The Sea Without a Shore (ARC)

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 latter 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.”

Bourbon waved Daniel and Adele ahead of him down the ramp. “I was expecting the Pantellarians to use bombardment rockets when we constructed this bunker,” he said. “That hasn’t happened, and your servant’s concern seems valid, Captain Leary.”

He wasn’t replying directly to Hogg, but he spoke loudly enough for Hogg and Zeffelini both to hear. Colonel Bourbon struck Daniel as a modest figure as a military man—but a first-rate politician, which was perhaps a better qualification for leadership here on Corcyra.

A steel door opened in the alcove left in the sandbagged wall. “Glad to have you back, Bourbon,” said the man in the doorway. He wore blotch-patterned battledress with the odd purple undertone of the Fleet Marines; his major’s lapel insignia was Alliance pattern also. “We’re all waiting for you inside. Figured it was easier than trusting to electronics since it was all parties.”

“I’m glad to be back, Wiren,” Bourbon said as he led the others into the bunker. “Frankly, the time I spent negotiating on Karst wasn’t much better than being a prisoner on Ischia. Fellows, this is Captain Leary who rescued me and has some thoughts about ending this business even before the missiles arrive from Karst. Leary, these are—”

The space was crowded with the new arrivals. Bourbon ran down the names. Wiren was commander of the naval contingent; clearly a mercenary whom Tibbs had hired. Major Gillard was the Regiment’s field commander, Pantellarian by birth but not necessarily interested in politics. Brother Heimholz, a sad-faced bruiser of fifty, headed the Transformationist contingent; Graves in Brotherhood had described his background. Three miners were present, representatives but probably not leaders of the troops who weren’t members of any official faction.

“Well, it’s fine that you’re outa jail, Bourbon,” said a miner. Her hair was a natural mousy brown on one side and faded blue on the other. “What I want to know, though, is when something’s going to get settled here so we can go back south where we belong. I don’t remember much happening before you went off except we got our asses shot off the onct by them ships.”

“Now look, you!” said Vanna, waggling his finger in the miner’s face. “You watch your tongue, or—”

Daniel expected the miner to slap Vanna’s hand away. Instead, she punched the lieutenant in the pit of the stomach, doubling him up gasping.

Zeffelini started to unsnap the holster of the pistol she wore as part of her uniform. Daniel reached across her body to grab her gun hand.

“That’s enough! Back off, everybody!” he bellowed at the three miners.

A number of people began babbling, including the blue-haired miner. She appeared to be embarrassed at what she’d done. Tempers were bound to fray during months in these filthy conditions.

“Look, I got a question,” said Hogg. “Why don’t you just blow the river? The bottom of the channel’s what, twenty feet above the ground here? It’d drain so quick the wogs wouldn’t be able to do squat to stop it.”

It was obvious that by “wogs” Hogg meant the Pantellarians. Half the people in this crowded chamber were Pantellarian by birth, however, and it didn’t require much imagination to guess that Hogg would’ve been willing to apply the term to an even wider circle than that. Daniel suspected that in the right context, Hogg might use “wog” to describe anybody who hadn’t been born and raised on the Bantry estate.

“Bloody hell!” said Gillard. “Have you seen where our positions are, you farmer? We’d flood ourselves out!”

Hogg smiled. He had just focused all attention—and all the anger—on himself. He was the harmless rural boob that nobody here had enough history with to hate.

“It’d be wet here, I see that,” he said complacently, his hands in the pockets of his baggy jacket. “You’d have to pull back a ways, though that wouldn’t be too terrible. And I was thinking that the Pantellarians might have worse problems without water to drink.”

“By heaven, he’s got something!” said Major Wiren, looking at Hogg in amazement.

“No, unfortunately,” said Bourbon quickly; though not quite quickly enough that Daniel hadn’t gotten his own hopes up. “There’s so much silt in the Cephisis here that Hablinger has always taken its water from a desalination plant fifteen kilometers out at sea. And the plant is on the sea bottom to keep it out of storms, so there isn’t a quick way of capturing it either.”

“Ah, well,” said Hogg. He yawned, then stretched his arms toward the ceiling. “We farmers think a lot about water, you know.”

