The Sea Without a Shore (ARC)

CHAPTER 23


Hablinger on Corcyra

“The militia field commanders have ordered their troops not to shoot without orders,” Daniel said, “and Colonel Bourbon has sent the same order to all the unassigned troops. That doesn’t mean the miners are going to obey him, but none of them hold positions too close to where we’ll be going in.”

“I don’t trust the Garrison not to shoot either,” Hogg said morosely. He rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. “But hell, you can break your neck stepping of the curb.”

Though Daniel wouldn’t be leading, he looked over his companions with the eye of a commander. They were outside the entrance to their dugout, hidden from the Pantellarian positions a kilometer away. Hogg wore much the same shapeless clothing as usual, though like the rest of them he had pulled a gray ski-mask over his head and face. It was more to block the thermal signature than from concerns over visible light.

Tovera wore dark gray coveralls of a harder fabric than her usual garments. Her little sub-machine gun was in a shoulder holster, looking like an awkward pistol. She wore heavy gloves to keep her hands clean for when she needed them.

A mortar thumped from Garrison lines on the other side of the river levees. “That’s the signal,” Hogg said. “Hide your eyes. When it burns out, we’ll get moving.”

Adele was the only one who needed the warning. She wore baggy coveralls over a Pantellarian officers’ uniform. Even though it was service garb, its shoulder boards stuck out like the arms of a clothes hanger.

Daniel darkened his goggles manually a moment before the pop! high in the sky indicated the flare had burst. Fierce radiance bathed the quadrant of the battlefield centered on the Cephisis and its high levees.

“Still time to grab something a little less clumsy than that damned cannon,” Hogg said, flicking a finger toward Daniel’s stocked impeller.

“I figure that crawling with this—”

Daniel wiggled the weapon in the crook of his left elbow.

“—isn’t as awkward as not having it handy if we need it tonight,” Daniel said. “I’ll be bringing up the rear as soon as we drop Tovera off, so my problems won’t slow you down.”

He’d slipped a condom over the muzzle. An impeller’s mechanism was pretty well sealed, but he didn’t want to fire one with the barrel plugged. Nobody could swear that he wouldn’t drop his weapon while crawling through this liquescent mud.

The hissing in the sky ended. For a moment a faint white afterglow shone above the levees.


“Send her on after I’ve got to the next dike,” Hogg said. His voice sounded as though the night itself were speaking, soft and almost lilting.

He moved sideways and was gone, unrolling a coil of communication wire behind him. The free end of the wire was attached to the belt of Adele’s coveralls.

Daniel watched his servant slither across the paddy. Even with his goggles’ light enhancement, all he really saw were the ripples. He kept his hand lightly on Adele’s shoulder.

Hogg had taught his young charge how to move in the wild. Daniel thought he was probably as good as most Land Forces soldiers with scout training. Hogg was a different order of creature, though, more like a water rat than a human.

Only because he knew it would be there, Daniel saw a brief hump slide over the top of the next dike. A field skipper clicked three times.

“You see that light in Hablinger?” Daniel said softly. It was probably an unshaded street light reflecting off a polished roof at just the right angle. “Crawl for that. Just keep going till you hit the dike. If there’s a problem—”

How in heaven’s name could there be? But Adele’s view of the physical world was as different from his as their views of mazes of data.

“—just follow the wire. And needs must, Hogg will come back and fetch you.”

“Yes,” said Adele. She hunched down and began crawling forward. She sounded like a school of redfish spawning in the shallows off Bantry, but the noise only mattered to senses as keyed up as Daniel’s own. There was no danger.

“What was the sound Hogg made?” Tovera said.

Daniel twitched, startled by the words in his ear while he was completely focused on what was going on in front of him. He smiled faintly. Was Tovera nervous? He certainly had been.

“That was a field skipper,” he said without looking away from the paddy. “We have them on Bantry. There’s an animal here, the webbed treemouse, that sounds the same only it gives single clicks, not three in a row.”

He smiled more broadly. “Now, if there’s a Pantellarian out there with as much interest in natural history as I have,” he said, “we might be in trouble.”

“That’s why you have the impeller,” Tovera said. Her voice was a rasping whisper.

“I never bothered to learn to use one of those,” she added after a moment. “I always figured that I’d get close enough to use what I have, or somebody else could deal with the problem. Now…maybe I should’ve learned.”

Daniel debated what—and whether—to speak. At last he said, “We’ll have to hope that one slug will do the job. It’s been my experience that with these—”

He hefted the impeller slightly.

“—one usually does.”

Tovera looked away, then turned to face him again. “Hogg said you’re as good as he is with one of those,” she said. No one would ever call Tovera’s voice gentle, but this time it had less of the usual crisp edge.

“On a good day,” Daniel said. He smiled and would have laughed under other circumstances. “Though on a really good day, we won’t need to learn.”

The field skipper clicked again. “Head out,” Daniel said. “Wait for me at the dike. Hogg and I hope Adele will have gone on ahead.”

