The Sea Without a Shore - eARC

by David Drake

  All three of them looked at Tovera. Tovera turned with a lopsided smile.

  “And you don’t want to haul a second log around, hey?” she said. “Well, I can see that. But bring her back, right?”

  “Right,” said Hogg, meeting Tovera’s eyes. “She comes back, or nobody does.”

  His expression might have been meant for a smile.

  “Which is how it was going to be anyway,” Hogg added. “Now, let’s go find Brother Graves so we can be done with this crap quick.”

  ***

  Daniel stepped aside at the head of the stairs so that Hogg could reach the top, but he let Adele approach the door of Graves office alone.

  “Mistress,” said Tovera urgently. “It isn’t latched!”

  “No,” said Adele. She rapped on the door jamb with the knuckles of her right hand.

  “Come in!” a male voice called. “It’s open.”

  Daniel felt himself relax and frowned because he had been anything but relaxed. The door was closed but not pulled quite to, something everyone did occasionally. Since it wasn’t an outside door which the wind might blow open, there was no reason to worry about it.

  Unless you were a paranoid sociopath like Tovera. Was there another person like Tovera?

  Adele pushed the door fully open and entered an ordinary office. Rikard Cleveland and an older man, presumably Graves, were standing on chairs as they replaced the glass in a window casement. Both panes had cracked across diagonally.

  Ceiling plaster had fallen in the corner beyond them. Someone had swept it up, but the chunks waited in a wastebasket to be dumped.

  “I’m sorry about the mess, Lady Mundy,” Graves said, stepping down carefully. “The excitement yesterday made the building flex a little. The disadvantage of building on bedrock is that anything that happens to the bedrock is transmitted at full strength.”

  He laid his utility knife on the desk and walked around it, holding his hand out to Daniel. “And you would be Captain Leary,” Graves said. “It’s an honor to meet you, sir. I’m Dallert Graves, as I suppose you know. Ah? Would you care to sit down? I can bring a chair out of the bedroom?”

  “Our servants will stand,” Daniel said. He supposed that made him sound like the stern master of storybooks—and of no few noble townhouses, though in the country things were more relaxed.

  “I thought they might,” said Graves with a sort of smile. He pulled the chairs from under the window, sitting in one and gesturing Cleveland into the other.

  “Now,” Graves continued. “Please explain what you want from me, Captain, and I’ll do my best to provide it. The Transformationist Community is in your debt for removing Colonel Mursiello. In fact all Brotherhood is. Despite the occasional cracked window.”

  Graves had understood that Hogg and Tovera were bodyguards, which Rikard Cleveland didn’t appear to have done despite being in close contact with them on the voyage from Cinnabar. It would be wrong to think of Graves as a dreamy religious nut.

  “Captain?” said Cleveland. His hands rested on the back of the indicated chair, but he hadn’t sat down. “If you’re prefer that I leave, I won’t feel offended.”

  Daniel had been on the fence about asking Cleveland to go. The volunteered offer convinced him that it wasn’t necessary.

  “Please stay, Master Cleveland,” he said, taking the chair facing the desk. Adele was already in the one against wall, immersed in the display of her data unit. “Though of course the operation depends on keeping the discussion among ourselves. The operation and lives depend on secrecy.”

  Daniel coughed. “Basically, we intend to put an agent into Hablinger,” he said. “We’d like to do it through the Transformationist positions in the siege line, because your contingent is relatively small. Also I believe your people are more trustworthy than those of other elements in the coalition.”

  He grinned and added, “I suppose that sounds as though I’m buttering you up.”

  “Yes,” said Graves, “it does. But I also believe it’s objectively true—as I suspect you do, Captain. Of course I’ll help you. Would you like me to accompany you north and speak to our field commander, Brother Heimholz?”

  “Do you think that would be necessary?” Daniel said. The possibility hadn’t crossed his mind. “I was hoping for a letter of introduction, so to speak.”

  “I believe our communications—mine, that is,” said Graves, “between here and both the field and Pearl Valley are reasonably secure.”

