The Sea Without a Shore (25 page)

CHAPTER 22

Hablinger on Corcyra

The River Cephisis was an expanse of brown glass when Daniel looked over the left side of the APC. The water wasn’t very far from the top of the levee, either: maybe the length of his forearm, maybe not that much. He dropped back into the compartment.

“Mundy?” he said, being relatively formal because they were sharing the vehicle with Colonel Bourbon and two of his aides. “When is high water? What part of the year, I mean?”

“The peak here was about two days ago,” said the female aide, Lieutenant Zeffelini, before Adele could answer. “On the other side of the river the road washed away yesterday in a couple places. Usually we’d be coming down on the west levee, though we can hop over the water easy.”

“I’m not sure about easy,” said Bourbon with a smile. “Can you swim, Leary?”

“Well enough,” Daniel said. He didn’t mention that Adele
couldn’t
swim, but he or Hogg would carry her if the situation arose. “But we should be fine.”

They were in the vehicle which had carried Hochner and his arrest team two days earlier. The slugs hadn’t damaged the lift fans, but Bourbon had decided to make the hundred mile run north to Hablinger in surface effect for safety’s sake. The vehicle didn’t lose much speed, and a motor failure on the road was an irritation. Failure twenty feet in the air could be a great deal more interesting, as Daniel and his companions had learned in the past.

Daniel stood again so that his head and shoulders were out in the airstream; he lowered the visor of his helmet. The compartment had a lid of pleated titanium battens, but it was rolled back at present.

Gunfire during the attempted coup hadn’t seriously damaged the vehicle, but there hadn’t been time to fully clean the compartment. Muggy heat turned residues of blood and brains into a stomach-roiling stench. Downwind of the fish-processing plant at Bantry was worse, but Daniel had no reason at the moment not to be out in the breeze.

Hogg was in the cab with the automatic impeller while Tovera rode on the passenger side of the cab, which would ordinarily have been the gunner’s seat when the impeller wasn’t manned. Tovera had wanted to drive the vehicle, but Colonel Bourbon had refused to permit that, and neither Adele nor Daniel had made any effort to overrule him.

Tovera knew the basic theory of driving. She would never be good, though, and the APC was much heavier than anything she had experience with. At some level Tovera probably understood that she shouldn’t be driving, but her need to control all aspects of her mistress’ environment had forced her to ask.

To Daniel’s surprise, Adele shut down her data unit and stood beside him. She surveyed the paddies to the right. The land across the river was identical, but the Cephisis was too wide to see across at this point.

Turning to Daniel she said, “I’ve never seen terrain like this. That is, I’ve seen imagery even before I began preparing to enter Hablinger; but the real thing is different from the images.”

She smiled, more or less. “I prefer the imagery,” she said.

The rice paddies were forty feet below the road the vehicle was following. They hadn’t been planted or flooded for over a year, but the ones Daniel could see were soppy because of leakage from the river. Weeds and self-seeded rice grew raggedly from the black muck.

The dikes separating each field from its neighbors were about four feet high. The tops of the dikes were grass, but shaggy trees grew out from the sides and curved upward; seedpods like lengths of orange tape dangled from some of them.

“I suppose the terrain is the same all the way to the city walls,” Adele said. Her smile quirked again. “That’s what the imagery showed, though imagery didn’t allow me to appreciate quite how muddy it would be.”

“The mud deadens sound,” Daniel said. He made his voice a trifle more cheerful than the words themselves required, but he was telling the truth. “You won’t clink on a stone, which is the sort of thing that wakes up even a Pantellarian guard. And Hogg will get you through, never fear. I won’t pretend it’ll be a walk in the park, but all you have to worry about is crawling. He’ll take care of the rest.”

Daniel’s voice changed in the middle of the final thought. Adele didn’t need anyone to kill for her; Hogg would simply do the business more quietly. And come to that—

Adele was looking at him with her minuscule smile.
She’s thinking the same thing
.

“Your little pistol doesn’t make a great deal of noise, granted,” Daniel said, finishing the thought aloud. “But Hogg is still a better choice.”

“Even Tovera agrees about that,” Adele said. “Which is high praise for Hogg, and a relief to me not to have to settle the matter myself.”

