The Sea Without a Shore (2 page)

This was an extremely large floorfish, even for an adult, and the eel was a similarly impressive member of its species. Because its jaws and belly expanded, it could easily ingest prey the size of an average-sized man.

“I got the lure set to female eel,” Hogg said in a hoarse whisper. “If it figures you’re a female, it likely won’t try to eat you. Just keep coming back. I don’t want to foul the prop in the weed, but I will if I have to.”

“I don’t especially want to be buggered by an eel, either,” Daniel said. It wasn’t a real concern—like other fish, the eels sprayed milt onto the eggs the female had just extruded into the sea—but it made Hogg chuckle, which is what Daniel had intended.

Hogg would rather die than let anything harm the Young Master. Daniel didn’t want him to leap into the eel’s jaws as the best way of saving his charge.

Daniel continued to splash. He didn’t look around. He couldn’t see anything through the agitated water. Perhaps Hogg could see more.

They were using the lure’s field to override the bioelectrical field of Daniel’s own body. Hogg was, at least; it wouldn’t have occurred to Daniel to do that. He’d certainly think of it should the situation arise again.

“Now, hold the lure in your left hand and hook your right over the gunnel,” Hogg said, speaking from just above Daniel’s head. He was again as calm as he had been years before while teaching his young charge to squeeze rather than jerk his trigger. “When you’re ready, you’ll swing up and I’ll haul you aboard. No problem at all for a strong young lad like you, right?”

“No problem,” Daniel whispered. His attendance at temple was sporadic at best, but he really would try to improve in the future.

Daniel’s hair brushed the skiff’s hull. He fumbled with his right hand, bicycling his legs to keep him up until he could grip a thwart. He took a deep breath and another, consciously trying to slow his heart rate.

He had only had one glimpse of the eel. It had seemed huge. Even allowing for the exaggeration of fear, it was probably ten feet long. Its slender body trailed behind a head the size of a bushel basket.

Hogg gripped Daniel’s left arm, just above the elbow. He wasn’t putting any pressure on the contact yet.

“On three,” Daniel said. “One, two, thr—”

Water exploded as Daniel rolled up and over the gunwale. The eel must have come after him, because Hogg shouted and Daniel heard the
crunch
as Hogg’s right arm drove the trident through the bones of the creature’s skull.

Daniel rolled into the belly of the skiff. Hogg had gotten out of his way, though Daniel wasn’t sure how. He wasn’t even sure he still had both legs, and his hands were locked together in mutual reassurance.

Bloody Hell, that was a bad one!

The skiff was rocking violently. Hogg shoved them backward and released the shaft of the harpoon. The little motor was backing with all the power it had available, ignoring the risk of weed clogging its intake.

Daniel raised his head to look over the gunnel. The shaft flailed back and forth, sometimes under the surface, as the fatally injured eel curvetted. The body behind the soot-colored head was so nearly transparent that Daniel could make out the bones of the skeleton.

His guess of ten feet long had been conservative. This eel was probably big enough to have swallowed the skiff itself along with the two men.

“I wonder what the record for a wolf eel is?” Daniel said. “Taken by hand, I mean.”

“You want this one as a trophy,” Hogg said hoarsely, “then you’re going to have to come back by yourself and get it. Me, I’m heading for home; and when I get there, I’m going to get
very
drunk.”

“Yes,” said Daniel. “I think that’s a good plan for both of us.”

Xenos on Cinnabar

Lady Adele Mundy—she had been released from the RCN when her ship was paid off, so she could not properly use her naval rank of signals officer—stood before one of the chest-high reading tables in the Long Room of the Navy House Archives. Her personal data unit sat to the left on the table; to the right was the small stack of ships’ logs which she was copying; and in the center was a flat conversion device eight inches deep by ten inches across.

The converter was a specialist item and would have cost a great deal to buy, even if she could have found one for sale. This one had been given her as an adjunct to her work for her other employer, Mistress Bernis Sand—the head of Cinnabar’s intelligence service, or at least one branch of it.

Adele didn’t think she was flattering herself to believe that she was in her way Mistress Sand’s most effective agent. She was fairly certain that the intelligence arms of the Alliance of Free Stars, the Republic’s greatest rival and frequent enemy, would have agreed with that assessment.