  “They are,” said Adele without looking up from her display. “Secure from any Pantellarian on the planet at present, at least.”

  “I was more concerned with the other factions in the independence coalition, to be honest,” Graves said with a smile. “But I suppose those risks aren’t as great with Colonel Bourbon back in charge. And I’m glad to know that the Pantellarians aren’t reading our messages, not that they would find much to interest them.”

  “If you’d just send a note saying that we’ll be arriving, probably tomorrow,” Daniel said, “I would appreciate it. A general note like that wouldn’t be a problem even if it did get out.”

  “Of course,” Graves said. “Brother Heimholz runs a tight ship, or whatever metaphor would be proper. He’s a former captain in the Land Forces of the Republic; and he rose from the ranks to a commission during the recent war.”

  Graves tented his fingers before him and looked at them. “I think Heimholz may have a more difficult task than I do,” he said. “The common soldiers of our contingent are rotated back to Pearl Valley every three months, but Brother Heimholz remains where he is; both for continuity of command and because he’s really the only member of our community who has the expertise. It’s very hard for one of us, a brother, to be responsible for slaughter.”

  “Brother Heimholz lives with a community,” Cleveland said. “You have nothing, no one.”

  Then, fiercely, he added, “I don’t know how you stand it! I’ve only been a member for two years and even so the separation of returning to Cinnabar was, was…”

  He smiled wryly. “It’s good that I’ve stopped drinking,” he said, his voice mild again. “I was an unpleasant drunk, and I would have stayed very drunk.”

  “I’m doing it for the cause,” Graves said with a lop-sided grin to show that he was joking. He wasn’t joking, of course.

  “I’m surprised that the Transformationists…,” Daniel said. His mind had toyed with “you cultists,” but there was no risk that would reach his tongue. “Would be so strongly for Corcyran independence. You don’t seem to be a very political group.”

  Cleveland looked blank. So did Graves for a moment, but then the older man chuckled.

  “I was unclear, Captain,” Graves said, “and I apologize. Yes, we’re an apolitical group as a general matter; our involvement in the independence movement is simply because we fear that the circumstances attending a return to Pantellarian rule would be non-survivable.”

  He cleared his throat, then said, “The cause to which I referred is the transformation of men as individual thinkers to men as aspects of a single social mind.”

  “That…” Daniel said. He didn’t know how to go on, so he stopped.

  “I do not expect this to occur within my lifetime,” said Graves, smiling. “And perhaps it won’t occur within the lifetime of the universe. Still, it’s the cause for which we strive.”

  As before, he wasn’t joking.

  Daniel rose to his feet. “I’m not a religious man, Brother Graves,” he said. “But your religion is one I can honor from a distance.”

  Graves stood also. “I’ll tell the field force to expect you, Captain,” he said. “And I assure you that craftsmanship at the level you and your companions demonstrate it—”

  He nodded not only to Adele, joining Daniel at the door, but to Hogg and Tovera as well.

  “—has my full appreciation also. May mankind be better for your efforts.”

  “Yes,” said Daniel as he led the way out of the r
oom. “We can all hope that.”

  His own goals were shorter term, but that was a worthy sentiment.

  CHAPTER 22

  Hablinger on Corcyra

  The River Cephisis was an expanse of brown glass when Daniel looked over the left side of the APC. The water wasn’t very far from the top of the levee either: maybe the length of his forearm, maybe not that much. He dropped back into the compartment.

  “Mundy?” he said, being relatively formal because they were sharing the vehicle with Colonel Bourbon and two of his aides. “When is high water? What part of the year, I mean?”

  “The peak here was about two days ago,” said the female aide, Lieutenant Zeffelini, before Adele could answer. “On the other side of the river the road washed away yesterday in a couple places. Usually we’d be coming down on the west levee, though we can hop over the water easy.”

  “I’m not sure about easy,” said Bourbon with a smile. “Can you swim, Leary?”

