The Sea Without a Shore (ARC)

CHAPTER 16


Platt’s Compound on Dace

The six sub-machine guns fired more or less together, though the first burst came before Hogg shouted, “Fire!” and the two last followed him shouting, “Cease fire!” There might have been yet another burst at the end if Hale hadn’t grabbed Furstein by the right wrist and twisted his hand and weapon skyward.

Daniel was philosophical about the shooting. He hadn’t been under any illusions about how his spacers measured up as marksmen. That was one of the reasons he’d set the crew to weapons practice here on the shore of the island.

“I’ve got them aiming at holographic projections right now, Master Platt,” Daniel said to the soft-looking bald man facing him beside the wall of Barracks #1. The shooters were a hundred yards away, so the gunfire was only an unpleasant crackling against the strong breeze. “Not a one of ’em would have a problem if I told them to blast you to cats’ meat instead. So tell me about the Corcyran envoys again, only this time make it the truth.”

Platt closed his eyes, but he couldn’t keep tears from leaking out under them. “Don’t,” he blubbered. “Don’t don’t don’t.…”

“Bloody hell, Evans!” Hale said. “You’ve got to take out the empty magazine before you can put in a fresh tube!”

Hogg and Hale were doing the training, but Daniel suspected that Hale was learning as much as the spacers under her charge. Her experience on a marksmanship team at the Academy would have given her a very false impression of what “shooting” meant to the average spacer. She had to understand the reality before she found herself commanding spacers in a firefight.

“Just tell me how the envoys were captured,” Daniel said soothingly. “Or arrested, if you want put it that way. You’re not in any trouble if you just tell me the truth.”

He’d figured the gunfire would make Platt uneasy, but he hadn’t expected the fellow to be such an abject coward that the implied threat made him incoherent. Daniel tried to hide his disgust when he realized that Platt had soiled himself in fear. Well, they wouldn’t be staying on Dace for long.

Platt’s Compound was one of eight settlements on the planet, all more or less the same. Dace was a low-lying world. Shallow seas covered ninety percent of the surface, and when a storm really got going, it could circle the planet several times before subsiding.

Large scale colonization and normal agriculture were impossible, but it was a good place to take on reaction mass and it provided seafood protein in simple factories which sucked in water and compressed the creatures which they filtered out. There was nothing in the seas more complex than a rotifer.

Platt’s had two barracks, a processing plant, and a residence which was only half the size of normal barracks. All the buildings were formed from slabs of edge-welded structural plastic. In good condition they were watertight. They would have floated off in storms if they hadn’t been anchored deep into the rock.

The permanent staff was four women and eight men, all members of one family. The women doubled as prostitutes; probably the men did also. Daniel hadn’t always been fastidious, but he found it hard to imagine that even the randiest spacer, no matter how much he had drunk, would have found the Platts enticing. No doubt he was wrong.

“It was nothing to do with us,” Platt said. He didn’t open his eyes. “We just made the call, you see. This ship from Ischia landed at Riddle’s Place—”

Near the south pole.

“—and said there was five hundred thalers for anybody who told them that a ship bound for Corcyra had landed at their compound. Just told them, you see? And five hundred thalers, that’s real money!”


Gunfire ripped along the shoreline. Platt whimpered and hunched forward, screwing his eyes closed again. Hale shouted at Evans; she was getting hoarse.

“You’re fine, Platt,” Daniel said, patting the fellow’s shoulder. “Just tell us the whole truth and we’ll be gone like we were never here.”

Butler, the engineer of the Cordelia, the ship which had been returning the envoys from Karst, was still on Corcyra when Daniel was looking for information on the capture. Butler said that they’d landed at Platt’s on Dace, the usual layover between Karst and Corcyra. They normally spent three days on the ground, mostly to rest the crew: the Cordelia’s fore-rigging was in bad condition, and the splices required clearing constantly.

A ship from Ischia had landed after the Cordelia did, but that wasn’t a matter for comment or concern. That night the crew of the Ischian ship had abducted the envoys from Barracks #1 at gunpoint, leaving a ransom demand for the Cordelia’s captain to deliver to the Independence Council on Brotherhood. Butler had been in Barracks #1 at the time, but he’d been drunk and knew nothing about the business until well after the Ischians had lifted. From what the captain said, there hadn’t been much to know.