She put another log in the converter. This was a chip recording, but the format was unique in Adele’s experience and may not have been common some seven hundred years ago when, according to the label, the officers of a freighter out of Palafox created it.

The converter whined for a moment, then projected the first entries through the data unit’s holographic display for Adele to view while the remainder of the contents was stored. She wasn’t trying to absorb all the data on the logs at this moment, but neither was she merely a copyist. She had repeatedly found cases where the labels slapped on quickly by disinterested clerks were seriously in error.

Adele smiled faintly. The clerks probably thought that items which hadn’t been incorporated into the general database were of no value. It was true that the logs were valueless except to someone who was very skilled and very obsessive. Even the skilled, obsessive Adele Mundy was unlikely to find any data that she would use during the however many further years of her life.

On the other hand, she had nothing better to do, and she liked gathering data. There was probably nothing she liked more.

Tovera, Adele’s servant, stood at the desk to Adele’s left, nearer the entrance. Besides the clerk, a naval rating, they had been the only people present in the Long Room, but an RCN midshipman wearing her 2nd Class uniform—her Grays—had entered and was talking to the clerk.

Tovera moved slightly, facing the doorway. She lifted the lid of the attaché case on her desk, just enough to reach inside.

Adele was by now too familiar with Tovera’s ways to be surprised; she didn’t even smile. Tovera wasn’t precisely paranoid, but she saw no reason why an unfamiliar midshipman might not intend to kill her mistress; therefore she prepared against the possibility.

After all, Tovera had nothing better to do either, and she had never cared about the reasons why she was told to kill someone. She had been trained by the Fifth Bureau, the intelligence service which reported directly to Guarantor Porra, the autocrat of the Alliance. Tovera had changed her allegiance from the Alliance to Adele Mundy personally, but she continued to follow her training.

Tovera did most things by rote. She was a sociopath and far too intelligent to make social decisions for herself. She would have been executed long since if she had done that, because she generally saw the simplest way out of a problem as being to kill the person making the problem.

So long as Tovera did as Adele directed, she would remain within socially acceptable norms. Thus far obeying Adele had given Tovera ample opportunity to kill people, which she liked to do as much as she could be said to like anything.

“Well, Midshipman,” the clerk said, raising his voice enough to be heard where Adele stood, thirty feet away. “I guess despite your exalted rank, you’re going to have to check the catalogue just like lesser mortals. And for that you’ll have to go back up to the lobby, because the terminal down here’s on the blink.”

“The catalogue only lists the logs of the
Princess Cecile
while the corvette was on the RCN list,” the midshipman said. “I know that she sailed a number of times in private commission, and I’ve heard that copies of those logs were deposited with Navy House also.”

In theory, the midshipman ranked a naval rating. In practice, she was probably on half pay since so many ships had been laid up after the Treaty of Amiens, and nothing was of lower importance to the RCN bureaucracy than a midshipman on the beach.

The clerk shrugged. “Could be, honey,” he said. “You’re welcome to look to your little heart’s content.”

“Excuse me, mistress?” Adele called. She had personal experience with poverty, since the Mundy wealth had escheated to the Republic when her parents were executed; besides which, she disliked people who didn’t do their jobs. “If you’ll come back here, I may be able to help you.”

As she had expected, her helpfulness irritated the clerk. He gave Adele a black look and returned to his desk display. He was watching a sporting event, though Adele—who had checked it out of habit—couldn’t imagine why a score of men (they were all men) were shoving a stone quoit up and down a grass field.

This basement area of the archives was more a storage room than a library in proper form. Floor-to-ceiling cages of woven-wire fencing marched down both sides of the room. Inside each were file cabinets, but boxes of additional material were stacked on the floors of many cages, particularly those nearer the entrance.

People using the archives could switch on direct lighting to supplement the glow strips in the arched concrete ceiling, but not all the lights worked. Specifically, the cage beside the desk where Adele was working didn’t have working internal lights. The unsorted boxes within were lumps in shadow.

