by L D Inman
Du Rau shut down his com-deck and turned off the lights in his office. Outside, in the gallery, no one stirred except a guard changing position two floors down. Du Rau could hear his own footfalls in the carpet as he continued down the gallery stair and around to his and Ingrid’s suite on the second floor.
He was not surprised to see Ingrid waiting up for him, though she had changed into a long night-robe and dressing gown. She glanced up at him with a half-smile of amusement, and reached for the brandy tray to pour herself and him a glass. Du Rau took the tacit invitation and sank down into the chair across from her.
“Dr. Berthau stopped by here a little while ago,” she said. “I told him you were unlikely to be available this evening.”
“Quite right,” he said, taking his glass and saluting her briefly.
“It makes him nervous when you put off his appointments.” It made Ingrid nervous too, but she never pressed him beyond his patience.
“He’ll have to wait to see me,” du Rau said. “Until I’m sure this operation is advancing properly.”
“So I told him. Shall I keep abreast of developments and make you an appointment?”
Which was Ingrid’s way of asking to be informed about the invasion itself. He would not begrudge her. “I’ll have Wernhier brief you at breakfast.”
“Not Herval?” she remarked, shrewdly.
Du Rau merely sighed, took another sip of brandy, and leaned his head back in the plush wing-chair. He was suddenly very tired.
“What are you going to do about him?” Ingrid was calm. She was always calm.
“There’s nothing more to be done at present,” he answered, eyes still closed. “I’ve designated him as an heir, and he knows better than to make a move toward unsealing those documents while I still breathe. If he wants so badly to be Lord Bernhelm and command the Executive Committee, he’d better not push me. I can always un-designate him.” Though cutting Herval loose would be a move of last resort.
Ingrid understood this; she made a dissatisfied noise. “We need more leverage than that. I will think on it.”
He allowed himself the touch of a smile, without moving.
“It’s late,” Ingrid said, after a moment. “Shall we go to bed, my lord?”
If he didn’t move now, he never would. “Yes. Let’s.”
He tipped back the last swallows of brandy, wincing at the sting, and set the glass down on the tray.
4
Douglas’s first dispatch arrived late that afternoon, not long after he had made his first report to Rear Admiral Taronas. Taronas confirmed his supply requests (to which Douglas, mindful of his charges’ needs, added a box of prayer lights), took his status report, and set the time of the next call.
Douglas stayed at his desk after reporting to Taronas, switching between his list of tasks and the maps he had kept up on the low projection. Sentinel Point had been alerted and fresh codes exchanged; a quick set of defensive drills and checks had been run, and billets were being prepared against the arrival of Selkirk’s promised infantry troops. He almost didn’t hear the soft bootsteps at the doorway. Looked up belatedly, just as the lieutenant gave a little cough.
“Lieutenant Rose. Come in. Is that a dispatch? Good.” Lieutenant Rose was dripping, but the dispatch pouch he withdrew from under his arm was merely damp. Douglas got up and relieved him of it. “Thank you. Do you have time to brief me?”
He glanced up from the pouch to catch Rose’s eyes darting all about the office—the open drapes, the neatened desk, the maps on the conference table. Rose snatched his gaze back to Douglas’s face, flushing. “Yes, sir.”
“Then get yourself a cup of tea and sit down here.” Douglas pushed a pile of guard books aside from the head of the table and sat down to unlock the pouch. Rose obeyed, his stride consciously sedate as he walked to the brewing station across the room. He came back with his cup and sat down at the place Douglas had cleared for him, carefully straight-spined.
“You’ll excuse me, I hope, for working while I listen,” Douglas said. Rose had his full attention, but Douglas did not want to subject him to obvious scrutiny. Let Rose take his stock of the open office; let him win his own insight and spare Douglas trying to guide it.
“Yes, sir,” Rose said.
“What action items came out of the junior officers’ meeting?” Douglas opened the pouch and withdrew its contents, spreading them out to examine.
Rose swallowed a hasty sip. “We’re doubling up our quarters and laying out bedrolls for the cadets from the far block, so we’ll have a whole wing open for guest billets.”
