The Sea Without a Shore (27 page)
Read The Sea Without a Shore Online
Authors: David Drake
Adele removed her gloves, then began to strip off the baggy coveralls. Mud caked her knee-high officers’ boots well up the shaft, but that was now part of her disguise.
“I’ll do it, ma’am,” the other prisoner said. “Ma’am, I got seven kids. They just marched in and says to all the men in the village, ‘You come with us or you’ll wish you had.’ So we come, what could we do?”
It was a likely enough story, though that didn’t make a real difference. Adele had shot people who were just as innocent as these fellows, people who had simply been in her way. Fine distinctions didn’t matter in a war; and in the longer term, nothing in life mattered.
“Then you already understand the terms,” Adele said, smiling minusculy. Hogg was binding the fellow’s ankles; the fact obviously reassured the prisoner, because it meant that his captors really weren’t going to slit his throat.
“Right,” the farmer said. “I’ll report, just like you say!”
He reached for the phone. Adele put her right hand on it. “Wait,” she said. “Hogg, are we ready to go on?”
“Yep,” he said without looking up. He was checking the load in one of the shotguns.
“All right,” said Adele, taking her hand away. “Call now.”
The farmer bent close to the phone—it didn’t have a separate handset—and pressed the button between the speaker and mouthpiece. It had originally been glossy black, but in the center that was worn down to the original beige of the plastic case.
“Hello?” the fellow said. “Hello? I’m hearing stuff! The grubbers’re coming, I hear ’em coming!”
“Hold one,”
crackled a voice from the speaker. Moments later the voice resumed,
“Post Three, are you drunk? We’ve got the scopes on their lines and there’s nothing happening. Not a bloody thing!”
Adele gestured to Daniel. He squeezed hard on his clacker. In the present stillness, Adele heard the miniature generator whine.
“They’re coming!” the farmer repeated. He probably wasn’t a very good actor, but under the circumstances his voice projected very real fear. “I hear ’em, I do!”
Adele and her companions were ducking beneath the lip of the pit so the light of the distant flare didn’t silhouette them. It
did
ruin the night vision of anyone who was looking toward the glare unprotected, and it certainly attracted the attention of anyone in the strongpoint.
Tovera’s submachine gun ripped out its whole magazine. It was probably the first time Tovera had fired a burst longer than three rounds in a life which had often involved using a submachine gun.
Three automatic impellers and at least a score of personal weapons blasted from the strongpoint. The slugs’ aluminum skirts vaporized in the magnetic flux which drove them down the bore, flickering above the gun muzzles. The barrels of the automatic impellers began to glow.
Other Pantellarians opened fire, followed moments later by troops in the Corcyran positions. The shooting was expanding along the siege lines like a growing brushfire.
“Time to go, Mistress,” Hogg said. He slipped over the back edge of the pit, and Adele followed.
CHAPTER 24
Hablinger on Corcyra
“Hey!” Hogg said in a hoarse whisper. Then more loudly, “Hey! Is this Point Three?”
“Who’s that?” a man cried from the darkness ahead, his voice rising across the two syllables. “Captain! Captain! They’re attacking!”
Adele touched Hogg’s shoulder with her right arm to quiet him. “Phlegrya, you idiot!” she shouted. “The password is Phlegrya! Don’t shoot!”
“Put your gun up, Perone,” a firm voice ordered “You out there? Who are you?”
Adele and Hogg were in what had been a communication trench when it was dug. In the year or more since then, the walls of soft earth had slumped so that what was left was a muddy swale through which she had hunched along behind Hogg.
When Hogg gestured Adele down, she thought that the Pantellarians’ Strongpoint Four—Hogg had said Three as part of their camouflage—was about fifty yards ahead of them. The guard’s panicked response to Hogg’s call had come from less than twenty feet away.
“I’m Major Tillingast,” Adele said. “The commissioner—Commissioner Arnaud—sent me to see what was happening at Point Three. They said the trouble was at one of their listening posts, and this yokel they gave me for a guide dragged me through the mud instead of finding it.
Is
this Point Three?”
In order to sound frightened, she imagined that she was going to fail and let down the people who were counting on her. She hoped that the Pantellarians would think that she was worried about being killed.
“This is Point Four,” the Pantellarian officer said. “Stand up so we can see you, please, Major.”
“Phlegrya!” Adele repeated firmly, then rose into a half crouch. She had gone to some lengths to get a proper-fitting Pantellarian staff officer’s uniform—Woetjans had tailored the garment to fit Adele’s trim body. She was so muddy after this final leg of the journey that only the epaulettes and peaked cap were really identifiable, but perhaps knowing that the uniform was correct made Adele’s own performance more convincing.
Besides, Woetjans had been delighted to do the work. Like most senior spacers, the bosun was an expert seamstress. Her own liberty suit, a set of utilities embellished with patches and ribbons, was a work of art.
“You can come forward, Tillingast,” the voice said. “I’m Captain Danes. Sorry for the inconvenience, but with all the shooting tonight—well, you can understand that we had to be careful. Here, I’m tossing over a ladder.”
