The Sea Without a Shore

by David Drake

  The Kiesche was in free fall. High Drive emissions could have been detected much more easily than the ship itself. Under the circumstances, Daniel thought about bringing them up to 1g with the High Drives and thumbing his nose at the enemy … but that would be pointless.

  “I’m sure that was what the Pantellarian commodore told Governor Arnaud,” he said.

  “The admiral,” Adele said, correcting him. “Admiral Stanzi.”

  “The admiral told Arnaud, then,” Daniel said. “I don’t think he really believes the Alliance would break the present truce with the Republic in order to help a motley crowd of miners on a piss-pot colony. I do think that Stanzi and his crews, particularly his officers, aren’t up to the drudgery of a blockade. Pantellarians aren’t cowards, by and large, but they do tend to be lazy scuts, over.”

  “Sir,” said Cory. “Not to take the enemy’s side, but it would be very difficult to run down blockade runners with destroyers. Unless you were going to shoot on sighting, maybe, but there’s regular trade with Corcyra, with Hablinger, I mean. Over.”

  “Five to ship,” Vesey said. She was opposite Daniel on the command console at present as the senior fighting officer under the captain. When the Kiesche had reached Corcyra orbit and Daniel was sure that they weren’t going to be fighting or fleeing in the next few minutes, Adele would trade places with Vesey. “Chasing blockade runners would improve the skills of the crews. Which drinking in dockside taverns, as I presume they’re doing while in port at Hablinger, will not do. Over.”

  “Six to ship,” Daniel said. “The Pantellarian navy has a culture different from ours in the RCN. For which I suppose we should be glad, over.”

  In the general pause, Cleveland said, “Sir? I believe the Pantellarians escort their own transports down. They send up two destroyers, the captain told me, but they don’t bother copper traders even when they’re both in orbit at the same time. Ah, over?”

  He’s really trying, Daniel thought. If Cleveland had grown up under Tom Sand instead of a flash nobleman who’d never grown up himself, things might have been different.

  Or not, of course. Daniel Leary certainly wasn’t a copy of his father, the Speaker.

  “Six to ship,” Daniel said, sitting as straight as he could during free fall. “I’ll take us in now. Don’t expect the kind of precise astrogation that you’ve gotten used to on the Sissie. We’re going to be an hour and a half on High Drive before we reach Corcyra orbit, and the computer is going to land us just like the Kiesche’s captain is a cack-handed drunk like every other tramp captain out this way.”

  Daniel took a deep breath. Though he kept his tone measured, he was feeling the excitement rise as it always did when he went into action. There wouldn’t be any shooting immediately, and perhaps never in the course of the voyage, but this was action nonetheless.

  “They aren’t going to learn that we’re RCN until we’re ready to tell them, Sissies,” Daniel said. “But they’ll learn then, by heaven!”

  He took another breath. “Ship,” he said, and how often had he used these words? “Prepare to insert in thirty, that is three-zero, seconds.”

  Corcyra Orbit

  “Thank you, Vesey,” Adele said as she took the lieutenant’s place at the back of the command console. The Kiesche was in free fall, so the exchange was simplified by Vesey hooking a boot around an armrest, pulling Adele to the console, and finally pushing her down onto the couch.

  When Adele first joined the RCN—or at any rate, became a member of the company of RCS Princess Cecile, a corvette in the service of the Republic of Cinnabar—it disturbed her that she was so clumsy, aboard ship generally and particularly when the ship was in free fall. She had come to accept if not approve of the situation.

  Adele was better at certain things than anyone else in the crew—and very possibly better than anyone else in the RCN. And she was hopelessly incompetent at other things which even the wipers in the Power Room did with reasonable skill. There were other people to do or to help Adele do the things she was bad at, but there was nobody you would prefer to have with you if you needed to open an enemy’s database.

  Or to stand beside you in a gunfight. Tovera had the same skills, but not even Tovera could equal her mistress in planning a complex action which might involve slaughter at each stage.