The hill on which Hablinger rose, a steep-sided mound over fifty feet high, was the only interruption of the flat landscape. Daniel could easily make out buildings without using the optical enhancements of his helmet visor.

“They can see us from there,” Adele said. “Why don’t they shoot?”

“Because we’d shoot back,” said Colonel Bourbon. He must have been listening for some time, but only now did he rise from his seat to join them.

“Isn’t that the point of the exercise?” said Adele.

There were openings in the inner walls of the dikes they were passing. A few—two, three; in one case six—people, mostly men, were visible near each, sometimes sitting on the dike itself. Generally but not always their weapons were nearby.

“Sniping would force both sides to keep under cover and make the siege more unpleasant,” Bourbon said. His aides were now standing also, apparently concerned that they were being left out. “It wouldn’t affect the military situation, though.”

Daniel nodded. “Everyone would stay under cover,” he said, in part showing that he understood but also making sure that Adele did.

“The combatants would stay under cover,” Bourbon said, correcting him. “Hablinger can’t be concealed. We don’t have real artillery, but automatic impellers could level the town. It’s stabilized mud, so the walls would shatter.”

He shrugged. “The Pantellarians find billets in Hablinger much more comfortable than muddy dugouts would be, and of course the townspeople
are
Corcyrans even if they happen to be under foreign control right now.”

“Most of them don’t care about independence,” said Bourbon’s male aide, a lieutenant. Daniel thought his name was Vanna, but Daniel paid more attention to young women than to men, whether or not they were in uniform. “They’re happy as long as the Pantellarians pay for what they take!”

“I’ve noticed,” Daniel said, trying not to sound too irritated, “that the tenants at Bantry worry more about how their crops are coming in than they do about who the Speaker of the Senate is. The crops determine how well they and their families are going to eat.”

“Quite right,” said Bourbon, though from his tone Daniel had the impression that the colonel’s main concern was to stop his aide from arguing with the honored guest who had rescued him. “This is where we’ll cross the river, so you might want to get down inside again.”

He and his aides ducked into the compartment. Daniel nodded to Adele and dropped to his seat just as the vehicle slowed and bumped down onto the Cephisis. Water spewed up on all sides.

Though the river looked like liquid mud from above, its spray had its usual rainbow beauty in the sun. Some of the iridescent fog settled over those in the compartment, but it was better to be damp than to close the cover and drown if a lift fan failed.

The APC lifted twenty inches in the air to clear the edge of the west levee, then slewed to the right along the roadway there so as not to plunge straight over the forty-foot escarpment. Only after the driver had slowed from the headlong pace at which they’d crossed the river did he nose his vehicle down toward the paddies. He angled his lift fans in order to keep the nose more or less level with the stern, though the latter was actually dragging on the slope.

“General good feeling between the sides or not,” Daniel said, his lips close to Adele’s ear, “I’d expect somebody in Hablinger to take a shot at a high-value target when a single slug could take out the whole vehicle and everybody aboard.”

Tovera, who either had very keen ears or was aided by a concealed antenna, said, “Pantellarians don’t think that way.” There was more contempt in those few words than even Hogg could have managed.

The APC reached ground level in an eruption of gluey black mud, some of which rained through the open roof. Daniel grimaced at the smear on his left sleeve, but he supposed he might as well get used to what would be a part of life so long as he remained here.

The driver turned hard to the left, back in the direction of Brotherhood, then turned left again. They rocked and bumped, dropped significantly; then dropped again and stopped. Daniel stood and looked around. They were in a sunken chamber made by welding structural plastic into a roofless box.

The walls acted as a coffer dam against seepage from the soil. A pump whined as it threw a column of muddy water over the levee and back into the stream of the Cephisis.

Even before the APC’s fans shut down, Bourbon’s aides had loosed the catches to drop the rear ramp. Daniel waited before he followed the locals out of the vehicle. The box in which they had stopped was built around a smaller box, fifteen feet by fifteen. The inner box was also formed from plastic, but it was roofed and all surfaces were covered with several layers of sandbags.

Well, bags of dirt. Daniel frowned, and Hogg, who must have been thinking the same thing, said, “Get a good storm and those bags’ll be sliding all over creation. And over anybody standing in this hole.”

“It almost never rains here in the north,” said Zeffelini, the female lieutenant.

