The Sea Without a Shore (11 page)
Read The Sea Without a Shore Online
Authors: David Drake
The door burst open ahead of Woetjans. The spacers who had hesitated to rush Hogg on the staircase turned at the new commotion. Woetjans swung a length of pressure tubing forehand and backhand, smashing two of them down.
More spacers—and former spacers; there was Hovenmeyer, who’d lost an eye when ice broke from the
Sissie
’s rigging on an unnamed world when he happened to be looking upward—crowded into the tavern. They were carrying clubs of one sort or another, generally heavy wrenches.
Two or three of Sorley’s men tried to fight and were knocked down immediately. They’d be safe enough on the floor, because most of the Sissies arriving wore spacer’s boots just as Schmidt had. Despite the enthusiastic kicks from the rescue party, the fallen crewmen were unlikely to sustain cracked ribs or ruptured spleens.
Powerful lift engines howled in the street. Through the splintered frame of the window, Daniel could see the stilt-legged tender which Mon had begun using as a mobile crane in the shipyard. It would transport people only if the passengers were willing to cling to struts with no protection against weather, windblast, and buildings that the tender happened to brush.
The Militia might have complained if they had noticed it—vehicles in the Xenos airspace were
very
tightly controlled—but that would have been a problem for another time, involving a judge rather than a coroner. A moment ago, having a squad of Militia burst into the tavern would have struck Daniel as a pleasant surprise.
One of Sorley’s men stumbled backward. Instead of fending him off with the chair, Hogg slugged him behind the ear with the knuckleduster. Daniel grimaced, but the man had brought it on himself when he decided to join a gang of his fellows to beat a couple strangers.
The tap room was already crowded. Mon joined his men inside. He didn’t carry a club, but he’d pulled on the gauntlets from a rigger’s suit. The smear on the knuckles of the right glove looked like blood.
Adele and Tovera followed Mon. Daniel smiled.
I thought she agreed too easily,
he thought.
It was just as well that Adele had second-guessed him, because he’d misjudged Sorley. This business had been a deliberate trap: not just the abduction of Rikard Cleveland, who knew where a treasure might be, but also an attempt to cripple or kill Captain Daniel Leary, whom Sorley had decided was his main rival in the treasure hunt.
Daniel smiled wryly. This hadn’t been one of the times when his reputation had been an advantage.
Miranda entered the Dancing Girl. She was in a dark blue suit, probably the one she wore when she visited Bergen and Associates with him, and she carried a hockey stick.
Miranda looked around the confusion. She wasn’t looking for
him
, as Daniel first thought, but rather seeing whether there were any proper targets for her stick. Only when she was sure that opposition had been downed did she relax and smile at Daniel.
“Pipe down!” Daniel said, using his command voice. Those present were spacers used to obeying orders, at least when they trusted the person giving them; they quieted immediately. The wheezing breaths of Schmidt at the bottom of the stairs—the stoneware bottle had given him a concussion if not a fractured skull—were the loudest remaining sounds.
“Woetjans,” Daniel said in the relative hush. “Sorley’s got two more in the alley behind here.”
“Right,” said Sun from beneath the landing where Daniel couldn’t see him. He must have come in by a back door. “They’re going to stay there a while, too.”
Speaking of Sorley … The merchant captain had apparently ducked under the banquette table. Now that the fighting was over, he was inching upward. He’d lost his hat, and he was bald from his eyebrows to mid-skull.
“Captain Sorley,” Daniel said, “I very much hope that we find Master Cleveland unharmed.”
“I’m quite all right, Captain Leary,” Cleveland said from the top of the stairs. “I … I’m very glad to see you, but I haven’t been harmed. Lady Mundy?”
“Yes,” said Adele. Her left hand was still in her tunic pocket.
“I ignored your advice,” Cleveland said. He bowed. “I apologize for the trouble I caused you and others by my decision.”
“This is the most bloody fun I’ve had since the
Sissie
lifted from Madison!” boomed Evans as he straightened. He’d been wiping the head of his eighteen-inch adjustable wrench on the dungarees of the spacer he’d knocked down with it.
That’s probably the opinion of most of the rescue party,
Daniel thought.
And maybe mine as well
.
Aloud he said, “We’ll escort you to your family home, Cleveland. We’ll talk on the way, but I think the
Kiesche
will be lifting rather sooner than we had discussed.”
Adele said something in Woetjans’ ear. “Evans and Crick!” the bosun ordered. “Go up and get his gear. Take it to the
Kiesche
on the tram, not the bloody tender like we came.”
“Right,” said Daniel. “Captain Sorley? Would you come out here, please?”
“Look, I got a
right
…” Sorley began. He didn’t move from his corner behind the round table.
Barnes and Dasi grabbed opposite sides of the table. They were bosun’s mates and used to working together without signals that anybody else could have seen. They ripped the table from the floor and hurled it into the rack of bottles behind the bar.