“We called Riddle when the Corcyrans arrived, that’s all we did,” said Platt when he regained enough composure to speak. “The Ischians landed that night and paid us, just like they said. And then they took off again, and it wasn’t till next morning I knew that the Corcyrans had gone off with them. That’s all.”

“The envoys were taken prisoner at gunpoint,” Daniel said. “Which you knew.”

“Not so,” Platt whimpered to his hands, knotted together before him. “There wasn’t a shot, not one shot. My daughter Hyacinth, she was entertaining some of the Corcyrans and she maybe said something about a gun the next morning but I didn’t think nothing about it.”

Daniel considered the situation. Platt hadn’t told him much which he and Adele hadn’t deduced before they lifted from Corcyra, but hearing it first hand was good practice whenever possible.

The kidnapping had been well planned and executed, not a spur-of-the-moment thing by individuals who might now feel they were in over their heads. Daniel had been ready to deal with matters either way, so the datum wasn’t simply good or bad. It was crucial that he—and Adele—knew which it was, however.

“All right,” Daniel said. “We’ll be lifting before nightfall, but I’ll pay you the normal landing fee. You can be gone, now.”

“Ah, captain-sir?” Platt said. “Will you be, well…the shooting, I mean. It gets on the nerves of me wife and daughters, you see?”

Daniel gave Platt a hard smile. “I think the weapons training will end after the next sequence,” he said, trying to suppress his contempt for the man. “We’ll use your shore for a briefing to the crew since there isn’t a building here large enough to hold us.”

He made a quick chopping motion with his hand when Platt seemed to be about to speak further. “And before you ask,” Daniel said, “we won’t be paying anything additional for the opportunity to raise a marquee on the shore for the purpose.”

Daniel turned on his heel and walked back toward the Kiesche and Adele. The reason besides information that he’d chosen to land on Dace was that it was a good place to inform his crew about his plans.

The Kiesches were brave and loyal beyond question, but they were spacers. A captain who expected his crew to remain sober and discreet on the ground was either very inexperienced or out of his mind.

Daniel was neither of those things. Waiting till they landed on Dace to explain the situation meant that nobody on Corcyra would learn about his plans until the Kiesche returned—or some other ship arrived with news of the disaster on Ischia. Daniel hoped and expected the first option, but he wouldn’t survive to care if matters worked out the other way.

***

Adele looked at the assembled faces, feeling uncomfortable. Normally her briefings would be aboard ship. Even if the whole crew of the Princess Cecile was listening, most of the personnel would be in separate compartments.

The Kiesche’s only quality imaging equipment was on the bridge, which wouldn’t hold the whole crew. Though the freighter carried only a fraction of the Sissie’s complement of over a hundred, the twenty staring faces kept Adele from pretending that she was alone with data on a display.

“Ischia has been settled in over a hundred valleys,” she said, displaying the planet with its populated continent toward her audience. “There is a federal government, but for the most part the valley clans are independent. We have to do with the Monfiore clan.”

She high-lighted a section in the southeastern quadrant. Pasternak had rigged a speaker from the ship’s PA system to amplify the signal from Adele’s personal data system, but she had to use the system’s own projector for imagery. A sailcloth marquee was necessary so that the greenish sunlight wouldn’t overwhelm the little unit’s holographic capability.

“The valleys provide enough food for the inhabitants,” Adele said, “but there’s nothing agricultural of such quantity or quality that it’s worth exporting. Ischia builds sturdy ships of moderate size, and much of the population is working or has worked as spacers. Ships and ships’ crews, along with small quantities of forest products, bring in all the foreign exchange.”

The breeze off the water was freshening, making the marquee rattle. Woetjans had decided it would be safe, so Adele knew her concern about it blowing away was unjustified. Still, the quicker this was over and she was back on the bridge, the better.

“Ischia is an Associated World of the Alliance,” Adele said. “Her spacers served on Alliance warships, but much of the Fleet has gone into ordinary since the Treaty of Amiens, just as the RCN has.”

Her audience murmured agreement. These spacers were the cream of the cream; all of them could have found berths in the merchant service and probably in the RCN even in its current reduced state. Spacers they knew, spacers whose families lived in the same apartment blocks as their families did, were out of work, though. It would be a while before the merchant service expanded to pre-war levels.

Adele showed imagery of several Ischian-built starships. Daniel and Cazelet—whose family had owned a shipping firm before they fell afoul of Guarantor Porra and were executed—had assured her that the vessels were typical Ischian construction.

