by David Drake
“Kiesche, this is Six,” Daniel said through the console. “Wait one, over.”
“Ship, this is Five,” said Vesey on the general push. “Action stations.”
The crew was already at action stations, to the degree there was anything of the sort on a tramp freighter. Personnel who had no duties on lift-off were in their bunks gripping sidearms and such other weapons as they fancied.
The hatch was closed. The ship groaned as Pasternak began reeling up the intake hose. It had been drawing water from the harbor to replenish the reaction mass which the idling thrusters converted into plasma while the Kiesche waited in her slip.
On a whim, Adele expanded the image of the Hablinger region on her display instead of returning to communications duties. Anything critical would appear as a text crawl at the bottom of her display.
I’m more worried than I realized. Worried about Daniel.
She was using light amplification with enhanced contrast rather than thermal imaging. The River Cephisis was a brown glitter curving back and forth through paddies which were a mixture of black and green. During the day a shadow bordered the levee on the side away from the sun, but now before dawn the high earthen banks blended into the fields below.
The hundred feet of channel nearest the Pantellarian lines swelled like the surface of a swamp when a bubble rises through it. The swelling burst outward. Its center dimpled down into a crater, but ripples continued to spread. The initial wavefront must have been twenty feet high as it coursed across the soft ground. All it left behind was a flat of mud which continued to tremble.
The river drained with the steady swiftness of sunrise, eating away the ends of the severed levees in its tumbling rush. The silt which had built the bottom of the channel a dozen feet above the plain had no mechanical strength to resist the powerful flow. The blast had homogenized all the soil in the path of the shockwave, but the sheet of water spread a luster over it.
“Is Six all right?” Vesey said. “Were they clear? I didn’t know what that was going to do!”
Adele raised her display’s magnification. For a moment she couldn’t find the truck which held the command group—
I didn’t know what the blast was going to do either!
—but then she cued the console to highlight movement. There was the truck, still right-side up and racing directly away from the Cephisis. Adele would have had to raise magnification further to be sure that Daniel was still in the vehicle, but for now she could assume he was safe.
The truck had been a mile from the charge and inside one of the channel’s slow curves. As it expanded the explosion crater, the shockwave liquefied several miles of levee. A suspension of mud and water slumped onto the plain. Instead of providing shelter, the earthen walls had almost flowed over the truck and buried it.
The miners had used the same explosive that they did to shatter rock: ammonium nitrate doped with fuel oil to sensitize it. They had said that it was perfectly safe, and Daniel had calmly agreed.
In checking Adele found that the farmers in the Delta used the same material as fertilizer. At some level, she seemed to have assumed that the explosion wouldn’t be very impressive.
The detonation of tens of tons of ammonium nitrate was impressive. In this finely divided silt, the devastation looked like the result of a meteor strike.
Strongpoint 3 had vanished. The earth had opened, not in a crack but by losing cohesion. It had sucked in the troops Adele had deluded a few days earlier.
She thought about the peasants Hogg had spared in the listening post. If they had gone back to the same duty, they were dead now; if not, their replacements were dead.
Everyone dies. I will die.
South of the Pantellarian positions, pink tubes of structural plastic rolled to the surface of the mud and rolled back under again—the linings of the dugouts of independence forces. The troops within a mile of the explosion had been withdrawn, but Adele suspected not even the miners themselves had guessed how far the effect of the blast would travel through the rice paddies.
Troops who had climbed out of their dugouts as they’d been warned to do would probably be all right: they might have been flung high in the air, but they would come down on a surface more yielding that an air cushion. Those who had remained under cover would at best have been battered against the inside of the dugouts and would probably have been buried as well.
Everyone dies.
“Look! Look!” Vesey said. “They did it! Captain Leary did it!”
Rather than try to guess what Vesey was talking about, Adele mirrored the command display on the left half of her own. Vesey was focused on Hablinger Pool, the shallow impoundment north of the town. It was the harbor for the Delta, holding at present four freighters similar to those in Brotherhood as well as the six Pantellarian destroyers.