“Colonel,” said Daniel. “Do you have quarters for me and my personnel? I’d like to sort out some matters with my staff—”

With Adele.

“—before I broach my proposals to you.”

If Daniel hadn’t said that or something along those lines, someone—maybe all the locals together—would be asking what his plans were. He was going to know more about the terrain here before he wanted to suggest anything publically.

In addition there was Adele’s business, whatever that was. He would learn when it was time for him to know.

“We’ve readied a dugout for you, Captain,” Brother Heimholz said. He smiled, transfiguring his face. “It small, dark and has no amenities, so you spacers should feel right at home. I’ll take you there now.”

Daniel bowed. “I was afraid it was going to be a pavilion with four-poster beds,” he said, “since I know how you Land Force types treat yourselves. I appreciate you going to such effort to make poor spacers feel comfortable.”

They trailed out behind the Transformationist commander. When they were clear of the inner bunker, Hogg muttered, “I’m going to rack out now. Come dark, I’ll go see what I can see.”

“Yes,” said Daniel. “You and I will go.”

Also, I will be thinking about my own next step, unless Adele comes back from Hablinger and hands me the Pantellarian surrender.

Which, Adele being Adele, might just happen.

***

Adele sat on a straight chair in the dugout, watching the changes her data unit had found in collating views of the terrain around Hablinger recorded by Pantellarian destroyers. Outside in the night a woman sang, “I wish I was a little bird.…”

Though the destroyers didn’t patrol, they lifted in pairs to escort supply ships in. Hablinger Pool was a bowl sculpted into the course of the Cephisis just downstream of the town, so the automatic logs of the ships recorded high resolution imagery every time. Any variation in the surface, whether caused by weather or by human activity, appeared as a highlight on Adele’s display.

“I’d fly up in a tree…” sang the woman.

From what Adele had seen, here and in Pearl Valley, women in the Transformationist community were treated the same as men, or as nearly so as human beings were capable of doing. There were relatively few women in the community, however. She would have to check with Brother Graves or one of the senior people in Pearl Valley, but the reason could be as simple as statistically fewer women than men emigrating to a mining world.

“I’d sit and sing my sad little song.…”

The woman sounded quite cheerful, and her voice was pleasant if untrained. Adele would have been interested to learn the internal society of the Transformationists, if—

She smiled in self-mockery.

—somebody else had compiled the data.

Speaking rather than singing, the woman concluded, “But I can’t stay here by myself!”

“They’re back,” called Tovera softly through the blanket-covered entrance of the dugout.

Hogg pulled the drape open for Daniel, then followed him in. Fresh mud stank on their utilities.

Though the only light in the dugout was the data unit’s holographic display, Daniel must have read the thought behind what Adele believed was a blank expression. “The good thing about the location,” he said, “is that there’s plenty of water to wash with. It’s got just as much mud, I suppose, but there’s probably less excrement in the form of fertilizer.”


“I’ll get you in, mistress,” Hogg said. “You’ll likely be bathed in this muck—

He grimaced and gestured with both hands.

“—but I guess it wouldn’t look right to the wogs when you was walking around if you didn’t.”

“What’s this, Adele?” Daniel said, bending forward to look at her display. She’d left it omnidirectional instead of cueing the unit to focus on her eyes alone. “Why, this is the plan of the Pantellarian lines! I didn’t realize we had anything so good.”

Adele stood and rubbed her shoulders. She wasn’t sure what time it was, but she’d been working at the data unit since Daniel and Hogg went out an hour after full darkness to scout the enemy positions.

“I put it together after you left,” she said, her eyes closed. “I got into the logs of the Pantellarian squadron. I sent most of the information back to the Kiesche for Cory and Cazelet to process, but I kept copies of the local imagery for myself.”

“Well, that’s wonderful!” Daniel said. “I’m surprised that…, well, I’m pleased that you were able to get into their logs so quickly.”

Adele smiled faintly, her eyes still closed. “You’re thinking that Pantellarian security must be very bad for me to open up warship data banks with no more that I have with me,” she said. She sat down again and stroked the case of her little data unit. “In fact their security was very good, but they had bad luck.”

She looked up at Daniel and half-smiled again. She was tired, but her work and that of her companions seemed to be going well; and tomorrow this would be over, one way or another.

