Baltic Gambit

by E. E. Knight

  “Poor bastards,” Valentine said.

  Duvalier had learned her first lesson about naval actions: once the shells started flying, matters were decided very quickly. She and Valentine returned to the warmth of the control cabin. Ableyard was putting on speed to leave the area of the fight in case another boat—or worse, a plane—showed up.

  “That’ll teach the damn pirates to board in these waters,” Ableyard said.

  The crab boat dropped an inflatable with a power motor and a cowling to keep out the spray. It shot toward the sinking wreck, bouncing across the waves.

  “Men won’t last long in these waters. Let’s hope a few made it off,” Ableyard said.

  “A moment ago you were damning them,” Ahn-Kha said. His powerful breaths were fogging up on the front windshield of the control cabin.

  Ableyard’s fingers tightened on the wheel. His eyes didn’t leave the little boat zipping to the wreck. “They’re enemies right up until they drop into the sea. Then they’re fellow sailors in distress. Heck, if they pull anyone out, they’ll probably want to settle down in free land.”

  “If they pick up any officers, would there be a chance to question them?” Valentine asked.

  “They’ll be in the hands of the Coast Guard. They won’t turn them over to anyone, except provincial authorities.”

  “Of course,” Valentine said. “They probably wouldn’t know anything after all.”

  Ableyard shrugged off the supposition that the Kurians had been informed of the name of his boat and its secret purpose. “I still don’t understand it. There has to be twenty or thirty guys who think like I do for every one that wants to keep the Kurian regime propped up. Yet they still manage to find men to go do their fighting for them. At sea, yet. All they’d have to do is sail into Halifax and jump ship.”

  Valentine borrowed the binoculars and watched the Skylark’s rescue efforts. “Typically they have hostages left behind. They’re comfortable, but they’re hostages nonetheless.” He handed the binoculars back to the captain.

  Valentine looked over at Duvalier, and they shared a smile and a memory. For a moment, she felt a ghostly presence on her ring finger that had once held a fake wedding ring for almost a year.

  The fishing ship followed a chain of islands leading northeast, navigating by getting radio bearings on stations that transmitted canned music or a tone. According to Ableyard, there were some unenviable Coast Guard duty stations on some of the little islands that were the first land ships crossing the North Atlantic hit in the northern latitudes.

  Valentine, Duvalier, and Ahn-Kha offered to clean up the blood spilled on the deck. They talked as they worked.

  “What’s interesting is the failure point in the chain. Southern Command was responsible for the travel arrangements to Halifax. From there, it’s the Refugee Network. Makes sense—they’re used to moving people in secret, know how to do it better than anyone across the Atlantic and Northern Europe. So either the Kurians know a lot about their doings, which seems unlikely because they’re otherwise successful, or someone from Southern Command tipped them, giving the day and endpoint of our journey that they knew about.”

  “You’re being paranoid, Valentine,” Duvalier said. “Things were sloppy in Halifax. I shouldn’t have wandered around town with Stamp. We should have stayed in tight.”

  By the second night out, Ableyard judged them safe from the Kurian net. They were in the wide-open Atlantic and rolling in the waves, though the weather had turned a little warmer. Sun and warm air from the south brightened everyone’s spirits. He, his old and weather-beaten boat chief, O’Neill, Valentine, and Sime chatted over beers in the crew galley.

  Duvalier sort of joined in, half listening and wishing for oblivion. O’Neill said that she’d get her sea legs soon; he’d seen plenty go to sea and get sick. Since she’d kept her preboarding breakfast down, he predicted that by the end of day two of the trip she’d be able to eat a little soup, and by day three the symptoms would be gone.

  “There have been three Battles of Halifax. I guess four now, if this little encounter counts,” O’Neill said. As there was plenty of time for stories, he relayed the history of the Kurian gambits against Halifax.