The water had drained back from the pool, and the ships floating there had dropped into the mud. Into the quicksand, more accurately. They fell so suddenly that the muck flowed into any open hatch that dove into it. Unlike water, the mud clung to surfaces, holding the vessels down and continuing to pour into their hulls.
Even as Adele watched, a destroyer rolled onto its side when its starboard pontoon had filled and continued to sink, dragging the ship with it. The crew must have removed access plates so that they could work on the float’s interior.
Another destroyer was stern-down, and none of them looked quite right as they rested on the quivering brown surface. Humans were crawling out of hatches, but they had nowhere to go: the boarding bridges had sunk when the earthshock lifted and dropped them.
“Even the ones that aren’t sinking will have clogged their thrusters, let alone the throats of their High Drives!” Vesey crowed. Adele didn’t remember her ever before sounding so excited. “And if their pumps were on, they’ve blown out or burned out from trying to suck mud into their tanks. It’d take the Sissie a week to repair damage like that! And these are Pantellarians, not RCN!”
“Then,” said Adele, suddenly relaxed, “it’s time for me to act.”
She keyed two separate switches, the electronic equivalent of a caged mechanical control. There was no real likelihood that Adele would throw a switch unintentionally, but she was a librarian: she preferred not to take chances, even when they weren’t really chances.
“Commissioner Arnaud, this is Lady Mundy,” she said. “I am speaking on behalf of Independent Corcyra.”
Her words were being reproduced through the Pantellarian emergency net on every audio or text device in Hablinger. Arnaud was not being given the choice of keeping this ultimatum a secret from his personnel, though he probably wouldn’t realize that until after Adele was done.
“Independent Corcyra offers you and all personnel of the Pantellarian Expeditionary Force the opportunity to surrender on honorable terms and to be repatriated to Pantellaria,” Adele said.
The console speaker relayed her words to everyone aboard the Kiesche. Cory was sending an alert to independence forces in Brotherhood, and the Freccia was lighting her thrusters. Captain Samona had brought all his personnel aboard during the night, but he had obeyed Daniel’s orders not to take visible actions which could warn Arnaud.
“You have twelve hours to accept this offer,” Adele said. “After that time, independence forces will resume actions to remove the invaders from Corcyra.”
She paused, then said, “I must warn you that the additional mines placed under Pantellarian positions have anti-tamper devices. If you attempt to remove them, you will cause the loss of life which we in the Independence Coalition hope to avoid. It would be a pity to kill thousands of people, many of them civilians, on the verge of a peaceful resolution.”
Adele broke the signal and leaned back on the couch with her eyes closed. It was a moment before she understood that the crew of the Kiesche was cheering.
Cheering her and Daniel.
CHAPTER 26
Outside Hablinger on Corcyra
Adele was familiar with th
e odor of swamps. She had landed on many swampy locations since she began accompanying Daniel Leary; and indeed, Bantry’s marshes—the water flowed there, although slowly—were a very similar environment. The smell of this warm, wet air circulating through the Kiesche’s open hatches was unique in her experience, however.
It wasn’t uniquely bad, exactly—though when Adele actually thought about the stench, it was pretty bad—but it was certainly unique. She hadn’t particularly noticed it when they landed six hours ago, but it had become more insistent now that the sun was down. It probably had to do with the way the explosion had stirred and homogenized the soil.
“They’ve stabilized the Borea by lashing her to the Nembo and a freighter, so she isn’t going to sink completely after all,” said Cory from the command couch. “I wouldn’t bet she could be made serviceable again, though, at least not economically.”
Cory was watch officer tonight, so he was helping Adele sort Pantellarian communications. His expertise made him ideal to monitor the destroyer squadron and the Pantellarian naval presence generally. Vesey’s enthusiastic certainty that Admiral Stasi’s ships would be out of action for a week or longer appeared to have been correct based on the discussions Cory was reporting.