The bartender ducked with a yelp, saving himself. Wood, bottles, and various liquors sprayed over the taproom. Spacers shouted and laughed.
The riggers turned toward Sorley. He threw his hands up and cried, “I’m coming! Look, I don’t have any fight with you!”
That much was certainly true.
“Thank you, Barnes and Dasi,” Daniel said, “but you can step back now. Captain Sorley, I’m asking you in the presence of these witnesses—”
Including Adele, who was certainly recording the whole affair.
“—if you renounce any right or interest in Rikard Cleveland and any matters he may have discussed with you?”
“Yes, yes!” Sorley said. “Go on, rob me like you’re going to do anyway.
I
don’t care!”
“Then I think we’re done here,” Daniel said pleasantly. “Master Cleveland, we’ll take you home now.”
“Tovera and I will escort Master Cleveland,” Adele said crisply. “You have a dinner date with your fiancée, I believe.”
“Yes,” Daniel said. “I do.”
He looked at his uniform. He’d split several seams, in particular the crotch. And something had splashed—gin diluting Schmidt’s blood, probably—to cover most of his right side. “Ah …”
Miranda stepped close and hugged him. Daniel realized for the first time that she was trembling. “We’ll eat in,” she said. “I told the cook before Adele and I left the townhouse that we probably would.”
“Right,” Daniel repeated, licking his dry lips. Reaction was beginning to hit him, too. “We’re done here, then.”
“Not quite, master,” said Hogg. “This shitworm—”
He thumbed toward Sorley.
“—tried to kill us both or the next thing to it.”
“I’m not going to dirty my hands on a man who’s too cowardly to fight,” Daniel said. He was trying to control his breathing. He wanted to gulp air through his mouth and nostrils both. “We’ll leave now.”
“I never minded getting my hands dirty,” Hogg said.
He punched Sorley in the stomach with the knuckleduster. Sorley crumpled to the floor with only a wheeze.
Hogg kicked him in the ribs. “Or my boots,” he said. “I’m a peasant, you know.”
Hogg grinned. “Now we’re ready,” he said, sauntering toward the gaping doorway.
CHAPTER 9
Bergen and Associates Shipyard, Cinnabar
“There’ll be some who say she looks dumpy,” Daniel said in the interval while the first load of cargo was stowed in the
Kiesche
’s hold and the second lowboy waited on the quay. Adele sat on the bed of the emptied vehicle. “Mon says she’s handy, but he means handy for a tramp freighter, of course.”
In fact the
Kiesche
looked dumpy to Daniel also, just as she would to anyone used to the slender lines of warships. Warships didn’t carry cargo, and short, fat cylinders provided much greater interior volume than long, thin ones.
“Given your record of success,” Adele said. She was working on something with her personal data unit; she didn’t look up. “I can’t imagine anyone objecting to your choice of a ship.
I
don’t object.”
Daniel wondered what Adele’s personal opinion of the
Kiesche—
or of the
Princess Cecile
—was, or if she even had one. Most people thought of familiar machines in human terms, as though they had will or even personalities. Adele didn’t appear to do that.
“Are your quarters satisfactory?” Daniel said. “I’m asking because you wouldn’t complain if there was something wrong.”
“Quite satisfactory,” Adele said. Her control wands moved and paused, adjusting the data on the holographic screen before her. “I have a bed, which converts rather neatly into a chair and desk. Further, I think it is very unlikely that it will rain aboard the
Kiesche
, as it did a number of times during the period when I often slept in culverts.”
“The reaction-mass piping doesn’t pass near the bridge quarters,” Daniel said. “I suppose it’s possible that the bunks I’ve added in the cargo hold might be flooded, but your rank hath its privileges. Cramped though those privileges might be.”
There were four curtained bunk alcoves—calling them cabins would have been silly—in the bridge compartment. Daniel had allotted them to himself; Vesey, the first mate; Cory, the second mate; and Adele. Cory had offered his alcove to Pasternak, who had accepted it gladly.
The off-duty crew was intended to bunk in the triple stacks against the port and starboard outer bulkhead at the rear of the compartment. Because the
Kiesche
was heavily overcrewed on this voyage, Daniel had added additional accommodation in the hold. Their cargo of carbines and automatic impellers would probably be valuable to the Transformationists, but it was primarily aboard to conceal the real purpose of the voyage. The crates didn’t begin to fill the available volume.
Daniel wondered what Adele was working on. It might not directly bear on the voyage, but he had come to accept her belief that there was no useless information. At least not if you had a librarian as skilled as Adele Mundy to sift the data when need arose.
“Send the next load!” Pasternak shouted from the main hatch.