The midshipman strode past the clerk’s desk without looking back. She was petite and dark-haired, and she was obviously angry.

“It’s ridiculous that an RCN officer has to depend on the courtesy of a private scholar to find something in RCN archives!” she said, probably hoping that her voice would carry to where the clerk sat. “Still, if you know where the logs might be stored, mistress, that’s the main thing. I’d be very grateful.”

Her nametag read HALE. She had probably bought her Grays used, because they had more wear than someone only a few years out of the Academy was likely to have given them.

“I think you’ll find them in there,” Adele said in a neutral voice, pointing. “In the second box down on the left-hand stack, the metal one. Tovera, help her with your handlight.”

Tovera opened the wire gate and gestured the midshipman into the cage. They could be padlocked, but most of them were not.

Hale followed Tovera’s narrow beam of light, lifted off the covering box, and took out the clear container within the one indicated.

“Perfect!” Hale said after a glance. “They’re on RCN standard chips, and it looks like they’re all of them here. And in order!”

Adele smiled faintly. A stranger like Hale probably wouldn’t have recognized the expression if she had even noticed it.

Hale came out, and Tovera closed the cage behind her.

“I suppose you’re wondering about these,” Hale said as she set the chips on a table across the aisle from Adele. She didn’t appear to have noticed Tovera. Adele’s servant excelled in being unobtrusive in any normal social setting. “You see, I was in the Academy with two midshipmen who were assigned to Captain Leary, only he wasn’t a captain then. You know—the famous one?”

Tovera didn’t snicker. Adele nodded expressionlessly. She did indeed know Captain Leary.

“Well, I
knew
them,” Hale said. She took an ordinary chip reader out of its belt pouch and set it on her table. “One was pretty sharp, I’ll grant, but the other always struck me as being as thick as two short planks. But they’ve both been promoted to lieutenant with no interest behind them.”

She shrugged. “I’ve got a lot of time on my hands since the peace,” she said, “so I thought maybe if I studied the logbooks I could figure out how they did it. Besides being lucky to serve under Captain Leary, I mean.”

“You’d be talking about Blantyre and Cory, I presume,” Adele said. Hale’s age made the identification certain, but she still had to resist her desire to check Naval Academy class lists. “I’ll remind you that Blantyre’s luck led to her being killed two years ago.”

“You knew Blantyre, then?” Hale said in surprise. “I didn’t realize …”

Adele nodded again. She was wearing a plain civilian business suit in dark blue. The light here wasn’t good enough for anyone but a couturier to realize that the outfit was of top quality. Hale had assumed that she was a private scholar, and Adele hadn’t bothered to correct her. Actually, she supposed she was a private scholar at the moment.

“Blantyre struck me as the best kind of RCN officer,” Adele said. “Competent in astrogation and other technical subjects, and a fighting officer above all else. But as I said, killed in battle.”

“Everybody dies, mistress,” Hale said. “Very few die with a record equal to Blantyre’s.”

She eyed Adele more carefully, but she clearly didn’t see anything more than she had at first glance. Tovera wasn’t the only one who remained unobtrusive under most circumstances.

“Blantyre and I were friends,” Hale said. “I’m not the sort to go put a bouquet on her grave—”

On her cenotaph,
Adele corrected silently. Blantyre’s body had been vaporized off Cacique, along with those of fifty-odd of her shipmates.

“—but I figure if I can use her record to learn how to be a better RCN officer, that’s a better memorial anyway. And—”

Hale straightened slightly, as though she were coming to attention for a reviewing officer.

“—you’re right about her. When you beat Blantyre on the Battle Board, you knew you’d done something. But more often than not, she beat me.”

Adele smiled very faintly at the pride in the midshipman’s voice; albeit probably justifiable pride. She wouldn’t have thought anyone could read the expression, but apparently Hale did, because she flushed slightly.

“Please excuse my discourtesy,” she said, extending her hand. “I’m Lucinda Hale.”

Adele shook her hand with a carefully gauged polite pressure. “I am Lady Mundy,” she said, using her civilian rank rather than the one Hale might have noticed in the logs of Daniel’s RCN commissions. “I’m pleased to have met you, Mistress Hale.”