“The army is dealing with rescue and damage control,” Adele said from her usual place at the console’s rear position. “I don’t see any signs that an attack is planned. And they’ve evacuated the remaining strongpoints.”
“I wouldn’t have thought there was much damage that you could repair,” Cory said as he sorted. He—and Cazelet when he was present—worked as though they were Adele’s separate limbs, doing what she requested with skill and flair. Though not as yet—she smiled minusculy—as much skill and flair as their teacher.
“The blast shook down houses in Hablinger,” Adele said. “They’re digging people out and lifting walls where they can, where the sheathing kept the walls together. I’m afraid there are many dead. Another blast could level most of Hablinger.”
The only discussion of Adele’s claim that there were other mines was between high officers, but the garrisons of the remaining strongpoints had begun dribbling back into the city as soon as they learned that Point 3 had vanished. By the time Pantellarian headquarters put out a formal recall, the outlying posts were already abandoned.
“Are there more mines?” Cory said. “Though I don’t think they’d be necessary. The Navy at least will mutiny if Arnaud doesn’t accept the offer.”
“No,” said Adele as she continued to cascade data down her display. “I suppose they could be placed easily enough if they were needed. The miners might have to use other techniques as a result of what the first explosion did to the ground, but I presume Brother Graves would be equal to the challenge.”
She had access to everything except Commissioner Arnaud’s own communications. Unless he had been killed—unlikely, because someone else would have mentioned it—Arnaud was using couriers and handwritten messages. Or he could be sitting in his trailer in a circle of empty bottles, but his subordinates would probably have been discussing that on the communications net.
The hatch between the bridge and the hold was open, but Barnes rapped on the jamb instead of entering. The rigger was in charge of the four guards at the main hatch.
“Ma’am?” he said, frowning. “There’s a guy here to see you. He says he’s an envoy from the wogs. The ones we’re fighting, I mean. He don’t have a gun.”
Now Adele frowned. There hadn’t been anything in official communications about peace emissaries, though quite a number of Pantellarian personnel had been discussing surrender among themselves.
“Send him to Captain Leary,” Adele said. Daniel was in the headquarters complex. Brother Graves and his team of miners and Transformationists had quickly created a hamlet of barracks and meeting rooms from the plastic sheeting which the Kiesche had brought on her hop from Brotherhood. “No, escort him to the headquarters. Or—”
She wasn’t usually indecisive, but this situation was unexpected. There wasn’t a hint of this in the communications traffic. Perhaps she—
“Ma’am,” Barnes said, “he says it’s you he wants, not Six. That’s why the perimeter guards brought him here. He’s just a sergeant, ma’am.”
“I’ll see,” Tovera said. She held her sub-machine gun. “If he’s planning to kill you, will you want to question him before I finish him off?”
“Yes,” said Adele. That was a Pantellarian response she hadn’t considered. Though surely an assassin would be even more interested than a peace envoy in seeing Daniel rather than her?
Tovera slipped out. Barnes stood in the hatchway, holding his impeller crossways in front of him like a quarterstaff.
Adele smiled faintly as she rose to her feet. Barnes couldn’t have been really worried that a killer would overcome Tovera, but the Sissies didn’t take chances with the safety of the Mistress.
A moment later Tovera said, “It’s all right, Barnes,” and the rigger moved to the side. Tovera entered, still holding the sub-machine gun but now smiling. Behind her was a middle-aged man in rumpled, muddy Pantellarian utilities. The blouse bore no nametag.
“I didn’t expect you, Commissioner Arnaud,” Adele said, taking her hand out of her tunic pocket.
“The fox never had a better messenger than himself,” Arnaud said with a shrug. It was probably a Pantellarian proverb. “You and I began this discussion, so I would prefer to resume it with you before I meet with Captain Leary.”
