The Sea Without a Shore (26 page)
Read The Sea Without a Shore Online
Authors: David Drake
“Ah, well,” said Hogg. He yawned, then stretched his arms toward the ceiling. “We farmers think a lot about water, you know.”
“Colonel,” said Daniel. “Do you have quarters for me and my personnel? I’d like to sort out some matters with my staff”—
with Adele
—“before I broach my proposals to you.”
If Daniel hadn’t said that or something along those lines, someone—maybe all the locals together—would be asking what his plans were. He was going to know more about the terrain here before he wanted to suggest anything publically.
In addition there was Adele’s business, whatever that was. He would learn when it was time for him to know.
“We’ve readied a dugout for you, Captain,” Brother Heimholz said. He smiled, transfiguring his face. “It’s small, dark, and has no amenities, so you spacers should feel right at home. I’ll take you there now.”
Daniel bowed. “I was afraid it was going to be a pavilion with four-poster beds,” he said, “since I know how you Land Force types treat yourselves. I appreciate you going to such effort to make poor spacers feel comfortable.”
They trailed out behind the Transformationist commander. When they were clear of the inner bunker, Hogg muttered, “I’m going to rack out now. Come dark, I’ll go see what I can see.”
“Yes,” said Daniel. “You and I will go.”
Also, I will be thinking about my own next step, unless Adele comes back from Hablinger and hands me the Pantellarian surrender
.
Which, Adele being Adele, might just happen.
* * *
Adele sat on a straight chair in the dugout, watching the changes her data unit had found in collating views of the terrain around Hablinger recorded by Pantellarian destroyers. Outside in the night a woman sang,
“I wish I was a little bird… .”
Though the destroyers didn’t patrol, they lifted in pairs to escort supply ships in. Hablinger Pool was a bowl sculpted into the course of the Cephisis just downstream of the town, so the automatic logs of the ships recorded high-resolution imagery every time. Any variation in the surface, whether caused by weather or by human activity, appeared as a highlight on Adele’s display.
“I’d fly up in a tree …”
sang the woman.
From what Adele had seen, here and in Pearl Valley, women in the Transformationist community were treated the same as men, or as nearly so as human beings were capable of doing. There were relatively few women in the community, however. She would have to check with Brother Graves or one of the senior people in Pearl Valley, but the reason could be as simple as statistically fewer women than men emigrating to a mining world.
“I’d sit and sing my sad little song… .”
The woman sounded quite cheerful, and her voice was pleasant if untrained. Adele would have been interested to learn the internal society of the Transformationists, if—
She smiled in self-mockery.
—somebody else had compiled the data.
Speaking rather than singing, the woman concluded, “But
I
can’t stay here by myself!”
“They’re back,” called Tovera softly through the blanket-covered entrance of the dugout.
Hogg pulled the drape open for Daniel, then followed him in. Fresh mud stank on their utilities.
Though the only light in the dugout was the data unit’s holographic display, Daniel must have read the thought behind what Adele believed was a blank expression. “The good thing about the location,” he said, “is that there’s plenty of water to wash with. It’s got just as much mud, I suppose, but there’s probably less excrement in the form of fertilizer.”
“I’ll get you in, mistress,” Hogg said. “You’ll likely be bathed in this muck”—he grimaced and gestured with both hands—“but I guess it wouldn’t look right to the wogs when you was walking around if you didn’t.”
“What’s this, Adele?” Daniel said, bending forward to look at her display. She’d left it omnidirectional instead of cueing the unit to focus on her eyes alone. “Why, this is the plan of the Pantellarian lines! I didn’t realize we had anything so good.”
Adele stood and rubbed her shoulders. She wasn’t sure what time it was, but she’d been working at the data unit since Daniel and Hogg went out an hour after full darkness to scout the enemy positions.
“I put it together after you left,” she said, her eyes closed. “I got into the logs of the Pantellarian squadron. I sent most of the information back to the
Kiesche
for Cory and Cazelet to process, but I kept copies of the local imagery for myself.”
“Well, that’s wonderful!” Daniel said. “I’m surprised that … well, I’m pleased that you were able to get into their logs so quickly.”