There was a sneer in her voice; or anyway, Hogg heard one. “And your pump never fails? Because I want to know the manufacturer if that’s so. You get these bags wet, and the soil comes through the cloth like soap … which gives you a few tons of slipping sandbags.”

Bourbon waved Daniel and Adele ahead of him down the ramp. “I was expecting the Pantellarians to use bombardment rockets when we constructed this bunker,” he said. “That hasn’t happened, and your servant’s concern seems valid, Captain Leary.”

He wasn’t replying directly to Hogg, but he spoke loudly enough for Hogg and Zeffelini both to hear. Colonel Bourbon struck Daniel as a modest figure as a military man—but a first-rate politician, which was perhaps a better qualification for leadership here on Corcyra.

A steel door opened in the alcove left in the sandbagged wall. “Glad to have you back, Bourbon,” said the man in the doorway. He wore blotch-patterned battledress with the odd purple undertone of the Fleet Marines; his major’s lapel insignia was Alliance pattern also. “We’re all waiting for you inside. Figured it was easier than trusting to electronics since it was all parties.”

“I’m glad to be back, Wiren,” Bourbon said as he led the others into the bunker. “Frankly, the time I spent negotiating on Karst wasn’t much better than being a prisoner on Ischia. Fellows, this is Captain Leary, who rescued me and has some thoughts about ending this business even before the missiles arrive from Karst. Leary, these are—”

The space was crowded with the new arrivals. Bourbon ran down the names. Wiren was commander of the naval contingent, clearly a mercenary whom Tibbs had hired. Major Gillard was the Regiment’s field commander, Pantellarian by birth but not necessarily interested in politics. Brother Heimholz, a sad-faced bruiser of fifty, headed the Transformationist contingent; Graves in Brotherhood had described his background. Three miners were present, representatives but probably not leaders of the troops who weren’t members of any official faction.

“Well, it’s fine that you’re outa jail, Bourbon,” said a miner. Her hair was a natural mousy brown on one side and faded blue on the other. “What I want to know, though, is when something’s going to get settled here so we can go back south where we belong. I don’t remember much happening
before
you went off except we got our asses shot off the onct by them ships.”

“Now look, you!” said Vanna, waggling his finger in the miner’s face. “You watch your tongue or—”

Daniel expected the miner to slap Vanna’s hand away. Instead, she punched the lieutenant in the pit of the stomach, doubling him up gasping.

Zeffelini started to unsnap the holster of the pistol she wore as part of her uniform. Daniel reached across her body to grab her gun hand.

“That’s enough! Back off, everybody!” he bellowed at the three miners.

A number of people began babbling, including the blue-haired miner. She appeared to be embarrassed at what she’d done. Tempers were bound to fray during months in these filthy conditions.

“Look, I got a question,” said Hogg. “Why don’t you just blow the river? The bottom of the channel’s what, twenty feet above the ground here? It’d drain so quick the wogs wouldn’t be able to do squat to stop it.”

It was obvious that by “wogs” Hogg meant the Pantellarians. Half the people in this crowded chamber were Pantellarian by birth, however, and it didn’t require much imagination to guess that Hogg would’ve been willing to apply the term to an even wider circle than that. Daniel suspected that in the right context, Hogg might use “wog” to describe anybody who hadn’t been born and raised on the Bantry estate.

“Bloody hell!” said Gillard. “Have you seen where our positions are, you farmer? We’d flood ourselves out!”

Hogg smiled. He had just focused all attention—and all the anger—on himself. He was the harmless rural boob that nobody here had enough history with to hate.

“It’d be wet here, I see that,” he said complacently, his hands in the pockets of his baggy jacket. “You’d have to pull back a ways, though that wouldn’t be too terrible. And I was thinking that the Pantellarians might have worse problems without water to drink.”

“By heaven, he’s got something!” said Major Wiren, looking at Hogg in amazement.

“No, unfortunately,” said Bourbon quickly; though not quite quickly enough that Daniel hadn’t gotten his own hopes up. “There’s so much silt in the Cephisis here that Hablinger has always taken its water from a desalination plant fifteen kilometers out at sea. And the plant is on the sea bottom to keep it out of storms, so there isn’t a quick way of capturing it, either.”