The Sea Without a Shore

by David Drake

  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.”

  Cazelet’s family had owned a medium-sized shipping line before they were killed and their property expropriated by the Alliance bureaucracy. Cory’s father was the largest paving contractor on Florentine, his homeworld. Daniel himself couldn’t have chosen better business advisors than those two, save for his sister, Deirdre.

  “Oh, I don’t question that it’s a fair deal,” Daniel said. “I just don’t like to see Karst getting the profit after the way they treated a Cinnabar envoy a few years ago.”

  He let his smile spread as he looked down toward the harbor. Three freighters similar to the Kiesche were loading copper. One was anchored at a buoy in midwater; her crew was bringing the ingots aboard from the barge moored alongside. A backbreaking job… .

  “I recall the incident,” Adele said. Her voice was as cool and measured as if she hadn’t herself been present on Karst when young Headman Hieronymos insulted a Cinnabar senator and refused to renew Karst’s long and friendly association with the Republic. “That said, Hieronymos is dead. The reason the contract is in place is that you rescued the envoys so that the arrangements could be finalized.”

  “One step at a time, Adele,” Daniel said. “Now that we’ve reformed the Independence Council into a body which actually wants to win the war, we can refine the means by which we achieve that.”

  Adele continued to look at him. “There are those in Xenos,” she said, “who would be pleased to hear that the strongly pro-Cinnabar government of Pantellaria has recovered Corcyra from the pro-Alliance exiles who had taken power there.”

  Daniel laughed and met her eyes. “Those are political considerations,” he said, “and I leave them for politicians. We’re on Corcyra to enable Rikard Cleveland to recover the treasure which he believes is buried here. I continue to think that a Corcyran victory is the best way to create conditions in which that will be possible. I would just like to achieve that—”

  His smile remained broad, but he felt the muscles of his face tighten.

  “—without bringing economic benefit to Karst.”

  Adele watched him without replying. Something was going on behind her eyes, but it didn’t leave readable signs on her face.

  “I know that the Senate is willing to leave Karst be,” Daniel said. “Even Senator Forbes is.”

  “Senator Forbes may be more willing to forgive the insult she received as envoy to Karst,” said Adele, “because that was the start of the sequence that led to her becoming Defense Minister. And led to the assassination of Headman Hieronymos, of course, but I believe that the Senator is too much of a politician to care about revenge for its own sake.”

  “The junta which killed Hieronymos and took power in Karst,” said Daniel harshly, “includes the advisors who convinced the boy to break with Cinnabar in the first place. The fact that they’re fawning on the Republic now doesn’t make me forget the way they insulted us in the past. You see—”

  He grinned, restored to good humor by the thought.

  “You see better than most, I suspect. You see that they not only insulted a Cinnabar envoy, they tried to humiliate a Leary. The Senate does as it deems politic, but a Leary takes care of his own honor.”

  “Understood,” Adele said with her usual lack of emotion. Daniel read amusement in her blankness, however.

  She pursed her lips and said, “Daniel, while we were still on Cinnabar I was given commissions—I won’t say assignments—which go beyond our private agreement with the Sand family.”

  Daniel shrugged. Of course Adele was involved in other matters. She was too valuable to the Republic not to be tasked with additional duties.

  “Go on,” he said aloud.

  “It is possible,” said Adele, “that at some point our purposes will conflict.”

  Daniel pressed his fingers against the stone bench; he didn’t drum them, just let his conscious mind focus on the moss-cushioned roughness.

  “If that should happen,” he said carefully, turning to meet Adele’s eyes again, “you will inform me that there is a conflict. I will decide on a further course of action then. At this moment, I would expect to trust your judgment and honor, and therefore I would defer to you.”

  She nodded crisply.

  “And now,” Daniel said, rising to his feet, “I will meet with Colonel Bourbon in the Manor. Would you care to come along?”

  “Lieutenant Cory says the Kiesche has received a message which he’d like to show to me,” Adele said as she put away her data unit. “I’m going back to the ship. I’ll keep you informed as developments require.”

  Which was something less than “I’ll keep you informed of developments,” Daniel realized as they started up the stairs. But there were many aspects of Adele’s business on which he preferred to remain ignorant.

  * * *

  Adele entered the Kiesche’s bridge, expecting to find Cory, the duty officer, sitting at the command console and no one else in the compartment unless a spacer was asleep in a bunk. The crew had performed without a real break since the ship lifted from Xenos, and Daniel believed in granting liberty to as great a degree as he could.

  Cory and Cazelet stood beside the console, facing the hatchway. When Adele stepped through, they braced to attention.

  “Ma’am!” said Cory. “I asked Master Cazelet for some help with this, but the responsibility is mine.”

  “Very well, Cory,” Adele said. “Please explain the situation.”

