The Sea Without a Shore (ARC)

CHAPTER 25


Outside Hablinger on Corcyra

Daniel wished he could have found a quieter alternative for the temporary headquarters than the back of an air cushion truck, but there wasn’t one if the command group remained near the siege lines. There were arguments for moving the command group much further back, but there were no arguments that Daniel himself would have accepted even if the other members were willing.

“Look, what are we waiting for?” said Administrator Tibbs, who certainly would have been willing to evacuate the command group. She wasn’t exactly wringing her hands, but seemed to be trying to strangle her attaché case’s handle.

Daniel smiled, though he looked up into the night sky rather than directing his amusement toward Tibbs, the real cause of his amusement. She can’t have understood how dangerous this really is or she’d still be back in Brotherhood.

“We’re waiting for an hour before dawn,” Colonel Bourbon said. “The time we set for the operation.”

“That’s only five minutes!” said Tibbs. “What difference would five minutes make?”

“Quite a lot of difference for the troops out there, since we told them 4:43!” snapped Lieutenant Angelotti. Colonel Bourbon had done a good job of hiding his frustration with the Regiment’s civilian head, but the naval lieutenant was younger and probably less politic by nature. “Jumping the gun puts their lives at risk. A lot of them are probably still in their dugouts!”

Tibbs grimaced, but she held her tongue instead of saying, “Who cares about those scum?” or words to that effect. Angelotti might have slapped Tibbs if she had.

Daniel’s smile hardened. Indeed, I might have slapped her; but probably not.

“I don’t guess it’d make much difference,” said one of the miners morosely. He took a long pull from the liter bottle which he and his companions had been passing among themselves since they arrived. “Us folk don’t pay a lot of attention to what townies say, and we bloody sure don’t take orders from townies.”

The miners’ representatives this morning weren’t the trio which Daniel had met when he arrived at the siege lines five days earlier. These were all males and much of a type: thin-faced, wiry, and shorter than Daniel’s own five feet, nine inches. They looked similar enough that they might have been grandfather, son, and grandson—they ranged from an apparent 20 to 60—but from conversation, Daniel doubted they were related.

“They’ll be buried if they don’t listen,” said Angelotti. “And anyway, nobody gave them orders. It was just a warning.”

Angelotti was keyed up, though it wasn’t clear whether she was goaded by fear—she did understand the danger—or by hopeful anticipation. She was able to do her duty either way, Daniel supposed; and besides, she had nothing to do except be present. None of them really had anything to do.

The youngest miner turned and spat over the side of the truck. Spitting outward may have been an afterthought, which Daniel appreciated. Eight people standing in the back of a one-tonne vehicle didn’t leave a great deal of open floor.

“This soft dirt?” the miner said. “Why, that’s nothing! You ought to see a cave-in back where we come from.”

“Anyhow,” said the oldest miner, “I guess it’s their business.”

You couldn’t dig any depth into the Delta’s rich black soil without having the excavation collapse. The miners had simply adapted the system they used in their own tunnels to the situation: they used screw clamps to roll sheets of structural plastic into tubes—the diameter differed depending on the size of the sheet, but usually two meters—and welded the join. As they advanced the tunnel, they shoved the tube deeper and added segments at the surface end in the fashion of a well casing.

If a rock layer shifted it could flatten the tube, but the plastic was sturdy enough to withstand the more common problem of a flake—which might weigh tons—spalling off the tunnel roof. The sheets and forming equipment were available in quantity because they were in general use throughout the pro-independence territories.

Under most conditions the plastic liners kept the besiegers’ dugouts here safe and even dry. Conditions were about to change; but as the miner had said, that was the business of the people who were at risk if they ignored the warning.

Bourbon hugged himself and grimaced. “If the Pantellarians knew that we’ve moved three quarters of our strength back,” he said, “they’d attack.”

“They won’t attack,” Daniel said. He cleared his throat while he decided how to phrase the next comment. “Officer Mundy would have given us plenty of warning—days of warning—if there were any chance of them attacking. We’re talking about the Pantellarians here, you’ll recall.”