Tovera nodded, then slipped into the mud. She wasn’t graceful, but she crawled on her elbows and knees instead of proceeding on all fours the way Adele had done. Daniel doubted that the Fifth Bureau had trained her to low-crawl, so the technique—like driving an aircar—was something Tovera had learned on her own.

She was also extremely strong. Her pace across the paddy was as steady as a metronome’s ticking. Daniel knew well how much strain low-crawling put on muscles which hadn’t been habituated to the exercise.

Tovera reached the dike and vanished. Daniel followed her track, cradling the impeller in the crooks of both elbows. Tovera, who wasn’t carrying a long-arm, would have been just as well off using her hands and feet; but she’d learned the “right” technique and she was going to employ it.

The mud was messy, but it was much easier on the person crawling than gravel or even a woodland littered with outcrops and fallen limbs would have been. The rice had seeded itself raggedly, and the paddies hadn’t been properly weeded or irrigated in the past year. The irregular growth was ideal for concealing somebody who knew what he was doing and didn’t mind staying low.

Daniel slipped over the dike. Tovera waited on the other side like a bog-hunting predator; an unusually large one.

“Mistress has reached the next wall,” she said, her voice barely a modulation of the breeze. Like Daniel himself, she wore RCN multifunction goggles. The night was very dark, but light enhancement brought out ripples in the starlight even though the body making them remained a shadow.

“We’ll go on together, then,” Daniel said. “The strongpoints keep a close watch on our lines but not on the rest of the landscape. Adele set their cameras to loop the same half hour from last night when we started out, but we should be safe the rest of the way without tricks.”

He smiled, though his mask hid the expression from Tovera. “Some Pantellarian technicians are quite good,” he said. “I told Adele that we were better depending on poor alertness and woodcraft among their line troops.”

“I’ll lead,” said Tovera. She began crawling forward again.

Daniel gave her a ten-yard start and followed. He carefully avoided closing the gap between them so that he didn’t prod Tovera to go faster than she was comfortable doing. That was quite fast enough anyway, and she hadn’t slowed from the first hundred meters.

At the third dike, he paused to let Adele finish her scramble over the fourth. The field-skipper clicked again; Daniel gestured Tovera forward and again followed.

The night had its own sounds. Even neglected, the paddies provided rich foraging for small animals and the slightly larger animals which preyed on them. There were even webbed treemice, Daniel was pleased to notice.

The crawl was hard work—he couldn’t pretend to be in condition for this sort of exercise—and potentially quite dangerous, but Daniel found it unexpectedly relaxing. It took him back to his childhood on Bantry, when Hogg taught him about the world of the estate’s nighttime, whose population was wholly different from that of the day.

Daniel had early on begun using night-vision electronics: a pair of RCN goggles from Uncle Stacy with light-enhancement and thermal imaging capacity. Hogg didn’t forbid the hardware but he was openly contemptuous of it, saying he could do anything goggles could and that he wasn’t going to break down when he was ten miles deep in a swamp.

That was literally true, but Daniel hadn’t had—and would never have—the forty years of experience that the older man did. Hogg was a wonderful mentor and a father figure for Daniel, but he was not a role model for civilized society.

He joined Tovera at the next dike. Because of the slight angle at which they were approaching Hogg’s entry point, they had reached one of the longitudinal walls which separated the paddies every five hundred meters or so. A pair of ten-foot trees grew from this side of the long wall. Fuzzy foliage gave the crooked limbs a ghostly appearance by starlight.

Daniel dug the flare’s base into the mud between the roots of the nearer tree and set the blasting cap in the fuze pocket. He handed Tovera the clacker with the fuze wire already attached.

“Suit yourself about where you hide,” he said, “but they’ve got automatic impellers in that strongpoint and a mortar besides. The dikes will probably stop an impeller slug and the mortars won’t do much in this mud unless they fuze the shells for air burst, but I won’t tell you this is going to be safe.”

Tovera was probably smiling. “Then I won’t tell you that you’re an idiot, Captain Leary,” she said.

Daniel chuckled. He gave her the end of his reel of commo wire; the ends were already split and stripped. Then he started forward again, letting the wire uncoil behind him.

There was a long way yet to crawl. Daniel had lost the rosy swaddling of nostalgia, but the only way you accomplished a job like this was by going on, putting one foot in front of the other.

Well, one elbow in front of the other in the present case.

Daniel crawled over the next dike and paused to check for sound or movement as he always did. Adele was waiting. She slipped her pistol back into its pocket and put her glove back on.

An almost-emptied reel of commo wire sat beside her. Hogg hadn’t taken it with him as he made the final approach of the listening post.

“I’m glad to see you, Adele,” Daniel said very softly. “Well begun is half done, isn’t it?”

A field skipper clicked ahead of them. Adele turned her head; she must have heard it, or at any rate heard something.

“Time to move,” Daniel said. He grinned. “We’ll go together this time. Nobody’s going to be listening ahead of us.”

Adele nodded. “Yes,” she said. She didn’t return his smile, though.

***

Adele hadn’t given any thought to the physical demands of reaching the enemy lines. All her concern had been for what happened then, after she began to do her job.