Adele straightened and slogged forward. “I’m
filthy
,” she said, trying to sound as though she cared. “All because some moronic yokels in a listening post panicked and started shooting at nothing, and an even greater moron dragged me through the muck instead of to the LP!”
She looked over her shoulder and mimed an angry glare. When she was really angry, her face had no expression at all, but she was acting the part of a disgusted staff officer, and she thought a scowl would be more easily believed.
Hogg carried the borrowed shotgun with the barrel in his right hand and the stock resting on his shoulder. He was chewing a rice stem. To look at him, he had no more wit than a cow and no more concern than a dead cow.
There really had been a Major Tillingast on Commissioner Arnaud’s staff, but appendicitis had prevented him from accompanying the invasion force. Arnaud had assigned him to logistics duties on Pantellaria instead of bringing him to Corcyra when he recovered. If Captain Danes had happened to know the real man, Adele would have become his sister.
The strongpoint was built of air-hardening nets formed into double walls two meters apart. The doughnut was then pumped full of mud from the interior of the position. The result would stop small-arms’ projectiles and was impervious to energy weapons. Real artillery would scatter the dried mud, but the explosion wouldn’t fling lethal splinters around the way as it would from a rock sangar.
Trying to climb the meter-high wall would have been a problem for Adele—and for most of the staff officers whom she’d met—so the rope ladder with wooden battens tossed from the inside where it was anchored was welcome. Hogg could doubtless have boosted her over, but he might have thought verisimilitude required that he pitch her some distance beyond.
Adele’s minuscule smile was perhaps less grim than it usually was. Hogg, like Daniel and like Adele herself, was a perfectionist.
She slid down the inside onto a firing step; she would have plunged another several feet to the ground if the Pantellarian captain hadn’t caught her arm. Hogg mounted the wall behind her, using the butt of the shotgun as a pole to brace himself. He looked clumsy, but Adele noticed that the weapon’s muzzle never pointed at his body.
“I swear we’d be better off not to have recruited these rubes!” Adele said to Danes. He was a short man with sad eyes; his name ribbon was unreadable for mud and fading. “We’d be better off never to have come to this filthy place. Let the grubbers have it!”
“You won’t get an argument from me,” the captain said. “Do you want a guide to Point Three? Though I warn you, you’d be better off going back into Hablinger and taking the axial road out.”
“I’m going into Hablinger,” Adele snapped. “And if Arnaud wants to send somebody out again, he can wake up Kaspary!
I’m
going to take a shower.”
“Perone,” the captain said to one of the half-dozen soldiers standing nearby, “guide the major to the gate and make sure she gets through.”
To Adele he added, “You won’t have any trouble following the road, though there’s a couple places where the mud’s over the flooring.”
“Tell me something I
don’t
know,” Adele said. “Come along, Hogg. I’m going to see if the commissioner can’t find a more suitable task for you. Like becoming a piling!”
She and Hogg followed the slack-jawed Perone across the interior of the strongpoint. Tent ropes and piled equipment encroached on the path.
So far, so good
.
* * *
Daniel lay near the listening post, beside the line by which Tovera was approaching. He was in a reverie of the sort familiar from his childhood, when he used to lie in the woods of Bantry and become part of the night.
It was a different experience from hunting, though an outsider wouldn’t have been able to distinguish the two. When Daniel hunted, his stillness was that of a coiled spring—a preliminary to action. Now he was a pool of water which simply exists and absorbs.
A many-legged lizard scuttled over Daniel’s right glove without noticing that he was any different from the matted rice stems and weeds on which he lay. Several of the tiny feet touched his bare index finger, light as so many hairs; the fingertip rested on the trigger of his impeller.
Tovera crawled past, focused on the listening post. In normal human terms she was very quiet. As she reached the lip of the LP, Daniel whispered, “All clear.”
Tovera paused, then very slowly turned her head. She was staring down the muzzle of the impeller which until then had been aimed at the back of her skull. After a few heartbeats of consideration, she giggled. The sound was that of a peevish insect.
Daniel twitched his impeller slightly to the side. “You’re in my country now,” he said.
“Yes,” said Tovera. “I appreciate what that means, now.”
“The two locals are tied up in the LP,” Daniel said. “We can talk quietly out here, if you wish.”
He didn’t know what Tovera wished, what Tovera thought, what Tovera felt, if she felt anything. The only thing he was sure about Tovera was that he couldn’t fathom her mental processes. Well, that and the fact that she would probably hit whatever she shot at.
“I decided to come forward,” she said. “We hadn’t arranged for that, so I decided to come quietly so that you wouldn’t hear a rustle and shoot at the sound.”
Daniel smiled, though his mask hid the expression. “I wouldn’t have shot because I heard a sound,” he said.
“No,” said Tovera. “You wouldn’t.”
She licked her thin lips and said, “Hogg told me you were a decent woodsman. I didn’t have a context for what he said. I do now.”
“Hogg is better,” Daniel said. “Much better. Adele is in good hands.”
A webbed treemouse clicked nearby, but only once. It was part of Corcyra’s natural world.
“What would you do,” Tovera said, “if the mistress was killed in Hablinger?”