“Last load!” the straw boss from the shipyard bellowed back. He and his team of three began shifting crates of weapons from the second lowboy to the conveyor, which in turn rumbled the cases toward the
Kiesche
’s hatch.
Pasternak, as chief of ship, was responsible for striking the cargo away in the hold, though most of the involved personnel were riggers, Woetjans herself among them. Vesey was at the command console for the present, though Daniel planned to take the
Kiesche
up to get the feel of his new vessel.
“Loading should be complete in three hours,” Daniel said, his eyes on the ship. “If Cleveland is aboard by then, I intend to lift off as soon thereafter as I can.”
The Dorsal A antenna was extended as usual in harbor to provide a vantage point, but it should take only minutes to lower it and lock it into its cradle. There was a panoramic camera at the masthead, courtesy of Adele’s other employers. The installation probably made the
Kiesche
unique among tramp freighters, but no one would examine the ship carefully enough to notice unless they were already very suspicious.
“He and Lieutenant Cory have left Cleveland House,” Adele said. “The tram system estimates they should arrive—”
Her wands twitched the air.
“—within two minutes.”
“You’re in touch with Cory?” Daniel said, hoping that he kept irritation out of his tone. He had sent Cory and Hale to meet their passenger and accompany him back to the shipyard.
He had sent Hogg as well, rather than a husky spacer or two. Hogg wasn’t polished, but he was used to operating in urbane society. Generally that involved keeping his mouth shut and being ignored; a large countryman who happened to be travelling in the same tramcar as two young gentlemen and a lady of the same class.
“No,” said Adele. She must have heard something in his voice, because she turned to face him for the first time since she had sat down on the lowboy. “Tovera asked if she might go with Cory and Hale. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have left me alone, but she seemed to think I would be safe enough so long as I didn’t leave the shipyard.”
“I see,” said Daniel. “Ah, I apologize for, well, for being surprised.”
He thought Adele smiled as she returned to her display, but he wasn’t sure. Even if she were smiling, he might have read the expression in her eyes rather than on her tight lips.
“I didn’t specifically thank you for disobeying me last night,” Daniel said, though that was overstating his request to Adele before he went to snatch Cleveland back. “Ah, and Tovera was very well behaved, which I noticed.”
“I’ve never known Tovera to disobey any direction I gave her,” Adele said in the direction of her display. “She doesn’t expect to understand all of them—and of course, she often doesn’t. She simply accepts my decisions and carries them out to the best of her ability.”
“That’s quite a … responsibility,” Daniel said. He had to raise his voice. The crates holding the automatic impellers were moving up the conveyor; their steel straps clacked like gunfire on the rollers.
Adele looked toward him again. For an instant, there was nothing at all in her face, but he had the impression that her eyes were on things in the distant past.
“Daniel,” she said, “it’s exactly the same responsibility as I carry for the pistol in my pocket. Neither one in their association with me has ever killed anyone without my direction.”
“Right,” Daniel said, looking away. He was watching his crew slide the cargo aboard and stow it in the stern hold, but that was simply an excuse.
Missiles launched at Daniel’s command had almost certainly killed more people than his friend had with her pistol, but Daniel hadn’t been watching his victim’s faces when they died. Scores of times, hundreds of times; sometimes so close that their blood splashed back in a red shower.
“Daniel?” Adele said to his profile. He turned back toward her in surprise. “How do you plan to take your leave from Miranda?”
“We, ah, did that last night,” he said awkwardly. “Well, this morning at the townhouse. I think it’s easier on her if she doesn’t come to the harbor, you see.”
Adele nodded. “Miranda asked me to tell you at a suitable time that she disagrees with you there,” she said. “The decision is yours, of course. But you have nothing really to do for the next two hours, and your fiancée is waiting in Mon’s office.”
“What?” Daniel said, looking up at the bank of windows.
Adele went back to her data unit. She didn’t respond, because there was nothing really to respond to.
“Right,” said Daniel. “
I
am captain of the
Kiesche
, and
I
make the decisions on anything to do with the ship and its crew.”
He rose to his feet. “If you will, Officer Mundy,” Daniel said, “inform Lieutenant Vesey that I’ll be back in two hours. Until then she is to do whatever she feels is necessary to prepare the
Kiesche
for immediate departure.”
Daniel strode toward the main building. Rikard Cleveland had just entered the shipyard with his escort. Daniel waved, but that was nothing the
Kiesche
’s captain need concern himself with, either.
Not for two hours, at least.
* * *
The roar of ions quenching in the water of the slip seemed louder than Adele, on the bunk in her alcove, was used to. She supposed that was because the freighter’s hull and frames were much thinner than those of the
Princess Cecile
.
The
Kiesche
’s four thrusters were arranged in a diamond pattern instead of side-by-side pairs like those of most starships. Pasternak was running up the bow and stern units together, checking flow and seeing that the Stellite petals of the nozzles moved smoothly when bathed in plasma.