  She sat at one of the jumpseats and accessed the console through her personal data unit. She was certainly interested in what Cory had to say, but she had found that an individual’s explanations were mainly valuable in illuminating the hard data which was an approximation of truth.

  “The Kiesche received a message in an unfamiliar code,” Cory said, still standing at attention. “It was addressed to Shipping Representative, Bantry Holdings. I asked Master Cazelet to take a look at it while I checked the source of the communication.”

  “Because I had been in the shipping business,” Cazelet said. They were both very tense. “I recognized it as a standard Pantellarian shipping code, keyed to the date of the first message in the series. Knowing that and the fact it was Pantellarian, it was easy enough to run it back till the contents stopped being garbage.”

  “Yes,” said Adele. An astrogation computer could handle brute-force computations like that in a heartbeat. Even without knowing that the key was in the Pantellarian calendar, the delay i
n reading would be insignificant. It was, after all, a shipping code meant to conceal arrival and pricing information from trade rivals for a few days.

  “Did you read the communication?” Adele asked, her eyes on the decoded message on her display. She spoke mildly.

  “Ma’am, we didn’t,” Cory said. “We just saw enough to know that it was none of our business.”

  “Umm,” said Adele. “You couldn’t be faulted if you had read it, it seems to me. But you’re probably better off not having done so.”

  “We weren’t sure whether it should go to Six or to you, Adele,” Cazelet said. “I said that since you had carried the Bantry Holdings authorization to the negotiations on Ischia, we’d start with you and you’d take it to Captain Leary if he was the correct recipient.”

  “Ma’am,” Cory said, “the origination of the message was Pantellarian HQ in Hablinger. The sender tried to disguise it, but he wasn’t very good.”

  “I think one can take as a given,” Adele said, feeling the humor of the situation, “that someone who uses a commercial code that’s at least twenty standard years old—”

  The inception date of the series.

  “—isn’t an expert in cyber security.”

  The code was probably the one that the Arnaud and Leary businesses had used to communicate from the beginning. When Pantellaria had joined—had been joined to—the Alliance of Free Stars, the communication became treason on both sides, but the code hadn’t been changed to something more secure.

  Arnaud—because the message was from Commissioner Arnaud—had used it here because he assumed that a ship under Captain Leary brought an agent to discuss his demands for help from Cinnabar in reconquering Corcyra. He was right in his assumption, though possibly not in the way he thought he was right.

  “I’m the correct person to deal with this,” Adele said. She looked up at the two officers—at her protégés, both of them. They deserved more than a brush-off.

  “This is a matter that Captain Leary isn’t aware of as yet,” she said. “Though obviously it concerns him. You may reasonably think it your duty to take it to him directly. I will … that is, I won’t blame you if you do.”

  Cory looked at her incredulously. “Ma’am!” he said. “We wouldn’t do that!”

  “Lady Mundy,” Cazelet said. He was standing more stiffly, if that was possible, than he had before. “You’ve said that you’re dealing with the matter, whatever it is. All that I, that either of us, need to know at this point is if there’s any help we can give you. And you’ll tell us in that case, I’m sure.”

  Why are they loyal to me? Adele thought. They should be concerned that I’m plotting with the enemy and hiding information from Daniel. Which is just what I’m doing!

  Cory and Cazelet accepted that she wasn’t Daniel’s enemy, even when the data would support the conclusion than she was. “Support” did not mean “compel,” and they trusted her. As they had every reason to do.

  “Very well,” she said. “I have nothing at present, but I will give you such tasks as circumstances require. As I have always done.”

  “We’ll be in the hold, ma’am,” Cory said. “Just call if you need us.”

  “No,” said Adele. “Cory, you’re on duty. Stay where you would ordinarily be, which I take to be the command console. Rene, I presume you’re at liberty, so do as you please. Chatting with Cory appears much more reasonable than twiddling your thumbs alone in the hold, however.”

  “We won’t disturb you?” Cazelet said.

  “No,” said Adele, who lost herself so thoroughly in her focus that the world outside ceased to exist. “I will continue to access the console from where I am now.”

  She had to respond to Arnaud, but she couldn’t say anything substantive until she had more information; she composed a neutral placeholder and sent it back along the convoluted track that would take it to Pantellarian headquarters.

  The original message demanded that, within three days, Daniel Leary make a public promise of Cinnabar support for the Pantellarian position—that is, for Commissioner Arnaud’s invasion. Because of Daniel’s public stature, the Independence Council would believe the promise and therefore be willing to compromise on terms that Arnaud would be able to claim was a victory for him.

  The alternative was that Arnaud would publish the whole course of his dealings with Bantry Holdings, claiming that he himself had been working against the Alliance oppressors. Speaker Leary would find it harder to justify the fact that he was building warships for the Fleet. The information probably wouldn’t do any good to the career of his estranged son, either.