“I don’t see how she can be sure of that,” said Tibbs, “but there’s only minutes to go. If the mine goes off, at least. What happens—”

She looked up at the others in the truck bed. Her expression had gone from peevishly nervous to sudden concern.

“—if something goes wrong with that? What do we do then?”

“There shouldn’t be any problem with the mine, mistress,” Brother Graves said. He sounded so calmly certain that his tone alone banished doubt. “It’s quite a straightforward operation, something I’ve done hundreds of times. Many of the others involved have laid thousands of charges.”

“You got that bloody right!” said the young miner. “Look, honey, if I thought you knew your job half as good as we know ours, I wouldn’t be near so worried about all this circus.”

“I think everybody here is competent,” Graves said, again damping a nervous exchange with his powerful calm. “And most important, I think Captain Leary and his staff are competent. You—”

He nodded to the miners.

“—and I had nothing to do but execute the Captain’s orders. I’m confident that we’ve done so ably.”

Daniel had brought Graves here not as the Transformationist representative—Heimholz remained in charge of the sect’s field force—but because he was an engineer. Corcyra’s miners worked in hard rock, and few if any had any better notion of how to tunnel in the Delta environment than a boy at the beach would.


Graves had used one of the drainage pumps as an excavator, carving the silt away with high-pressure water. By sloping the entrance tunnel at a slight downward angle, the tailings flowed back and cleaned the work facewithout additional effort.

The only trick had been reducing the nozzle from 15 centimeters to 2 centimeters to keep the stream sufficiently precise. Controlling the hose required six husky miners, and the teams had to be replaced every few minutes. There were plenty of men and several women available.

Besides, it made the miners feel good about their place in the independence movement. Miners had from the first provided most of manpower, but because of their individualism and lack of structure they hadn’t been involved in planning. Couldn’t be involved in planning, but miners tended to think that outsiders from off-planet were keeping them in the dark out of contempt.

Daniel’s smile became wry. There was a degree of truth to the miners’ belief, of course. People were complicated and generally farther from perfect than one sometimes wished.

“Something’s funny, Leary?” Colonel Bourbon said.

“I was thinking that I wouldn’t have much place in a perfect universe,” Daniel said truthfully. “And that if all women were perfect ladies, I would have had a great deal less fun. But now to work, I think.”

Smiling broadly, Daniel keyed the portable communications unit clamped to the back of the truck’s cab. In speaker mode, he said, “Kiesche, this is Six. Report your status, please, over.”

The others in the back of the vehicle were staring at him. Lieutenant Angelotti pursed her lips and murmured, “Can the Pantellarians listen to that?”

“No,” said Graves without taking his eyes off Daniel.

Adele set this up so that we’re actually using the satellite link through Pantellarian headquarters, Daniel thought. The Pantellarians were intercepting and perhaps decoding ordinary independence communications, but they weren’t checking their own.

He didn’t say that aloud, because the others wouldn’t have found it reassuring. Besides, this wasn’t the time to discuss communications security with laymen.

Daniel rapped his knuckles on the roof of the cab to get the attention of the driver, a sergeant from the Regiment. It was their truck. Hogg sat beside him.

“Ammings,” he said, bending close to the open window into the cab. “Bring us up to full power. Hover if you can. And get ready for one hell of a ride.”

The intake flow built to a roar and a bearing began to sing. The motor doesn’t have to survive long, Daniel thought at the back of his mind, but I sure hope it’s got another few minutes. Aloud he said, “Colonel Bourbon, would you push the button, please?”

“Not me, Leary,” Bourbon said. “This was your plan. You do the honors.”

Daniel thought, then smiled again. The obvious person to set off the charge was Brother Graves, but though the Transformationist was too nice a person to react to an insult, it certainly would be an insult to a man who strove for peace.

Instead, Daniel gestured to the eldest of the miners and said, “Sir, I think that the people who did the work should have any honor there is going. Will you press the button, please?”

I wish I’d heard his name.

The miner handed the bottle to one of his colleagues and took the necessary step forward to the communications unit. He looked suddenly diffident. He reached out, then looked questioningly at Daniel.