Adele wondered what the advantage of the arrangement was. The answer was probably “none,” given that it was so uncommon.
She wore an RCN commo helmet for its sound-cancelling effect. Rather than view data on the face-shield as most spacers did, though, she linked her personal data unit to the console as she would have done on the
Sissie
. On a warship she would have been at a console with its own sound-cancelling system.
Checking the ship’s internal networks by habit, Adele noticed that Cleveland was netted in. Someone had given him a commo helmet, though he probably didn’t know how to use it.
Cleveland lay on a bunk in the bridge compartment by his own choice. Daniel had offered him an alcove, but the youth had said that he didn’t want to be given any mark of honor. Being treated as a common spacer would be part of his penance for his past behavior.
Adele’s smile would have been visible if anyone had been looking at her, which of course they weren’t as the
Kiesche
prepared for liftoff. People who spoke of penance and divine retribution believed in an ordered universe.
Adele’s sister, Agatha, was eight years old when she was killed and her head displayed on Speaker’s Rock. The sergeants who stabbed the little girl to death believed they were acting according to the terms of the Proscriptions which followed the Three Circles Conspiracy.
They weren’t: the Proscriptions applied only to adult members of the families involved, the Mundys included, but it wasn’t a time when legal details were getting much attention.
The killers
certainly
didn’t think they were instruments of divine balance. They were emblems of the universe in which Adele lived.
Still, if Rikard Cleveland wanted to believe that by punishing himself he approached oneness with his universe, so be it. He wasn’t hurting anyone else; and he certainly wasn’t hurting innocent eight-year-old girls.
Adele had been going over the
Fleet Handbook for the Ribbon Stars
, the Alliance equivalent of the
Sailing Directions
issued for each region by Navy House. Because Alliance influence in the Ribbon Stars had been great even before Pantellaria’s temporary annexation, the
Handbook
was generally more detailed than corresponding Cinnabar information. Comparison of the two was therefore worthwhile—to the degree that any human activity was worthwhile.
Most people wouldn’t have added the final proviso. Adele did.
On the other hand, she wasn’t going to learn anything from the
Handbook
which would cause her to interrupt Daniel and the
Kiesche
’s crew in their liftoff preparations. For no better reason than her paired thoughts—that Cleveland looked lost, and that he would not have killed a young girl—Adele opened a two-way link to his helmet.
Those were good reasons, after all. “Master Cleveland?” she said. “If the equipment is in proper order, we will probably lift off within the next half hour.”
“Who?”
said Cleveland. He sat up so abruptly that he bumped his helmet on the bunk above his.
Adele had an inset of the boy’s face in a corner of her screen, using imagery from the recording unit in the compartment ceiling. She thought of cutting her image onto his display, but there didn’t seem to her to be any advantage in that. Instead she said, “I’m Adele Mundy. I don’t have any duties at present, and I thought I would offer you, well, companionship. I’m not a spacer, but I have a good deal of experience by now on vessels as small as this.”
The
Kiesche
was close to the same displacement as the
Princess Cecile
, though the latter—though any warship—was more sophisticated. Besides, Adele knew Daniel’s routines.
“I see,”
said Cleveland, lying back again. He was frowning over a thought.
The thrusters idled down to a hiss. The port and starboard pair lighted in their place, their roar and vibration sharpened as Pasternak sphinctered the nozzles. Even at low output, the
Kiesche
rocked fore and aft as though balanced on a teeter-totter.
“Lady Mundy,”
Cleveland said.
“On the ship which brought me from Karst to Cinnabar, I asked if I might go out on the hull while the ship was in the Matrix. Have you ever done that?”
“Yes,” said Adele. She didn’t amplify the bare statement. The only privacy she and Daniel had for discussions out of the crew’s hearing was on the hull. “If you wish, you’ll be able to do that on this voyage as well.”
“I don’t,”
Cleveland said.
“I thought that being in the Matrix, and seeing the whole cosmos arrayed about me, would be similar to the feeling I get in the Chapel in Pearl Valley. There I know that God is real and that all humanity, not just me and fellow Transformationists, are one with Him. It’s a wonderful realization. It’s transforming, in fact.”
Adele heard the smile in his voice. Her initial information about Cleveland had come from his mother and stepfather. The boy himself had said that he was a different person than the one his parents had known … and Adele was beginning to believe that he might have been telling the truth.
“
Was
it the same experience?” she asked. Cleveland seemed to have drifted into a reverie.
“Unfortunately, it was not,”
Cleveland said.
“God was there, certainly. But I felt utterly alone—lost to life and to my fellows. I entered the airlock and hid there until one of the crewmen noticed me, because I didn’t know how to work the mechanism. The crewman took me back within the ship’s hull, where it was a little better. I haven’t completely recovered yet. I’m not sure I ever will.”
