The Sea Without a Shore (12 page)

CHAPTER 10

Corcyra System

The
Kiesche
hung three light-minutes from Corcyra. The tramp’s upgraded sensor suite gave Daniel an excellent view of the planet, but Pantellarian vessels on patrol would be very unlikely to observe the newcomer.

Daniel had the highest regard for Pantellarian optics, which were as good as or better than anything produced on Cinnabar. He had less regard for the crews of Pantellarian destroyers like those sent to Corcyra. Even first-rate personnel would have difficulty scanning a three-light-minute sphere without specialized equipment like that which Adele’s other employers had provided the
Kiesche
.

“Officer Mundy … ?” Daniel said on the general push. On a vessel with a larger or less select crew, he might have used the command channel or even a two-way link, but whenever possible he liked to give his people as much information as there was. “I’m not seeing anything in orbit over the planet. Are you, over?”

“No,”
said Adele.
“And we have enough data that a ship hidden in the planet’s shadow would have emerged by now, regardless of its orbital period.”

She forgot to say “over” when she ended her reply. Daniel smiled: Adele normally forgot.

“Cleveland?” Daniel said. “Did you hear any discussion about Pantellarian patrolling practices before you lifted from Corcyra? I assume you were aboard a blockade runner, over.”

“Well, there wasn’t really a blockade, Captain Leary,”
Cleveland said.
“Ships land at Brotherhood daily or thereabouts to load copper ingots. I bought passage on one that was bound for Karst, the
Evelyn
. The captain said the Pantellarians—actually, he said the Spigotties—don’t patrol because they’re afraid that an Alliance squadron will sweep up anything in orbit. While they’re in port, they’re protected by antiship missiles.”

Daniel smiled, though no one looking at him would have seen any humor in it. As much as Daniel hated anything, it was lazy incompetence, even in an enemy.

The
Kiesche
was in free fall. High Drive emissions could have been detected much more easily than the ship itself. Under the circumstances, Daniel thought about bringing them up to 1g with the High Drives and thumbing his nose at the enemy … but that would be pointless.

“I’m sure that was what the Pantellarian commodore told Governor Arnaud,” he said.

“The admiral,”
Adele said, correcting him.
“Admiral Stanzi.”

“The admiral told Arnaud, then,” Daniel said. “I don’t think he really believes the Alliance would break the present truce with the Republic in order to help a motley crowd of miners on a piss-pot colony. I
do
think that Stanzi and his crews, particularly his officers, aren’t up to the drudgery of a blockade. Pantellarians aren’t cowards, by and large, but they do tend to be lazy scuts, over.”

“Sir,”
said Cory.
“Not to take the enemy’s side, but it would be very difficult to run down blockade runners with destroyers. Unless you were going to shoot on sighting, maybe, but there’s regular trade with Corcyra, with Hablinger, I mean. Over.”

“Five to ship,”
Vesey said. She was opposite Daniel on the command console at present as the senior fighting officer under the captain. When the
Kiesche
had reached Corcyra orbit and Daniel was sure that they weren’t going to be fighting or fleeing in the next few minutes, Adele would trade places with Vesey.
“Chasing blockade runners would improve the skills of the crews. Which drinking in dockside taverns, as I presume they’re doing while in port at Hablinger, will not do. Over.”

“Six to ship,” Daniel said. “The Pantellarian navy has a culture different from ours in the RCN. For which I suppose we should be glad, over.”

In the general pause, Cleveland said,
“Sir? I believe the Pantellarians escort their own transports down. They send up two destroyers, the captain told me, but they don’t bother copper traders even when they’re both in orbit at the same time. Ah, over?”

He’s really trying,
Daniel thought. If Cleveland had grown up under Tom Sand instead of a flash nobleman who’d never grown up himself, things might have been different.

Or not, of course. Daniel Leary certainly wasn’t a copy of his father, the Speaker.

