The Sea Without a Shore - eARC

by David Drake

  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 non-emergency, 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 bean-bag. 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 can’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.

  They didn’t actually flip—which might have been survivable in the soft mud or might not—because the passengers, even Hogg, instinctively threw their weight to the high side. The base welds of three struts cracked and the fencing sagged down, but the vehicle came to a halt. Everyone was still safe aboard, albeit in a cursing pile on the back deck.

  Evans pushed his way off the bottom of the pile and dropped to the ground, his face red. Daniel had brought both power room techs back with him, leaving most of the riggers to follow on a later run.

  “I’ll strangle the whore!” Evans snarled, his voice choked with fury. He was very possibly the strongest person in the crew, squat where Woetjans was rangy, and solid bone and muscle from his toes to the top of his bald head.

  Before Daniel could intervene—Evans didn’t have the intellect to come up with a threat he didn’t mean to carry out—Hogg put a hand on the big technician’s shoulder. “C’mon, Curly,” he said. “You and me, we got better uses for a woman that that, don’t we? Anyway, the Mistress needs us on the ship right now, and I sure don’t want to disappoint her.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Evans said. “Bloody hell, I shoulda remembered that. Thanks, Hogg.”

  “Hogg surprised me,” Vesey said quietly as she and Daniel followed the others up the boarding ramp. “I thought he was angry also.”

  “I suspect he was,” Daniel said. “But Hogg isn’t going to do anything because he’s out of control. He knows that killing a Pantellarian driver would cause all sorts of trouble for me, so he made sure that Evans kept his mind on business too.”

  “I believe we could have finessed the driver,” Vesey said, deadpan.

  Daniel was still laughing as he entered the Kiesche behind her.

  He seated himself at the command console. It was already live with the display which Adele had prepared for him.

  The Madison Merchant, Captain Sorley commanding, had landed in Brotherhood Harbor two days ago; forty-nine hours now, to be as precise as Adele always was. The ship had lifted off again seven hours later without listing a destination and indeed, without more than cursory notice to Brotherhood Control that she was lifting.

  Which I suspect is true for at least half the ships landing on Corcyra, Daniel thought with a smile. Blockade runners and tramp freighters generally were crewed by people who ignored rules which weren’t backed by potential force. Corcyra didn’t have guard ships in orbit.

  Daniel smiled even more broadly. The controllers on the ground here weren’t going to get bent out of shape about such details either. So long as duties were paid on cargo coming or going—there hadn’t been time for the Madison Merchant to shift cargo—it was no skin off the nose of Brotherhood Control if ships managed to collide because a couple cowboys had chosen to lift off at the same moment. A part of Daniel preferred that attitude to the care with which he himself entered and left harbor.

  A starship’s astrogation console automatically dumped its log to the port computer on landing. That default could be circumvented or even faked, but Sorley hadn’t had any reason to do so—if he or anybody aboard his rustbucket even had the skills. Daniel wasn’t sure he could have reprogrammed the log himself.

  Adele had highlighted the data. Dace had been the most recent landfall before the Madison Merchant reached Corcyra. The Garden was a typical waystation for ships approaching the Ribbon Stars from the Galactic East, so it would have been on Sorley’s course from Cinnabar.

  Daniel switched to the command channel. With the pumps running and all the Kiesche’s other systems in readiness for liftoff, there was too much noise to trust unaided voice.

  “Vesey,” he said, “plot a course for Dace. Figure an hour, but I plan to lift as soon as everybody’s aboard.”

  Cory and Cazelet should arrive within minutes with the remainder of the crew which had been on duty at the construction sites. Woetjans with Dasi and Barnes, her two strikers, had gone into Hablinger to pick up the off-duty personnel.

  No former Sissie was going to deliberately miss a recall signal, but there was a decent chance that some of them were going to be blind drunk or dead drunk. Spacers who couldn’t remember their own name or who weren’t hearing anything except the cymbals being clashed by the cherubs in their skulls might not react as quickly as they wo
uld wish the next morning when they had sobered up.

  Woetjans and the bosun’s mates could carry them back unconscious or, if necessary, knock them unconscious and carry them back. An hour was plenty of time to get everybody aboard, though it might be a day before some of them were really up to speed.

  Adele highlighted a separate batch of data. The context wasn’t immediately clear to Daniel, so at first glance it meant nothing.

  “I searched all the files in Brotherhood for mentions of the Madison Merchant or any of its officers,” Adele explained on a two-way link. “As soon as the ship landed, Sorley checked with every chandlery in the port to find a reaction mass pump.”

  She spoke matter-of-factly, as though anybody could have combed every database in a city five hundred miles away—in less than an hour, since Adele wouldn’t have started searching until after she had alerted Daniel. Of course, I’ve seen people blink when I tell them that I’ve shaved days off a plotted course by going out on the hull to keep an eye on conditions in the Matrix.

  “And didn’t have any luck, I’d guess,” Daniel said. When the ships in Hablinger Pool had dropped into the muck, they’d burned out more pumps than there were replacements on all Corcyra.

  “That’s correct,” Adele said. “Chowdry Sons offered to adapt a bilge pump taken from a surface barge; which seems odd, but Sorley had arranged to look at it later in the afternoon. The Madison Merchant took off before the meeting was to take place.”

  “Adapting a bilge pump is rather a clever notion,” Daniel said. I’ll have to drop in on Chowdry Sons when next I’m in Brotherhood. There wouldn’t be any real purpose in seeing the ship chandlers, but meeting clever people was never a waste of time. “If you can seal it properly, which would be difficult.”

  Probably much more difficult that Captain Sorley realized, but that wasn’t the real question because Sorley hadn’t bought the unit. The Madison Merchant had lifted with a pump which had been failing when Daniel glanced over the tramp on Cinnabar.