  Adele strapped herself onto the couch after she started to drift off again. Vesey, who had expected that to happen, had waited to catch Adele by the ankle and to hold her until the harness clicked.

  “Thank you, Vesey,” Adele repeated, coldly furious with herself. If Vesey and probably everybody else in the crew knows that I’ll forget to strap myself in, why can’t I remember it!

  The console was already displaying feeds from the planet below. The sites had been chosen by algorithms tailored to Adele’s specifications by specialists in Mistress Sand’s organization, or possibly by specialists working for Navy House, whose services had been loaned to Mistress Sand for this purpose.

  Occasionally Adele heard or saw a comment which made her wonder how important she was considered by the highest levels of the Republic’s bureaucracy. The thought shocked and disturbed her, because Adele’s self-image was that of a librarian of considerable skill, whom nobody ever thought about.

  Except when she got angry, of course, and then Mundy of Chatsworth was apt to come out. But arrogant nobles were a soldi a dozen in Cinnabar society.

  “Freighter Kiesche out of Xenos to Brotherhood Control,” said Vesey, using the 20-meter band. Corcyra did not have a working satellite communications system since the Pantellarian invasion, so shortwave was the first choice to raise somebody on the ground. “Request landing instructions, over.”

  Vesey, now in Adele’s alcove, was handling the commo. She was adequately competent at every aspect of what might be required of an RCN officer, including communications duties, but Cory and Cazelet were far more skilled at them.

  They were acting as Adele’s aides in sorting the information pouring in from databases below, however, so Vesey was on the boards. She was hugely overqualified for a job which on a tramp freighter was ordinarily carried out by a technician who moved his lips when he read.

  Adele focused on the information displayed in greater resolution than it had been by her personal data unit. She almost-smiled when a thought at the back of her mind drifted to the surface before receding: the fact that Adele had been concentrating on the data before and during her move to the command console probably had something to do with the fact that she had forgotten to strap herself in.

  As usual, for both items.

  Adele sank into information, a world in which it didn’t matter that a spacer was detailed to watch her whenever she was on the hull—even though a safety line anchored her to the ship. First things first: Brotherhood Harbor was a half-loop west of the present channel, formed when the Cephisis River changed its course a millennium ago. A canal with locks now reconnected the upper end of the cutoff to the main channel to keep the harbor level high. Ships drank large volumes of water to refill their reaction-mass tanks, and they vaporized even more with their thruster plumes as they landed and lifted.

  Two antiship missile batteries protected Brotherhood. They were not interconnected by a single targeting apparatus and were not even operated by the same organization. The battery in a concrete emplacement was crewed and controlled by the Garrison.

  The other unit was equipped with more recent, higher velocity missiles, but its triple launcher was protected by only a cursory sandbag revetment. The leaders of the Corcyran Self-Defense Regiment had brought the battery with them from Pantellaria, along with a great deal of money, which permitted them to recruit locally. Very few of the exiles themselves were in uniform, but the Regiment appeared at close inspection to be a respectable fighting force—just as Mistress Sand’s files had suggested it would be.

  “Ma’am, I’ve put together data on the Freccia,” said Cory on a net he’d created for himself, Adele, and Cazelet. “T
hat’s the destroyer in harbor, the Corcyran navy as they call it. I thought it might save you some time before you send a report to Six, over.”

  “Captain,” Adele said, forwarding the file unopened. If Cory was going to be so punctilious, she would do the same. “Lieutenant Cory compiled this data on the Corcyran destroyer. I don’t have the knowledge base to assess it, so I’m passing it directly to you. Over!”

  “Thank you, Mundy,” Daniel said. His inset image was smiling from the corner of her screen. “Cory, please brief us, over.”

  “Sorry,” Cory muttered. The problem with an organization like the crew of the Princess Cecile—and the still greater problem when the corvette’s personnel had been winnowed from a hundred and twenty to twenty—was to know whether to behave like family or like members of a hierarchical military organization.