  “Well enough,” Daniel said. He didn’t mention that Adele couldn’t swim, but he or Hogg would carry her if the situation arose. “But we should be fine.”

  They were in the vehicle which had carried Hochner and his arrest team two days earlier. The slugs hadn’t damaged the lift fans, but Bourbon had decided to make the hundred mile run north to Hablinger in surface effect for safety’s sake. The vehicle didn’t lose much speed, and a motor failure on the road was an irritation. Failure twenty feet in the air could be a great deal more interesting, as Daniel and his companions had learned in the past.

  Daniel stood again so that his head and shoulders were out in the airstream; he lowered the visor of his helmet. The compartment had a lid of pleated titanium battens, but it was rolled back at present.

  Gunfire during the attempted coup hadn’t seriously damaged the vehicle, but there hadn’t been time to fully clean the compartment. Muggy heat turned residues of blood and brains into a stomach-roiling stench. Downwind of the fish-processing plant at Bantry was worse, but Daniel had no reason at the moment not to be out in the breeze.

  Hogg was in the cab with the automatic impeller while Tovera rode on the passenger side of the cab which would ordinarily have been the gunner’s seat when the impeller wasn’t manned. Tovera had wanted to drive the vehicle, but Colonel Bourbon had refused to permit that and neither Adele nor Daniel had made any effort to overrule him.

  Tovera knew the basic theory of driving. She would never be good, though, and the APC was much heavier than anything she had experience with. At some level Tovera probably understood that she shouldn’t be driving, but her need to control all aspects of her mistress’ environment had forced her to ask.

  To Daniel’s surprise, Adele shut down her data unit and stood beside him. She surveyed the paddies to the right. The land across the river was identical, but the Cephisis was too wide to see across at this point.

  Turning to Daniel she said, “I’ve never seen terrain like this. That is, I’ve seen imagery even before I began preparing to enter Hablinger; but the real thing is different from the images.”

  She smiled, more or less. “I prefer the imagery,” she said.

  The rice paddies were forty feet below the road the vehicle was following. They hadn’t been planted or flooded for over a year, but the ones Daniel could see were soppy because of leakage from the river. Weeds and self-seeded rice grew raggedly from the black muck.

  The dikes separating each field from its neighbors were about four feet high. The tops of the dikes were grass, but shaggy trees grew out from the sides and curved upward; seedpods like lengths of orange tape dangled from some of them.

  “I suppose the terrain is the same all the way to the city walls,” Adele said. Her smile quirked again. “That’s what the imagery showed, though imagery didn’t allow me to appreciate quite how muddy it would be.”

  “The mud deadens sound,” Daniel said. He made his voice a trifle more cheerful than the words themselves required, but he was telling the truth. “You won’t clink on a stone, which is the sort of thing that wakes up even a Pantellarian guard. And Hogg will get you through, never fear. I won’t pretend it’ll be a walk in the park, but all you have to worry about is crawling. He’ll take care of the rest.”

  Daniel’s voice changed in the middle of the final thought. Adele didn’t need anyone to kill for her; Hogg would simply do the business more quietly. And come to that—

  Adele was looking at him with her minuscule smile. She’s thinking the same thing.

  “Your little pistol doesn’t make a great deal of noise, granted,” Daniel said, finishing the thought aloud. “But Hogg is still a better choice.”

  “Even Tovera agrees about that,” Adele said. “Which is high praise for Hogg, and a relief to me not to have to settle the matter myself.”

  The hill on which Hablinger rose, a steep-sided mound over fifty feet high, was the only interruption of the flat landscape. Daniel could easily make out buildings without using the optical enhancements of his helmet visor.

  “They can see us from there,” Adele said. “Why don’t they shoot?”

  “Because we’d shoot back,” said Colonel Bourbon. He must have been listening for some time, but only now did he rise from his seat to join them.

  “Isn’t that the point of the exercise?” said Adele.

  There were openings in the inner walls of the dikes they were passing. A few—two, three; in one case six—people, mostly men, were visible near each, sometimes sitting on the dike itself. Generally but not always their weapons were nearby.