“Good.” There were four packets of papers, two of them sealed for Douglas, and a small square which he unfolded to find a set of admiral’s ribbons, bright and new. He sighed over them briefly and set them aside with the sealed dispatches.
“We decided to recommend to Captain Stevens that we go ahead and freeze the rotas for the duration. Then we made a list of all the specialists in our cadre who could be spared to the executive council for other teams.”
“All right. Remind me what duty your rota is on.” Douglas unfolded the first unsealed packet: a manifest of the first supplies to arrive with the dispatch shuttle.
“Supply and waste, sir.”
“Lieutenant Corda is your second?”
A hesitation. “Yes, sir. If that’s—”
“Good.” Douglas looked up from the list, calmly. “Yours is going to be one of the more demanding jobs in this operation. You’ll be answering to Captain Marag, and even two of you won’t be able to be everywhere at once. You’ll need a trusted second to fill in the gaps.”
“Yes, sir.” Rose drew an easier breath; remembered he had a cup of tea, and lifted it for a sip.
“Anything else?”
“Yes, sir. Acting on the suggestion from the rota captains’ meeting, we assigned the rota on training duty to assist Captain Wallis with the medical ward. And the classroom duties we’ve converted to records and internal communications.”
Douglas nodded, back to perusing the manifest. One comm-signal booster had arrived, and another was coming; good. He opened the other packet to find orders for three infantry companies due to arrive—Douglas glanced at the clock—any time now. There wasn’t going to be time to ease Rose out on the morale of the junior cadre: a pity, because Rose had relaxed and was drinking his tea as if he could finally taste it.
The orders for the troop arrival were in triplicate. Douglas separated one set and handed it over. “You have your first orders for securing billets,” he said. “Take these and brief the other rota captains. I’ll—”
There came a knock at his doorframe: one of the cadets on comms in the outer office. “Admiral Douglas, sir,” he said, “we’ve had a signal that some troops have landed at the depot and are on their way in. And we’ve got the line open to Central One at the top of the hour like you asked, sir.”
“Thank you, Cadet. I’ll take the call down here.” As the cadet withdrew, Lieutenant Rose followed Douglas to his feet and set the teacup and saucer down on the table. “Lieutenant,” Douglas said, reaching for his new ribbons, “I won’t have time for a longer conversation. So I’ll just say plainly: Your cadre has my confidence. Ryswyck has my heart. And any council in this room—” he was startled to hear the tremble of emotion in his own voice— “will have nothing less than open truth at its center. Am I well understood?”
“Yes, sir!” Rose snapped to attention, in lieu, Douglas suspected, of figuring out which salute to give him. He saw the amusement on Douglas’s face and relaxed sheepishly.
“I suggest we be impeccably Ilonian for this operation,” Douglas said, smoothing the second ribbon into place. “Just to cut down on the ambiguity for other divisions’ sake.”
“Yes, sir.” Rose tamped down a smile and brought his hand up crisply in a plain military salute.
“Thank you. Don’t forget those billet ord—”
A raveling roar streaked over their heads. Douglas and R
ose ducked involuntarily; the rumbling wake shook raindrops down the windows and rattled Rose’s abandoned teacup. Before they could recover, a second roar followed, in tearing pursuit. Douglas leapt at the window in time to see a flash of red-striped underwing flit through the low skirts of the cloudbank. Lightning that was not lightning flashed at the near horizon. Berenian scudder: chased by a fighter from Amity. If it survived to come about, it wouldn’t hesitate to fire on the tower.
“Get that comm booster off the airfield and under cover!” Douglas shouted to the cadets in the doorway. “You, Rose, get a team and find a way to cover our troops on their approach.”
Rose didn’t wait to salute but tore out of the office at a dead run.
Douglas followed him into the outer office. “Has the tower still got Central’s line up?”
“Yes, sir,” said the cadet, shakily.
“Give it to me while we have the chance.”
The Red Mark buzzers started up again in the hall as Douglas strode back to his desk and slapped the code-pad. The projection blinked up, and this time it was Selkirk himself.