  A Kurian and his Reapers arrived at the town to help “organize” in the wake of the 2022 ravies plague and other disasters. Nova Scotia hadn’t suffered greatly from ravies. The population was just too spread out and with too few roads, letting the locals set up checkpoints and choke points where a few military weapons and some tough volunteers made all the difference. “They had to be… ruthless,” O’Neill said, summing up worlds of agony in one little word. Duvalier understood it to mean that they shot down anyone with the slightest sign of the plague like mad dogs.

  The Kurian was evicted as soon as he started demanding that a new list of offenses should be enforced and criminals moved out to a special compound on the other side of the island from Halifax.

  The locals, while suffering from some shortages, didn’t much care for his ideas about how to organize themselves, and he lacked the muscle to ram his demands down their throats. They turned against the Kurian and sent him on a lobster boat back to Maine.

  A few months later, pieces of the U.S. Navy led by a frigate now in Kurian control powered up into the harbor and shelled the town. The frigate’s helicopter dropped flyers over the town, assuring the people that whatever idiotic rumors they might have heard, the Kurians were here to help, not harm.

  The Canadians replied that they had some privation, but were making do. If anyone wanted to press the matter further, they could take it up with the government. In Quebec City.

  The second time, in 2024, they tried to take Nova Scotia. A combination of human “militia” and Grogs landed under the guns of four destroyers and a rocket-battery support ship in order to “suppress the flow of weapons” moving south. The people of Halifax and the smaller towns knew that next to nothing was flowing south, except a few boats shuffling refugees.

  While there wasn’t much they could do about the guns of the ships in the harbor, at least initially, they did make life difficult for the occupying troops. Their equipment was sabotaged, and when that led to a few hangings, men and Grogs started finding themselves the target of everything from snipers to hidden bear traps. A preserved Grog-leg and the trap that crushed it (severing a vital artery) sits in the Resistance Museum in Halifax to this day.

  The Kurians shelled some government buildings in return.

  The Nova Scotians, showing tremendous courage, carried out, on one night of rain so heavy it was difficult to see more than a dozen meters, a small boat raid on the ships in the harbor, planting improvised limpet mines on the hulls. They sank three of the four destroyers—the crew was a far cry from the trained USN crews that had once operated the destroyers, and when the bombs went off they panicked and jumped overboard—and the rocket-battery ship managed to blow itself up in a spectacular explosion while firing a reprisal attack into the heart of the city.

  The surviving destroyer hurried south, never to return. The garrison in town decided to give up and handed over all light and heavy weapons, and a good deal of valuable material was salvaged from the wrecks of the destroyers and the rocket ship.

  The third “battle” took place a year later, when long-range planes bombed the harbor, mostly ineffectively, over a course of weeks. The Nova Scotians had nothing to fight aircraft with other than a few old cannons. They noted that every raid consisted of fewer aircraft. The Kurians were losing some due to mechanical failure and not a few defections with each wave, and while there was a good deal of loss of life on the ground, the Kurians finally decided that Halifax could be left on its own.

  Which may have been a mistake. Over the decades, the Free Canadians built up a small but powerful Coast Guard, mostly small boats that waged seagoing guerilla warfare against the Kurian Order from the Maine and Massachusetts coasts to the Great Lakes. The Kurians produced a few seagoing surprises of their own, including amphi
bian Grogs, which Valentine identified as “Big Mouths,” having had some experience with them on the Great Lakes and in the Pacific Northwest. Big Mouths could be trained to be adept at the sort of raids that had sunk the three destroyers at the Second Battle of Halifax. The Free Canadians now offered a bounty on Big Mouth heads, and there were a few tough crews who maintained a very nice, but sometimes short-lived, lifestyle as Grog hunters on the bounty system.

  “Big Mouths are vicious bastards. Anyone who goes after them deserves their money,” Valentine said. “If you can find the bases and get their trainers, they’ll cause just as much trouble for the Kurians.” Valentine told a few stories of his own experiences with them in the Pacific Northwest. Some of them Duvalier hadn’t heard in full before.

  “Maybe on your return trip, you could spend a few months as a technical adviser,” Ableyard said. “The Coast Guard would love to pick your brain.”