  Adele began working. She had sneered at Arnaud’s skill at computer security, but try as she might she couldn’t find, let alone access, the computer on which he had composed his demand. It apparently wasn’t hooked into the network in Hablinger except during the moments that it was actually transferring data.

  Adele had to get into Arnaud’s files so that she could modify them in the way she had planned. There was one obvious method: physical contact.

  That had its own set of problems, but she could consult experts. Daniel and Hogg were as skilled at physical intrusion as Adele was in her field.

  CHAPTER 21

  Brotherhood on Corcyra

  “They’re coming out of the Manor,” Tovera said. “They’ve seen us; they’re coming over.”

  Adele reduced her data unit’s display—she didn’t shut down—and turned. She was sitting on a block of the tumbled railing at the northwest corner of the plaza. The corner to the south had been carved away by the first of the missiles which destroyed the Gulkander Palace; the transmitted shock had been enough to damage the other end of the retaining wall also.

  Daniel and Hogg came toward them across the plaza, picking their way over the tilting blocks with the effortless assurance of water finding a level. Adele waved. She didn’t have to call attention to herself as she had thought she might need to do—Daniel hadn’t been expecting to see her—but it was polite. It was one of the things human beings did to show that they were pleased by the company of other human beings.

  Adele glanced at Tovera and said, “You’re a good role model.” Tovera smiled faintly but said nothing.

  Besides the toppled railing there were other reminders of the brief coup—or of the counter-coup, depending on how you wanted to describe the process by which Colonel Mursiello had returned command of the Garrison to Colonel Bourbon. There was enough powdered stone in the air, lifted by breezes, to make the back of Adele’s throat feel dry and itchy.

  Much worse were the cloying, sickening combustion products of the propellant which had been sprayed over a wide area before it ignited. Antiship missiles used boron fuel to get maximum acceleration. The residues were poisonous, though at the present dilution they wouldn’t be an acute problem.

  Adele smiled wryly. She didn’t expect to die of emphysema.

  Daniel put his foot on the base of the fallen stone banister which had once supported part of the railing on which Adele sat; he stared down what was nearly a perpendicular cliff for the first twenty feet and a stiff slope for the next twenty feet also. RCN midshipmen accompanied the riggers as part of their duties, so it wasn’t likely that an officer who had risen to the rank of captain would be troubled by vertigo.

  Daniel turned and seated himself on the block beside Adele’s. Hogg and Tovera were facing outward some six feet away from their principals, watching other people on the plaza.

  “I’ve been talking with Colonel Bourbon,” he said, looking toward the main stream of the Cephisis well to the east. “He’s doubtful, but he’s willing to support my plan for the time being. In return, he’d like my help in getting fair benefits for his personnel.”

  “Benefits?” Adele said.

  “Bourbon is aware that an independent Corcyra will have very little need for a standing army,” Daniel said, “even without the general popular dislike of the Garrison. Mursiello may have thought he could rule by force,
but Bourbon is smarter than that. The miners are mostly armed by this time.”

  His laugh had a harsh undertone. “I don’t think Bourbon really has the stomach to try that, either,” he said, “but that’s a separate question. Still, he doesn’t want to see his people dumped in the street after the Pantellarians are gone. Dumped or massacred.”

  “I see,” said Adele. That problem was now being considered in the back of her mind. She had a more immediate concern, however.

  “Daniel,” she said, “I need to enter Hablinger to meet a man. I hope you have some suggestions. The Kiesche could do that, but I would like to return to Brotherhood afterward as well. Could you get me into Hablinger without being noticed by the independence forces?”

  “Not directly,” Daniel said. He didn’t ask why she wanted to meet a man in Hablinger. “Now, it’s possible that we might be able to meet an incoming ship above Corcyra and transfer you to it. The only ships bound for Hablinger are Pantellarian and in convoy, so that would mean intercepting a normal copper trader and bribing her to take you into Hablinger instead; which we could do, though I’m not sure about timing. Or—”

  He pursed his lips as he calculated mentally. I would be staring at my display, Adele thought.

  “—we could lift for Pantellaria and put you on a ship there,” Daniel continued. “They wouldn’t think anything in Brotherhood about a Pantellarian ship landing in Hablinger, and of course they couldn’t track us from the ground. That would work!”

  “I need to be in Hablinger within three days,” Adele said. “I’m sorry, I should have said that.”

  “If you get us to the independence side, master,” Hogg said, sidling closer, but continuing to face outward, “I can get her through the Pantellarian lines. Unless you’re fussy about a sentry or two, mistress?”

  “I don’t care about that,” Adele said curtly. “Daniel, will Colonel Bourbon give us his support? Because we’ll need at least neutrality from independence forces at the point we set out from.”