“Well, my lord,” Douglas said, with the shriek of the alarm around him belying his calm, “in case you weren’t aware, the southern attack you predicted is here.”
~*~
Selkirk hadn’t wasted time launching the mission, nor was it difficult to brief the special ops team on the procedure they were to follow. Still, it was an impatient wait while the signal was relayed to their agent on the Berenian coast, and the autumn dusk was falling when they got back confirmation that the way in had been secured and the palace operation set in motion. They would have a six-hour window to get in, take Bernhelm, and get out to the holding location.
The team had absorbed Barklay’s instructions with an almost uniform determined assent, unfazed either by the objective or the risks. Barklay was sure these young soldiers had their own opinions, but the only one on his team whose face he could read—besides his cadets, who were long since committed—was Ahrens. His lips twisted briefly in tacit chagrin, but he raised no objections and Barklay did not address it until he could speak to Ahrens alone.
“No,” he agreed quietly as they strapped into the hold of the sub cruiser, “there are no failsafes on this mission. We’re depending on the success of three agents and two Berenian conspirators to keep our path open. And that’s if we make it across the battle-lines in the strait itself.”
Ahrens, settling in between Barklay and a bulkhead, raised his eyes to the low ceiling over their heads as a loud series of clacks and reeling hydraulics announced their descent in the waters of the estuary. Barklay had thought Ahrens the kind of man who liked to keep his feet on solid ground, but Ahrens’s expression was observant and calculating: the engineer at work. Barklay was grateful afresh to have Ahrens here. “Room to improvise, sir,” Ahrens said calmly. “And on enemy ground. Could be worse.”
They would be underway for a couple of hours at least. Barklay bade them get some sleep if they needed it, and the hold settled into a strange, dim peace.
Half-lulled himself by the steady engines and the movements and voices of the crew, Barklay was startled to full wakefulness when Ahrens spoke quietly to him some time later.
“So what’s this I hear about you mistreating Douglas?” he said.
About to formulate a reasonable explanation, Barklay let the urge pass with a sigh. No more evasions. “I mistreated him,” he said, simply.
He glanced at Ahrens: in the low light, he made out Ahrens’s thoughtful frown. “On purpose?”
Of course that was the question a Ryswyckian would ask. In his mind’s eye he could see Douglas, standing upright in his office, his pained gaze searching the distance over Barklay’s shoulder and his threadbare dignity wrapped around him. “I lied to myself about it,” Barklay said. The truth was soft, like a whisper of tissue in the hard-packed silence. “I pretended to myself I wasn’t harming him. But it wasn’t true.”
“And the others you kept close to you. Did you mistreat them too?”
“I don’t—I don’t know,” Barklay said, helplessly. “I didn’t think a casual understanding was harmful. It may have been. Selkirk…said I was happy for them to think I was meeting them in a fair arena.” That accusation had bitten deep since the morning. “I thought I had made it fair. I suppose…I suppose it would have been better for me to acknowledge that I couldn’t.” He stopped a moment, and then forced himself to say the rest: “That I didn’t want to.”
That would have been fault enough. “But it wasn’t casual, between you and Douglas,” Ahrens said. “He loved you.” That was Ahrens: cutting past the subtleties and striking to the heart. Barklay shut his eyes and leaned his head back against the cool steel wall. “Everybody could see it. And it made sense in context,” Ahrens went on quietly. “But I can see how it looks, out of it. And Lord Selkirk thinks…that you made up the context so to excuse your faults?”
“Something like that,” Barklay said.
“And did you?”
“No,” Barklay said. “I was trying to bury my faults, not conceal them.” Not that it had worked.
Ahrens was silent for a minute. Barklay could feel his thought like a measured weight. When he spoke again, his voice was lower.
“They’re also saying that you committed war crimes when you were across the strait.”
“I did.”
“Why?” Ahrens’s dogged probe for understanding was worse than judgment itself.
