better condition than its consort, the APC stayed low enough to be in ground effect most of the way. Pedestrians jumped or, less wisely, flattened themselves on the pavement. Adele didn’t see anyone actually crushed, but that obviously hadn’t been a matter of concern to the Garrison driver.

  “Sir, we can open the main hatch whenever you’re ready,” Vesey said. She had seated herself at the back of the console, the place Adele had given up. Daniel’s couch was empty.

  “Right,” said Daniel. “Give me a moment to sort things with the crew. We don’t want anybody shooting from here.”

  “They’d probably miss us,” said Tovera.

  Adele smiled; Daniel laughed and clapped Tovera lightly on the shoulder as he strode past. It was the first time Adele remembered Daniel treating her servant as anything but a dangerous pet.

  “All right, listen!” Daniel said as the keyed-up spacers backed to make room for him. Adele and Tovera followed with Cazelet and Bourbon behind them. “Any of you have guns, put’em down right now! When the time comes, we’ll go out and sort things with the wogs. We don’t need bloody guns to do that, do we?”

  No/Hell no/We sure bloody don’t!

  “So we’re all going to move back in the hold, out of sight,” Daniel said. “I’ll tell you when we go for ’em. And can somebody find me a nice length of pipe?”

  “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 unguessibly many landings by now.

  Unguessibly, 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 sub-machine 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 sub-machine 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 a
nd 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 snaps 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 anti-ship 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 lock-out 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 t
he 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.”