Adele smiled faintly, her eyes still closed. “You’re thinking that Pantellarian security must be very bad for me to open up warship data banks with no more than I have with me,” she said. She sat down again and stroked the case of her little data unit. “In fact their security was very good, but they had bad luck.”
She looked up at Daniel and half-smiled again. She was tired, but her work and that of her companions seemed to be going well; and tomorrow this would be over, one way or another.
“The new Pantellarian Navy Department, the one put in place after independence,” Adele said, “suspected that all their codes and coding equipment were known to the Alliance. They were correct in that assumption.”
Daniel nodded. Hogg seemed to be focused wholly on the landscape display, but Adele knew that he was hearing and understanding the explanation.
“They asked Cinnabar for help revising their systems and procedures,” Adele said. “My other employer provided them with help of the highest quality, but of course we kept full records of what codes Pantellaria might now be using and how the codes were being generated.”
Hogg snorted in amusement. Daniel remained stone-faced for a moment, then smiled broadly.
“You may reasonably think it dishonorable of me to use information gained in this way,” Adele said, knowing that she was speaking more to herself than to her audience. “I made the decision without referring to you or to anyone else.”
“If you get yourself killed because you were too proud to look at what somebody
handed
you,” Hogg said, suddenly glaring at her, “then I’ll be sorry, because I like you and we all like you. But if you get
me
killed like that, I’ll come out of Hell for you, I swear.”
“Fortunately, that situation doesn’t arise,” Daniel said mildly. “I’m glad to have this imagery, though I don’t think it changes anything we saw on the ground. See, Hogg? Here’s the strongpoint in front of us, and here’s the listening post. There’s six of them between strongpoints, it looks like fifty yards apart. Well, fifty meters.”
“There are three listening posts to either side of each strongpoint,” Adele said. She suddenly felt tired. There was always more to learn, but she had completed the tasks which had an immediate bearing on her entry into Hablinger; her entry tomorrow into Hablinger. “I think they’re connected by wire. The strongpoints report to Hablinger headquarters by radio, including anything the listening posts have reported, but I don’t pick up signals from the posts directly.”
“Probably just two men in the LPs,” Hogg said. “With this lot, maybe only one. I’ll slip up the last hundred yards and take care of them while the mistress waits, then come get her and we both go through. There’s no more manned posts, just wire, and that’s no problem.”
“Call,” Daniel said. “You don’t need to come back. That’s extra work and extra noise. You can sound like a field-skipper, three times in quick order.”
“She won’t hear me, master,” Hogg said in irritation. “And she’ll get bloody lost on the way. I don’t care how simple it seems to you!”
Adele hadn’t heard the older man use that frustrated tone to Daniel in the past. It was justified: Hogg had put into words the analysis which Adele had made in her head already.
“I’ll catch it,” said Daniel calmly. “I’ll bring her up to the LP and wait there till the two of you come back. And I won’t get lost.”
Hogg remained completely still for a moment. Then he said, “Right. I don’t need more bloody exercise at my age.”
Looking away, he muttered, “Sorry, master.”
“You need a distraction,” Tovera said without turning to face the others. She squatted in the dugout’s opening with a corner of the blanket drawn back, her submachine gun in her hand.
“We’ll have a distraction,” Hogg said. “I’m going to set a flare midway to the post. When we’re there and ready to head in the town, I’ll trip it with a clacker. Nobody’ll be looking toward us even if, well, if the Mistress is having a bit of trouble with the going.”
“A clacker won’t work,” Tovera said. “It won’t have enough juice at three hundred meters.”
“I’ll put it closer, then!” Hogg said. “Just so the wogs are looking to our lines and not out to the side!”
The clacker was a hand-squeezed generator that set off a blasting cap. Adele didn’t have any idea how great a charge would remain at the end of a thousand feet of thin wire, but Tovera was probably correct.
“No,” Tovera said. She was icy calm through the whole discussion. “I’ll be twenty feet from the flare, holding the ends of your wire between my thumb and forefinger. I’ll feel the spark, and I’ll set off the flare.”
She turned to glance at Adele. “Keeping radio silence, mistress,” she said.
“Yes, that sounds good,” said Daniel. His tone was casual, but Adele and probably the others knew that the discussion was over. “Now, let’s get some sleep. Starting an hour after dark tonight, we all have a great deal to do.”