Thinking about the crawl wouldn’t have changed anything—it simply had to be done, and there had been no time available for physical training. Even so, she felt foolish not to have considered a business which had pushed her so near her physical limits. She had failed herself intellectually, whether or not that made any difference in fact.


Daniel put his hand on Adele’s left ankle, throwing her into an instant’s nightmare in which the darkness had come alive and grabbed her. She snatched for her pistol and only smeared mud from her gloves onto the flap of the coveralls. She had been lost in a world of her own in which nothing mattered but the mechanical process of crawling forward and the intellectual analysis of that process.

She had almost fallen into the listening post. It was a small pit whose floor of plaited reeds was thick enough to keep the mud from oozing to the level of the two men now lying face-down on it and blubbering. There was also a small field telephone and a pair of electromotive shotguns, single-shot hunting weapons. The men wore loose trousers and open shirts; they had no shoes.

“They’re local farmers, master,” said Hogg, squatting at the back of the pit with his knife out. “I didn’t much feel like cutting their throats, though if you think it’d be safer…?”

“I don’t believe that will be necessary, Hogg,” Daniel said. They spoke in low-pitched voices; Adele could scarcely hear them. “In any case, if safety had been my primary concern, I probably wouldn’t have joined the RCN. would I?”

“I have a use for them if they prefer to continue living,” Adele said. By leaning over the edge of the shallow pit as Daniel was doing, the depression itself would drink her words. “For one of them, anyway.”

One of the local conscripts was weeping as though he were watching his library burn. Adele smiled at her simile. His chicken coop burn, that would be better.

The other man stopped crying and even turned his head to look up at Adele. She gestured toward him and said, “I want you to call your base on the phone and say that you hear noises halfway back to the grubber lines. Can you do that? We’ll let you live if you do.”

The farmer nodded enthusiastically. His throat worked, but he didn’t—more likely couldn’t—speak.

“Nobody’s going to hurt you,” Adele said, letting her gray precision overcome the irritation she was feeling at this fool. Of course if the listening post had been staffed by better troops, they would be dead and she wouldn’t have this opportunity to confuse the Pantellarian strongpoint.

Hogg tied the wrists of the crying man behind his back with commo wire. “Should have brought cargo tape,” he said, “but I wasn’t figuring on prisoners. Anyway, this’ll do.”

Adele removed her gloves, then began to strip off the baggy coveralls. Mud caked her knee-high officers’ boots well up the shaft, but that was now part of her disguise.

“I’ll do it, ma’am,” the other prisoner said. “Ma’am, I got seven kids. They just marched in and says to all the men in the village, ‘You come with us or you’ll wish you had.’ So we come, what could we do?”

It was a likely enough story, though that didn’t make a real difference. Adele had shot people who were just as innocent as these fellows, people who had simply been in her way. Fine distinctions didn’t matter in a war; and in the longer term, nothing in life mattered.

“Then you already understand the terms,” Adele said, smiling minusculely. Hogg was binding the fellow’s ankles; the fact obviously reassured the prisoner, because it meant that his captors really weren’t going to slit his throat.

“Right,” the farmer said. “I’ll report, just like you say!”

He reached for the phone. Adele put her right hand on it. “Wait,” she said. “Hogg, are we ready to go on?”

“Yep,” he said without looking up. He was checking the load in one of the shotguns.”

“All right,” said Adele, taking her hand away. “Call now.”

The farmer bent close to the phone—it didn’t have a separate handset—and pressed the button between the speaker and mouthpiece. It had originally been glossy black, but in the center that was worn down to the original beige of the plastic case.

“Hello?” the fellow said. “Hello? I’m hearing stuff! The grubbers’re coming, I hear ’em coming!”

“Hold one,” crackled a voice from the speaker. Moments later the voice resumed, “Post Three, are you drunk? We’ve got the scopes on their lines and there’s nothing happening. Not a bloody thing!”

Adele gestured to Daniel. He squeezed hard on his clacker. In the present stillness, Adele heard the miniature generator whine.

“They’re coming!” the farmer repeated. He probably wasn’t a very good actor, but under the circumstances his voice projected very real fear. “I hear ’em, I do!”

Adele and her companions were ducking beneath the lip of the pit so the light of the distant flare didn’t silhouette them. It did ruin the night vision of anyone who was looking toward the glare unprotected, and it certainly attracted the attention of anyone in the strongpoint.

Tovera’s sub-machine gun ripped out its whole magazine. It was probably the first time Tovera had fired a burst longer than three rounds in a life which had often involved using a sub-machine gun.

Three automatic impellers and at least a score of personal weapons blasted from the strongpoint. The slugs’ aluminum skirts vaporized in the magnetic flux which drove them down the bore, flickering above the gun muzzles. The barrels of the automatic impellers began to glow.

Other Pantellarians opened fire, followed moments later by troops in the Corcyran positions. The shooting was expanding along the siege lines like a growing brushfire.

“Time to go, Mistress,” Hogg said. He slipped over the back edge of the pit, and Adele followed.