“Six to ship,” Daniel said, sitting as straight as he could during free fall. “I’ll take us in now. Don’t expect the kind of precise astrogation that you’ve gotten used to on the
Sissie
. We’re going to be an hour and a half on High Drive before we reach Corcyra orbit, and the computer is going to land us just like the
Kiesche
’s captain is a cack-handed drunk like every other tramp captain out this way.”

Daniel took a deep breath. Though he kept his tone measured, he was feeling the excitement rise as it always did when he went into action. There wouldn’t be any shooting immediately, and perhaps never in the course of the voyage, but this was action nonetheless.

“They aren’t going to learn that we’re RCN until we’re ready to tell them, Sissies,” Daniel said. “But they’ll learn then, by heaven!”

He took another breath. “Ship,” he said, and how often had he used these words? “Prepare to insert in thirty, that is three-zero, seconds.”

Corcyra Orbit

“Thank you, Vesey,” Adele said as she took the lieutenant’s place at the back of the command console. The
Kiesche
was in free fall, so the exchange was simplified by Vesey hooking a boot around an armrest, pulling Adele to the console, and finally pushing her down onto the couch.

When Adele first joined the RCN—or at any rate, became a member of the company of RCS
Princess Cecile
, a corvette in the service of the Republic of Cinnabar—it disturbed her that she was so clumsy, aboard ship generally and particularly when the ship was in free fall. She had come to accept if not approve of the situation.

Adele was better at certain things than anyone else in the crew—and very possibly better than anyone else in the RCN. And she was hopelessly incompetent at other things which even the wipers in the Power Room did with reasonable skill. There were other people to do or to help Adele do the things she was bad at, but there was nobody you would prefer to have with you if you needed to open an enemy’s database.

Or to stand beside you in a gunfight. Tovera had the same skills, but not even Tovera could equal her mistress in planning a complex action which might involve slaughter at each stage.

Adele strapped herself onto the couch after she started to drift off again. Vesey, who had expected that to happen, had waited to catch Adele by the ankle and to hold her until the harness clicked.

“Thank you, Vesey,” Adele repeated, coldly furious with herself.
If Vesey and probably everybody else in the crew knows that I’ll forget to strap myself in, why can’t
I
remember it!

The console was already displaying feeds from the planet below. The sites had been chosen by algorithms tailored to Adele’s specifications by specialists in Mistress Sand’s organization, or possibly by specialists working for Navy House, whose services had been loaned to Mistress Sand for this purpose.

Occasionally Adele heard or saw a comment which made her wonder how important she was considered by the highest levels of the Republic’s bureaucracy. The thought shocked and disturbed her, because Adele’s self-image was that of a librarian of considerable skill, whom nobody ever thought about.

Except when she got angry, of course, and then Mundy of Chatsworth was apt to come out. But arrogant nobles were a soldi a dozen in Cinnabar society.

“Freighter
Kiesche
out of Xenos to Brotherhood Control,”
said Vesey, using the 20-meter band. Corcyra did not have a working satellite communications system since the Pantellarian invasion, so shortwave was the first choice to raise somebody on the ground.
“Request landing instructions, over.”

Vesey, now in Adele’s alcove, was handling the commo. She was adequately competent at every aspect of what might be required of an RCN officer, including communications duties, but Cory and Cazelet were far more skilled at them.

They were acting as Adele’s aides in sorting the information pouring in from databases below, however, so Vesey was on the boards. She was hugely overqualified for a job which on a tramp freighter was ordinarily carried out by a technician who moved his lips when he read.

Adele focused on the information displayed in greater resolution than it had been by her personal data unit. She almost-smiled when a thought at the back of her mind drifted to the surface before receding: the fact that Adele had been concentrating on the data before and during her move to the command console probably had something to do with the fact that she had forgotten to strap herself in.

As usual, for both items.

Adele sank into information, a world in which it didn’t matter that a spacer was detailed to watch her whenever she was on the hull—even though a safety line anchored her to the ship. First things first: Brotherhood Harbor was a half-loop west of the present channel, formed when the Cephisis River changed its course a millennium ago. A canal with locks now reconnected the upper end of the cutoff to the main channel to keep the harbor level high. Ships drank large volumes of water to refill their reaction-mass tanks, and they vaporized even more with their thruster plumes as they landed and lifted.