Adele shut down her data unit and hunched—the ceiling was low—to the bedstead she had chosen. The frame was plastic tubing and there was no mattress over the slats, but she had slept on much worse.
“Yes,” she said, putting her rolled jacket at the end of the frame for a pillow.
She fell asleep almost at once.
CHAPTER 23
Hablinger on Corcyra
“The militia field commanders have ordered their troops not to shoot without orders,” Daniel said, “and Colonel Bourbon has sent the same order to all the unassigned troops. That doesn’t mean the miners are going to obey him, but none of them hold positions too close to where we’ll be going in.”
“I don’t trust the Garrison not to shoot, either,” Hogg said morosely. He rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. “But hell, you can break your neck stepping off the curb.”
Though Daniel wouldn’t be leading, he looked over his companions with the eye of a commander. They were outside the entrance to their dugout, hidden from the Pantellarian positions a kilometer away. Hogg wore much the same shapeless clothing as usual, though like the rest of them he had pulled a gray ski-mask over his head and face. It was more to block the thermal signature than from concerns over visible light.
Tovera wore dark gray coveralls of a harder fabric than her usual garments. Her little submachine gun was in a shoulder holster, looking like an awkward pistol. She wore heavy gloves to keep her hands clean for when she needed them.
A mortar thumped from Garrison lines on the other side of the river levees. “That’s the signal,” Hogg said. “Hide your eyes. When it burns out, we’ll get moving.”
Adele was the only one who needed the warning. She wore baggy coveralls over a Pantellarian officers’ uniform. Even though it was service garb, its shoulder boards stuck out like the arms of a clothes hanger.
Daniel darkened his goggles manually a moment before the
pop!
high in the sky indicated the flare had burst. Fierce radiance bathed the quadrant of the battlefield centered on the Cephisis and its high levees.
“Still time to grab something a little less clumsy than that damned cannon,” Hogg said, flicking a finger toward Daniel’s stocked impeller.
“I figure that crawling with this—”
Daniel wiggled the weapon in the crook of his left elbow.
“—isn’t as awkward as not having it handy if we need it tonight. I’ll be bringing up the rear as soon as we drop Tovera off, so my problems won’t slow you down.”
He’d slipped a condom over the muzzle. An impeller’s mechanism was pretty well sealed, but he didn’t want to fire one with the barrel plugged. Nobody could swear that he wouldn’t drop his weapon while crawling through this liquescent mud.
The hissing in the sky ended. For a moment a faint white afterglow shone above the levees.
“Send her on after I’ve got to the next dike,” Hogg said. His voice sounded as though the night itself were speaking, soft and almost lilting.
He moved sideways and was gone, unrolling a coil of communication wire behind him. The free end of the wire was attached to the belt of Adele’s coveralls.
Daniel watched his servant slither across the paddy. Even with his goggles’ light enhancement, all he really saw were the ripples. He kept his hand lightly on Adele’s shoulder.
Hogg had taught his young charge how to move in the wild. Daniel thought he was probably as good as most Land Forces soldiers with scout training. Hogg was a different order of creature, though, more like a water rat than a human.
Only because he knew it would be there, Daniel saw a brief hump slide over the top of the next dike. A field-skipper clicked three times.
“You see that light in Hablinger?” Daniel said softly. It was probably an unshaded street light reflecting off a polished roof at just the right angle. “Crawl for that. Just keep going till you hit the dike. If there’s a problem—”
How in heaven’s name could there be?
But Adele’s view of the physical world was as different from his as their views of mazes of data.
“—just follow the wire. And needs must, Hogg will come back and fetch you.”
“Yes,” said Adele. She hunched down and began crawling forward. She sounded like a school of redfish spawning in the shallows off Bantry, but the noise only mattered to senses as keyed up as Daniel’s own. There was no danger.
“What was the sound Hogg made?” Tovera said.
Daniel twitched, startled by the words in his ear while he was completely focused on what was going on in front of him. He smiled faintly. Was Tovera nervous?
He
certainly had been.
“That was a field-skipper,” he said without looking away from the paddy. “We have them on Bantry. There’s an animal here, the webbed treemouse, that sounds the same, only it gives single clicks, not three in a row.”