  “We’ll see how things are going back home,” Valentine said.

  He was still worried about the summer’s campaigning in Kentucky. But Duvalier couldn’t think of a way to take his mind off his worries, with nothing to do on a fishing boat rolling west. She had her own troubles—she was more and more nauseous with each mile into the open ocean.

  She was seasick for a good part of the rest of the voyage and remembered very little of the first leg, save for not really caring whether the Out for Lunch sank or not in the rough spring seas.

  According to Ableyard, the weather was “about average” for this time of year. Rolling around in the boat’s lower forward cabin like a pea in a can, she would have hated to experience a bad spell.

  Just about the time she was able to digest something other than crackers it was time to say good-bye to Ableyard and his “marked boat.”

  “It won’t be so bad. A new radio mast, a couple of changes to the cabin and railing and you won’t recognize her.”

  They were handed off to a German fishing boat somewhere halfway between Iceland and Ireland. That in itself was a tricky process in the spring seas. The boats threw over every fender they had and swung them across in a canvas sling with a safety line looped about the chest at the end of a yardarm.

  The Schöne Anna out of Cuxhaven was somewhat larger, but had a similar arrangement to the Out for Lunch. It had a false wall in two of the fish holds. The Germans had engineered a better ventilation system, so fresh air could be brought in through a vent—it even had a small heater. With luck, they’d need it only for the final run into the Frisian Coast.

  Obviously, the conference wasn’t taking place up one of Norway’s fjords, or they could have just turned east. Kind of a shame. Duvalier had seen pictures of the fjords while paging through old books and magazines, and the stark contrast of mountain and sea appealed to her.

  No, they were heading for Germany’s North Sea coast. She’d set foot in Europe in an area not famous for much of anything she’d ever heard of. No Eiffel Tower or Amsterdam dens of iniquity for her.

  Duvalier made friends with one of the crewmen, a young sandy-haired fellow who knew just enough English to offer obscene suggestions. He called her “tiny thing” and gave her his heavy wool coat—well, traded. He was interested in her duster and it was oversized enough to fit him—“sehr wunderbar,” he called it. The seaman’s coat was of the type Sime called a “duffel” and worked superbly in the wind and wet.

  The captain’s English was somewhat better.

  “Ach, ve have little trouble. Kurians don’t care about one or two. Most of those escapers, to a Kur, is better off without, yes? Keep him where he is, he so unhappy he make trouble. Maybe start resistance. So why not let the restless go?”

  It was a puzzle. Duvalier didn’t care for mental house-of-mirrors games, where everywhere you turned all you saw was your own back, open and inviting to the enemy’s knife. She liked to think about what she was going to do to them, rather than what they might do to her.

  Still, someone tipped off the Kurians. They knew where they were leaving from and what day, but they didn’t know that it was the Out for Lunch that bore them. That made a leak in the Refugee Network and its connections to the Baltic League less likely, as their passage had clearly been planned in advance.

  So, a couple of gunboats had been lurking just over the horizon. Valentine had a point: the Kurian Order had plenty of advance warning of their departure.

  Nothing made sense, however. It wasn’t like their presence at the conference held some key to humanity’s future. Sime was going on the trip to tell the rest of the freeholds, in no uncertain terms, that Southern Command was taking a breather. Who needed that message squelched, and why?

  Or perhaps it wasn’t the message, but the messenger. She, Valentine, and Ahn-Kha had given the Kurian Order plenty of reasons to wish them dead—perhaps Ahn-Kha most of all, since the Coal Country, where Ahn-Kha had fought with the central Appalachian guerillas, was still a mess and electricity was being rationed on the East Coast. Perhaps someone wanted Sime out of the way for reasons of high politics. She idly wished she’d read the newspapers that irregularly arrived by mail at Fort Seng.

