They dug deep, driving the boat around the lip of the hole, riding its edge until they could break away from it, but the hole didn’t want to let them go. The reversing current kept trying to push them back upstream and they had to paddle like maniacs to break free.
They finally shot out and she started pushing the bow sideways. “We’re going right,” she shouted. “I see a small hydraulic we can use.
“Easy, easy, stop paddling.” She looked back. “Roj?”
“I got it.”
The two ahead of Viggo pulled in their paddles. He turned to look back and saw that the monk next to Roj had handed his over and the older monk was now holding both, giving only an occasional correction to keep them in place.
“There’s a boulder behind us that makes the current reverse over itself here,” Roj explained, giving a couple of short strokes. It lets us sit still with minimal effort, gives us the chance for a break halfway through.”
“But you’re still paddling.”
“I am but this is leisurely, compared to what we just went through, and these old muscles of mine would seize up if I just flopped down like those lazy oafs up forward.”
The other three hurled good-natured insults at him.
“You guys aren’t what I would have expected,” Viggo said, “for monks, that is…”
The old monk grinned. “And what would you have expected, Viggo Rickson?”
“More solemn, I suppose, and it was a surprise to see women among you…”
“Solemn is boring,” Roj said dismissively. “As for women, if you’re surprised to see them, wouldn’t you be even more surprised there’s anyone here at all after thousands of years?”
He quirked his head to the side. “Your parents did explain how things work, when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much and…”
“Yes,” Viggo cut him off. The woman giggled in the darkness behind him. “I get that you would have died out pretty quickly without both sexes. I think the translation of ‘monk’ in Dheema is the cause of my surprise. On Earth, a monk is usually a male.”
“So your monastic orders are entirely male?” Roj frowned. “Do they last more than a single generation?”
“They do. Mostly they recruit form outside their orders so there’s a steady stream of new monks but they live only among men, shut away from women. They’re expected to resist their urges as a part of their vows.”
“I don’t want to tell you how to organize your religious orders, young man,” Roj said, a hint of amusement in his voice, “but it seems to me that locking up a bunch of horny young men together and expecting it to result in celibacy seems like a plan for failure to me.”
“For the record,” the young man near the bows chimed in, “I much prefer our way of doing things!”
Viggo turned to see him exchanging a loaded look with the woman across from him.
“I’ve heard of a few female-only monasteries,” she said, “but that was back in the old empire. No idea if they still exist.”
“There’s the Carbon Brotherhood on Chaco Benthic,” Viggo offered. “All males but they used to get plenty of recruits from families looking for a better life for their kids. Used to be the only way to get off-world.”
“And now?” Roj asked.
“Now my family runs the place. The industry is more mechanized, so there’s no need to force a labor pool to stay there. The brotherhood’s still considered a good way to learn valuable skills. Young men join for a few years and then some of them leave for corporate jobs.”
“And they enforce celibacy?” the woman asked.
“Not in the least. A lot of young men actually get married as soon as they’re accepted as novices. They can move their wife into their quarters and they get increased benefits. The Dactari Republic refuses to license celibate orders. The few that exist end up coming to the Alliance territories.”
“Really,” Roj mused. “Didn’t think the Dactari had that much sense…” He pulled on the oars almost automatically but a bounce in the current brought him back to the present. “If you three are done with your beauty rest, can we proceed?”
The other three monks took up their positions and Roj handed back the paddle to the younger man who sat opposite him.
“We need to go left from here,” the woman said. A collection of nasty-looking rocks were sliding past on the right side. “Steady, now!” she shouted. “And give way!”
They all increased their tempo, surprising Viggo, who’d assumed the order meant stop paddling.
The boat shot neatly between two groups of rock.
“Left again,” she called out. She dug deep, blurring as she worked to aim them in the right direction.
Viggo looked past her, seeing one jagged spire of rock that blurred less than the others. It was slowly moving to the right of the boat’s centerline. He realized the blurring, or the lack thereof, must be a part of how she identified the rocks that posed the greatest risk.
They sped past the offending rocks but she was already yelling their next move. “Hard right now! We need to get to the far side before the brambles!”
They were all working harder than ever now, turning into greenish hazes of activity, the paddles a smear of reflection. Viggo wanted to grab a paddle and help but he knew there was no room for him to fit in between the others without throwing them off their rhythm. Would it help or hinder if a fifth rower suddenly threw off the balance they have right now?
He looked downstream and his blood ran cold. The ‘brambles’ must be a reference to what he was seeing. Dozens of jagged fingers reached out of the water, wavering in hazy admonishment.
It looked like there was no path where a boat could fit through but these people knew what they were doing.
Didn’t they?
Rendezvous
Inside the edge of the Great Bled
Odin nabbed the edge of the bedsheet and pulled it up, covering June as well. She made a grateful sound in her throat and slid closer to him.
They were both very relaxed.
“What I don’t understand,” he said cautiously, “is why you do it, if you hate it so much.”