He smiled more broadly. “Now, if there’s a Pantellarian out there with as much interest in natural history as I have,” he said, “we might be in trouble.”
“That’s why you have the impeller,” Tovera said. Her voice was a rasping whisper.
“I never bothered to learn to use one of those,” she added after a moment. “I always figured that I’d get close enough to use what I have, or somebody else could deal with the problem. Now … maybe I should’ve learned.”
Daniel debated what—and whether—to speak. At last he said, “We’ll have to hope that one slug will do the job. It’s been my experience that with these—”
He hefted the impeller slightly.
“—one usually does.”
Tovera looked away, then turned to face him again. “Hogg said you’re as good as he is with one of those,” she said. No one would ever call Tovera’s voice gentle, but this time it had less of the usual crisp edge.
“On a good day,” Daniel said. He smiled and would have laughed under other circumstances. “Though on a
really
good day, we won’t need to learn.”
The field-skipper clicked again. “Head out,” Daniel said. “Wait for me at the dike. Hogg and I hope Adele will have gone on ahead.”
Tovera nodded, then slipped into the mud. She wasn’t graceful, but she crawled on her elbows and knees instead of proceeding on all fours the way Adele had done. Daniel doubted that the Fifth Bureau had trained her to low-crawl, so the technique—like driving an aircar—was something Tovera had learned on her own.
She was also extremely strong. Her pace across the paddy was as steady as a metronome’s ticking. Daniel knew well how much strain low-crawling put on muscles which hadn’t been habituated to the exercise.
Tovera reached the dike and vanished. Daniel followed her track, cradling the impeller in the crooks of both elbows. Tovera, who wasn’t carrying a long-arm, would have been just as well off using her hands and feet; but she’d learned the “right” technique, and she was going to employ it.
The mud was messy, but it was much easier on the person crawling than gravel or even a woodland littered with outcrops and fallen limbs would have been. The rice had seeded itself raggedly, and the paddies hadn’t been properly weeded or irrigated in the past year. The irregular growth was ideal for concealing somebody who knew what he was doing and didn’t mind staying low.
Daniel slipped over the dike. Tovera waited on the other side like a bog-hunting predator, an unusually large one.
“Mistress has reached the next wall,” she said, her voice barely a modulation of the breeze. Like Daniel himself, she wore RCN multifunction goggles. The night was very dark, but light enhancement brought out ripples in the starlight even though the body making them remained a shadow.
“We’ll go on together, then,” Daniel said. “The strongpoints keep a close watch on our lines but not on the rest of the landscape. Adele set their cameras to loop the same half hour from last night when we started out, but we should be safe the rest of the way without tricks.”
He smiled, though his mask hid the expression from Tovera. “Some Pantellarian technicians are quite good,” he said. “I told Adele that we were better depending on poor alertness and woodcraft among their line troops.”
“I’ll lead,” said Tovera. She began crawling forward again.
Daniel gave her a ten-yard start and followed. He carefully avoided closing the gap between them so that he didn’t prod Tovera to go faster than she was comfortable doing. That was quite fast enough anyway, and she hadn’t slowed from the first hundred meters.
At the third dike, he paused to let Adele finish her scramble over the fourth. The field-skipper clicked again; Daniel gestured Tovera forward and again followed.
The night had its own sounds. Even neglected, the paddies provided rich foraging for small animals and the slightly larger animals which preyed on them. There were even webbed treemice, Daniel was pleased to notice.
The crawl was hard work—he couldn’t pretend to be in condition for this sort of exercise—and potentially quite dangerous, but Daniel found it unexpectedly relaxing. It took him back to his childhood on Bantry, when Hogg taught him about the world of the estate’s nighttime, whose population was wholly different from that of the day.
Daniel had early on begun using night-vision electronics: a pair of RCN goggles from Uncle Stacy with light-enhancement and thermal-imaging capacity. Hogg didn’t forbid the hardware, but he was openly contemptuous of it, saying he could do anything goggles could and that
he
wasn’t going to break down when he was ten miles deep in a swamp.
That was literally true, but Daniel hadn’t had—and would never have—the forty years of experience that the older man did. Hogg was a wonderful mentor and a father figure for Daniel, but he was not a role model for civilized society.