There was no need for the images, but they provided something for spacers to focus on during the lecture. Adele had learned in childhood that most people didn’t have the passion for data which so consumed her.

“Ischia has a particular problem,” she said. “During the eighteen years while Pantellaria was annexed to the Alliance, Ischian ships were given a monopoly on the carrying trade between Pantellaria and the five core worlds of the Alliance. Guarantor Porra was rewarding a court favorite whose brother was the Alliance Advisor on Ischia. Despite the large fee the advisor was taking, Ischia did very well out of the trade.”

Vesey and Cazelet were listening to the briefing on the console on the Kiesche’s bridge, ready to start lift-off procedure instantly. Pasternak was in the Power Room, cycling reaction mass. The Chief Engineer wouldn’t light the thrusters until the crew was aboard, but it wouldn’t take this group long to board in a crisis.

“Since Pantellaria regained its independence,” Adele said, “the new government—the Council of Twenty—has refused landing rights to any ship with Alliance registration, including ships from worlds which are Associates of the Alliance. This is being described to the Pantellarian people as a rebuke to their former Alliance overlords.”

Adele paused, forcing herself to look around the semicircle of her audience: her shipmates, her family members. Daniel was grinning; others smiled to meet her eyes or frowned in their determination to understand, somehow, what the Mistress was telling them. I have to remember that it isn’t just me against the universe any more.

Adele was still alone in the dark hours of the morning, when she was visited by the faces of those she had killed, of the many she had killed. But I’m not alone now!

“Some of you may be thinking that the Council is taking reasonable retribution on Pantellaria’s oppressors,” Adele said. As she spoke the words, she realized that the only people in this audience likely to think in those terms were the commissioned officers. Ordinary spacers were only concerned with political decisions as they were affected by them, and nothing that happened on Pantellaria affected the Kiesche’s crew.

“The Pantellarian councillors are oligarchs,” she said, grimacing at having used a word that would mean nothing, nothing, to the spacers. “Rich folk, rich folk from rich families, running things for themselves and not for the people.”

She spoke harshly because she was angry with her own inability to communicate. Her audience read her tone as righteous indignation and responded with nods and grunts of approval. Evans even slapped one big fist into the other palm and muttered, “That’s how it always bloody is, ain’t it?”


Adele paused. Yes, it generally was; on Cinnabar as surely as on Pantellaria and on the worlds of the Alliance. The spacers were unsophisticated, but they weren’t all stupid; and even a stupid man—which Evans was by any reasonable standard—could see straight through to a point which a highly educated noblewoman was ignoring because it wasn’t in the compartment she was examining at present.

“Quite right, Evans,” Adele said aloud. “Three of the twenty members of the Council have shipping interests and expect to make a great deal of money out of the embargo on Alliance hulls.”

She cleared her throat. “One Ischian clan, the Monfiores, decided to reverse the disastrous loss of trade by kidnapping the envoys of the Corcyran independence movement. They’ve demanded a ransom of three million Alliance thalers or the carrying trade from Corcyra on the same terms as under the Alliance. The Monfiores specialized in the Corcyran copper trade, and that’s probably how they got good enough information on the envoys’ route to carry out the very sophisticated operation which took place here on Dace.”

Forgetting her audience, Adele added, “I hope to get more details when we reach Ischia.”

That was true, but it had nothing whatever to do with what Adele was supposed to be explaining to the crew. Before she could get angry with herself again, she noticed that the spacers were nodding in approval again. The Mistress is on the job. She’ll know where the Ischian buggers bought their socks before she’s done.

Adele smiled visibly at her audience. She had learned from observation over the past few years to interpret people’s reactions even when she could not in a lifetime imagine why they thought the things they did. There are many kinds of information.

“The Corcyran Council did not agree to the terms,” Adele said. “They have allowed us, allowed Captain Leary, to use his own efforts to free the prisoners, however. Remember that though we’re dealing with a single clan rather than all Ischia, it seems probable that the Monfiores’ attitude is shared generally across the planet. Certainly the depression is planet-wide.”

Adele cleared her throat and forced herself to look around her audience again. She had become a good—an exceptional—pistol shot through constant practice at the range in the basement of Chatsworth Minor. She doubted that she would ever become a good public speaker, but she had a better appreciation for the value of practice than most people did.

“Are there questions before I move aside for Six?” she said, not really expecting a response.