“The new Pantellarian Navy Department, the one put in place after independence,” Adele said, “suspected that all their codes and coding equipment were known to the Alliance. They were correct in that assumption.”

Daniel nodded. Hogg seemed to be focused wholly on the landscape display, but Adele knew that he was hearing and understanding the explanation.

“They asked Cinnabar for help revising their systems and procedures,” Adele said. “My other employer provided them with help of the highest quality, but of course we kept full records of what codes Pantellaria might now be using and how the codes were being generated.”

Hogg snorted in amusement. Daniel remained stone-faced for a moment, then smiled broadly.

“You may reasonably think it dishonorable of me to use information gained in this way,” Adele said, knowing that she was speaking more to herself than to her audience. “I made the decision without referring to you or to anyone else.”

“If you get yourself killed because you were too proud to look at what somebody handed you,” Hogg said, suddenly glaring at her, “then I’ll be sorry because I like you and we all like you. But if you get me killed like that, I’ll come out of Hell for you, I swear.”

“Fortunately, that situation doesn’t arise,” Daniel said mildly. “I’m glad to have this imagery, though I don’t think it changes anything we saw on the ground. See, Hogg? Here’s the strongpoint in front of us, and here’s the listening post. There’s six of them between strongpoints, it looks like fifty yards apart. Well, fifty meters.”

“There are three listening posts to either side of each strongpoint,” Adele said. She suddenly felt tired. There was always more to learn, but she had completed the tasks which had an immediate bearing on her entry into Hablinger; her entry tomorrow into Hablinger. “I think they’re connected by wire. The strongpoints report to Hablinger headquarters by radio, including anything the listening posts have reported, but I don’t pick up signals from the posts directly.”

“Probably just two men in the LPs,” Hogg said. “With this lot, maybe only one. I’ll slip up the last hundred yards and take care of them while the mistress waits, then come get her and we both go through. There’s no more manned posts, just wire, and that’s no problem.”

“Call,” Daniel said. “You don’t need to come back, that’s extra work and extra noise. You can sound like a field-skipper, three times in quick order.”

“She won’t hear me, master,” Hogg said in irritation. “And she’ll get bloody lost on the way, I don’t care how simple it seems to you!”

Adele hadn’t heard the older man use that frustrated tone to Daniel in the past. It was justified: Hogg had put into words the analysis which Adele had made in her head already.

“I’ll catch it,” said Daniel calmly. “I’ll bring her up to the LP and wait there till the two of you come back. And I won’t get lost.”

Hogg remained completely still for a moment. Then he said, “Right. I don’t need more bloody exercise at my age.”

Looking away, he muttered, “Sorry, master.”

“You need a distraction,” Tovera said without turning to face the others. She squatted in the dugout’s opening with a corner of the blanket drawn back, her sub-machine gun in her hand.

“We’ll have a distraction,” Hogg said. “I’m going to set a flare midway to the post. When we’re there and ready to head in the town, I’ll trip it with a clacker. Nobody’ll be looking toward us even if, well, if the Mistress is having a bit of trouble with the going.”

“A clacker won’t work,” Tovera said. “It won’t have enough juice at 300 meters.”

“I’ll put it closer, then!” Hogg said. “Just so the wogs are looking to our lines and not out to the side!”

The clacker was a hand-squeezed generator that set off a blasting cap. Adele didn’t have any idea how great a charge would remain at the end of a thousand feet of thin wire, but Tovera was probably correct.

“No,” Tovera said. She was icy calm through the whole discussion. “I’ll be twenty feet from the flare, holding the ends of your wire between my thumb and forefinger. I’ll feel the spark, and I’ll set off the flare.”

She turned to glance at Adele. “Keeping radio silence, mistress,” she said.

“Yes, that sounds good,” said Daniel. His tone was casual, but Adele and probably the others knew that the discussion was over. “Now, let’s get some sleep. Starting an hour after dark tonight, we all have a great deal to do.”

Adele shut down her data unit and hunched—the ceiling was low—to the bedstead she had chosen. The frame was plastic tubing and there was no mattress over the slats, but she had slept on much worse.

“Yes,” she said, putting her rolled jacket at the end of the frame for a pillow.

She fell asleep almost at once.