“With the Independence Council,” Adele said.
“Piffle!” Arnaud said. The anger he let out in the word showed what was really going on beneath his calm. “If I had no one to deal with but the Corcyrans, I wouldn’t be here now. I’m here to talk with you and then Leary, and the rest can go hang!”
Adele considered the situation. “I take your point,” she said. She gestured to a jumpseat and said, “Sit down, please. I’m glad to have a chance to discuss matters with you before you say something in public which might cause you embarrassment.”
“I’ll leave,” said Cory, rising from the command console.
“Please sit down, Master Cory,” Adele said, though she wasn’t sure she was making the correct decision. “You’re on duty. While I don’t have anywhere else suitable to talk with the Commissioner, I think you’re safe with anything you might hear.”
Arnaud shrugged again and sat carefully on the jumpseat. “You’re setting the terms,” he said. He sounded calm, but Adele thought she heard his voice tremble under the surface.
To get the basic pint out of the way immeiately, Adele said, “Evidence in your personal console will show that you were a Cinnabar agent while Cinnabar was at war with the Alliance of Free Stars. You communicated with your handlers through Bantry Holdings. Furthermore, it will show that you conspired with Captain Leary to betray your force on Corcyra to Captain Leary. The signal detonating the mine which stranded your squadron was sent from the network computer in your headquarters.”
Unexpectedly, Commissioner Arnaud laughed. “I assumed there would something of the sort when I realized who you were,” he said. “Which I didn’t do until you made the surrender demand in your own name this morning, unfortunately. And I’ll admit that I didn’t expect quite so elaborate a frame-up, though I suppose I should have done.”
He shook his head, then showed another flash of anger as he snarled, “You must think I’m a complete fool, milady!”
Cory was back on his couch, focused so rigidly on his display that he might have been shot and stuffed. He seemed embarrassed to be listening, but it really was the only option.
“I told you…,” Adele said. “That you hadn’t realized what you were doing when you brought Captain Leary into your war. Captain Leary travels with a staff.”
“I understand, now that it’s too late,” Arnaud said. His eyes had drifted to a corner of the floor. He looked up and said sharply, “I understand that I was particularly a fool to threaten Captain
Leary, wasn’t I? Would he have helped me if I’d come to him in a different fashion?”
Daniel didn’t even know about the threat, Adele thought. Aloud she said, “Your situation would not have been worse if you’d approached Captain Leary as a friend. I don’t know that he would have agreed to help you even then, however.”
“My situation couldn’t be worse,” Arnaud snapped. “I came here to ask for asylum on Cinnabar. I’ll be hanged if I go back to Pantellaria, regardless of any treason you’ve invented for me.”
He suddenly grinned in a return to good humor. “By the way,” he said. “You won’t find any evidence on the console in my trailer. Before I started here tonight, I set off a thermite grenade inside it. I didn’t know what you had done to it, Lady Mundy, but I realized you’d done something.”
“There was evidence elsewhere, of course,” Adele said, getting to her feet again. “But you’ve convinced me that you’re not a fool, Commissioner.”
She coughed; Arnaud stood up also, looking tensely hopeful. Adele said, “I’ll take to you to Captain Leary, now. He’s been considering the situation following the end of the war. You may learn something to your advantage.”
Tovera gestured Arnaud to the hatch. She had holstered her sub-machine gun again, which was more a comment on her state of mind than on how quickly she could react to danger.
“Six says he’s not a politician,” Tovera said. “But he’s lying.”
She laughed, a cackle that might have come from a peevish reptile.
***
Daniel awakened in his hammock. He didn’t know where he was—neither what planet he was on or what he was doing there. Here.
“Daniel?” said Adele’s voice, bringing him fully alert and back to his present in the conference room where he had slung a hammock instead of returning to his cubicle aboard the Kiesche.
“Hang on,” said Hogg. His feet slapped the floor, which sheeting like the walls and roof.