  “Sniping would force both sides to keep under cover and make the siege more unpleasant,” Bourbon said. His aides were now standing also, apparently concerned that they were being left out. “It wouldn’t affect the military situation, though.”

  Daniel nodded. “Everyone would stay under cover,” he said, in part showing that he understood but also making sure that Adele did.

  “The combatants would stay under cover,” Bourbon said, correcting him. “Hablinger can’t be concealed. We don’t have real artillery, but automatic impellers could level the town. It’s stabilized mud, so the walls would shatter.”

  He shrugged. “The Pantellarians find billets in Hablinger much more comfortable than muddy dugouts would be, and of course the townspeople are Corcyrans even if they happen to be under foreign control right now.”

  “Most of them don’t care about independence,” said Bourbon’s male aide, a lieutenant. Daniel thought his name was Vanna, but Daniel paid more attention to young women than to men, whether or not they were in uniform. “They’re happy as long as the Pantellarians pay for what they take!”

  “I’ve noticed…,” Daniel said, trying not to sound too irritated, “that the tenants at Bantry worry more about how their crops are coming in than they do about who the Speaker of the Senate is. The crops determine how well they and their families are going to eat.”

  “Quite right,” said Bourbon, though from his tone Daniel had the impression that the colonel’s main concern was to stop his aide from arguing with the honored guest who had rescued him. “This is where we’ll cross the river, so you might want to get down inside again.”

  He and his aides ducked into the compartment. Daniel nodded to Adele and dropped to his seat just as the vehicle slowed and bumped down onto the Cephisis. Water spewed up on all sides.

  Though the river looked like liquid mud from above, its spray had its usual rainbow beauty in the sun. Some of the iridescent fog settled over those in the compartment, but it was better to be damp than to close the cover and drown if a lift fan failed.

  The APC lifted twenty inches in the air to clear the edge of the west levee, then slewed to the right along the roadway there so as not to plunge straight over the forty-foot escarpment. Only after the driver had slowed from the headlong pace at which they’d crossed the river did he nose his vehicle down toward the paddies. He angled his lift fans in order to keep the nose more or less level with the stern though the l
atter was actually dragging on the slope.

  “General good feeling between the sides or not,” Daniel said, his lips close to Adele’s ear, “I’d expect somebody in Hablinger to take a shot at a high-value target when a single slug could take out the whole vehicle and everybody aboard.”

  Tovera, who either had very keen ears or was aided by a concealed antenna, said, “Pantellarians don’t think that way.” There was more contempt in those few words than even Hogg could have managed.

  The APC reached ground level in an eruption of gluey black mud, some of which rained through the open roof. Daniel grimaced at the smear on his left sleeve, but he supposed he might as well get used to what would be a part of life so long was he remained here.

  The driver turned hard to the left, back in the direction of Brotherhood, then turned left again. They rocked and bumped, dropped significantly; then dropped again and stopped. Daniel stood and looked around. They were in a sunken chamber made by welding structural plastic into a roofless box.

  The walls acted as a coffer dam against seepage from the soil. A pump whined as it threw a column of muddy water over the levee and back into the stream of the Cephisis.

  Even before the APC’s fans shut down, Bourbon’s aides had loosed the catches to drop the rear ramp. Daniel waited before he followed the locals out of the vehicle. The box in which they had stopped was built around a smaller box, fifteen feet by fifteen. The inner box was also formed from plastic, but it was roofed and all surfaces were covered with several layers of sandbags.

  Well, bags of dirt. Daniel frowned and Hogg, who must have been thinking the same thing, said, “Get a good storm and those bags’ll be sliding all over creation. And over anybody standing in this hole.”

  “It almost never rains here in the north,” said Zeffelini, the female lieutenant.

  There was a sneer in her voice; or anyway, Hogg heard one. “And your pump never fails? Because I want to know the manufacturer if that’s so. You get these bags wet and the soil comes through the cloth like soap…which gives you a few tons of slipping sandbags.”