Two antiship missile batteries protected Brotherhood. They were not interconnected by a single targeting apparatus and were not even operated by the same organization. The battery in a concrete emplacement was crewed and controlled by the Garrison.

The other unit was equipped with more recent, higher velocity missiles, but its triple launcher was protected by only a cursory sandbag revetment. The leaders of the Corcyran Self-Defense Regiment had brought the battery with them from Pantellaria, along with a great deal of money, which permitted them to recruit locally. Very few of the exiles themselves were in uniform, but the Regiment appeared at close inspection to be a respectable fighting force—just as Mistress Sand’s files had suggested it would be.

“Ma’am, I’ve put together data on the
Freccia
,”
said Cory on a net he’d created for himself, Adele, and Cazelet.
“That’s the destroyer in harbor, the Corcyran navy as they call it. I thought it might save you some time before you send a report to Six, over.”

“Captain,” Adele said, forwarding the file unopened. If Cory was going to be so punctilious, she would do the same. “Lieutenant Cory compiled this data on the Corcyran destroyer. I don’t have the knowledge base to assess it, so I’m passing it directly to you. Over!”

“Thank you, Mundy,”
Daniel said. His inset image was smiling from the corner of her screen.
“Cory, please brief us, over.”

“Sorry,”
Cory muttered. The problem with an organization like the crew of the
Princess Cecile
—and the still greater problem when the corvette’s personnel had been winnowed from a hundred and twenty to twenty—was to know whether to behave like family or like members of a hierarchical military organization.

Adele was certainly poor at following procedure, because in her heart she
wasn’t
part of a military organization. That didn’t cause her difficulties, because nobody else aboard thought of her as a junior warrant officer of the RCN, either.

It didn’t matter to ordinary spacers, because they understood the bounds of familiarity in the same fashion that tenants on the Bantry estate did. They might joke with Six before going on liberty, but if they met him out of uniform, he was still Six—just as he was still the Squire to a tenant in Xenos. They didn’t need the trappings of authority to understand their relationship to their betters.

Adele smiled in sad memory of her mother. Esme Rolfe Mundy believed that all human beings could rise to the ideal which the Rolfes and Mundys already embodied. She would never have used the term “betters” in that fashion, and she would have been horrified if she had heard her daughter do so.

In fact, Adele didn’t believe in the distinction between the lower orders and their betters, either; though having lived many years on the bottom of society, she was unable to romanticize its residents as her mother had. That said, most of the members of the so-called lower orders whom Adele had met
did
believe in the distinction.

A few of them resented it; more of them would have said that the separation was ordained by heaven. Most simply accepted the division as they accepted sunrise and got on with important matters like sex and putting food on the table.

Cory and Cazelet, the younger commissioned officers, were the ones most affected. They operated informally under Adele in collecting and sorting the data which poured into Adele’s console at every landfall. Their skill at these tasks was part of the reason that Captain Leary’s missions had been uniformly successful, but the tasks were no part of their RCN duties—and they still
had
RCN duties.

Cory, the
Kiesche
’s second lieutenant and therefore senior to the freighter’s signals officer, didn’t know whether to give important information to his formal superior officer, the captain, or to Adele, the informal superior at whose direction he had gathered the information. The real answer was “give it to either one,” but that wasn’t a response which RCN regulations could accept.

“Sir, the
Freccia
’s got all her thrusters and High Drive motors, and her fusion bottle was replaced just last year,”
Cory said.
“She’s got a full crew according to the books, but they’re thirty percent landsmen hired here on Corcyra. And I don’t trust the books.”

“Nor should you,”
said Daniel.
“I never knew a Pantellarian ship where the captain didn’t collect the pay of at least ten spacers in a hundred, slots that were never going to be filled, over.”

“They only keep an anchor watch on board,”
Cory said.
“I doubt they could get under way in less than six hours, and that’s if the stores are loaded. Which again the books say they are, but I doubt it. The
Freccia
’s no danger to us, sir, over.”