  Adele was certainly poor at following procedure, because in her heart she wasn’t part of a military organization. That didn’t cause her difficulties, because nobody else aboard thought of her as a junior warrant officer of the RCN, either.

  It didn’t matter to ordinary spacers, because they understood the bounds of familiarity in the same fashion that tenants on the Bantry estate did. They might joke with Six before going on liberty, but if they met him out of uniform, he was still Six—just as he was still the Squire to a tenant in Xenos. They didn’t need the trappings of authority to understand their relationship to their betters.

  Adele smiled in sad memory of her mother. Esme Rolfe Mundy believed that all human beings could rise to the ideal which the Rolfes and Mundys already embodied. She would never have used the term “betters” in that fashion, and she would have been horrified if she had heard her daughter do so.

  In fact, Adele didn’t believe in the distinction between the lower orders and their betters, either; though having lived many years on the bottom of society, she was unable to romanticize its residents as her mother had. That said, most of the members of the so-called lower orders whom Adele had met did believe in the distinction.

  A few of them resented it; more of them would have said that the separation was ordained by heaven. Most simply accepted the division as they accepted sunrise and got on with important matters like sex and putting food on the table.

  Cory and Cazelet, the younger commissioned officers, were the ones most affected. They operated informally under Adele in collecting and sorting the data which poured into Adele’s console at every landfall. Their skill at these tasks was part of the reason that Captain Leary’s missions had been uniformly successful, but the tasks were no part of their RCN duties—and they still had RCN duties.

  Cory, the Kiesche’s second lieutenant and therefore senior to the freighter’s signals officer, didn’t know whether to give important information to his formal superior officer, the captain, or to Adele, the informal superior at whose direction he had gathered the information. The real answer was “give it to either one,” but that wasn’t a response which RCN regulations could accept.

  “Sir, the Freccia’s got all her thrusters and High Drive motors, and her fusion bottle was replaced just last year,” Cory said. “She’s got a full crew according to the books, but they’re thirty percent landsmen hired here on Corcyra. And I don’t trust the books.”

  “Nor should you,” said Daniel. “I never knew a Pantellarian ship where the captain didn’t collect the pay of at least ten spacers in a hundred, slots that were never going to be filled, over.”

  “They only keep an anchor watch on board,” Cory said. “I doubt they could get under way in less than six hours, and that’s if the stores are loaded. Which again the books say they are, but I doubt it. The Freccia’s no danger to us, sir, over.”

  “Freighter Kiesche out of Xenos to Brotherhood Control,” Vesey repeated, since she hadn’t gotten a response the first time. “Request permission to land, over.”

  Adele guessed from the available data that the crews of the missile batteries were asleep or even that the batteries were unmanned at present. That sort of sloppiness at a port which might be attacked at any instant would horrify her, but she had too much experience of fringe worlds—and of human nature more generally—to doubt that it was possible.

  If everyone were like me, it would be a very different universe. A very polite one. And probably very dangerous.

  A starship landing nearby would awaken the soundest sleeper, and someone startled out of a sound sleep might very well roll to the firing switch and press it. Fortunately, the batteries’ electronics took a minute or more to calibrate after they were turned on, and both were cold at present. Adele would be watching that status readout carefully.

  “Daniel?” Adele said. “Captain Leary, I mean. Although there’s been no fighting around Brotherhood, and so far as I can tell no Pantellarian threat to it, all three of the main rebel military organizations have at least a third of their strength in and near the city. Based on ration returns for troops in Brotherhood against those in the siege lines around Hablinger. Over.”

  Adele wouldn’t have had to give her source to this group, but she had too often made a statement to strangers and gotten the reply, “You can’t know that! You’re guessing!”

  Fewer people would have responded in that fashion if they knew what went through Adele’s mind when someone did, or if they noticed her left hand dipping toward her pistol. Much of what Adele had learned over the years involved ways to avoid putting herself in situations which would make her angry.