June rolled onto her side, putting her head on his shoulder and a hand on his chest. She frowned, framing her response.
“Because I’m good at it,” she said. “And it’s a bit strong to say I hate it…”
“But you often come back from a raid in a gloomy frame of mind.”
“Of course I do,” she said. “It’s different from a standard Midgaard raid where you’re waving a blade around and your blood is up. Have you ever looked at some unaware guard and calculated the chances that he might spot your team and get some of them killed?”
“Not really.” He frowned. “Well, there might have been a few occasions. There was this sentry I had to get past so I could see if the enemy had any ladders in their camp to scale the walls of the town we’d taken. Slit his throat.”
He stared up at the pipes and conduits that clung to the ceiling. “Can’t remember the name of the place for the life of me.”
“Who was the enemy?” She asked.
“Alfred,” he said distractedly. “Was it Wiltunscir?” he muttered. “Winburnan? Something with a ‘W’, I think. Anyway, it was fifteen hundred years ago.”
“Wait a minute…” She sat up to look down at his face. “Do you mean Alfred the Great?”
He was momentarily distracted because the sheet had slid off of her breasts. “Who?” He finally looked up to her face. “The Great?” he grimaced. “He was hardly what the northmen or a Midgaard would describe as ‘great’. I saw him in that camp but didn’t realize it till later. I’d thought it was just one of their priests at the time.”
“You don’t think he should be called great?”
“Oh, he had a greatness to him, I suppose. I just wouldn’t quake in my boots if I’d ever faced him in a shield-wall. His greatness lay in his ability to rule. Most kings back then were little better than petty thugs.
&n
bsp; “Alfred was a great one for making laws. He had so many priests following him around it looked like a flock of starlings had their wings clipped. They recorded all of his laws and commandments, you see.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Laws made him great?”
“His laws gave his realm order. It’s a lot easier to plant a crop if you know it’s not going to be stolen by a stronger neighbor. Commerce thrived. He made Wessex into a fat land. It was the ultimate prize for the northmen but a prize we could never quite take.”
“Why not?” she poked him in the chest. “I thought you guys had the best warriors!”
“We weren’t very good at sieges, though. Alfred realized that and set out to make it a central part of his overall strategy. That’s why he was great, I suppose. He was a thinker. He fortified the towns and we could almost never get inside them. He even had a formula for how many men were needed for a given length of wall.”
“That’s why you don’t want to call him ‘Alfred the Great’,” she teased. “He out-thought you instead of relying on his sword?”
“He wasn’t without his victories on the battlefield,” Odin said grudgingly. “He beat us soundly at Aesc’s hill.”
“I’ve studied military history,” she reminded him. “His brother, the king, led that fight.”
“You may have studied it,” Odin said, “but I was there, weighed down with chainmail and a lime-board shield. I was trudging up the boggy hill toward the Saxons, sure we’d win. Halfdan was shouting that we had the king in front of us and we just had to break them one more time and the Wealth of Wessex would be ours.”
“But you just said it wasn’t the king…”
“Oh, he was there; we could see him taking part in a prayer service while we approached,” he said gloomily. “That’s why we were so sure we’d win. The Christians always put at least as much stock in praying as they did in fighting. It looked as if the king would go on praying right up until one of us put a blade to his neck.
“But Alfred was on the other flank,” he continued. “And though he might love prayer as much as his brother, he was still thinker enough to know his brother’s kingdom was in danger… Readingum!”
“What?”
“Readingum!” Odin repeated. “That was the town we’d taken, when I went out to scout for ladders.”
“That’s the place that starts with a ‘W’?”
“You know how messy the English language can be,” he said dismissively. “Anyway, we’d just driven them off from their assault at Readingum and pursued them all the way to Aesc’s hill. We were invincible warriors, all trained from early childhood while the only thing in our way was a small praying army backed up by the Fyrd – a mob of farmers with pointy things.
“That was when Alfred hit us. We were tired from the pursuit, thirsty because the Saxons had drunk any ale they found along the way and dragging our feet through mud uphill. Drove us all the way back to Readingum, those of us that survived.”
“I don’t see why you’d say he wasn’t a good warrior.”
“Well, I’m not sure he’d survive for long if you stuck him in a shield wall,” Odin explained. “It calls for savagery. When it comes to knowing when to send that wall forward, that’s where he stood out. When it comes to knowing how to defeat the endless invasions, that’s where he really showed his genius.
“The minute we raided some village or farm and set fire to the buildings, the raid was effectively over. The smoke was visible for miles. Every place we went, we’d find it cleared out. Everyone took their valuables and food and scampered off to the nearest fortified town.”
“I suppose you never considered not setting fire to everything in sight?”
He laughed. “Clearly, you’ve never met these people.
“But you’ve just made my point,” she told him. “You’d start a raid, send up a big smoke signal because you can’t help yourselves, and then you end up getting nothing. If you’d been fast and sneaky, you’d have ridden right into Witancaester and taken the king hostage because everybody knows you don’t operate like that and they probably weren’t taking a whole lot of precautions against it.