“Ma’am?” said Cory. “Why haven’t these Monfiores sold their prisoners to Pantellaria, because by now it must be pretty obvious that Corcyra isn’t going to pay the ransom they’re asking.”

“I apologize,” Adele said. “I should have covered that without being reminded. I’m speculating because my information isn’t recent enough to have an answer directly from Pantellarian files, but the background suggests a familiar pattern. Commissioner Arnaud is a member of the Council and probably the most important single member of it.”

She paused to order her presentation. If my father had come to me, I could have predicted that his coup would fail, Adele realized. Though at age 15, the skills she had since developed working with Daniel Leary might not have been sufficient to the task.

And it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, because Lucius Mundy would not have believed her, believed anyone, saying something which he didn’t want to be true. That common human trait was something else that Adele had learned in the years since the failure of the Three Circles Conspiracy.

“Arnaud has nineteen colleagues, however,” she continued. “While none of them have openly declared themselves Arnaud’s enemy, many—” and perhaps all “—have privately indicated disquiet about Arnaud’s intentions if he should return to Pantellaria after a great military victory. One may reasonably speculate that they would rather that Arnaud fail, though they could not be seen to actively work against him and become traitors in the eyes of the general populace.”

“Ah, Mundy?” Daniel said. They hadn’t discussed the background in detail, because until recently the Pantellarian invasion itself hadn’t been part of their own mission. “Why did Arnaud take the risk of commanding the expedition? Because he must have known that it would be risky simply to be off-planet when his colleagues were unfriendly. Or frightened of him, which is even worse.”

Adele nodded, closing her eyes for a moment. “Again this is something I hope to learn more about when we’re back on Corcyra,” she said. Her voice was being amplified; Daniel’s had not been, but she and the audience heard him easily over the breeze. “Arnaud owned three copper mines on Corcyra, which the Independence Council nationalized; that probably affected his planning. The factor I cannot determine without access to Commissioner Arnaud’s mind, however…”

The smile she gave her audience was thin and as hard as chipped flint, but it was a smile.

“Which is still beyond my capabilities. The factor is whether Arnaud really is aiming at autocracy—tyranny, dictatorship, whichever term you prefer—as his fellow Board members believe. My information makes me doubt that he could have succeeded in seizing power before he took command of the expedition. If he should manage to recover Corcyra, however, his chances of a successful coup would be much better.”

“But ma’am?” Cory said. The eyes of the audience swivelled toward him like those of spectators at a tennis match. Cory has developed a very respectable voice of command during the time he served under Captain Leary. “Arnaud can’t succeed, can he? Not now. Even without the Corcyrans getting missiles from Karst, the best the Pantellarians can hope for is a stalemate.”

“Information suggests…,” Adele said. The information was from Deirdre Leary, not Mistress Sand, but her only concern with data was its accuracy. “That Commissioner Arnaud hopes that Cinnabar will support his attempt to recover the planet. I do not believe that his hopes have much chance of being fulfilled.”

In the larger scheme of things, it didn’t matter if human civilization collapsed into a renewed death struggle between Cinnabar and the Alliance. In terms of human beings, though, it would be a very bad thing.

I don’t really feel that I’m human; but my friends certainly are. The spacers watching Adele didn’t understand her smile, but it was a real smile.

Adele took a deep breath. She was wrung out, much as she would have felt after a gunfight.

“Captain Leary,” she said. She didn’t make it a question, because she very badly wanted to get out from under the gaze of her shipmates. “Please take charge.”

Adele’s first thought had been to go back to the Kiesche and sit at the console. She caught herself and instead took Daniel’s seat on the bench, between Cory and Woetjans.

“Fellow spacers,” Daniel said, grinning. “I want you to know that I plan to ransom the captives, not stage an armed prison break. I think we’d be a little outclassed taking on a whole planet, even if we were back in the Sissie.”

The spacers cheered. Adele suddenly realized that without thinking she had slid her data unit away in its pocket, but Daniel didn’t need amplification.

“But I’ll tell you this also,” he said, roughening his tone a little. “I plan to get the people we came for, and I’ll do whatever it takes to do that. Are you with me?”

The bellowed response sounded as though it came from caged animals rather than human beings. Adele listened in amazement and delight. They’d react the same if Daniel announced that they were going to climb up the throats of plasma thrusters at full output. And I’d be with them.

“Then get squared away, spacers,” Daniel said. “We’ll lift in four hours.”

They cheered again. All of us are cheering.