  Angrier would be a better description. Anger—at life, at the universe, and especially at herself—was the bedrock of Adele’s personality, as she well knew.

  “Freighter Kiesche out of Xenos to Brotherhood Control,” said Vesey yet again. “Request landing instructions, over.”

  “They’re worried about each other, then,” Daniel said. There was a touch of humor, or at least speculation, in his tone. “Or they individually are each planning a coup. Not so?”

  “I don’t believe either the Regiment or the Navy thinks that it’s strong enough to launch a coup with any chance of success,” Adele said. “I find recent plans in the Garrison’s database which suggest that its leaders may believe they could succeed.”

  She would review at leisure the data her systems were pulling in, but experience had given her an eye for relevant detail in a quick scan. She added, “I very much doubt they’re correct, given the loathing with which every other organization on the planet appears to regard them, but arrogant stupidity isn’t uncommon among leaders. Even nonmilitary leaders.”

  “Point taken,” said Daniel with a chuckle. “Some of us military leaders are smart enough to listen to advisers who don’t have a military background, however. But what about the Transformationists we’re involved with?”

  He and his friend Adele were chatting now; neither of them was thinking about the others on the net. Adele was therefore startled when Rikard Cleveland said, “Sir! We have no troops in Brotherhood, just the company of a hundred at the siege of Hablinger. We have no interest in ruling Brotherhood or Corcyra; we just want to worship without interference. That is, over.”

  Well, perhaps he has a right to be offended, Adele thought. Aloud she said, “Cleveland’s statement is correct, Captain. As far as I can tell.”

  “Officer Mundy, do you have any doubt on that point, over?” Daniel asked more sharply than Adele expected. He had a right also: he was Six, and he could ask any question he pleased aboard his own ship.

  “My only doubt, Daniel,” Adele said, deliberately defusing the situation by using his given name, “comes from the fact that I have not yet managed to enter the Transformationist database in Pearl Valley. Alone of systems on the rebel side, that is. In theory, it might be filled with plans for galactic conquest, but I very much doubt it. I think these religious dreamers simply have someone very good in charge of computer security.”

  “Freighter Kiesche, you are cleared to land,” said a voice, responding on the 15-meter band. “Pick any available sl
ip; but be warned: if you’re not on the seawall, your cargo will have to be lightered to and from your holds because the floating gantries aren’t working at present, over.”

  The Regiment’s antiship missile battery had gone live. Adele sent its control module the lockout command which she had prepared as soon as the Kiesche reached orbit and she learned the model of the unit.

  Accidents happen; but if they were accidents for which Adele could have prepared, then she felt that she deserved to die. She would regret that she had failed her shipmates in her last instant, though.

  “Roger, Brotherhood Control,” Vesey said. “Kiesche out.”

  “Officer Mundy?” Daniel said. His inset image was smiling.

  “Go ahead, Six,” Adele said. “Any further information I need will be easier to gather on the ground. Out!”

  She smiled also, pleased to have remembered the correct protocol. For a change.

  “Ship, prepare for landing,” Daniel said and hit the EXECUTE button on his virtual keyboard. The thrusters roared as the Kiesche braked toward Brotherhood Harbor under the control of the ship’s computer.

  CHAPTER 11

  Brotherhood on Corcyra

  Adele stood beside Daniel while the main hatch began to squeal open. Most of the Kiesche’s crew was in front of them in the hold, which was fine with her; she felt no need to be the first of the freighter’s personnel to set foot on Corcyra. Steam and a nose-wrinkling whiff of ozone swirled in through the crack.

  There was a shriek and clang: the hatch had jammed. Only a hand’s breadth of air was visible between the upper edge and the coaming.

  “Hold one!” called Cory over the hatch speakers. “I’ll back it—”

  “Keep clear!” said Woetjans as her arm swept one of the riggers a step sideways. Evans swung a bronze mallet with an ease that belied its twenty-pound weight, striking not the jammed piston but rather the plating to which the unit was bolted. The deck jumped under Adele’s soft-soled boots.