“Kiesche,” Daniel said. “This is Six. Wait one, over.”

He pointed to the miner and dipped his finger. The older man thrust down forcefully on the Execute button.

Daniel couldn’t see what happened to the course of the river a mile closer to the Pantellarian positions because the truck was behind an angle of the levee, but he did see the enormous gout of mud and muddy water lift into the sky. An instant later the shockwave arrived through the ground, bouncing the truck like a tennis ball.

Five seconds later the deafening roar swept over them, but by then that was old news.

Brotherhood on Corcyra

Adele had realtime imagery of Hablinger in the center, but most of her display was given over to the commo threads she was following. Events in Hablinger would affect her, but she couldn’t affect them. She preferred to give her attention to things she could do something about.

“Kiesche, this is Six,” said the console. It was the signal they were waiting for. “Report your status please, over.”

“Six, this is Five,” said Vesey. “All is according to plan, over.”

Adele was at the back of the Kiesche’s console; Vesey was on the command seat. Adele was aware that Pasternak had lighted the thrusters, but only because the plasma exhaust put a buzz across the radio frequency spectrum. Her equipment filtered it out, but the buzz was factor in her conscious universe which the ship’s physical vibration was not. Adele’s body might have been aware of being shaken, but her mind was where she lived.

“Lady Mundy,” said Vesey, using a two-way link. “Is it all right if I talk to you, over?”

The first response that went through Adele’s mind was, “I’m busy, you idiot! I’m busy trying to keep Daniel from being killed!”

Adele heard the words mentally before they reached her tongue, fortunately, and the shock of embarrassment brought her to her senses. It was as unlikely that anything she was doing at the moment would matter to the Hablinger operation as it was that a meteorite would plunge from the sky and destroy the console at which she was working. To imagine otherwise was staggering arrogance, disgusting arrogance.

“Yes, of course, Captain,” Adele said. “Is there something in particular that I should be looking for? Over.”

“No,” said Vesey. “Lady Mundy—”

“Officer Mundy,” Adele said, correcting the ship’s captain in a fashion that she wouldn’t have dared to do if she hadn’t been “Lady Mundy” in her mind as well as in Vesey’s. She smiled like a sphinx. But whenever possible Adele followed RCN protocol.

Whenever I think of it, I follow protocol. Which wasn’t as often as one might wish, but there wasn’t a problem so long as she served under Daniel, and Adele could not imagine serving in the RCN under anyone except Daniel.

“Officer, Adele…,” Vesey said. “Please, I need to talk to you. To someone who understands and who’ll be honest, which is you alone on this planet. I need advice, over.”

“Go ahead,” Adele said. Perhaps I am Lady Mundy today, after all.

“Should I turn over command to Cory?” Vesey said baldly. “He’s a fighting officer—you know what I mean. Tell me!”

“No, you should not,” Adele said. “Captain Leary put you in command in his absence. I trust his judgment on such matters, and so should you.”

Because of the circumstances, Adele’s eyes were on the Hablinger siege lines. A tiny ripple crossed the image every few minutes, rather like an extremely slow raster scan. The signals were being sent from tramp freighters whose optics were mediocre by naval standards, even when the signals were sharpened by the Kiesche’s top-of-the-line console.

The Independence Council had sequestered three blockade runners and sent them into orbit under Spacer Hale and two lieutenants from the Corcyran Navy—officers superfluous to the Freccia’s present needs. It wasn’t a surprise that the Pantellarian exiles ran heavily to officers rather than common spacers, nor that those officers had been unwilling to give up their ranks the way Cazelet had done.

Corcyra no longer had any imaging satellites. Both sides had made them targets as soon as the Pantellarian expeditionary force arrived, apparently for no better reason than that it was fun to destroy things. This wasn’t a war of movement in which orbital reconnaissance might be crucial.

The Pantellarians would probably send up destroyers to deal with the Corcyrans eventually, but the observation ships had lifted off from Brotherhood only an hour before the critical moment. No officer in the Pantellarian squadron was going to get out of bed before dawn simply because three blockade runners were loitering in orbit.