Vengeance, he had said to his Ryswyckians. But the truth could be stripped even simpler than that. “I thought I had the right,” he said, and knew that for the final indictment. Here in the depths, with the weight of miles of dark water above them, Barklay knew that his fault had never been buried: could not be. “The one true unmendable fault,” he whispered. “In twenty years of work I haven’t even touched it.”
He could feel Ahrens looking at him. Barklay turned his head and opened his eyes.
It was plain and unembroidered compassion looking out of Ahrens’s square-set eyes. Barklay could not deflect it; he no longer wanted to. His fault itself was his only appeal.
“So you’re going back there,” Ahrens said.
“Yes.”
“You want to make acknowledgment to Lord Bernhelm….” The light was not strong enough to tell, but Barklay thought he saw a twitch of humor in the young man’s face.
“…by abducting him. Yes,” Barklay said. The twitch flitted briefly into view as a half-grin, and Barklay smiled back.
“Even if it doesn’t do any good?”
“It probably won’t. But if I aim high, I can at least get Selkirk’s objectives in my scope.”
Ahrens nodded. “What do you want me to do, sir?”
Marag had asked him that. Speir, too: it was in her nature to try and help him own the faults she saw in him; he had not wanted to own them, and had misused her insight. It was a loaded question Ahrens was asking; but at least he seemed to know that much. Barklay hoped so.
“Set me an example, Ahrens,” he said.
Ahrens said nothing. But he pulled his hand free from among the gear piled around them and gave Barklay’s arm a brief, awkward grip.
~*~
Black night had fallen on Colmhaven. The scudder attacks had abated, for wisdom knew how long, and the gunners were snatching a rest while the maintenance crews worked to keep Hadley in condition. Ansett had sent a party out to check the visual recorders and reset the bafflers in their outlying positions. They had lost another gun to the north, which meant Hadley had less sound cover from the Berenian rangers working beyond Colm’s Island. Speir asked her soldiers if any of them had a good head for heights; Beaton and Malle had, so she assigned them with the baffler crew, and they departed into the rain and dark with their rappelling rigs.
Now, Speir and Ansett crouched over a small table in the hollow of the watch-deck, sipping tea and waiting for their comms to crackle to life with reports. In the absence of gunfire floate
d an eerie silence, fuzzed by the ringing in Speir’s ears. Ansett had given her a pair of plugs, but her bones still held the day’s reverberations like a full sponge, and her sips of tea felt like slips of brume going down her throat.
It was unlikely they were going to get much of a chance to find out if they liked or disliked one another, but Speir was interested in Ansett nonetheless. “So then where are you from?” she asked.
Ansett looked up. She was older than Speir, to judge by looks, but not by all that much. “Killness, originally,” she answered. “My mother’s a civil surveyor there.” A small silence while Ansett took another sip, eyes on Speir with a measuring look. “And you?”
“Capital,” Speir confessed, knowing the effete impression it would produce. “Military district.”
Ansett didn’t grunt in response; she didn’t need to. “And then Ryswyck Academy,” she said, a hint of the sardonic in her glance.
Speir answered this only with an unwavering gaze.
“You meant that, didn’t you. About making them spend themselves on us before icefall.” Ansett was still sizing her up, tallying her capital-bred officer-class status and her command style and her Ryswyckian errantry. Speir merely sketched a shrug. “You do realize,” Ansett went on, “that that helped only because it was a distraction.”
“That was all I aimed for with the sergeant,” Speir said. “If I aim for conviction it’s only for myself.”
“I’ve no doubt you could work up enough conviction to run headlong off Hadley Point cliff,” Ansett said bluntly. “Do you expect your soldiers to follow you over?”
It wasn’t mere hostility, Speir thought, sizing her up in turn. She was asking. She wanted to know. Give me a gate narrow enough to fight in, Speir had once boasted to Mulhall, and I’ll stand up whether anyone’s behind me or not. This wasn’t a time for boasts. “It would take a great deal of conviction,” Speir said carefully, “for me to fling myself off a cliff. Not to mention a compelling tactical reason and a blazing desperation. At which point the appeal would be obvious.”