He joined Tovera at the next dike. Because of the slight angle at which they were approaching Hogg’s entry point, they had reached one of the longitudinal walls which separated the paddies every five hundred meters or so. A pair of ten-foot trees grew from this side of the long wall. Fuzzy foliage gave the crooked limbs a ghostly appearance by starlight.
Daniel dug the flare’s base into the mud between the roots of the nearer tree and set the blasting cap in the fuse pocket. He handed Tovera the clacker with the fuse wire already attached.
“Suit yourself about where you hide,” he said, “but they’ve got automatic impellers in that strongpoint and a mortar besides. The dikes will probably stop an impeller slug, and the mortars won’t do much in this mud unless they fuse the shells for air burst, but I won’t tell you this is going to be safe.”
Tovera was probably smiling. “Then I won’t tell you that you’re an idiot, Captain Leary,” she said.
Daniel chuckled. He gave her the end of his reel of commo wire; the ends were already split and stripped. Then he started forward again, letting the wire uncoil behind him.
There was a long way yet to crawl. Daniel had lost the rosy swaddling of nostalgia, but the only way you accomplished a job like this was by going on, putting one foot in front of the other.
Well, one elbow in front of the other in the present case.
Daniel crawled over the next dike and paused to check for sound or movement as he always did. Adele was waiting. She slipped her pistol back into its pocket and put her glove back on.
An almost-emptied reel of commo wire sat beside her. Hogg hadn’t taken it with him as he made the final approach of the listening post.
“I’m glad to see you, Adele,” Daniel said very softly. “Well begun is half done, isn’t it?”
A field-skipper clicked ahead of them. Adele turned her head; she must have heard it, or at any rate heard something.
“Time to move,” Daniel said. He grinned. “We’ll go together this time. Nobody’s going to be listening ahead of us.”
Adele nodded. “Yes,” she said. She didn’t return his smile, though.
* * *
Adele hadn’t given any thought to the physical demands of reaching the enemy lines. All her concern had been for what happened
then
, after she began to do her job.
Thinking about the crawl wouldn’t have changed anything—it simply had to be done, and there had been no time available for physical training. Even so, she felt foolish not to have considered a business which had pushed her so near her physical limits. She had failed herself intellectually, whether or not that made any difference in fact.
Daniel put his hand on Adele’s left ankle, throwing her into an instant’s nightmare in which the darkness had come alive and grabbed her. She snatched for her pistol and only smeared mud from her gloves onto the flap of the coveralls. She had been lost in a world of her own in which nothing mattered but the mechanical process of crawling forward and the intellectual analysis of that process.
She had almost fallen into the listening post. It was a small pit whose floor of plaited reeds was thick enough to keep the mud from oozing to the level of the two men now lying facedown on it and blubbering. There was also a small field telephone and a pair of electromotive shotguns, single-shot hunting weapons. The men wore loose trousers and open shirts; they had no shoes.
“They’re local farmers, master,” said Hogg, squatting at the back of the pit with his knife out. “I didn’t much feel like cutting their throats, though if you think it’d be safer … ?”
“I don’t believe that will be necessary, Hogg,” Daniel said. They spoke in low-pitched voices; Adele could scarcely hear them. “In any case, if safety had been my primary concern, I probably wouldn’t have joined the RCN, would I?”
“I have a use for them if they prefer to continue living,” Adele said. By leaning over the edge of the shallow pit as Daniel was doing, the depression itself would drink her words. “For one of them, anyway.”
One of the local conscripts was weeping as though he were watching his library burn. Adele smiled at her simile. His chicken coop burn, that would be better.
The other man stopped crying and even turned his head to look up at Adele. She gestured toward him and said, “I want you to call your base on the phone and say that you hear noises halfway back to the grubber lines. Can you do that? We’ll let you live if you do.”
The farmer nodded enthusiastically. His throat worked, but he didn’t—more likely couldn’t—speak.
“Nobody’s going to hurt you,” Adele said, letting her gray precision overcome the irritation she was feeling at this fool. Of course if the listening post had been staffed by better troops, they would be dead and she wouldn’t have this opportunity to confuse the Pantellarian strongpoint.
Hogg tied the wrists of the crying man behind his back with commo wire. “Should have brought cargo tape,” he said, “but I wasn’t figuring on prisoners. Anyway, this’ll do.”