“I’m not Six, mistress!” Vesey said.

“No, you’re not,” Adele said calmly. You should be very glad that you’re not. The only thing worse might be to be me. “You’re a known quantity to Daniel, however.”

She used the given name to emphasize subconsciously that the words were coming from Captain Leary’s friend and confidante. This was in many ways identical to interrogation. Adele was listening to what the other party said and tailoring her responses to bring the other party to the state of mind she herself desired.

In this particular case, that was what Vesey probably desired also, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that an officer on whom Daniel was counting would function efficiently. That was Adele’s duty.

“If Daniel had thought Cory or Hale or I should be in charge, he would have appointed that person,” Adele said, her voice as mechanically precise as a metronome. “He knows what sort of actions will be required in the next few minutes, and he knows how you are likely to perform those actions. That’s what he wants.”

Adele smiled, though she wasn’t certain that her version of the expression would look reassuring. Still, Vesey should know her by now.


“In any case,” Adele said, “I believe that you’ll do just as well as anyone else, Daniel included, if it becomes necessary for the Kiesche to fight a Pantellarian destroyer.”

Vesey’s miniature image looked out from Adele’s display. “Yes,” she said, nodding. “I would. I’d ram them.”

Adele hadn’t expected an answer to her joke, and she certainly hadn’t expected that answer. “Then I presume,” she said with a broader smile than previously, “that you now understand why Captain Leary put you in charge in his absence.”

“Kiesche, this is Six,” Daniel said through the console. “Wait one, over.”

“Ship, this is Five,” said Vesey on the general push. “Action stations.”

The crew was already at action stations, to the degree there was anything of the sort on a tramp freighter. Personnel who had no duties on lift-off were in their bunks gripping sidearms and such other weapons as they fancied.

The hatch was closed. The ship groaned as Pasternak began reeling up the intake hose. It had been drawing water from the harbor to replenish the reaction mass which the idling thrusters converted into plasma while the Kiesche waited in her slip.

On a whim, Adele expanded the image of the Hablinger region on her display instead of returning to communications duties. Anything critical would appear as a text crawl at the bottom of her display.

I’m more worried than I realized. Worried about Daniel.

She was using light amplification with enhanced contrast rather than thermal imaging. The River Cephisis was a brown glitter curving back and forth through paddies which were a mixture of black and green. During the day a shadow bordered the levee on the side away from the sun, but now before dawn the high earthen banks blended into the fields below.

The hundred feet of channel nearest the Pantellarian lines swelled like the surface of a swamp when a bubble rises through it. The swelling burst outward. Its center dimpled down into a crater, but ripples continued to spread. The initial wavefront must have been twenty feet high as it coursed across the soft ground. All it left behind was a flat of mud which continued to tremble.

The river drained with the steady swiftness of sunrise, eating away the ends of the severed levees in its tumbling rush. The silt which had built the bottom of the channel a dozen feet above the plain had no mechanical strength to resist the powerful flow. The blast had homogenized all the soil in the path of the shockwave, but the sheet of water spread a luster over it.

“Is Six all right?” Vesey said. “Were they clear? I didn’t know what that was going to do!”

Adele raised her display’s magnification. For a moment she couldn’t find the truck which held the command group—

I didn’t know what the blast was going to do either!

—but then she cued the console to highlight movement. There was the truck, still right-side up and racing directly away from the Cephisis. Adele would have had to raise magnification further to be sure that Daniel was still in the vehicle, but for now she could assume he was safe.

The truck had been a mile from the charge and inside one of the channel’s slow curves. As it expanded the explosion crater, the shockwave liquefied several miles of levee. A suspension of mud and water slumped onto the plain. Instead of providing shelter, the earthen walls had almost flowed over the truck and buried it.

The miners had used the same explosive that they did to shatter rock: ammonium nitrate doped with fuel oil to sensitize it. They had said that it was perfectly safe, and Daniel had calmly agreed.

In checking Adele found that the farmers in the Delta used the same material as fertilizer. At some level, she seemed to have assumed that the explosion wouldn’t be very impressive.