“When I take my team on a raid, we’re usually back out before anyone even knows we were there. If it goes wrong, a few dozen might end up getting killed but a straight-up raid, like the Midgaard prefer, ends in thousands of dead.”
He sighed. “True enough.”
She knew the death-toll didn’t concern him very much. Perhaps I’ll feel the same way in a thousand years? She hoped not.
“I’m going to visit the bridge,” she told him. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed. “Make sure the other ships are keeping station. You know how they get with important but boring details like that. It’s too easy to miss a rendezvous in here where there’s no frame of reference.”
Odin replied with a snore.
She got dressed and, just on general principle, rolled him over so he’d stop the noise before she left.
It was quiet on the bridge and a few of the watch officers were looking dozy. “The conn is still yours, Garth,” she told the commander in the center of the bridge. “I’m just visiting.” She started with the sensor team.
“Any anomalies out there?” she asked, her tone a little more crisp than ususal.
“No, my lady,” the officer replied, angling his head from side to side to stretch his neck muscles. He stood a little straighter. This was a Midgaard-built ship where seats on the bridge were still looked at as effete luxuries. “Nothing at all, really. Just more blackness.”
She nodded. “When they get here, we won’t see much, if anything at all. Remember, they’re all LRG, they have specialized sensor suites that out-range ours by fifteen percent.”
“And they love to sit outside of our detection range and watch us,” the officer agreed, “just so they can rub our nose in it!” He’d taken on a look of fierce determination.
“Sitting here, inside the edge of the Bled,” he continued, “with almost no background light-scape, we stand a better chance of picking up any slight return off their scouts. I’ll pass a message to our other ships, reminding them of the need to stay sharp!”
“Excellent, Hjallmar!” She punched him lightly on the shoulder. “We don’t want those LRG space rats catching us flat-footed and, frankly, we need to be on our guard anyway. We’re waiting to rendezvous with a force coming out of Dactari territory. If they’ve been compromised, if their systems have been hacked…” She’d added the last in deference to Midgaard attitudes toward those who give up information under torture.
Suggesting that the RV coordinates might have been captured by hacking avoided any implicit insult to a Midgaard force. Still, she knew from her training that pretty much everybody talked, sooner or later, and the Dactari used sophisticated techniques, employing their educational pods to delve deep into a prisoner’s mind.
She moved over to the nav station next but they’d already shifted themselves into more attentive poses. She much preferred to set an active example like this, when possible, rather than shouting at them to stay sharp. She’d been on long night-shifts like this one thousands of times over the last century and she understood how easy it was to fall into lethargy.
One of the jobs of a senior officer was to set the right kind of example. That was Garth’s responsibility, as the officer of the deck, but she knew, from personal experience, that nobody was immune from boredom. She’d stood in Garth’s place herself and nearly dozed off a few dozen times at least.
“Station-keeping is looking perfectly correct,” she acknowledged as she approached the helm, “but I just remembered something I heard about LRG operations out here during the war.” She looked over her shoulder. “Commander Garth, might we borrow you for a moment?”
She waved to the officer at the communications station. “Lieutenant, a moment if you please?”
A politely worded request from the lady of their household was as good as an order – it was just more gr
acious in delivery. If June hadn’t come from a military background and hadn’t served in the fleet under combat conditions, her requests would have carried less weight but she had made her reputation and her warriors accepted her leadership.
“I recall hearing,” she began as the two officers came over, “that the LRG, when operating in the Bled, would push their screen out beyond normal sensor range, relying on narrow-beam communications to maintain position.
“They used to escort freighters and capital ships along the edge of the Bled and pop out where the Dactari least expected them. The enemy never saw those ships because the screen was so deep. Dactari records showed only a few scouts and then, suddenly, an irregular force would rise up on their frontier, fully equipped and armed.”
“You’re thinking of expanding our positions?” Garth asked, his tone not quite concealing his misgivings.
“No,” she assured him, “and you’re right to be concerned. That’s too much to coordinate on a first attempt. The frigates and cruisers should stay close to the Skidbladner, in any case; they’re here to protect the carrier, not to be our eyes and ears.”
“Just our Hussars, then?”
She nodded. “That way, they’ll still spot our screen before we know they’re there but they’ll never get close enough to locate our main force. I don’t know about the rest of you but I don’t like their habit of dropping out of distortion right under a regular fleet’s noses, just to show off.”
She looked at the others. “No issues to raise?” The two men looked at each other and then shook their heads. “Good. Let’s put it into play now.”
June walked toward the front of the bridge, not wanting to be looking over Garth’s shoulder while he sent his orders. She wandered through the holographic tactical display.
The display was the most visible representation of how different this operation was. There were no planets or star systems showing as actuals. There were a few broken-line indicators, showing where some of the closer systems were calculated to be, but they were based on the nav database and records from inertial compensation.
Asymmetry Page 11