  Of course, for all she knew, Stamp might have been the target; in that case the entity that set them up had lucked out. She’d hinted that she was deep in UFR politics. If they were as cutthroat as some of the Quislings she’d known, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Frisian Coast: Alessa Duvalier may have wished for fjords, but she landed on a sunny coast as flat as if it had been rolled out on a baker’s table, full of treacherously shifting sandbars and deceptive shallows. The sandbars form little islands guarding the coast, often reachable by the locals, who can wade out at low tide to some or row out through reeds to others. The sandbars are popular with clam diggers, individual fishermen who smoke their catch before taking it inland, teenagers looking for a private place to enjoy a bonfire and some beer, couples seeking some sun for a private thrill, or those who just enjoy a solitary walk next to the sea.

  Smugglers also make use of the tricky waters of this coast. The sandbars are a perfect place for deep-sea craft or shore-hugging flat-bottomed barges to meet smaller boats, exchanging negotiable valuables for luxury items unavailable to everyone but top-ranking Quislings. Then there is just a good deal of everyday trade between fishermen; the English and Germans and Danes often meet in these waters to swap tea for schnapps, cider for cigarettes, and news for news, very little of which is good.

  On the true shoreline, patches of the coast still serve as a resort area, with different grades of recreation. The best beachfront and most picturesque towns tend to be frequented by Mitteleuropean Quislings and their entourages escaping late summer heat. They bring enough money for there to be some of the traditional tourist-industry businesses: fine dining, boat charters, small, exclusive hotels, and of course health spa-resorts dedicated to the one common concern of the Quislings—keeping an energetic and youthful appearance.

  Others further down the food chain still go to this coast, but stay at cheaper lodgings with smaller, muddier beaches, or go to campgrounds in the wilder and reclaimed areas of the coast.

  There is a good deal of “reclaimed” coastline. Dredging and other shore management improvements have been ignored for decades, as the Kurians don’t see much need for intercoastal trade—the more Balkanized and isolated their subject peoples, the better. The very few birdwatchers are pleased that coastal flocks are thriving in the newly wild areas, but for others in dying, cut-off towns in the border areas, the wilder parts can mean danger.

  The fishing boat made use of one of only two channels kept open to this part of the coast, running a gauntlet of broken-down sea windmills. The thin windmills gave Duvalier a bit of a chill, since from a distance in the predawn they looked like a line of crucified Grogs she’d once passed through near Kansas City, Missouri.

  The Schöne Anna paused at a sandbar on its way back into Cuxhaven. It passed into German territorial waters with
only the most cursory of searches. A pair of sailors came on board, swapped Turkish cigarettes for Scottish whiskey and a couple of Norwegian gold coins, and that was the end of the search. The Scotch was provided by the captain, the gold supplied by the Refugee Network.

  The sailor who had traded coats with Duvalier gave her a little piece of knotted line fashioned into a bracelet as a souvenir. “Schöne Alessa,” he called her. Then said something that began with Vielleicht, which Duvalier understood meant “perhaps,” but she didn’t understand any of the words that followed.

  They spent no time at all in the little seaside village; they were under orders to get inland as quickly as possible, as the coasts were more closely watched than the interior areas, which were largely peaceful under the Kurians. This was accomplished by one of the wives of a hand of the Schöne Anna, who bundled them into a high-sided horse-drawn wagon with potatoes, a live pig, and some chickens as camouflage. Sime’s dark skin and Valentine’s Amerind features drew a few curious glances from the Germans, but the coast was frequented by tourists, so there could be a number of explanations, including a breakdown of transportation and a ride from a friendly local.

  They rode for three hours, going northwest and therefore inland. Wind-farm graveyards turned into cow pasture, and they enjoyed a picnic dinner of cheese and bread and dried fish before she handed them over to Zloty.

  Zloty was a Pole who’d lived in Germany most of his life. Duvalier liked his big, sad eyes. There was something of the tragic clown in him. He was a roofer by profession and had a permanent cough from the chemicals they used, though Duvalier also noticed that he smoked frequently, dreadful hand-rolled cigarettes that had only a hint of tobacco amid all the noxious chaff. How he was involved with the Resistance he did not say and no one asked. His English was quite good.