The detonation of tens of tons of ammonium nitrate was impressive. In this finely divided silt, the devastation looked like the result of a meteor strike.

Strongpoint 3 had vanished. The earth had opened, not in a crack but by losing cohesion. It had sucked in the troops Adele had deluded a few days earlier.

She thought about the peasants Hogg had spared in the listening post. If they had gone back to the same duty, they were dead now; if not, their replacements were dead.

Everyone dies. I will die.

South of the Pantellarian positions, pink tubes of structural plastic rolled to the surface of the mud and rolled back under again—the linings of the dugouts of independence forces. The troops within a mile of the explosion had been withdrawn, but Adele suspected not even the miners themselves had guessed how far the effect of the blast would travel through the rice paddies.

Troops who had climbed out of their dugouts as they’d been warned to do would probably be all right: they might have been flung high in the air, but they would come down on a surface more yielding that an air cushion. Those who had remained under cover would at best have been battered against the inside of the dugouts and would probably have been buried as well.

Everyone dies.

“Look! Look!” Vesey said. “They did it! Captain Leary did it!”

Rather than try to guess what Vesey was talking about, Adele mirrored the command display on the left half of her own. Vesey was focused on Hablinger Pool, the shallow impoundment north of the town. It was the harbor for the Delta, holding at present four freighters similar to those in Brotherhood as well as the six Pantellarian destroyers.

The water had drained back from the pool, and the ships floating there had dropped into the mud. Into the quicksand, more accurately. They fell so suddenly that the muck flowed into any open hatch that dove into it. Unlike water, the mud clung to surfaces, holding the vessels down and continuing to pour into their hulls.

Even as Adele watched, a destroyer rolled onto its side when its starboard pontoon had filled and continued to sink, dragging the ship with it. The crew must have removed access plates so that they could work on the float’s interior.

Another destroyer was stern-down, and none of them looked quite right as they rested on the quivering brown surface. Humans were crawling out of hatches, but they had nowhere to go: the boarding bridges had sunk when the earthshock lifted and dropped them.

“Even the ones that aren’t sinking will have clogged their thrusters, let alone the throats of their High Drives!” Vesey crowed. Adele didn’t remember her ever before sounding so excited. “And if their pumps were on, they’ve blown out or burned out from trying to suck mud into their tanks. It’d take the Sissie a week to repair damage like that! And these are Pantellarians, not RCN!”

“Then,” said Adele, suddenly relaxed, “it’s time for me to act.”

She keyed two separate switches, the electronic equivalent of a caged mechanical control. There was no real likelihood that Adele would throw a switch unintentionally, but she was a librarian: she preferred not to take chances, even when they weren’t really chances.

“Commissioner Arnaud, this is Lady Mundy,” she said. “I am speaking on behalf of Independent Corcyra.”

Her words were being reproduced through the Pantellarian emergency net on every audio or text device in Hablinger. Arnaud was not being given the choice of keeping this ultimatum a secret from his personnel, though he probably wouldn’t realize that until after Adele was done.

“Independent Corcyra offers you and all personnel of the Pantellarian Expeditionary Force the opportunity to surrender on honorable terms and to be repatriated to Pantellaria,” Adele said.

The console speaker relayed her words to everyone aboard the Kiesche. Cory was sending an alert to independence forces in Brotherhood, and the Freccia was lighting her thrusters. Captain Samona had brought all his personnel aboard during the night, but he had obeyed Daniel’s orders not to take visible actions which could warn Arnaud.

“You have twelve hours to accept this offer,” Adele said. “After that time, independence forces will resume actions to remove the invaders from Corcyra.”

She paused, then said, “I must warn you that the additional mines placed under Pantellarian positions have anti-tamper devices. If you attempt to remove them, you will cause the loss of life which we in the Independence Coalition hope to avoid. It would be a pity to kill thousands of people, many of them civilians, on the verge of a peaceful resolution.”

Adele broke the signal and leaned back on the couch with her eyes closed. It was a moment before she understood that the crew of the Kiesche was cheering.

Cheering her and Daniel.