Daniel considered the question. He didn’t say that he hoped that wouldn’t happen, because Tovera knew that.
Everyone
knew that.
“I would gather data,” he said. “And then I would respond appropriately.”
He wasn’t avoiding the question. He was giving the most truthful answer he could. Daniel didn’t have enough information to precisely predict his reaction.
Tovera nodded. “I’d go in there,” she said, making a tiny gesture toward the Pantellarian camp by crooking her left index finger. “And I’d kill everyone I saw. I would keep killing them until they killed me. There wouldn’t be a place for me in the universe without Lady Mundy.”
She could have been reading a grocery list for the sign of anything more serious in her voice. The words were all the more terrible for the lack of emotion or emphasis in her tone.
Again, Daniel thought. Then he said, “I’d give you a home if anything happened to Adele. For her sake, of course; but your services to me and to the RCN have earned you that consideration.”
Tovera giggled again. “You think I’m a dangerous insect,” she said.
Daniel patted his impeller’s receiver with the pad of his right index finger. “I think this is dangerous,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s going to randomly kill me or mine, and I don’t think you would either.”
He didn’t address the “insect” comment. He wasn’t going to tell Tovera a lie; especially not an obvious lie.
“Thank you,” Tovera said. “Lady Mundy has taught me to thank people who offer me help. But all the same, I think I’d try to kill everyone in Hablinger.”
Daniel considered the situation. “I think …” he said slowly. “I think that after I’ve gathered data … I might very well decide to join you.”
Something clicked in the night. It was just a treemouse.
* * *
“When we go around this corner,” Hogg said, swinging his shotgun butt forward to indicate the angle in the communication trench, “there’s the gate. And we’ll be looking down the muzzle of an automatic impeller.”
He spat and added, “Mind, with this lot I’m not saying that anybody’ll be manning the gun.”
Adele stepped past him and paused, just out of sight of the entrance to the Pantellarian base. “Phlegrya!” she called. “Phlegrya! Major Tillingast returning from reconnaissance!”
“Solfatara,” a youthful male voice replied, giving the response after a noticeable delay. “Come forward, Tillingast.”
Adele walked briskly around the angle. As satellite imagery had shown, the trench mouth was blocked not by a gate but rather by three baffles welded from braced rectangles of pipe. Barbed wire wrapped the barriers. Anyone entering the camp would have to step around them under the muzzle of an automatic weapon, just as Hogg had said.
The man who had called was in the gunpit with the impeller’s crew. He wore goggles which, Pantellarian optics being what they were, were probably as good as RCN issue. An identical pair rested on Adele’s forehead, but she hadn’t brought them down lest the gunner’s finger twitch when a masked figure approached. She scarcely needed light amplification to follow the trench, and the lack of depth perception meant that goggles wouldn’t help to judge how deep the potholes were.
Some of the potholes were knee-deep. She had proven that by experience.
“Ah, sir?” the young officer said. “We weren’t told to expect any scouts tonight?”
“I’m not a bloody scout,” Adele said as she walked—slogged; her boots were caked with mud—toward and past the gunpit. “I’m on Commissioner Arnaud’s staff, and this local
moron
”—she glared at Hogg—“has taken me on a tour of every mudhole on this bloody
planet
!”
Hogg stood blank-faced, chewing on his rice stem. He looked as though he could be on the other side of the planet for all the attention he paid the people around him.
Adele breathed hard, and her thighs ached. The trench had risen steadily from the strongpoint to the outer edge of Hablinger. Some of the elevation came by ramps, but steps had been cut at many points in the zigzag course. Ordinarily climbing stairs didn’t bother Adele, but at present the layers of mud trebled the weight of her boots.
“Ah, should we report your arrival, Major?” the Pantellarian officer called as Adele and Hogg walked toward the city park where Arnaud’s headquarters was supposed to be.
“Do as you please!” Adele said without turning her head. “I’m not going to report until I’ve gotten a bath and some sleep. There’s nothing
to
report. It was just numbskulls shooting at shadows!”
If the fellow did try to call back on the post’s landline, the headquarters commo computer would dump the message into a suspense file accessible only by the off-planet Major Tillingast. They might try radio after the landline failed, but at this hour of the night the worst result would be confusion left for an officer to puzzle out in the morning.
When Adele and Hogg were behind the first line of tenements and out of sight of the guard post, Hogg said, “Let me get the big chunks off your boots, mistress.”
He snicked open his knife and used the back of the blade to shave mud from the boots. The false edge was sharpened, but Adele never felt the tug of steel on the leather.
Great chunks fell off.
As though he were skinning me,
Adele thought. The thought made her smile.
“How do you figure to get in to see Arnaud?” Hogg said without looking up from his task. “He’ll have guards, and there’s a company at least billeted in the park with his trailer. I looked at the satellite stuff.”
“The same way we got this far,” Adele said. “I’ll claim to be an officer whom Arnaud had summoned from Point Three to see what was going on.”
“That’s a way,” Hogg said. Adele realized that he was deliberately avoiding eye contact while he disagreed with her. “Another way would be if something happened to get all the wogs running around while you waltzed into the tailer and nobody noticed you.”
